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You can pretend to be serious;
you can't pretend to be witty.
  - Sacha Guitry

Google's Spam Tsar

 Google's got a Spam Tsar (spelled with a T).  Czar, of course, is another spelling.

Via the BBC: Google's Spam Tsar 

The whole workspace is divided into areas covering various aspects of Gmail from the calendar to documents and from the reader to spam.

The 'Spam Tsar' who keeps Gmail free from offers you don't want.

The guys fighting to keep spam out of the Gmail inbox are tucked away in a dark corner of the office. Brad Taylor is known as the 'Spam Tsar', a title he quite enjoys.

He has been working on Gmail since its public launch back in 2004 and says he has seen a real growth in the amount of unsolicited email flooding into the system.

"Originally when we launched 25% of email was spam. We caught a lot of that. Over time its grown and grown and currently around 75% of all email is spam and so our job has got a lot harder."

What's he fighting?

We can spend up to half our working day going through our inbox, leaving us tired, frustrated and unproductive.

A recent study found one-third of office workers suffer from e-mail stress.

And it is expensive, too. One FTSE firm estimated that dealing with pointless e-mails cost it £39m a year.

Now firms are being forced to help staff deal with the daily avalanche in their inboxes. Some hire e-mail consultants, while others are experimenting with e-mail free days.

Tsar or Czar? 

1. also tsar or tzar (zär, tsär) A male monarch or emperor, especially one of the emperors who ruled Russia until the revolution of 1917.
2. A person having great power; an autocrat: "the square-jawed, ruddy complacency of Jack Farrell, the czar of the Fifteenth Street police station" (Ernest Hemingway).
3. Informal An appointed official having special powers to regulate or supervise an activity: a racetrack czar; an energy czar.

Usage Note: The word czar can also be spelled tsar. Czar is the most common form in American usage and the one nearly always employed in the extended senses "any tyrant" or informally, "one in authority." But tsar is preferred by most scholars of Slavic studies as a more accurate transliteration of the Russian and is often found in scholarly writing with reference to one of the Russian emperors.

Serenity has Lukemia.

This is Serenity. She has Lukemia.

Serenity, was diagnosed two days ago with Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia . She's two.

Her Dad, Phil, is a friend of mine. He's been blogging about her condition and situation for the last few days.

The Burns family is in for some very rough times. They're not rich. While the medical bills have yet to start rolling in, the family could use some financial support to help with the expenses and costs of a large family and lost income.

This widget will allow you to help Serenity and the Burns Family with some of these costs while they go through this. If you can, please make a small donation below through this Chipin Widget and lets see if we can't take at least a little of the financial burdon off of a family in tremendous turmoil. 

This is from Phil's blog:

"Several people have contacted us asking if there is a ’support Serenity’ site or account being created.  There is.  Some other people are heading it up and I’m told it should be ready by Tuesday.  I don’t know a lot of the details on it, but for those asking, we’ll have that soon.  I’m especially moved by the offers of donations.  It was something that never occurred to me would happen, but several people have pointed out that this is going to cost a ton of money - another thing I’m not even thinking about.  It’s interesting how you can stress about money and then when something like this happens that is probably going to cost more than our house - money isn’t what you stress or think about - you just do it.  So to those thinking about it for us - thank you!  I’m sure that once we get home and back to the real world that will become a much higher priority for us. 

We have to be here in the hospital for 7 days starting today.  They have to closely monitor her while they get her started on treatment and refine the protocol they are going to use.  After that it will be weekly, then monthly visits for more than two years.  We’re honestly looking forward to all those treatments - it means we’ll have our little girl with us that long and hopefully get cured and she can go on to live a full life."

100 New Sendsiders

I logged into my account this morning and saw that I've personally invited 100 people into Sendside.

By the way, we've left our Beta and released v1.0 for our Personal and soon to be released Business and Enterprise Editions. If you'd like an account, fire me off a request through the link below and I'll set you up. 

