I first got wind that age as a marketing segmentation parameter was becoming much less relevant about 3 years ago when I paid a sales call to Castro Model ( a big Israeli fashion house with a chain of retail stores) to try and sell them a data loss prevention solution from Fidelis Security Systems. The sales pitch had something to do with protecting fashion designs and was based on common knowledge that there is a lot of design theft in the fashion industry.
I reported back to a female colleague at the office and I commented that the dresses I saw in the showroom seemed to be cut for young girls and would probably not fit her (she is nice looking, in great shape and 40 something…). Very Bad Idea.
Mary told me – “never tell a woman that a dress is too small for her”.
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Polish digital TV broadcaster N (owned by ITI Neovision) has disclosed a breach of customer data records – after PII was discovered accidentally on the Net by a subscriber via a search engine.
The partner who manages our offices in Warsaw (the team specializes in high end data security consulting and DLP projects in Central Europe) called me this morning after hearing about the data loss event on the radio on the way to work.
The details are fairly typical for a telecommunications service provider.
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A colleague who has a startup in the US for social networking for doctors was whining to me the other day that advertising business models are dead for everyone except the top 5-10 Internet properties like Yahoo and Google. He said that Google does a great job of aggregating ads from small Web site but that doesn’t mean that a small-mid size Web property can monetize traffic enough in order to be profitable. It’s a corollary of the long tail of the Internet, that the small guys a the end of the tail will never have enough traffic to monetize.
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Apparently people in a social network like Facebook don’t mind the ads but they would not join a branded group according to this article Social network users reluctant to join branded groups
Less than one third of social network users would be willing to join a brand’s group even with the offer of exclusive or free content, according to new research from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB).
This jives with evidence we heard from colleagues regarding some well-known cases of pharmaceutical companies sponsoring content for treating cardiology problems in online forums on medical Web sites. When it became known that the content was sponsored – doctors protested and fled the site en-masse. In other words – power to the people and not branding to the people. Now – if we could only get IT and IT security professionals to be as critical as doctors.
Facebook management are correct in their policy of not vetting applications and letting the wisdom of crowds become the security of crowds. The best security countermeasure is a lot of eyeballs and 3 people tackling a terrorist in an airplane is the cheapest and most effective anti-terrorism measure.
Fifteen years ago when I worked at Intel as site telecom manager, Andy Groove sent an email to the employees telling us that he expected email to be the next killer application. I wrote back to Andy that I thought that email is like a phone – so if you think a phone is a killer app then I guess email is a killer app too.
Over time I’ve seen statistics claiming that email usage is going down per capita taking a backseat to mobile phones – when you break it down by age groups. Mow Nielson Online is saying that the number 1 online app is social networking, which explains why Facebook and other social networking sites are a fertile ground for security exploits and phishing.
I read last week that Facebook has been the victim of five different security problems in one week,
According to Trend Micro, four hoax applications became available on Facebook plus a new variation of Koobface virus, whichdirects users to a fake YouTube page where they are encouraged to install malware.
Two of the hoax applications that have been downloaded by Facebook users include ‘F a c e b o o k – closing down!!!’ and ‘Error Check System’. By downloading the app, users give hackers access to their profile and personal information, which sends fake messages to their friends, inviting them to download the programs.
I personally think that you have to be a moron to download everything you see in your Facebook.
The newspapers this morning online and print, had a number of items citing how Obama won in the social networking space – au contraire – Obama won the election because he sold Americans a message of hope, even if it was modeled on a character from the TV Series “24″,
The majority of Americans are not wired like us high-tech geeks – but TV and cell phones are something that everything watches and uses.
Next week, in the U.K. and Australia; Hutchison will launch a new 3G cell phone with social networking applications. The phone is produced by the new Hutchison mobile device subsidiary INQ Mobile.
The new handset is supposedly a new product category of “low-cost social mobile” devices that make applications like Facebook as easy to use as SMS texting. The key to stimulating more usage of mobile data subscribers is to reduce the cost to the operator and provide easy-to-use applications. Cellular operators, having already made large CapEx investments in the 3G infrastructure need to drive data usage into all users, not just the 15% that use smart phones today.
Using a smart phone for social networking raises some interesting security questions. If you could be anonymous online, it will now be easier to track down the exact identity or even physical location of that hot-looking woman you are chatting with. A cellphone number is more exact than a geographic lookup of an IP address.
For the full article see: Hutchison preps Facebook Phone Launch
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