A few months ago I wrote about a movie called “Google Me” which tells the story of a man who goes around the world to meet other men who share his same name. The movie is now available on YouTube in HD.
60 Minutes: Cyber Crime
I keep talking about this with everyone so I might as well include it on my blog because evidently nobody seems to watch 60 Minutes these days which is a shame. I love the segments they do and it is funny because when I was a child I used to despise it because I saw the infamous ticking clock which meant Monday morning and school was not too far away. Cyber warfare fascinates me, I literally sat through the episode just glued to the TV. It is hacker meets pirate meets James Bond meets ninja meets…OK you get the point. I actually liked it so much I showed it to someone and sat through it twice. Let me know what you think.
Get More Energy
Advertising Agency: STIR, Milwaukee, USA
Creative Director / Art Director: Bill Kresse
Copywriter: Scott Shalles
Photographer/Retoucher: Brian Steenstry
Published: November 2009
New Evan Pictures
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- Good Hygiene
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- Evan’s Pumpkin
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- Evan Just Chillin
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- Evan I Love You
My sister sent some new pictures of my nephew Evan this afternoon.
Cisco Communications
I went to Cisco’s headquarters yesterday in San Jose for a CMMA event to talk about what they are doing with their communications. We met with Margaret Smith Cisco’s Collaboration Specialist and Abby Smith Cisco’s Director of Employee Communications. I was able to see telepresence for the first time which was very interesting. You really do feel like you are in the same meeting room as the person in the other location (could be anywhere in the world). After seeing telepresence I am further convinced that our educational system will be completely changed in the next 10 years. I can’t imagine us continuing to have large expensive universities when you can literally sit directly in front of a television and feel like you are in the same room as your professor and other students. Below are my notes from the visit.
Abby Smith – Director of Employee Communications
- Cisco’s Corporate Communications Organizational Overview:
- Employee Communications
- Investor Relations
- CXO Communications
- Public/Analyst/Community Relations
- Communications Architecture
- Strategy and Integration
- New Media
- Asian Pacific Communications
- News@Cisco is their media portal
- Single site for Cisco Community and Social Media
- Newsroom.cisco.com
- 350+ RSS Feeds
- Where the public can go to get news about Cisco
- Social Networking (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
- 650,000 hits quarterly on the site
- Twitter
- @Padmasree (Cisco CTO)
- 500,000 + followers
- Cisco has a social media communications policy
- CEC – Cisco Employee Connection (Cisco’s Intranet)
- Executive video blogs, discussion forums
- CEC articles
- Management Central
- Pulse Surveys – how is the culture, what are you feeling etc, how
- John Chambers, the CEO has a video blog of what is on his mind on the CEC. Employees said “I’ve never had a conversation with John so having him give me a personal message each month is amazing.” It also helps to save money on video production costs.
- They did their first virtual company meeting on August 23, 2007
- Their Communications Department has ~250 employees
- Cisco TelePresence Overview
- Cisco TelePresence – life-like in-person video collaboration
- Unified communications – video calling, WebEx, and interopability
- Desktop video streaming – video broadcasts to desktop PCs
- Digital signage – networked video signage
- Video surveillance – IP-based video surveillance
- Can support up to 48 segments (65” plasma and a camera)
- Integrates with Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook.
- Their telepresence (“TP”) is 1080P resolution. Spatial audio which provides virtually an in-person experience
- Why did Cisco get into the video space?
- The problem
- More than 60% of communication is non-verbal
- Current collaborative technology doesn’t allow for clarity, interaction of face-to-face
- Scalability, productivity trade-off
- The problem
- Rules of Telepresence
- Experience the meeting, not the technology
- Life size and high-resolution to discern body language
- Guarantee everyone a seat at the table
Sounds like in the later part of 2010 look for consumer telepresence from Cisco
Cisco’s enterprise telepresence requires 14 mbps up and down
Stop Bullying
Jaylen Arnold, 9, has Tourette’s Syndrome. When he started to get bullied at school, he didn’t fight or run away. As Kelly Cobiella reports, Jaylen launched a Web site and its worked wonders.
The Google Story in 2 Minutes
A (very) quick look back at the Google story over the last 11 years. From Stanford to Mountain View and around the world, featuring many different products, starting with BackRub (Search) up to Google Wave, StreetView and Chrome.
KeePass
I found a great open source password management tool called KeePass which I wanted to share with you. If you are like me you have tons of different passwords you have to remember. KeePass organizes your passwords and encrypts them which makes storing your passwords very safe and secure. The other nice thing is it works with Linux, Windows, and Macs. The above screenshot is the application freshly installed from my home PC running Ubuntu but at work let me tell you it is a good long list! It is also highly configurable and even allows for plugins.
Net Neutrality & The Internet Freedom Act
Net neutrality is nothing new if you are a geek. We want the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) of the Internet to be nothing more than a “dumb pipe”. What that means is we don’t want the ISPs to be able to control what we are able to access, how fast we can access what we paid for, and they should offer the service at a reasonable price. John Wilbanks in the above video says that net neutrality means it is our “rights as an Internet user and we should have a right as an Internet user to have access to a neutral architecture that lets us innovate with no more restrictions than fulfilling the technical protocols.”
I am against the Internet Freedom Act and that might surprise you if you are not familiar with what the act actually stands for. I mean I give credit for naming the act something that people would oppose just by the name of it. Who would want to vote against Internet Freedom right? Well John McCain, the man who almost won the presidency has introduced legislation that would prohibit the FCC from regulating the Internet. Yes, the man who doesn’t even know how to use the Internet (see the video clip below) has introduced legislation about your Internet experience. Not to mention he has received more campaign dollars than any other politician from telecommunications companies (hmm coincidence he is introducing this legislation to help empower telcos…?)
What he is essentially proposing is broadband providers could limit the traffic to certain sites and protocols if it so desired. For instance many of you probably use Skype to talk to your friends and loved ones online. Well media companies and ISPs don’t like Skype because it allows you to have something for free which they would love to charge you for. What some ISPs have done and are still doing today is throttling your connection and even dropping packets so your Skype call or bittorrent connection is terminated sporadically. See here for more information on how Cox (in Canada) and Comcast in the US have throttled network connections.
Oh and yes Obama is for net neutrality. If you love the Internet and you want innovation of technology, we must stop this legislation.
This Door is A Rocking So You Can Come Knocking
Oh forget the clapper, this thing is awesome! If only I was an angel investor I would so sink some money into this.