Gesture Control Demo

One of the nice things about visiting clients is getting a glimpse of new technology that will be showing up soon in our offices or our living rooms.

Case in point: Here's a demo of a gesture control system that uses stereo vision to detect people and objects at 60 fps. The TYZX G3 Embedded Vision—that's the small white camera mounted above the flat-panel display—enables a user to manipulate images simply by moving his hands.



The TYZX G3 camera system shown here works both indoors and outdoors.

For more information, check out TYZX.

QA Cafe Looks Ahead

I had the pleasure of having lunch yesterday with Joe McEachern, founder and CEO of QA Cafe. Joe's company has two main product lines. The first, CDRouter, is a test solution for Customer Premises Equipment such as DSL modems and wireless routers. Over the past decade, a truly impressive list of customers have adopted CDRouter to ensure that their products comply with RFCs and industry standards and are easy and straightforward for consumers to use.

The second product, CloudShark, which the company introduced at the SharkFest Conference at Stanford in June, is a virtual appliance for securely storing, cataloging, and sharing packet-capture files. Instead of leaving capture files scattered over the network, enterprise IT teams and service providers can upload them into a secure repository and share them with authorized users over the Web. Which means, yes, you can now analyze capture files on your iPad.

What's new in Joe's world? In the past 6 months, droves of CPE vendors have adopted CD Router's IPv6 solution. QA Cafe introduced its IPv6 tests a couple of years ago, but it's been only recently that organizations responsible for consumer products have shown a lot of interest. Joe's conclusion: the SOHO networking industry believes it's finally time to bring IPv6 to consumers.

The other big news at QA Cafe is the ongoing development of CloudShark. Joe's team is working with prospects and customers to turn this into a truly enterprise-class IT management tool. Watch for more announcements about CloudShark in the months ahead.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2011: Scenes from a Growth Market

When I toured the Exposition area at this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, two things quickly became clear:

• There are a lot of vendors offering nearly identical social networking products.
  
• For now, the market demand for these products seems is big enough that all these vendors are surviving, and a market shake-out doesn't seem imminent.
  

Heck, the market seemed crowded when I first covered this conference three years ago. Though a few of these vendors have had layoffs and restructurings, the field remains just as crowded today, giving customers a lot of products and services to choose from.

With products are nearly identical (Facebook-like interfaces, support for Twitter-like activity streams, configurable user profiles, etc.), vendors are differentiating themselves by emphasizing implementation details (SaaS vs. on-premise), go-to-market strategies, a few especially advanced features, and pricing. For example:

• Blogtronix differentiates itself in part through its enterprise-class security, highly configurable customer profiles, and low pricing ($1/user/month).
  
• ClearVale by BroadVision claims to be unique in its ability to share information across internal networks and external networks, such as support sites (though other vendors claimed they could support this, too).
  
• IGLOO Software, which spun out of the RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie's Centre for International Governance Innovation, differentiates itself by its SaaS delivery and (perhaps not surprisingly) its support for the BlackBerry platform.
  
• Microsoft SharePoint offers integration with Lync, Microsoft's unified communication client, and with Office programs such as Word. Additional social media services are available through integration with software from partners such as Newsgator. Incidentally, SharePoint is apparently the file technology "under the hood" for Microsoft's new Office Live services.
  
• The Port, which had focused on non-profits in the past, is now focusing on providing social media tools that could be bundled in business platforms such as Netsuite and SAP.
  
• ThoughtFarmer, whom I've written about before, positions itself as a provider of intranet solutions. Co-founder Chris McGrath told me they're still finding customers who have primitive intranets (just few static Web pages and a file server) and who know they need something more modern, comprehensive, and flexible. At the show the company announced a new SaaS version of their platform.
  

Similar feature sets, different approaches. Customers can compare the offerings and pick the one that best meets their needs.