GET YOUR OWN SENDSIDE ACCOUNT >

 
Of interest may be that <jeffbarson> following my name. It's my Sendside 'Member Name' and with this new release you can now send directly to that and I'll receive that message. In future releases you'll be able to send to other unique identifiers just by typing them into the TO field. If they're unique, they'll be delivered directly to that recipient's Sendside inbox.

The takeaway here for all of you 'social network types' is that Sendside doesn't rely on your email address but identifies you in the same way that you're identified by all of your unique identifiers offline.. as an individual with a unique identity. Cell phone, email address, social security number, street address, military ID, name... anything unique, or any unique combination of identifiers could be used to send a message.

There are plenty of identifiers you can send to, but they're generally some sort of username inside the network. As far as I know, Sendside's the only network that has the potential to combine ANY online identifier as well as all things offline to determine exactly who you are and deliver content to you with total precision and security.

That, buy the way, is tres impressive. 

Twitter-Spam & Social Climbers

So I've joined Twitter.

While I can see some merit, I'm not yet convinced that it's a killer app and not just a fad. It feels something like a feature looking for an application. Perhaps I'm wrong. I often am. Certainly it looks to be taking off.

Here's Allan Young's take on Twitter: The Twitter Influence Ratio 

With the Twitter Influence Ratio, we’re going to try and get a read on someone’s true influence level. It stands to reason that if you are interesting, have neat thoughts, and add value to the network, people will naturally gravitate to you and “follow you.” Some of the most influential members of Twitter have many more followers than people they follow. So the Twitter Influence Ratio will attempt to express this relationship as;

Followers / Following = Twitter Influence Ratio

Example: 533 / 609 = 0.875

In the above example, one such self-branded “social app guru” has 533 followers and is following 609 others. This gives him a Twitter Influence Ratio of only 0.875 which means this person is not very influential. Intuitively, you ought to have more followers interested in what you have to say than the number of people you’re following. One might say that 533 followers is nothing to sneeze at. I agree, but the fact that this person has so many followers and is following so many more makes it highly probable that he is what is known as a “friend whore” or “follow whore.” Like the desperate high schooler, he’s just trading votes. Someone with a TI Ratio of less than 1 but is only following 30 others is probably not out there actively trading votes or follows. If I were looking for a consultant, I would run away from this guy and find someone more influential.

It's easy to see what Allan's talking about. My own Twitter Influence Ratio is abysmal, roughly two-to-one or .5. I guess I'll have to become more profuse in my twitting about... we'll, there's your problem.

You suck at photoshop

These 'You suck at photoshop' tutorials are masterpieces of intelligent executions edutainment. Slickly produced and very funny. (Educational too if you're looking to pick up some photoshop skills.)

I love this kind of smart-ass information delivery. After I get the 'corporate' look and feel stuff done for Sendside I'll be looking to stimulate the rest of the economy with just this type of tongue-in-cheek delivery. 

How to explain the complex with paper cutouts and a whiteboard.

CommonCraft rocks. 

Here's CommonCraft's channel on Blip.tv.

There are any number of ways of explaining complex systems. Duarte Design is another company based out in Silicon Valley who has built a business on information design. They produced Al Gore's presentation 'An Inconvenient Truth' and if you've seen that, you know that it's probably the most interesting two-hour Powerpoint presentation you've ever seen. (Although they did it in Apple's Keynote.)

CommonCraft wows you with clarity rather than production values. They're not the first to use this paper cut-out technique or draw diagrams on a whiteboard, but they're great at distilling out the information that's relevant and putting that into a two or three minute spot that doesn't bore you to tears while you're watching it.

Park City Angel Network

I had dinner this week as a guest of the Park City Angel Network, an angel group that formed up here in Park City towards the end of 07 and around the same time that we put together our little angel group.

Certainly this is going to be a beneficial group to Utah's entrepreneurs and startups. I was impressed that they've already invested in three of the fifteen so startups that have pitched so far. An impressive clip out of the gate.

One of the immediate benefits of this group is that it's started out with a larger group, somewhere around 25 right now, allowing them to have some ability to fund more deals and spread the love around a little. 

