Outside Innovation

Certificate Authorities Have Been Compromised! What Does This Mean To You?

By Peter Horne, one of Patty’s Pioneers

How Does the Internet Verify Identity?
We all know that when you travel internationally, your passport ties the whole security process together. So let's play a thought experiment. If someone wanted to pretend to be you and travel with your identity, they would have to have your passport number so that they could book an international flight, then they would need a fake passport as photo ID at the counter to pick up the ticket, and then they would have to present the fake passport to a TSA or customs official who has been trained to study passports, including what to look for when they shine the ultra violet, or black light, on your passport. Let’s assign some very low odds to the chances of success. Let’s say that they have a 1/100 chance of getting your passport ID without detection and being able to book a flight in your name. Now let’s assume they have a 1 in 100 chance of producing a fake passport that has your passport number and photo that fools the airline ticket staff and their computer, or works in the auto check-in kiosk. Now let’s assume that there is a 1/100 chance the passport is of high enough quality to beat the trained official with their black light and experienced eye. That gives the bad guy a 1 in a 1,000,000 in making it through the process. Nice odds against the bad guy.

But what if they have your passport number and have the government machine that makes passports? What are the odds the bad guy will get through the process? They are now close to 100%.

Your web browser is nothing more than a TSA official that checks web site passports (using Secure Socket Layer or SSL technology). It is trained to look at web sites using a set of black lights that are shipped with it. It uses these black lights to check the passport a web site presents to the browser to see if it has an “official” stamp on it. If it sees the right stamp under the right light, it tells you the site is who it says it is.

What Do Customers Want to DO on Your Web Site?

We’ve been thinking a lot about web site design recently. In particular, how to ensure that your prospects and customers know what they can DO on your site and understand how what you offer fits with their needs. One of our favorite reference sites is Nature Education’s Scitable.com. You’ll notice that at the top right of their home page is a simple box that lists 4 things you can DO on their science library and personal learning web site:

- Browse & Search Science Articles
- Get Help or Connect with Peers
- Build an Online Classroom
- Contribute & Share Your Content

Ronni Marshak uses an analogy to describe the need for this kind of clear navigation on your home page. She calls it “Book a Load, Track a Load.”

Promoting Your Sweet Spot
Make Sure Your Web Site Makes It Easy for Customers to Do What They Most Likely Want to Do
By Ronni T. Marshak, Executive VP and Senior Consultant, September 1, 2011

Salesforce Invites End-Customers Into Its Social Media Groups: Great News for CABs!

Salesforce.com has been touting its enterprise social media strategy for some time. Now there’s a new and very important enhancement: the ability to invite customers into Private Chatter Groups for cross-company collaboration around customers’ issues. Salesforce Chatter is a B2B equivalent of Facebook (that also integrates well with Twitter, Facebook, et al). You can see a good, current demo given to Rackspace’s Robert Scoble in late August, 2011 here. (Thanks, Robert!)

Salesforce’s enterprise social media strategy is simple and seductive:

1) Give employees social media tools that are integrated with the enterprise applications they already use as well as with external social media tools like Facebook and Twitter.

2) Ensure that your employees have visibility into their clients’ companies’ and individuals’ social media activity so they’ll know what’s going on with their clients’ companies and with their individual customers.

3) NEW: Enable employees to invite customers into private social groups for customer interactions. These can be customer-account-specific groups to work collaboratively and in an ad hoc manner on customers’ issues or proposals. They can also be private groups of customers who are working on a common project with your subject matter experts. This is the kind of collaborative support that’s perfect for supporting the ongoing work of Customer Advisory Boards and Customer Innovation Teams.

What I like about the new version of Chatter is that you can create private groups of employees + customers from MULTIPLE customer accounts. Think about a customer advisory board or a group of customer co-designers who are providing input and feedback to your strategy and your product directions. All you need is your customers’ email addresses in order to invite them. They can accept the invitation whether or not Salesforce.com Chatter is used within their own organizations. You’ll be able to share files and do real-time screen sharing and collaboration with the members of the group. Everyone from your company who joins in the conversations will KNOW that this is a group that includes customers. So they’ll engage in appropriate behavior. But the interactions will be more casual, more ad hoc, more free-flowing, and they can be tagged with keywords that will make it easy for members to follow (or subscribe to) the conversation threads they’re interested in.

Salesforce.com has also made Chatter part of its Force.com platform with an open API (REST), using its Heroku (Ruby on Rails) integration. So third-party developers will be able to write applications that build on the Chatter foundation.