LiquidPlanner 3.0

Another Enterprise 2.0 exhibitor that I've written about before is LiquidPlanner. This Seattle-based start-up offers project management software that works with estimates and probabilities, rather than forcing users to work with "hard numbers" that all-too-often turn out to be incorrect guesses. Considering the complexities of any team project, LiquidPlanner's probability-based approach to project planning Just Makes Sense. At this year's expo, the company was showing off a new UI and a new feature that enables tasks to be shared across projects. If you're interested in improving the accuracy of your project management efforts, I would recommend checking them out.

Final Thoughts

The keynotes at the conference featured stories from big companies such as Deutsche Bank, and there's no doubt that the Enterprise 2.0 revolution is making slow but steady progress in global enterprises.

But when I hear ThoughtFarmer's stories about small companies interest in replacing an old IIS server with internal wikis and blogs, and I hear the Blogtronix folks talk about 20,000 downloads of their open source Sharetronix software, I can't help think there's an even broader revolution taking place across thousands of small companies interested in finding better ways to communicate and collaborate. That's a good thing for these companies and their customers. And how fortunate for these small companies that so many vendors are working hard to create innovative collaboration platforms that get better every year.

Smaller, Faster, Easier

Computing is going lightweight. The first laptops were more luggable than portable. You risked putting your back out carrying an early Mac laptop.

Over time, though, laptaps did really become light. And powerful. And thin. Now have laptops so thin that you can pack them in envelopes and call them Air.

But sometimes you don't need a device at all—even an iPad, netbook, or remote control wand.

The next generation of devices, such as televisions and some compute systems, will include 3D vision cameras that can interpret hand signals.

It's sign language for communicating with the digital world.

Here's a sign of the times: 3D vision company TYZX has received a Notice of Allowance for a new patent for using stereo vision (3D) cameras to read gestures for controlling systems such as televisions. TYZX's 3D vision systems work in variable lighting conditions and process data at 60 fps. A snap of the fingers in other words—or a wave that can be interpreted and acted upon.

The TYZX Web site has more information about their ultra-fast, ultra-compact visions systems, which are in use today in robots, interactive art installations, security systems, and more.

Photo of a hand by striatic. CC Some Rights Reserved.

The Erosion of Privacy on Facebook: Read the News and Audit Your Account

Could Facebook have grown its community to hundreds of millions of users so quickly if it had not promised to protect the privacy of its users? I suspect the answer is "no." Users trusted Facebook, and they signed up in droves.

Evidently, the company feels it has grown big enough that it can rescind its earlier promises about data privacy and weather whatever micro-storm of protest ensues. As has been much reported, the company is changing its privacy policies and—just as importantly—its UI for controlling privacy settings.

The policies now lean toward disclosure rather than containment. The new UI controls require one to click, click, click with the perseverance of a busy switchboard operator to regain most of the privacy one enjoyed a few months ago. Alas, it's impossible to regain all of it.

Facebook wants to ensure that it and its partners have access to as much personal information as possible. That's how they'll make money.

Their loosey-goosey manner of opening the floodgates leaves users vulnerable to all sorts of hacks, exposing private data not just to Facebook and its partners, but also to any hacker or marketer with sufficient diligence and cunning. (See Wired Magazine's article, Rogue Marketers Can Mine Your Info on Facebook.)

Users, understandably, are unhappy. Fifteen organizations have banded together to file a complaint to the FTC. User defections are becoming more common and well publicized. Facebook management is scrambling to the respond.

For a quick summary of what's changed, what's new, and how exposed your own Facebook account is, consult the following.

Analysis

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Facebook's Eroding Privacy Policy: A Timeline

Updated: Facebook Further Reduces Your Control Over Personal Information

Quote from this second article:

Today, Facebook removed its users' ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information. Certain parts of users' profiles, "including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests" will now be transformed into "connections," meaning that they will be shared publicly. If you don't want these parts of your profile to be made public, your only option is to delete them. . . .

But even for an innocuous interest like cooking, it’s not clear how this change is meant to benefit Facebook's users. An ordinary human is not going to look through the list of Facebook's millions of cooking fans. It's far too large. Only data miners and targeted advertisers have the time and inclination to delve that deeply.

