PardonMyFrench

I'm Into MoFuse for Mobile Blogs

An old friend of mine sent me a link yesterday for MoFuse and I really like it.  While on vacation to Disney it was very hard for me to browse my own website on my Treo and when I wanted to make a comment, I had to email another friend to make a post on my behalf.  Via MoFuse I set up my mobile blog in literally about 5 minutes.  It was fast and painless and believe it or not the user interface was a piece of cake.  Sure, I could spend more time on it to clean it up a bit, but I'm heading to California today and I want to take my blog with me.  Here's my mobile link and a screen shot.

I had a few issues with it, but my biggest one is that it doesn't appear that I can update my TypePad code to automatically redirect to my MoFuse mobile URL, but that's ok for now.  It might be available but I just didn't have the time to play with it.  I also didn't see the need to upgrade to the Pro version for $3 per month, but perhaps I will later.  My final issue is that besides splitting the ad revenue (probably non existent right now), I wonder how they will make money in the long term.  It definitely appears to be modeled after TypePad (proprietary URL, ad revenue, a little subscription), but unlike TypePad they will have to survive long enough for real mobile interactivity.

MoFuse looks like a great play right now for me and I'm glad my friend sent me the link.  If you have a blog, take 5 minutes to set something up.  You'll be glad you did.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

HP's Pretexting Worries Me More Than Whitehouse Wiretapping

Have you been following the story of HP hiring investigators to uncover leaks from the highest levels in their company?  It has been in the Wall Street Journal the past few days and I have to tell you I'm very worried about this.  As you can see from my title of the post, I'm wondering why there isn't bigger outrage over this? 

No matter which side of the political fence you are on, this seems a lot more to worry about than the Government getting phone records or wiretapping people that it suspects has ties to terrorism.  One has to do with national security and the other has to do with keeping a company's private conversations under wraps until it is ready to release it.  On the one side you don't have any victims that have been identified while on the HP pretexting side you have reporters, a reporter's father, and board members that have had their privacy compromised.  Here's a quick summary of the relevant articles I've been reading.

• HP's SEC filing of the resignation of board member Thomas Perkins over HP's investigation into leaks.   It also mentions some form of pretexting was used.
• Perkins letter where he writes how his phone records were hacked and also the letter from AT&T explaining how this occurred.
• CNET reports how the HP Probe snared a third reporter, a father and 6 other reporters in the pretexting scheme.  Let me repeat that again, Steven Shankland's father, Thomas, a semi-retired physicist has his phone records targeted.
• Wall Street Journal has many articles, but the best are Nine Journalists Phone Records Targeted in HP Probe of Leaks and key HP documents.

So how does the pretexting work?  Well according to the AT&T letter that they sent to Thomas Perkins it doesn't seem that difficult.  First, you need a 3rd party who wants to pose as you in order to obtain your records.  In this case it was mike@yahoo.com with IP address 69.99.17.80.  Second, mike@yahoo.com got a copy of the last 4 digits of Mr. Perkins' social security number and phone number and then established an online bill with AT&T for local.  Mike then tried to establish an online LD billing account but was denied so he called into customer care and had it manually established.  Not bad huh?

I don't know about you, but this worries me a lot.  How many documents do you receive in the mail every month that someone could get a hold of to gain information on your records.  Here are some steps that I'm taking ASAP.

1. No more using Mother's maiden name as a security question.   I'm going with other less obvious ones that people can't find by looking up marriage licenses.
2. Shred all bills and financial statements
3. Open and then shred all offers for credit cards
4. I don't do this, but make sure you use a good version of passwords.  Your first name with last initial is terrible.  Come up with something that can't be figured out in 2 seconds.  I always try and make mine letters, number, and special characters.
5. Be careful who you give your data to online.  I'm still pissed off that Second Life's customer database was recently hacked.
6. I won't be leaking anything to the press from the various boards I'm serving on ;-)

The HP pretexting case should worry you a lot more than the Government using phone records to track potential terrorist activities.  A reporter's dad was targeted....think about that....it could easily happen to you.  And you thought you just needed to make sure you don't call Iran on a regular basis.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Springsteen Gets Hitwised

So, if you haven't figured out by now I'm a huge Bruce Springsteen fan and have been for a long time (1983).  However, with Bruce's change in music direction to a folksy one with the release of the We Shall Overcome:The Seeger Sessions, I found myself on the outside looking in on this Springsteen period.  Gone are the rushes to the store to buy the CD before its official release, the endless games of trying to score good tickets, and the hours spent on my favorite Springsteen fan site Greasylake.  Almost all of my friends feel the same way and then I started wondering, what impact this change in direction has had on the rest of Springsteen's fan base. So, I went about this the way I could using whatever online data I could find at my fingertips.

My first visit was to Google Trends to see what the search activity looks like. However, because the data only goes back to 2004, I can't see what the long term trend looks like.  However, judging from what is there, it looks like Bruce's trend has been level except for the Vote for Change Tour and the recent spike around the Seeger Sessions.  One thing you can see is that the recent spike is not as large as the VFC one and now looks like he is returning to normal levels. 