Last week's meeting was more than four hours long, with two pitches and dinner. I can see that the Park City Angel Network will be around for quite some time and the the members are serious about creating a sustainable group. I mentioned that I thought it would be beneficial to roll our smaller group into this larger one. There's a considerable amount of bandwidth needed to manage these groups and 7 is just too small.

There's a growing community of quality startups out there. Park City is set to be the place to bring the best of them if you're a Utah startup. 

Sendside on the Red Herring Top 100

Sendside Networks is on Red Herrings list of the top 100 most promising startups.

Via Red Herring: 
"For over 10 years, the Red Herring editorial team has diligently surveyed entrepreneurship around the globe. Technology industry executives, investors, and observers have regarded the Red Herring 100 lists as an invaluable instrument to discover and advocate the promising startups that will lead the next wave of disruption and innovation.

Past award winners include Google, Yahoo!, Skype, Netscape, Salesforce.com, and YouTube."

Getting named to these types of groups is nice, but not earth-shattering. Certainly I think that we have some potential that could be measured against the past winners, but we're all keeping our heads down on execution. It's easy to get swept up in the reaction we get from companies when we demo our technology, but the real market test will be how fast we can drive adoption and create value for the companies who build on top of us.

Botnet & spam attacks are getting ugly.

Everyone's aware of the trojans and the zombie computer botnets that often spawn from them have been a problem for many years, but now the attacks have been getting downright nasty. Attackers are using more and more sophisticated methods, including social engineering, to get past users' defenses. Like an attack targeting eBay members and stealing their online identities using multi-stage attacks in order to perpetuate fraud.

 

The eBay attack began with hackers compromising third-party web sites using a technique called SQL injection. Extra code was dynamically added to the main page of these web sites using a hidden IFRAME tag which loaded a malicious web page. This page contained a VBScript file that used AJAX to download and save a file called MISuvstm.exe into the Windows system folder. Once this file was downloaded, it attached itself to the Windows Explorer process and went hunting for a further trojan, called SRTops32.exe, which was the basis for a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack on eBay itself. The attack uses eBay's own Application Programming Interfaces to guess eBay users' passwords by brute force, although more traditional phishing techniques are also being used. 

More on security threats:

Malicious programs hit new high

The battle against the botnet hordes

FBI tries to fight zombie hordes

PC stripper helps spam to spread

Boom times for hi-tech criminals

Poisoned websites attack visitors

 

From Searchsecurity.com:

"The future outlook isn't promising -- bot-affected software is growing more powerful and stealthy, making it harder to find and return to a secured state. The pressure is on computer users to become savvier about security and on organizations to spend more money on proactive defenses, and detection and reaction capabilities. Law enforcement will also need to deal with an increasing number of crimes that involve potentially thousands of computers at a time."

Of course, here's where Sendside comes in since it's designed to eliminate spam, phishing and fraud without IT integration. Looks like the market opportunity continues to grow. 

Sendside on Podtech

William Borghetti, founder and CEO of Sendside Networks, is no stranger to big ideas–he sold his last startup, Campus Pipeline, to Sungard after automating inefficient “stand-in-line” processes at Universities. Now, in the same way FedEx revolutionized traditional mail with overnight delivery, Sendside Networks aims to provide an entirely new way for individuals and organizations to interact and transact electronically. Borghetti and team see a future where businesses replace paper, postage, and delivery time. Instead Borghetti expects businesses to offer an exchange of rich, interactive messages, documents, even full-blown web applications in a trusted messaging environment free of spam, fraud, and phishing scams.

Borghetti’s shares the story with Brad Baldwin from Rocky Mountain Voices and explains why Sendside created an entirely new technology offering for sensitive and confidential communication. Sendside believes SMTP and “bolt-on” solutions (like encryption) just can’t extend SMTP’s life. To protect its vision, Sendside created an IP arsenal filing 16 patents.

Want to send or receive secure messages with complete tracking and guaranteed retraction–even after someone opens it? Sendside Networks opens for public sign-up April 3, 2008.

Sendside Premier April 3rd. Entrepreneurs invited.

Sendside Networks Open House.