New York Times

Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options (a chart showing the hierarchy of Facebook's new privacy settings)

Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada

Report of Findings into the Complaint Filed by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) against Facebook Inc. Under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (2009)

Wired Magazine

Public Posting Now the Default on Facebook (December 2009)

Quote:

Facebook estimates that 80 to 85 percent of its users have stuck with the default privacy settings, which means hundreds of millions of users will soon be publishing to the entire net, by default when they type into their status box. The previous defaults for status updates were “Friends of Friends” and networks, including geographic ones with millions of users, while photos defaulted to everyone.

Audit Tools

Profile Watch: Scans your privacy settings and rates your exposure on a scale of 1 to 10.

ReclaimPrivacy.org: Scans your Facebook privacy settings and provides detailed analysis of your exposure, along with links to the Privacy Settings page on which you can make adjustments for a particular score.

If you know of other useful audit tools, please let me know.

Thanks to Sarah Evans for the link to Profile Watch and to Chris Marino for the link to Reclaim Privacy.

Photo credits:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/calliope/ / CC BY 2.0

A Gentle Critique of McAfee Product Marketing

Fifteen-second summary of the marketing lessons discussed in this post:

1. Write, chat, and speak in plain English.
2. Don't put populating fields in your CRM system above serving your customers.
3. Create demos that really demonstrate.
4. Build Web sites with tiers of information, so if customers want to dig for details, they can.

If you've already practicing what these lessons preach, feel free to click away and find useful instruction elsewhere.

But if you harbor a sliver of a doubt about your own organization's ability to do all the things I've listed above, then read on . . .

The Story

One of my systems needs to go into the shop for repairs. It's an old system, and it's got a ton of files on it. Some of the files are confidential, so I'd like to encrypt them. I don't need to encrypt the whole disk, just certain files and folders.

I know that there's disk encryption software out there, and I'm sure that David Strom (a writer I know and like) has written about this sort of thing, and I thought about digging up his old columns. But I'm a customer of McAfee's. Their AV software came installed on my laptop, and I'm pretty happy with it. So I decided to start there. Actually, I decided to look at McAfee, Symantec, and PGP.

Let's take these in reverse order. PGP emphasizes whole disk encryption and encryption for email (not something I'm looking for at the moment). Their disk encryption software, which I'm sure is very good, starts at $99 (though that page is a little hard to find; looking for it just now, I ended up on a page for a similar product costing $149). Not egregiously expensive, but more than I was looking to pay. After all, I just want to encrypt a few folders.

A quick glance at Symantec's Web page describing their security products for Home systems leads me to conclude that they offer a bunch of nice features, but not disk encryption.

Which brings us back to McAfee. Of the three vendors, McAfee's positioning for the home computer market seems to be the strongest. Their Web page design is bright and clear, and Web copy doesn't suggest that you need to place an order of 100 units or more to begin to be interesting to their sales organization.

Here's their Web page for their encryption product, which it turns out is called McAfee Anti-Theft.



I think this page is well done. (None of my quibbles concern McAfee's UI design but rather their UX design.) To call attention to just a few things I like about this page:

• It's clear and legible. There's a product shot and a check list of key features.


• There's a bright "Buy Now" button with a legible footnote explaining exactly what it is you're buying.


• The ribbon-like design treatment in the upper right reinforces the suggestion of trust conveyed by the gold badge. It looks like they've won a badge for merit.


• More technical details, such as the fact that the product supports AES encryption, appear below. (As they should. Headlines up top. Details down below.)
  

You'll notice that below the photo of the box, there's a View Demo button. That's where my trouble with trying to purchase McAfee Anti-Theft began.

The demo animation runs for roughly 2:30 (two minutes, thirty seconds). Of that, 1:30 is a slide presentation basically recapitulating the information that appears on the Web page. OK, fine. I realize you're selling to the home market, and you need to spell things out really clearly. The last minute presents a demo showing how to set up a "vault," assign it a password, and drag files into it.

