Communications and Technology Blog - Tehrani.com

Apple has a very closed ecosystem and at least some think the company may be headed down the road of antitrust litigation if it isn't careful. This article asserts the problem Apple could get into is an area where Google absolutely dominates - advertising. To me, Google will act as an eternal counterbalance letting Apple get away with a great deal as it fights the search giant.

This by the way, this is why regulators allow Oracle to buy anything and everything... The argument is we need this stuff to compete with Microsoft. In some ways Apple is double protected as it will argue it needs to pursue its business goals in an effort to balance out both Microsoft and Google. And in many ways they will likely be right.

Do you agree?

With so many people putting off any plans which take into account their death, I wonder what the response will be to DataInherit, a service which allows you to specify who gets your data, passwords, etc when you die.

With all due respect to the VP who was a past TMC expo keynoter who by the way did an outstanding job. It just seems too ironic to not request such a picture - I would want exclusive rights of course. A snow blower works as well - and it needs to be from this recent snowstorm.

Hi all, here is an ad we are currently running for a new position. Please forward this to anyone who you think is a great, not good fit.

Thanks -- we are really looking for the best of the best!

Ideally, the perfect candidate will submit a video resume as well.

--

Fast-growing B-to-B publisher based in Norwalk, CT is looking for a proven leader to head their marketing department. Ideal candidate possesses the perfect mix of strong managerial and leadership skills, and hands-on marketing abilities. TMC is a fast-paced environment where success is often driven by our marketing department's ability to quickly roll out new products and initiatives.

Responsibilities:

• Work with marketing team to execute Web, e-mail and direct marketing campaigns, including: planning, budgeting, copywriting/messaging/positioning, creative execution and after-marketing activities.
• Work with marketing team to support sales teams in meeting aggressive revenue goals.
• Seek out, negotiate and manage strategic partnerships.
• Work with marketing team to track and analyze response and adjust strategy to improve future efforts.
• Complete additional projects as required.
• Assist operations team as needed to ensure flawless execution of events.

• 5+ years hands-on Web/Direct marketing experience, preferably marketing publications, Web sites, conferences/trade shows/events
• Experience managing marketing team
• Excellent copywriting/editing a must
• Ability to seriously multi-task a must
• Excellent project and time management skills
• Database management experience
• Desktop publishing skills (Quark, Photoshop, etc.) required
• Willingness to travel 4-5x per year a must

Salary/Benefits: Salary commensurate with experience. Qualified applicants should reply and MUST include salary requirements in your response. Please include your resume as an attachment to your message, or fax resume and salary requirements to 203-295-0170 or email sthompson (at) tmcnet dot com.

Last week, Doug Mohney had the big scoop that Supercomm will be cancelled - he blogged it as a rumor which was subsequently confirmed by the TIA and USTelecom today. As a show organizer myself I get a lot of questions regarding what this news means to our industry. Rather than continuing to opine on a person-by-person basis, I thought it made sense to put my thoughts in writing.

Before I begin however I would like to say thanks to the TIA and USTelecom associations for holding this show which I have faithfully gone to for decades, I have always held the show in tremendous regard.

Some of my most memorable moments from the expo are around 1997 or so when it was held the same week as COMDEX which took place in Atlanta and I had to get from Georgia to New Orleans in record time to attend meetings at both shows. When I finally got to the show - a behemoth of an event, I was immediately yelled at by an advertiser. Why? Well we were asked by another advertiser if they could take a spot in our booth and in a spirit of being helpful we said sure. Well, it turns out the booth we had allowed the testing vendor in our booth Hammer Technologies (Now Empirix) to block a company which is now part of Spirent. Another great set of moments was annual meetings to learn about Fujitsu's SONET products in the early nineties with their then head of PR Patrick O'Rourke - of the most knowledgeable guys in the biz. He has subsequently moved on from telecom.

