Those of you who liked my transcripts of Guy Kawasaki’s Art of the Start conference may also like to check out this video of “The Art of Innovation” presented by Guy at UCLA. Enjoy!
(Guy starts about 13 minutes into the video)
My employer, PGP, is seeking another stellar Product Manager to add to the team. Hot company, hot space (security), and <insert superlative here>! That, plus Phil Zimmermann drops by every so often, if that turns your crank (talk about your non-taxable benefit!).
If you’re a crypto-geek (as in “into encryption” not “difficult to understand”) with a good technical background, product management experience, good communication skills, and you “clean up good” for customers (my words, not PGP’s), then check out the job posting.
Seriously, I could use all the help I can get. 😉
A funny thing happened to me yesterday and then again today. I’m not sure why I hadn’t consciously acknowledged it before, but for some reason it just became overwhelmingly apparent: there are geeks everywhere.
The first shoe dropped last night while watching the bonus features of Lost: The Complete First Season (a geeky endeavor in its own right – after all, who really watches all of the “bonus material anyway?). JJ Abrams was recounting how he had met Damon Lindelof, the writer for the pilot of Lost. Cue numerous cutscenes between the various network/producer people talking about the experience. What was scary was what they all remembered about meeting Damon for the first time: he had on this cool vintage “Star Wars” t-shirt. For a good ten minutes, this was what they talked about. Not the meeting of the minds. Not the creative powers, coming together to join forces. A freakin’ Star Wars t-shirt.
It struck me at the moment that film geeks might not be all that different from the regular IT variety. Here we had a bona-fide tribe of film/write geeks. Darwin, I think we’ve got ourselves a new species.
The other shoe dropped while watching an episode of Oprah (not intentionally, of course; Ashley had it on while we were eating dinner tonight), who was interviewing fashion designer Marc Jacobs. Enter Fashion God, clad in: plain black sweater over white collared shirt, plain jeans, white socks and tennis shoes, and a set of translucent military issue RPGs (rape-prevention glasses). Plus programmer-worthy unruly long hair. Cue another six shots of this same guy beside every hot model to grace the cover of a magazine for the past decade while wearing the exact same outfit!
That alone (nevermind the fact that in the wrong light, Marc Jocobs looks like a younger David Paymer or an older Tantek Çelik) was enough to justify the identification of yet another sub-species: the fashion geek.
The question is: when everyone is a geek, who’s left?
Seriously, what’s up with NBC’s commentary on the Olympics? They can’t seem to make it through a description of an athlete or an event without invoking the macabre. Deaths in the family. Mothers on dialysis. Heinous war crimes. I thought this was supposed to be a happy event – instead, it’s like spending two weeks with relative that’s constantly reminding you about how bad they had it when they were a kid.
If I want that kind of grief, I’ll watch the news.
A number of sources are reporting on a Baltimore Sun story pointing out that Olympic athletes in Torino are acting as unwitting billboards for Apple’s iPod. Most interesting is the fact that the athletes have not only been using the device as they train and prepare to compete but also are, in some cases, wearing the devices as they’re competing.
I have to wonder, given the known effect that music has on the brain, couldn’t this count as a “performance enhancing drug”?
Dear Joyce Park (aka Troutgirl):
We’ve had our differences in the past – between my constant un-RSVP’d appearances at 106 Miles, or my continued insistence that I am still relevant despite ‘betraying’ engineering for product management – but Saturday changed everything. There, in the company of your Renkoo brethren, you spoke the words I’ve longed to hear:
Boy, Renkoo really needs a product manager! I mean, I never realized there was all this stuff that needed to be taken care of! We need someone to venga-ize us!
At first, I thought you were joking. Or drunk (Lord knows it sounds like you were making words up). Or possibly both. I knew those words would never easily escape your lips, at least not without the assistance of some light bondage and a car battery. But the sincerity, the exasperation with which those words were spoken made me realize you were serious.
Although I had wondered about your Herculean intake of tequila over the course of the evening, I now understand what you were doing: steeling your nerves for this scandalous admission. I just want to let you know, privately, how much I appreciate this validation. Product Management’s a tough gig, and most engineers don’t get it because they can’t measure it in lines of cleanly encapsulated, syntactically pure code. We take the requirements from the customers to the engineers. That’s our jobs. We have people skills dammit!