The last minute of the demo—the real demo part of the "demo"—is good as far as it went. But it only showed a file or two being dragged into the vault. I wondered if I could drag whole folders. I mean, yes, almost certainly in 2010, I would expect that a product like this would accept folders, as well as files. But the demo didn't show any folders being dragged in. The Web copy doesn't mention "files and folders"; it repeatedly just says "files." The 2-page data sheet, which I opened as a PDF, does not include the word "folder." Which made me wonder: can you drag in whole folders? Wouldn't that have been an easy thing to show or mention, if it did?

Every now and then you buy a product assuming it will do X and Y, and you discover that no, it only does Y.

OK. This is a pretty straightforward question. Can I drag whole folders (preferably a multi-layer hierarchy of folders) into a McAfee Anti-Theft Vault. Yes or no? Yes, folders, or no, just files?

I click around the site. Suddenly there's a chat window popping up on my screen. OK, fine. I'll start a chat. This should be easy.

Here's a transcript. (With names changed: I have no interest at all in impugning any individuals here; I'm simply concerned with site architecture and process. I have a great deal of sympathy and admiration for people who work in call centers and help desks, and my admonition to myself [which I admit to sometimes failing to heed] is to always be unfailingly polite.)

Chat Conversation	Commentary
Please wait while we find an agent to assist you... Hello, welcome to McAfee Chat. My name is John Doe. Please briefly describe your goal or question so I can connect you with the best resource to meet your objectives.	Wow. Who wrote that? It's so stilted. It reads like it came out of a committee that drew a diagram on a white board analyzing customer requests ("some of the users will have goals and others will have questions, so our copy should reflect that"). It reminds me of a story a tech-writer friend told me about starting at a company where a fellow writer greeted her with the words, "I'll be happy to show you the supply cabinet where you can obtain all the supplies which you'll utilize." And it makes me admire companies like eBay who make a concerted effort to make their Web copy clear and friendly. McAfee's chat greeting is a cold bucket of corporate-ese splashed on a user who on the Web site was treated as an ordinary home computer user trying to protect his tax returns or pictures of favorite grandchildren. But this opening copy, though awkward, is important. The person I'll be chatting with is not someone who has answers; he's not even someone who is supposed to have answers. He's less of a support rep and more of a concierge who will direct me to someone who really does (supposedly) have answers. Two thoughts here: First, McAfee should make this process quick. This hand-off provides no direct value to the user; it's simply an implementation detail for McAfee. Second, let's explain this role in a friendly way. Something like: "We have a lots of different groups at McAfee. First we're going to connect you to a Customer Service Concierge who will find out what you're looking for, then transfer you to the right group. We'll make this quick." But for now, I need to describe my goal or question. Then I'll be connected to the best resource.
John Doe(the name I'm giving the rep in this blog post): How can we help you today?	That's better. "How can we help you?" Friendly and to the point.
Customer: Quick question. With the Anti-Theft product, do I have to drag files into the vault one at a time, or can I drag entire folders and subfolders? John Doe: Were you considering purchasing protection today?	Uh-oh. To answer my question, you shouldn't need to know whether or not I'm about to purchase. I'm happy to talk to a sales rep at some point, but a lot of inside sales people don't know technical details. But OK, fine. I'll go along with this.
Customer: Yes. John Doe: Ok, what I can do for you is transfer you to one of our Sales Agents and they can assist you in processing your order and make sure you get the appropriate product Customer: Before I buy it, though, I'd like an answer to my question. Customer: I'm comparing it to PGP's product, which apparently lets me encrypt folders. John Doe: A Sales Agent will be able to assist you with your questions as well John Doe: My purpose is to direct you to the best resource that can help you with your inquiry. By asking a few questions I can determine what kind of assistance you need, in this case our sales team Customer: OK. John Doe: OK, I will need to collect some information in order to manage your request appropriately. Can you please provide your first and last name email address and your phone number	So I'm in a chat session in which a customer service rep needs to collect more contact information so McAfee can answer a question about a basic feature of a product. Chat sessions imply instant service; that's why users join them. If I had wanted to get talk to a salesperson on the phone, I would have called Sales. But already we're talking about "processing my order." I still don't have an answer to my question.
Customer: I don't want a phone call. I just want an answer to my yes-or-no question. You can email me at [ email address ]. John Doe: As per your question you have to simply drag the files to the vault. Is anything else I can do for you? Customer: I know I can drag individual files. Can I drag entire folders? Customer: If I have a folder hierarchy with 120 files, do I have to drag them all individually? The demo on the Web site is pretty cursory, and it shows only individual files being placed in the vault. John Doe: If you need assistance with that you have to contact tech support, as I mentioned I am only an operator to direct you to the appropriate department to assist you. You can visit www.mcafeehelp.com or contact them at 1866-622-3911	They won't answer my question by email or by transferring me to another chat agent. They have to have a phone number. Or I can call Technical Support. What's wrong with email? Why offer the chat session at all? Why not just post numbers for Sales and Tech Support? Somewhat stunned.