See TMC interviews from the last Supercomm 2009 in Chicago

Sadly, this colossus of an event split into two, changed names and dates and locations as a result of an internal disagreement. The situation sadly continued for years resulting in shows with a lack of attendees and terrible ROI for exhibitors. This had a negative effect on the entire industry as many companies counted on this expo for their livelihood.

It is worth mentioning that the trade show business has changed dramatically and what most people outside this industry may not understand is that 15 years ago if you wanted to hold an event, you typically went out and rented targeted mailing lists from magazine publishers. Magazine lists were the absolute best names and still are because regular mailing and address changes keeps the addresses up to date. I have seen 50% of a list become undeliverable over the course of one year meaning that a 6-month old list is likely 25% inaccurate.

But those days are gone. The main magazines which used to support this event were America's Network and Telephony and neither is printed anymore. To make matters worse, direct mail continues to be less effective meaning even the best list is far less effective than it used to be.

This gets me to the TMC philosophy on events - in order to have a successful conference, you need to have community interaction with your audience every moment of day of every year. You need to be a media company with a strong web presence and magazines. Trade show companies have limited days ahead of them if they don't own their communities 24x7.

This is exactly why you shouldn't think the demise of a show alone can predict the health of an industry. Sure the economy is bad but Ethernet, wireless backhaul, 4G, M2M and Smart Grid are some of the hottest areas I have ever seen in the communications space.

Moreover, we have seen the death of COMDEX and as far as I can tell there is a tech industry. Then we experienced the death of VON (twice now) and the last I checked, IP communications is alive and growing (see videos below from ITEXPO last month in Miami). Also -- anyone remember Internet World - a great show before it died - and guess what, the Internet is still around!


Andy Abramson hosting his famous wine dinner where he exclaims loudly regarding the success of ITEXPO "VoIP is alive." In reality the show is much broader than VoIP and his nice comments are more than appreciated.

Shows - especially tech events are cyclical - they rise and fall in popularity and if you aren't reinventing yourself always, you die.

And while Supercomm should have been reinventing itself (admittedly it tried but the directions they went in such as entertainment were baffling) it was busy changing its name, postponing the show and dealing with infighting.

You can't necessarily blame anyone at the event mind you because when you have an association running a show you need consensus to get anything done. When you have multiple associations the challenge becomes that much greater - think of it as (association)². And we live in an age of speed - I firmly believe that the slowest organizations in virtually all industries are at a competitive disadvantage. In October of 2008 when I wrote about how companies need to navigate the financial crisis I said the following:

Speed: It is better to be fast than right. After all, you can't be right every time but if you are fast, you can adjust and become right faster than the other guy.

If I am to be remembered for one saying, I hope it is this one.

This gets us back to the carrier, CLEC/ILEC/ISP/Rural telco/Cable/Wireless community which TMC has been doing its best to serve all these years.

In order to continue fostering community among this group, TMC will continue to run webinars and publish magazines focused on the topics of interest to the industry. For example, Internet Telephony and Next Generation Networks Magazines are a few of the publications we publish focused on the service provider market.

In addition, ITEXPO has been seeing increased carrier attendance and we continue to focus on this area of the market with collocated events such as 4GWE, M2M Evolution, Smart Grid Summit and a plethora of content aimed at telco 2.0 topics (see video). 

Dear carriers, ITEXPO will continue to be your home, now more than ever. We continue to listen to you and provide you with leading edge information you need to better service your customers and stay competitive. This is our promise to you.

In closing, let's understand that the Internet is having a profound influence on many businesses but the death of one show should not ever be used as a sole barometer of an industry's health. When you realize all the challenges Supercomm has had over the last few years, it is a miracle it was even pulled off in 2009. Personally I remain very optimistic about the future of the carrier telecom market. There will be a number of companies who do very well in this space. Some will not adjust and won't make it but for those who do, there will be tremendous opportunities in cloud computing, video, IP communications, backhaul, Ethernet, 4G, M2M and more.

Google surprised many with an ad on the Super Bowl and I have to say this is one of the best ads I have seen in a while and hats off to the company for doing such a great job.