Will Inviting Customers into Chatter Turn the Salesforce.com Ecosystem into a Customer Ecosystem?
We’ve been longtime fans of Salesforce.com’s fantastic ecosystem of applications, developers, partners, and consultants—known as Force.com—and its AppExchange (which pre-dated Apple’s App Store). What’s been missing for us is the fact that the Salesforce ecosystem has been designed to be ABOUT end-customers, not FOR end-customers. Most of the applications in the Salesforce.com ecosystem help companies manage their relationships with customers. There are few offerings that help END-CUSTOMERS manage their relationships with their suppliers.

Now, customers get to participate, too! We like the friction-free support for cross-company collaboration that Salesforce now offers with the new version of Chatter. This may be the way that customers gain more visibility into the conversations, interactions, and workflows that impact them! Chatter will benefit customers in many ways. It can be used to streamline approval workflows and to add visibility into that process for customers (e.g., approve a discount for a pending deal; approve a credit to a customer that impacts the customer, the reseller, and his distributor). Chatter can be used to resolve a thorny technical problem with multiple experts adding their advice (e.g., get real-time help from company experts, partner experts, and peer experts for a real-time customer problem). All of these typical collaborative brainstorming and/or problem-solving activities can be visible to customers. This is the kind of transparency that most customers are seeking!

First Responders Need Your Help!

We usually avoid “politics.” But this is really important for residents of the U.S. As you may be aware from the recent 9/11 Commission Report Card, there is one really important action that the U.S. Congress needs to take ASAP: allocate wireless spectrum for public safety so that firemen and policemen (and other first responders) can communicate. You may not be aware that ours is one of the few countries in which there is no interoperability between emergency communications systems! This has been true for decades, but it came to everyone’s attention during 9/11, when police and firemen in New York were unable to communicate effectively. Now, 10 years after 9/11, this problem has still not been solved. Yet there is current legislation before Congress—the Public Safety Spectrum and Wireless Innovation Act, S. 911. If this bill can pass the Senate, the House may be compelled, through public pressure, to pass it as well. It’s hard to imagine our Congress stonewalling a measure that is so important to the wellbeing of the American people during any emergency (hurricanes, floods, terrorist attacks, etc.). But we all know that money talks and can stall this kind of measure forever. So please contact your Senators and Representatives! http://psafirst.org/take-action

For more information about the issues, here’s an excerpt from a white paper by the Public Safety Alliance (an organization of police and fire chiefs, emergency medical technicians, and other first responders):

“Public safety is currently the license holder of 10 MHz of broadband-ready spectrum in the 700 MHz band. As the only remaining portion of unlicensed 700 MHz spectrum on a nationwide basis, public safety must be allocated the D Block in order to build out a 20 MHz broadband network. From a fiscal standpoint, allocating the D Block to public safety would be the most financially and nationally responsible use of the spectrum, as the build-out of a 20 MHz network split between two separate bands would cost taxpayers billions more than simply building one 20 MHz network on a singular spectral band. Allocating the D Block to public safety will allow for a nationwide interoperable broadband network on a contiguous 20 MHz spectrum swath.

The D Block is the only spectrum capable of accommodating public safety’s needs, due to the unique propagation techniques of 700 MHz spectrum. The combined 20 MHz of spectrum would provide the framework for an ideal broadband network for first responders because it would provide enough capacity necessary to transmit mission critical real-time high resolution video, voice and data with the in-building penetration required by police, EMS and fire when responding to emergencies within residential and commercial units. The robust network would be strong and efficient enough to provide mission critical-grade communication in the case of a natural disaster, terrorist attack, or other emergency.”

And, here’s a link to a recent interview with the co-chairs of the 911 Commission in which they describe this legislation as one of the two most important actions that need to be taken.

My brother, Andrew Seybold, one of the world’s top consultants in wireless communications, has been donating huge amounts of his time to the first responder community to educate our legislators about this topic. Andy does this not only on his own nickel, but in ways that are contrary to his own self-interest, since many of his clients are the telcos who want the spectrum allocated to them to resell. Andy has been tied into the first responder community since he was a teenage volunteer fireman in our home town. I asked Andy for the most recent update on the legislative process. He replied:

“The push right now is to get S 911—the Rockefeller/Hutchinson bill onto the floor of the Senate. It passed in committee with a voice vote of 24-4, which is a good bi-partisan vote. We need it to come to the floor of the Senate ASAP and we believe it will pass putting a LOT of pressure on the House, where the real battle is going to be over money—always money!”

~ Andrew Seybold, Consultant and Editor, Public Safety Newsletter, Tell It Like It Is wireless communications blog, and Wireless Mobile Commentary e-newsletter

Why the urgency? We’d love to see this legislation signed, sealed, and delivered by the anniversary of 9/11!