When: Thursday, April 3rd, 5:00 pm - 7:30 pm

Where: 6440 South Millrock Drive, Suite 190, SLC UT 84121

> Google Map of Sendside's new location

Sendside's technology has the potential to forever change how individuals, companies and their customers communicate and interact online. And after nearly two years in development, it's ready for its premier.

On Thursday, April 3rd we're hosting our own coming out party and you're personally invited.

Sendside's startup team, investors, users, partners, and everyone we know will be there. If you're interested in networking, technology, partnerships, understanding how Sendside is going to revolutionize human communications online, or just looking for some free finger-food, you're invited to stop by and kick our tires.

Horses

It's not often that I speak kindly of our horses. The car my wife drives around in smells like horse, my house sometimes smells like horse, even my daughter often smells like horse.

But they're not all terrible.

This is my daughters horse Moon and even I'm impressed with this photo of him jumping.

Of course, he smells like horse too. 

The power of inspiration

Presentation Zen has this post on the power of inspiration with words and images.

Silicon Slopes: A tech community site from Omniture

I tumbled to Omnitures tech community site Silicon Slopes when they delivered the 2008 poster to me.

It was an instant love-hate relationship.

I give Omniture high marks for intent. Silicon Slopes looks to create a community site and resource for Utahs high tech companies. (Silicon Slopes lists that number at 3500 which seems astronomically high to me but what do I know?) Omnitures taking the lead with this site in not only promoting the site to build a tech community (and position Omniture as leading the discussion) but promoting Utah, presumably with the intent of positioning Utah as a winter wonderland of technology to balance Silicon Valleys fog. High marks there as well.

But the execution is somewhat problematic. First, the site is so slow that I think that they must be running it on a Comodore 64. I mean it is PAINFUL. If I weren't really interested I would shoot the site in the head just to get if off of my foot. (It looks as if it's built on a wiki platform.)

There are some unexpected behaviors as well. It seems that you can just create and edit a company without even logging in. I created Sendside's profile easily enough but it surprised me when I updated the logo with a message telling me that it would have to approve before going live. Either the creation landed just as the admin was looking to OK new pages, or the logics odd. As a secondary bonus it seems that someone added Vspring as an investor in Sendside.... not only has Vspring not invested, but there's no way to edit or delete that information. (Someone's messing with our cap table.)

Something's amiss. I'm a fan of Omniture and I'd like to be a fan of Silicon Slopes. I'll give it a week.  

Update on 2008-02-06 17:50 by Jeff Barson

SInce I posted this yesterday, Mark Adams, Director of Community Development for Omniture called me. Evidently, Silicon Slopes is a newer venture that I thought and they're going through some birthing pains which I fully understand.

After speaking to Mark for a while I've revised my previous estimate. I'll give the site a month. 

CyberSLAPP Suits & Your Blog

This is just one of my blogs. I have others.

 
One of them is Medical Spa MD, a blog for physicians in medspas and cosmetic medicine where there's a pretty active community. Medspa MD has around 50,000 unique visitors a month, mostly doctors, who are interested in both the business and treatment aspects of cosmetic medicine.

Medspa MD's become the defacto leader for docs in that field and as such it's become both an aggregator and a target. Loved by it's members and hated by those who have a less than pristine reputation. This has led to the following confrontation.

Dermacare and it's CEO Carl Mudd want to sue eveyone on Medical Spa MD.

 
A few of the posts on Medspa MD is a bout a medspa franchise called Dermacare and it's CEO, Carl Mudd. 

• Dermacare, Sona, American Laser Clinics & the rest.
  
• Dermacare Laser & Skin Care Clinics
  
• Dermacare Medical Spa Franchises Unite?

Together, these three posts have mucho comments. The middle one is gong to break 700 shortly.

Evidently, Dermacare and it's CEO Carl Mudd are not pleased since they sent me this email and letter threatening me with some sort of action if I didn't hand over all of the IP addresses of everyone who's commented.

This sort of action is both extremely cynical and growing in popularity. It's called a CyberSLAPP Suit and it works like this: If you don't like what someone is saying about you on the web you file a suit. This allows you to issue subpoenas to whoever you like. So now you can find out who these individuals are and threaten to haul them into court. It uses a lawful procedure to effectively intimidate dissent and free speach, both of which are protected after all.

If you've never run into this, count yourself lucky, but don't think it couldn't happen to you. It's a dragnet. 

Here are some links about these kinds of CyberSlapp suits and where the law comes down on free speech and other issues around this:

Chilling Effects Clearinghouse: A joint project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, University of San Francisco, University of Maine, George Washington School of Law, and Santa Clara University School of Law clinics.

Do you know your online rights? Have you received a letter asking you to remove information from a Web site or to stop engaging in an activity? Are you concerned about liability for information that someone else posted to your online forum? If so, this site is for you.

Defamation
The law of defamation balances two important, and sometimes competing, rights: the right to engage in free speech and the right to be free from untrue attacks on reputation. In practice, the filing or even the threat to file a lawsuit for defamation has sometimes been used as a tool to shut down legitimate comments on the Internet.

John Doe Anonymity
Do you post to a public message boards or discussion areas on websites such as Yahoo, AOL or Raging Bull? Do you use a pseudonym, fake name or a "handle"? Has someone asked the host of the discussion or your ISP to turn over information about you or your identity? If so, then the John Doe/Anonymity section may answer some of your questions.
Topic maintained by Stanford Center for Internet & Society

Protest, Parody and Criticism Sites
The Internet, which offers inexpensive access to a worldwide audience, provides an unparalleled opportunity for individuals to criticize, protest and parody.

Digital IQ story on Sendside: Building a better email.

Digital IQ ran this story on Sendside: Building a better email.

 
We are in our new office space and it's quite a step up.

"Down a meandering hallway diffused with fluorescent lighting, in a squat two-story 1980s office complex like the one where your dentist works, is the door to Sendside Networks, Inc. Through that door you won’t find a sleek reception desk, a backlit logo, modern art, or anything else that says, “Welcome to a cutting-edge corporation, to the offices of a company that is changing the way you do business!” Rather, guests are greeted by…The Wall of Shame. Not papered with finger-pointing posters nagging you to quit smoking or gambling or visiting certain unsavory Websites – no – the red-faced source of this wall is mail. Ordinary U.S. mail and envelopes from FedEx and the like. From ceiling to baseboard, a crate’s worth of catalogs and cardboard dangles from tacks like scarlet letters.

“Our wall of shame is merely a two-week example of mail we’ve received here in the office,” says William Borghetti, CEO of Sendside. It is all mail that the company wants to be sent via the Internet and the “channel” Sendside is creating, a new category of electronic communication that promises to be highly secure, interactive and productive.

Imagine a week (or month) of your mail or, to save time, let’s talk about mine: Numerous statements from credit cards and banks. Reports and updates from my financial advisor and mutual funds. A delightful, lengthy exchange with the Veterans’ Administration over a relative’s benefits, requiring copiers and additional machinery. Queries from an insurance company that demand written responses.

Now picture all of this happening online, safely, without a hitch, knowing you received, they received – done and done. Envision a secure portal to interact and transact with all of these individuals and institutions – folks of your choosing whom you know and trust – through which you can accept, sign and return large documents. View statements and make payments without additional passwords and the click-click-click of following link after link or logging in to other Websites. Attach e-signed power of attorney papers and shoot them to the federal government and know they were recieved without interception. This is what Sendside Networks is creating – a gigantic, secure pneumatic tube from you to your sources and back.

Sendside’s network isn’t designed for all mail, but for the “layers that matter,” says Geoff Kahler, the company’s VP of marketing and sales. It’s not for protecting pictures of your pet fish and sharing with everyone on your mailing list. “Will the network entirely replace traditional email?” Kahler asks. “Not in the short term. It’s more likely to become an immediate replacement for paper-based communication,” a way to avoid the mailbox and the FedEx guy, saving billions in paper and mailing costs, including losses due to fraud, scams and lost productivity.