To me the ad shows that Google continues to understand that it needs multiple types of marketing. The company has been extremely aggressive lately partnering with media companies to promote many of of its products such as Google Docs and search appliances.

What hasn't changed however is how the company approaches business. Garrett Rogers explains that Google would not have run the ad if it didn't receive such favorable reviews on YouTube. So Google used the power of the web and YouTube to show the ad would be received well - before running it on TV.

Using focus groups for advertising is not a new idea but I wonder why more companies don't use panels and focus groups to ensure their ad dollars are spent as efficiently as possible.

An illustrative story, worth passing on.

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before, but had once failed an entire class.

That class had insisted that Obama's socialism worked and that no one would be poor and no one would be rich, a great equalizer.

The professor then said, "OK, we will have an experiment in this class on Obama's plan".

All grades would be averaged and everyone would receive the same grade so no one would fail and no one would receive an A.

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone got a B. The students who studied hard were upset and the students who studied little were happy.

As the second test rolled around, the students who studied little had studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride too so they studied little.

The second test average was a D!

No one was happy.

When the 3rd test rolled around, the average was an F.

The scores never increased as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings and no one would study for the benefit of anyone else.

All failed, to their great surprise, and the professor told them that socialism would also ultimately fail because when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great but when government takes all the reward away, no one will try or want to succeed.

Absolutely hilarious - A Google employee decided he would take a stand against drivers who talk on their cell phone in their cars by well - standing in front of a car where the driver was talking on the phone. In this case it was Michael Arrington who placed his car in park so he could get out and discuss the situation with the person. When the door opened the Googler fled.

Either Michael Arrington is one mean-looking dude or perhaps those Google employees are less tough when they leave the world of algorithms. Anyway, here is the picture of the Googler who Michael Arrington is looking for. According to Michael he wants to know who it is so he can send him a T-shirt. Yeah sure - I wouldn't be surprised if the shirt is wrapping a 2-week old herring.
 

In a recent post I mentioned that years back I launched the world's first Tablet computing conference and at the time our fortunes were tied to Microsoft. Obviously the tablet PC market did not take off and now that the iPad has debuted and is already deemed to be successful by analysts, many are beginning to dissect the problems at Microsoft.

One very good article on the matter is from Mary Jo Foley at ZDnet who says the answer is for the company to continue focusing on small and isolated teams which launch new products isolated from the corporate parent. Ironically this is exactly what Microsoft did with ResponsePoint, the SMB PBX which was full-featured and a tremendous value. Somehow the company just didn't see sales ramp as fast as they would have liked and abandoned the project after a few years. I was really hoping this division would lead to the transformation of the whole company.

Then again, telephony is a funny business, there are a few small PBX players in the market whose CEOs I wouldn't trust to put gas in my car and the reason they have a job is because of a legacy reseller base in a bunch of small cities you never heard of. In these towns, the Interconnect (that is what telephony VARs used to be called if you are new to the biz) golfs with local small business owners and as a result gets the phone system buy.

But back to Microsoft, another good article comes from InfoWorld - this one argues that it is too bad that Microsoft hasn't been broken up.

Perhaps this is the right approach. From my perspective Microsoft is much too big for its own good and lawyers and politics have stolen the company's soul. Some past Microsoft execs say the problem has to do with Steve Ballmer who is not technical enough to run the company.

If Steve Jobs could clone himself and be the head of just about any company, he would improve it. But if Jobs was to run Microsoft, wouldn't you expect the company to see sales skyrocket? The brand name that Microsoft has - the product line, the distribution channel, the cash... There is just one item missing and it is big... A soul and passion for excellence above all else.

This is not to say that many of the products coming out of Redmond aren't the absolute best in the market. But there needs to be more cohesion and a grander vision and better execution.

A multitude of small spin-offs may be the answer or just the cleaning house of lawyers and political animals. BTW I hear there are lots of job openings in DC.

There should be no immediate concern for the company's profits as the existing OS and Office franchise can be milked for billions of dollars over the years. The fear should be the company continues to lose its best people and its products continue to deteriorate as Google, Apple, Oracle and others take share from every possible angle.

There is time to turn the ship around but sooner or later, one of the shots coming from the competition are going to disable the rudder.

Corporate and government secrets are currently being stolen on a grand scale - can anything be done about it?

If you are one of those people not easily rattled, please have a seat and get ready to shake. A new acronym, APT which stands for Advanced Persistent Threat is on the scene and by many accounts is an online threat which is virtually impossible to detect and even worse eradicate. Once your company is infected it seems hackers have access to virtually any and all information on your network. And once again, there may be nothing you can do about it.

Most of these attacks are launched through social interaction consisting of spear phishing - for example where someone poses as a friend via a social network or email and sends a link which includes code which begins the launching of an exploit. This is exact security flaw by the way which recently hit Google and in that case a vulnerability of Internet Explorer was used to begin the infiltration.

Quite often when a company is hacked, they keep it quiet, not wanting to let the world know about the breach. But it seems according to Wired that thousands of companies have been infected since 2002 and Google is one of the first to go public with such news.

"The scope of this is much larger than anybody has every conveyed," says Kevin Mandia, CEO and president of Virginia-based computer security and forensic firm Mandiant. "There [are] not 50 companies compromised. There are thousands of companies compromised. Actively, right now."

What you need to know about APT attacks is that they are different than typical exploits which may be targeting credit card information. Advanced Persistent Threats are designed for long-term espionage - siphoning off Microsoft Office files and PDFs. The files are aggregated and stored on your network and then combined into larger files which are then sliced into small files which are encrypted and sent in bursts to servers which are typically in China.

Defense companies, government agencies and oil companies have been hit and another target which may not seem surprising are companies doing business in China - especially law firms. In one case, a company negotiating to purchase a company in China was infiltrated and information pertaining to the negotiations was stolen by a company inside China. As you may have guessed, this information, once discovered -- killed the deal.

According to the Christian Science Monitor:

In this new scenario, a single piece of malware often has multiple characteristics. Its digital signatures can morph to evade detection. At the same time, it can spin off decoys intended to be caught to make it appear as if an attack has been thwarted.

More than half of the 600 IT managers operating critical infrastructure in 14 countries reported being recently hit by "high-level" adversaries such as organized crime, terrorists or nation states, according to a new global survey of information technology executives by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington late last month.

A majority of the group hit, 59 percent, said they thought their computer networks and controls systems were under "repeated cyberattack, often from high-level adversaries like foreign nation-states."

US Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair's comments might be news to the Senate, but cybersecurity experts face these threats daily. The "persistent" threat he referred to, for instance, is known widely as the "Advanced Persistent Threat" or APT within the security community. It's also shorthand for state-sponsored "foreign intelligence" operations and sometimes just "China."

"These are not 'slash-and-grab jobs'," says Rob Lee, a director at Mandiant, a leading cyber security firm. "The goal of the intruder is to occupy the network. These are professionals, not people doing this at night. This is someone's full-time job from the initial breach to lateral movement across the network, the actual occupation, then the exfiltration of data - there are clear lines of responsibility between different actors going on."

According to Mr. Lee and other experts, the common thread in the APT is connected to China. Among 40-45 very sophisticated attacks in the past year, about two-thirds were "China related," he said.

Shawn Carpenter, principal forensics analyst at NetWitness Corporation, concurs. He says that in a number of cases he has traced malware code back to Chinese hacker sites and to Chinese character sets in software compilers used to create the code. "You can put together some pretty compelling links that trace their way back to China," he says.

Representatives of the Chinese Embassy regularly rebut such criticisms, as they did with a Monitor report last month on cyber attacks targeting the US oil and gas industries.

Phase 1, Reconnaissance: Attackers will watch and take notes on who in an organization they need to target, from administrative assistants to executives. Much of this information is gleaned from public Web sites.

Phase 2, The Initial Breach: They will use spear-phishing attacks to send those identified targets an attachment with an exploit that can be used to hijack the target's system. Any personal information the attacker knows about the source will be used to entice the target user to open the attachment.

Phase 3, Get a Network Backdoor: MANDIANT says the attackers will do what they can to get network administrative credentials. And they will also implant malware (that they centrally control) designed to avoid detection. These will be used to gain further access to more of the victim company's infrastructure.

Phase 4, Grab User Credentials: These credentials are used to log-on to end point systems, and siphon data. MANDIANT said the typical victim organization it studied has 40 systems compromised: some had more than 150.

Phase 6, Data Ex-filtration: Continuing to move about the infected network and increasing access rights to more sensitive systems, the attackers are now compressing stolen data - imagine anything from financial data, marketing plans, research and development information - and transferring that information to an external server under the attackers control.

Phase 7, Maintain Persistence: The rest is a cat and mouse game: as the organization cleans and updates systems, the attackers establish additional footholds.

If there is any good news to be found on the matter it may be that the above mentioned company NetWitness has received a US Patent for network analysis which may be helpful in detecting and preventing APT attacks. According to TMCnet:

The new patent is a development over its currently held patent NetWitness' method of capture, reassembly, port-agnostic service identification, and recursive data extraction, covering all the essentials for network and application layer network forensics. The patent applied for in 2002 defends a core investigative technology in the NetWitness NextGen product suite, and stresses on the exclusive method in which NetWitness models and systematizes the captured network data.

As voice, video and fax all ride over IP networks, there is absolutely no reason why these attacks can't target these mediums meaning video calls between the CEO and the board can be captured. Phone calls, voicemails, contracts... Everything on the network is at risk.

Now that the extent of the problem is being made public I hope that global governments get involved and create harsh penalties for countries caught in wide scale corporate espionage. Moreover, the opportunity for security and vendors seems enormous - one would imagine security experts are salivating at the potential profits they can make from helping companies and governments secure their vital information.

 Communications, wireless, consumer electronics, cloud computing, virtualization -- in a turbulent market, it is good to be in technology.

Monster.com was one of the companies I considered to have a natural monopoly in the US job search market a decade ago. Amazingly, social media sites like LinkedIn and Craigslist are making Job sites less relevant and as a result Monster just picked up HotJobs for $225 in cash to shore up its decreasing market share.

A decade or so ago it was common knowledge that satellite radio would eventually make a huge dent in the business of traditional radio companies. While this was certainly the case, the rise of iPods and streaming radio stations like Pandora have changed the game, adding pressure to not only legacy radio stations but those of the satellite variety as well.

The success of Pandora shows how rapidly a smart idea with excellent execution can disrupt markets with billions of dollars of investments - virtually overnight.

It was pretty well known that Pandora has had problems in past years because of their success and the amount they had to pay in licensing of the music they stream. So to me it is fascinating to read how the company is generating tens of millions of dollars in traditional advertising from large companies and is now reaching out to smaller advertisers as well.

Technology disrupts - it allows anyone with an idea and a dream to almost instantly change customer behavior. It is this fact that adds massive excitement to the industry for me. Keeping up with the changes in media, communications and tech can be exhausting but at the same time if you aren't up to date on the competitive landscape you can be wiped out by a company you never heard of.

Today Nick Bilton over at the New York Times devoted time and energy to beat up George Packer at The New Yorker for bashing Twitter without actually using it. Interestingly I agree with Packer that the obsession with the service is excessive but then again, it has changed my business overnight. If TMC, a leading communications and technology media company didn't not only embrace Twitter but become experts in social media, we risked being disintermediated out of existence.

Check out a great excerpt from the article:

Most importantly, Twitter is transforming the nature of news, the industry from which Mr. Packer reaps his paycheck. The news media are going through their most robust transformation since the dawn of the printing press, in large part due to the Internet and services like Twitter. After this metamorphosis takes place, everyone will benefit from the information moving swiftly around the globe.