Your confession is appreciated – it’s always good to know someone “gets it”. If only every engineer understood this, and I wish you would tell them all – but don’t worry: the secret of your admiration for Product Managers everywhere is safe with me. I wouldn’t dare speak a word of it – who would believe me? I mean, I could plaster it on the Internet, complete with a photo or two of the moment, (the blogosphere will believe anything), but putting this out there would just be…tacky. 😉
Sincerely,
Brendon J. Wilson
With all the kafuffle over a number of search engines handing over users’ query data to the feds in the news recently, a certain little security company I know (read: work for) has been getting a fair bit of play in the news (both online and off). It’s nice to see that people are starting to wake up to the risk to their personal privacy in the digital age – as more information goes online, it’ll only get easier to assemble a fairly comprehensive picture of a person’s habits from scattered sources.
One comment from Andrew Krcik, VP of Marketing at PGP, on the whole Google-versus-the-feds story that I found particularly interesting:
Companies are at risk too. Think about what employees search for in the course of the day. That information can reveal a lot about what is going on at a particular company — whether it is preparing for a product launch, or researching a new demographic, or preparing for a lawsuit.
While Andrew’s comment was with respect to the omniscience of search engines into the everyday thinking of businesses as evidenced by their employees’ search queries, search engines aren’t the only ones with the opportunity to collect that information. Think about the path the average search query follows when someone executes a search:
- I enter a search term in my browser and click “Search!”
- My browser, via my operating system, creates a HTTP request
- My operating system passes the request through my network card to my Internet connection
- My ISP passes my request to the search engine, which returns a list of results
- I click a link in the list of results (repeating a lot of the steps above), and create another HTTP request for the URL I want to visit
- The web server at my ultimate destination registers my request and returns the page I requested
Look at all the trust links in that sequence of steps! Ask yourself: Do I trust my browser not to collect statistics on the sites I visit and report them back to whoever created the browser? Do I trust that my operating system, or even my network card, isn’t doing the same thing? What about my ISP – are they “monetizing” my traffic by selling details on my surfing habits? I mean, did you really read all the terms of service, warranty, and other legal bric-a-brac that accompanied your computer and its associated software and services?
I’m guessing you didn’t.
Putting aside Ken Thompson-style subversions of your own operating system for a moment, let’s assume you trusted your operating system, your hardware, your ISP, and even the search engine. There’s still one person who knows what you’re asking for: your final destination web site!
Every time you visit a web site, the web site records your IP address; in some cases, an IP address might be resolved to belong to a particular organization. Imagine you’re a company and you notice a lot of hits coming from IP addresses owned by a particular company – what are they up to? With enough analysis, you might be able to eek out an idea of why they’re visiting. If, for example, they seem to be primarily visiting one section of your web site, you might conclude they’re preparing to launch a competitive product.
Companies hemorrhage information in many other ways, and that’s where things get really interesting. Combining information sources can allow noise to be resolved into useful information. For example, many email clients add the source IP address as a header to outgoing email – a company that combined analysis of its email traffic with web site traffic analysis might be able to determine who specifically is reading their site. It’s not that hard to do – I, for example, am often able to tell which of my friends are visiting my web site because I know a lot of their home or work IP addresses from email they have sent me in the past. Tools could easily be incorporated into corporate email, phone, web, and other systems to build a more cohesive picture.
In some ways, I’m surprised companies aren’t turning to information-warfare techniques to either camouflage their online activities to eliminate these subliminal channels of information leakage or to turn it to their advantage (you could, for example, recognize a competitor when they surf your web site and choose feed them misinformation). Given the relative overhead of such an undertaking, it’s unlikely it will happen – nevertheless, it’s important to recognize that the search engines aren’t the only ones who might be watching you.
This appears like it might be old news (someone reported early confirmations here, but I hadn’t spotted any signs to date), but I spotted a sign indicating the availability of free Google-provided WiFi down the street from my Mountain View apartment during a walk this morning.
The hotspot is located at “Kapp’s Pizza Bar and Grill” and has the SSID “Google WiFi”. Happy free surfing!
As we head into the new year, I started noticing something on television: there seems to have been a dramatic swing in the amount of advertising targeted at, ahem, “mature” markets. The Boomers are getting ready to exit stage left and with that exit will come an explosion in the market for products that make them feel younger, cure their ailments, or otherwise help them live the good life (for a price).
I shudder at this dystopian vision of the future: adult diapers, rash treatments, cosmetic cure-alls, home equity ponzi schemes, and other assorted questionable scams to snooker Ma and Pa into believing they’re still twenty and Living Large. This is what the next thirty years of advertising will resemble.
Buckle up everybody, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
One of my friends is working over at Yahoo! and their product just launched: Yahoo! Answers – “a free service where people can ask questions and get answers from real people on any topic”
See the press release for more details.