Oh, if only that 2:32 video had been 2:37 and showed a folder being dragged. Unless, of course, it couldn't.

So I called McAfee sales. I spoke to a service rep. She asked if I was a customer. I said I was, but that it shouldn't matter: I was calling about a different product, and I just had a simple question. She said she needed my email address before she could continue. I gave her a valid email address. It turned out not be the one in their records. I asked her if she could direct me to someone technical who could answer my question. It's a yes/no question, I reminded her. She told me to look for technical information on the Web site. I told her I wasn't going to buy her product and said good-bye.

As I mentioned earlier, I was almost certain that David Strom had written about disk encryption products for personal computers. I surfed to his site, www.strominator.com, clicked on a few tags, found the relevant article, saw that he uses PGP Disk but also recommends some free open source products.

I found an open source product that supports AES encryption of files and folders. Installed it. Encrypted my files. Yes, the interface is not as friendly as the interface to the McAfee product, but it's the end of the day now, and my files are encrypted. I still don't know if the McAfee product can encrypt whole folders in addition to individual files.

And now, nor do I care. I've solved my problem. And my biggest expense was time dealing with McAfee marketing and customer service.

A Lesson

I understand the temptation of sales and marketing folks to capture every interaction in a CRM. Budgets are tight, and accountability is more important than ever.

But workflows shouldn't put collecting CRM data over fast, friendly service. A single rep with a good, old-fashioned FAQ or knowledgebase would have made my day more pleasant and McAFee $29.95 richer. That's chump change, I realize, but I wonder how often interactions like this play out across all the various call centers at McAfee.

A Reminder that Digital Doesn't Mean Forever

I enjoyed Alberto Manguel's earlier book, The City of Words, so now I'm reading his new book, The Library at Night. In a chapter called "The Library as Space," Manguel reminds us just how fragile digital data can be:

"The tools of the electronic media are not immortal. The life of a disk is about seven years; a CD-ROM lasts about ten. In 1986, the BBC spent two and a half million pounds creating a computer-based, multi-media version of the Domesday Book, the eleventh-century census of England compiled by Norman monks. More ambitious than its predecessor, the electronic Domesday Book contained 250,000 place names, 25,000 maps, 50,000 pictures, 3,000 data sets and 60 minutes of moving pictures, plus scores of accounts that recorded "life in Britain" during that year. Over a million people contributed to the project, which was stored on twelve-inch laser disks that could only be deciphered by a special BBC microcomputer. Sixteen years later, in March 2002, an attempt was made to read the information on one of the few such computers still in existence. The attempt failed. Further solutions were sought to retrieve the data, but none was entirely successful. "There is currently no demonstrably viable technical solution to this problem," said Jeff Rothenberg of the Rand Corporation, one of the world experts on data preservation, called in to assist. "Yet, if it is not solved, our increasingly digital heritage is in grave risk of being lost." By contrast, the original Domesday Book, almost a thousand years old, written in ink on paper and kept at the Public Record Office in Kew, is in fine condition and still perfectly readable."

It's sobering to think of all the business and family records transferred to CD-ROM, supposedly permanently, so that paper originals could be done away with. A great deal of copying lies ahead. . . .

Photo of the Domesday Book in public domain.