Next visit was to Alexa to look at reach of the three best sites  - Greasylake, Backstreets.com, and brucespringsteen.net.  The Alexa data was a little more interesting because I can track back to 2002.  What does it show?  Well for Greasylake, Backstreets, and  brucespringsteen.net it shows a drop off in traffic with the most pronounced dip on backstreets.com which looks like a Roger Clemens split-finger fastball falling off the table.

Ok, so the traffic is definitely lower on all of the main sites and one could assume so is the search activity.  However, I was still missing the final piece of the puzzle which was whether there was a change in the fan base.

Enter my final stop which was Bill Tancer over at Hitwise.  I asked Bill to take a look at the data hoping he was a Springsteen fan (or at least a casual fan) and you know what, Bill published a great report over at his blog called Springsteen: The Boss Goes Folksy. I won't steal Bill's thunder too much, but he looked at Backstreets.com's website visitor profile from last year and compared it to this year.  He found that Springsteen's fan base has indeed shifted from an Urban Core profile to an Elite Suburban/Midtown Mix.  Very interesting.

So, traffic is down across the board as is search activity for the change in music direction.  Also, it appears that the current fan base is not made up of the working class people and is more elitist.  My guess is that the activity drop-off was probably planned, but what shocked me the most was the shift to the elite suburban mix due to folk music.  I guess the people that enjoy folk music are not the down to earth people you would have guess and instead seem to have a lot of money.  Hmmm, I wonder what their political profile would be???

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

AT&T - Your World Delivered Sometime in 2008

Tonight I'm writing to you from my hotel room in beautiful Alexandria Virginia where I'll be until tomorrow night after I have a few meetings on political online advertising.  There are so many articles out there on my Bloglines RSS reader, that I hardly know where to start.  I may have to do a marketing rapid fire list, so if I'm still awake after I finish this post, I'll give you one more quick one.

The one article that deserves some attention is one written over at the Wall Street Journal called AT&T Readies Service Uniting Internet and TV and if this is the New, New, New Your World Delivered by AT&T definition of a united offering then perhaps their product management team should visit dictionary.com.  According to the article, AT&T through a new digital product called Homezone will allow users to download for a fee on demand movies (whoopee) as long as they have AT&T DSL and satellite TV from Dish Network.

Yes folks, this is just what you've been waiting for.  This the TV bundled offering that I'm sure you just can't wait to have and now you'll trade in your high-speed digital cable service so you can stick a dish on your house and get slower downloads on DSL all for the privilege of downloading movies for around $3.95 a pop (my guess at the price).  Oh wait, you get some more services with Homezone including the ability to listen to music from Launchcast or view photos on your big screen TV.

The only good news about this bundle is that the movies will be of higher quality than the versions currently found on the internet - you see when you need to make a movie for a small 300x250 pixel box unit you can skimp on the quality , but on the big screen you need quality.  The only problem with this is that you won't technically be on an on-demand platform because it will take some time to download files.  It is too bad because I wrote about this as the challenge for streaming TV shows on the internet in the post called the last few feet to the TV box.  Sure you can get on-demand internet TV shows and movies but there won't be huge demand until you can watch them in high quality on your big HDTV screen.

This offering reminded me of a bad bundle that the old AT&T launched back I think in 1998.  It was crafted by a product manager without any consumer input as I recall.  I don't remember then name of this bundle and I asked a few people but they couldn't remember it either.  What this bundle had was a kitchen sink mentality of putting all of these unrelated AT&T services together and then offering a bottom line discount.  Heck, if AT&T raised chickens back then, they would have thrown that in too. Sadly, AT&T learned after wasting much time, energy, and political capital (I actually berated a product manager who was mishandling the project so badly that after he got into a car accident at lunch time, he still showed up to his meeting with a concussion) that the only good bundle is one where the services are joined together on a single technology device, not wrapped up in a discount package that the customers can see through. 

According to the Journal article there will be a Homezone set top-box that connects to the internet, but this still doesn't qualify as a good bundle.  You still need to have DSL and a Satellite dish to participate in this offering.  It isn't until sometime in 2008 when AT&T finally delivers a TV offering courtesy of a project called Lightspeed that they deliver a TV bundled offer.  Until then, just sit this one out and wait for your neighbor to  get this new world delivered on demand with a 20 minute delay.  Meanwhile, you can watch whatever you want with your DVR.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

Phishing in Safety Town

The marketing team at Symantec put together a great site to highlight the dangers of phishing through a fun interactive movie found at www.safetytown.com.  They created a movie that plays in a mythical movie theater in Safety Town complete with a popcorn counter where you can download screen-savers and music, plus of course purchase Norton's 2006 Internet Security.  On a side note, the movie is not that bad, but what I like the most is the overall design and the message they are promoting.

Phishing is a pretty bad problem on the internet these days especially for financial services companies.  In fact about 2 years ago my COO at Harrisdirect Mike Hogan told me "in a few years we won't be able to use email, so figure something out!"  Phishing is when your credentials are stolen by either sending out a fake email with links to a site where you try and log in with your actual password and ID or even worse, the URL is hidden on the clicks and you end up on one of these sites.  In fact, I saw presentations where they had screen shots of sites where these stolen credentials were bought and sold.  BTW - the site in question was busted up by the FBI.  Don't believe me - check out this link from Chase.com

The more you know about phishing the better off you'll be and if you can learn about it in a fun interactive way, so much the better.  Personally, I want to see what happens in the movie.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric