The Magnolia Ventures
Technology Business Report
EFF Takes On ATT and Bush
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
Below is the contents of an email sent from the Electronic Frontier Foundation to its membership:
At a packed San Francisco hearing today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) defended your Fourth Amendment rights and urged the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to let our class-action lawsuit against AT&T go forward. The case demands that AT&T stop illegally assisting the National Security Agency to snoop on its customers' telephone and Internet communications.
There's much more at stake here than stopping the Bush Administration's illegal spying and holding the telco giant accountable, though. The President is arguing that thin claims of "state secrets" can trump the courts' constitutional duty to uphold the rule of law.
Without judicial review, there's no way to protect ordinary citizens against government abuses of power. No president, now or in the future, should be allowed unfettered authority to evade the courts and trample on your freedom. As Judge Vaughn Walker wrote in rejecting the government's claims at the lower court, "The compromise between liberty and security remains a difficult one. But dismissing this case at the outset would sacrifice liberty for no apparent enhancement of security."
For the past 17 years, EFF has been proud to take on the hard cases to ensure that your liberty is not sacrificed unnecessarily. Please support us in this critical case by donating to EFF at http://secure.eff.org/att .
And please spread the word to your friends and family.
Join EFF today! http://secure.eff.org/att
For a News.com story from the hearing:
http://news.com.com/Appeals+court+may+let+NSA+lawsuits+proceed/2100-1028_3-6202865.html
For more about the case: http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att
Tell Congress to stop the illegal spying: http://action.eff.org/fisaLabels: advocacy, ATT, privacy, telecommunications
About the Author
Michael Taus is the Managing Director of Magnolia Ventures a technology incubator and venture business consultancy, and Aquo Interactive, a software development and Internet marketing firm . He has been involved in the growth and development of network-related technology companies since 1996, including Rent.com (acquired by eBay) and BigLinx, a proprietary search engine marketing service. He currently is an advisor to a number of early-stage technology companies.
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Search Engine Optimization: Marketing and Technology
Friday, May 25, 2007
This is a tale of two cities -- no make that universes. In one universe, you have traditional marketers, whose purpose in life it is to create content shaped to a customer's needs and behaviors. In the other universe, you have programmers, whose existence is dedicated to building efficient, flexible and reliable platforms for delivering that very content.
This is not a new tale. Anyone who has worked in a technology environment has probably observed the clash of marketing and product development. But today, the setting has changed. Today, the "rise of search" has compelled these two groups to cooperate at an ever-increasing depth and frequency. Search engine optimization or search marketing has become central to the success of both groups and, therefore, has become the a new fertile ground for breeding success (and waging war).
The world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be quite a mystery to your average marketer. More often than not, search marketing consultants are vague about the techniques they employ. Often, this is for a good reason. After all, how many traditional marketers are equipped to understand the SEO implications of a simple website decision like using Flash or graphics.
And, while programmers have a deep understanding of the technology distinctions -- say, client-side versus server side scripting -- they are rarely concerned with the nature and quality of the content displayed.
Fortunately for both groups, the SEM community has a new bible of sorts at its disposal. Search Engine Optimization with PHP (and the soon to be released ASP version) is designed to be a bridge between these two communities. The book is a collaboration between Jaimie Sirovich, a search marketing consultant, and Christian Darie, a software engineer.
It seems unlikely that an experienced marketer will learn much about marketing. Nor will a good programmer learn much about programming. But with this book, each group has the opportunity to learn about the other's area of expertise.
So, who should read this book? Well, if you are a search marketing consultant, you probably (hopefully) are quite familiar with the concepts covered. You may benefit from the fairly comprehensive coverage of systems or foreign language SEO. But in general, if you've been at this for a while, you will most of this book to be light reading.
Overachieving programmers, will certainly have more to benefit here. This is especially true in areas such as site planning, content relocation and inadvertent black hat mishaps.
Marketers will benefit the most from this reading. This is true even if they avoid all the sample code and acronyms. Ultimately, marketers are responsible for the search-engine rankings of their sites. And therefore, having a solid, yet high-level, understanding of SEO is critical to their success. It also helps to ensure that there is less feuding and more collaboration.Labels: marketing, search engines, seo, software, technology
About the Author
Michael Taus is the Managing Director of Magnolia Ventures a technology incubator and venture business consultancy, and Aquo Interactive, a software development and Internet marketing firm . He has been involved in the growth and development of network-related technology companies since 1996, including Rent.com (acquired by eBay) and BigLinx, a proprietary search engine marketing service. He currently is an advisor to a number of early-stage technology companies.
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Is RFID Dead?
Friday, September 01, 2006
Last month, HP announced a new tiny chip -- dubbed "Memory Spot" -- that can be attached to nearly any object, making content available across a wide range of commercial and consumer products. Sounds a bit like RFID? You've got it. So what's the big deal?
What makes the Memory Spot is size. Not just the physical size of the chip, which is considerably smaller than a typical RFID. The chip incorporates a processor, memory and a wireless receiver, all bundled together in a device 2-4 mm2. Memory Spot has small physical dimensions, but more importantly, it has greater memory capacity and data access speed. And, becuase the tiny chip can be attached to or embedded in almost any object, resulting products could be exponentially more compelling than RFID-attached units. The research done to design and build the chip was done in Hewlett-Packard's laborotory in Bristol. Hewlett-Packard says that the chip is so small that it can be built into almost any object, and have proposed several possible uses. These include, but are not limited to: - Ensuring that drugs have not been counterfeited
- Tagging patients' wristbands in hospitals
- Adding multimedia to postcards
- Incorporation into books
HP claims that once the units are in mass-production, they may cost as little as one dollar each.
No batteries are needed because the chips get their power by induction from the devices which read the data. Current wireless transfer speeds are 10 Mbit/s. The current development version of the chip can hold 512 kB of data; but HP say that the memory capacity is likely to increase in the future. They claim that they are two years away from commercial production.
References
Some examples are:
* Medical records: Embed a Memory Spot chip into a hospital patient’s wrist band and full medical and drug records can be kept securely available.
* Audio photo: Attach a chip to the prints of photographs and add music, commentary or ambient sound to enhance the enjoyment of viewing photos.
* Digital postcards: Send a traditional holiday postcard to family and friends with a chip containing digital pictures of a vacation, plus sounds and even video clips.
* Document notes: A Memory Spot chip attached to a paper document can include a history of all the corrections and additions made to the text, as well as voice notes and graphical images.
* Perfect photocopies: A Memory Spot chip attached to a cover sheet eliminates the need to copy the original document. Just read the perfect digital version into the photocopier and the result will be sharp output every time, no matter how many copies are needed, and avoiding any possibility of the originals jamming in the feeder.
* Security passes: Add a chip to an identity card or security pass for the best of both worlds --- a handy card with secure, relevant digital information included.
* Anti-counterfeit tags: Counterfeit drugs are a significant problem globally. Memory Spot chips can contain secure information about the manufacture and quality of pharmaceuticals. When added to a drug container, this can prove their authenticity. A similar process could be used to verify high-value engineering and aviation components.
About the Author
Michael Taus is the Managing Director of Magnolia Ventures a technology incubator and venture business consultancy, and Aquo Interactive, a software development and Internet marketing firm . He has been involved in the growth and development of network-related technology companies since 1996, including Rent.com (acquired by eBay) and BigLinx, a proprietary search engine marketing service. He currently is an advisor to a number of early-stage technology companies.
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You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as you leave the article title, author name, body and resource box in tact (that means NO changes) with the links made active and you agree to our posted Terms of Use.
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