The idea for Sendside Networks, Inc. was hatched a couple of years ago, when, Borghetti says, “the light bulb came on for us” while going through mail and paying bills. “You may log onto your bank…so the bank has that going for it, in that you will initiate the self-service mode, but no one wants to log into the County of Salt Lake. No one wants to log into their accountant’s Web service, or lawyer’s.”

Borghetti continues, “Overall, [Sendside] is a way of restoring a two-way balance to communication in many respects. The organizations we’re talking to – not just banks, but credit card companies, insurance companies, law firms – they want to be able to send confidential information quickly, easily, cost-effectively. And the only way to do that is FedEx, U.S. Mail or the online ‘come and get it’ method, meaning there’s something important for you but you’ve got to log in and get it.”

The “come and get it” method of delivery of information – an email from your bank notifying you that your new statement is available when you click your mouse twice and type the magic words – is where a lot of time on the Web is wasted. Yes, the fact that we can pay bills online, securely, is more than we could do a decade ago, but has email and secure communication really come that far? Borghetti says no. “The world today, electronically, is a frenetic work-around to email’s shortcomings. Email encryption is a classic example of bolting on something that should be scrambled and non-viewable in transit anyways.” 

Email, or really the Internet, promised a lot of things in the beginning. Weren’t we going to save billions of trees back then because we wouldn’t be needing pesky old printers anymore, or moth-eaten books? It’s more likely (hasn’t someone out there done a study?) that we’re now able to work and produce and waste paper more rapidly than ever. Who doesn’t still subscribe to the Sunday paper, just because it feels good to open and flip and fold up each section when finished? But no one enjoys reading a financial statement (maybe some people do) or legal contracts over a cup of coffee. These are items we want to deal with as quickly, securely and professionally as possible and this is what Sendside is all about.

“We’re often misunderstood,” says Borghetti. “Is this a security thing? Is this an encryption company? What is Sendside Networks? It’s really none of those things. The heart of Sendside is being a trusted network providing the technology to allow organizations to connect to each other but also to connect to individuals. It’s not just secure email. There are a lot of secure email solutions out there, but they’re a pain in the butt for the consumer. We are creating a multi-faceted way of presenting information that is unique and novel and had never been done before.”

As founder of other technology-based companies including Campus Pipeline, a Web platform for universities that Borghetti started in his garage, the man is no stranger to new territory or the state’s start-up scene.

Jeff Barson, founder of Surface Medical, entrepreneur, networker of CEOs, blogger and “Chief Evangelist” for Sendside (according to his LinkedIn profile) writes, “William seems to be the group’s entrepreneur in residence and I find myself agreeing with him completely regarding his views with the state of startups in Utah. While it takes only a small amount of wine [to] get William’s views of the Utah capital markets and the way they work, I couldn’t agree more…William’s also philosophically inclined to give back, which I find refreshing. He’s got some good policies including buy-me-lunch-and-I’ll-tell-you-stuff, and no-need-to-call-in-on-powder-days.”

Still in the audit phase, Sendside Networks is up and running today and offering three products or levels of service. The first is Sendside.com, designed for individuals and available free of charge but by invitation only. Sendside Professional was developed for small- and medium-sized businesses, and for large organizations with millions of customers, there is Sendside Enterprise.

And while pricing for the professional versions is yet to be determined, Kahler says it will be a “no-brainer, approachable” alternative to the costs of regular mail and courier/shipping services. “We have an organization in California that needs to distribute quarterly updates to contracts to 850 providers at a cost of probably $25 per FedEx and usually the guy on the other side is sending a FedEx back with the signed contract, so they have a paper copy that they can shove in a file,” he says. “Why not give that organization a license, if you will, to send as much information as they want to that organization, quarterly updates, etc. for $25 a year, per customer? We’ve reduced their costs by 75 percent.”

Now, that would inspire a significant clearing of anyone’s wall of shame. In Sendside’s case, their wall may be disappearing altogether, unless someone plans to reinstall it in the company’s new modern office space in the East Cottonwood area of Salt Lake City."

Our Christmas Video

Shelly, my wife, made our Christmas card as a video this year. Merry Christmas.