The excitement and energy of tech was evident a few weeks back at ITEXPO where TMC hosted the world's first ever Startup Camp Telephony (video, Jamie Siminoff keynote) with Larry Lisser and many people commented the conference was like Silicon Valley recreated in Miami. Thanks to people like you this launch event was a grand success.

Dave Michaels had some nice things to say about the conference at Pin Drop Soup and I have some of the excerpts below and highlighted for your reading pleasure:

Well, back to ITEXPO and the telecom world, I finally met Larry Lisser - who so far I had only met through Twitter. Larry is a principal of Embrase Business Consulting which guides telecom (and other) startups. The idea of Startup Camp was "to better expose and support the very early stage: those companies disrupting in the trenches, those still bootstrapping, those without the benefit of PR budgets to generate the visibility and partner opportunities they needed to get to market faster. Those in voice, mobile, video, network and other forms of emerging telephony." Quoted from Larry's Blog.

What I need to state clearly here is this was an electric event. It should not have been - this was not a start-up crowd. Nor was it well timed - it was at the end of a long day of sessions and exhibitions. Time to go back to the hotel. But instead, it was a packed event - guessing 200 people. The energy in the room was unlike any other ITEXPO session. I attend quite a few telecom events every year and I never describe any of the meetings or sessions as "electric". But that's what startups do, and startups just don't fit into my normal world of enterprise communications. There is plenty of innovation among the enterprise players - but it isn't raw. It is filtered and branded. Google was quite innovative with Google Voice, but the real innovation came from Grand Central which Google acquired. These are the early Grand Central's. Telecom isn't particularly associated with young vibrant companies - the barriers to entry over the decades were significant. But like so many other industries, the web and new APIs are unleashing innovation in even the most stubborn industries.

It was so nice to this innovative startup spirit alive at an industry conference. The transition from digital to VoIP was not as disruptive as many predicted. But now that VoIP is here, the real possibilities are arriving - a wave of new products and services are transforming the industry. No assumption (albeit dialtone makes sense, T1s are cost effective, long distance is expensive, whatever) can be assumed to be true any more. The industry is about to deliver new services ranging from visual communications to location-based solutions that were either incomprehensible a few years ago or promised and unfulfilled for decades.

TMC moved into its new corporate HQ this week and we have had a few visitors so far - in every meeting I have had there is more optimism than I have heard in a long while. With great news like Acme Packet and Cisco beating numbers and mergers like Comcast/NGT which took place yesterday, it is a very exciting time indeed (and once again) to be in communications and technology.

YES! Over IP -- We just sold our wholesale VoIP company

You can smell the hops brewing at the nearby Coors plant when you visit the corporate headquarters of New Global Telecom located in Golden Colorado. One imagines having a beer brewer nearby was a definite plus during the celebration which ensued after the hosted VoIP wholesaler sold their company to Comcast for an undisclosed amount. To get an idea of the size of this acquisition, NGT says they have 100,000 VoIP seats under management.

What is curious about this news is why Comcast would purchase a VoIP wholesaler serving a big competitor AT&T. Then again, another customer is Belgacom SA so perhaps this move helps the cable company become a global IP communications wholesaler.

As a slew of companies such as Netflix, YouTube and Roku continue to provide services which compete with Comcast's bread and butter business of providing television service, the company is smart to look for other similar businesses to get into. Providing content via the NBC deal or hosted VoIP makes sense as the company needs to diversify quickly to ensure predictable revenue in a turbulent tech market which sees continuous disruption.

I suggested companies join the RPX patent protection club back in 2008 as I have seen how patent litigation can destroy a company's profitability and force it to lose focus. RPX as you may remember is a firm whose goal is to allow companies to buy into a pool of patents which can be used to protect them against future lawsuits. The idea is a company will think twice about pursuing a patent lawsuit if you can countersue using a huge pool of patents.

Since my original entry, Microsoft, Nokia and Sony have signed up for the service. I expected all the companies who signed up to be the size of RPX customer ShoreTel or even smaller so I was a bit surprised when I read about the success RPX is having with large companies. If you want to learn more, be sure to check out this article from Rachael King at BusinessWeek.