Today I moderated a panel for Redmond Media on this topic, with experts including Ryan Holland from Amazon Web Services, Kenneth Westby from CoalFire and Rana Singh of Vormetric. Whether you are running PCI compliant workloads in the cloud today or if you are considering moving your Card Holder Data to the cloud, you need to know about the changing regulatory and compliance structure that the new DSS v3 standards will bring about.
Over on the site SolutionProvidersfor Retail.com tomorrow at 1pm ET, I will be holding a Webchat. We will be discussing my recent research of the top 100 restaurant chains and sharing how they use various technologies, including best practices for their chain websites, essential features for their smartphone apps, how they use and misuse social media networks, and their use of online ordering and digital loyalty programs. We will discuss what they’ve discovered works well and what doesn’t, how interactive technologies such as wait staff tablets and integrated POS terminals can impact business. In addition, we will come up with recommended best practices.
You can see the slides here:
The use of Big Data is growing rapidly as companies seek to use its power to help improve business efficiency and look for new business opportunities. In this presentation for the local chapter of the Data Warehousing Institute, I will discuss how big data is being applied across a variety of industries, including even farm tractor maker John Deere, illustrated above.
You can download my slide deck here.
Firewalls started their journey to the next generation at about the same time as the Star Trek TV series. While the products have advanced, many IT security experts are still stuck with the original firewalls that handle ports and protocols.
You can read the full article (with registration) here in the September issue of Information Security magazine.
There is also an accompanying video/slidedeck with copious screenshots of the various products and a more specific article about how to manage application access policies. All three can be found here.
This week I was at DellWorld moderating a panel featuring two Dell social media managers:
You can see some of the things that we spoke about above. Dell is doing some great things in social media marketing and it was fun to talk to both Richa and Richi about what they are doing.
I was interviewed for the Internet Law Cyber Report radio show about my trip to Chattanooga and learning about how they became the Gig City, having gigabit fiber to every home and business within city limits.
There are a few different podcasts that focus on tools for journalists and freelance writers that are worth listening to. While podcasts were all the rage around 2006, some still endure and have regular episodes, while others are archived and are still relevant. I took a listen to many of them on this topic. My recommendation is to try a few out if you have a long commute or want something to listen to at the gym.
A good first place to start is with Bob Baker, the head of the St. Louis Self Publishers Association and he blogs at FullTimeAuthor. He is a one-man think tank when it comes to the topic of self-publishing books and he has a lot of relevance for the general freelance market too. While he has produced only five podcast episodes of less than ten minutes each, they come packed with suggestions and are very professionally produced.
For example, episode 3 reviews the “7 Aattributes of highly successful authors” such as: be on a mission and have something to say or a story to be told and be personally involved with your own promotion of your writing. Baker also has lots of other materials on his website.
If you want to listen to a lovely British accent, check out the more than 120 episodes of the Creative Penn by Joanna Penn. She offers tips on things such as author branding and Amazon tagging and interviews with mostly leading fiction authors, but there are some great tips for us non-fiction types too.
Janice Campbell is the director of the National Association of Independent Writers and Editors. Her podcast is called The Freelance Life. There are several dozen episodes that are mostly 40 minutes or so about topics such as what authors must know about publishing, or advantages of ebooks over print, how to use Twitter, and how to package your books. While she hasn’t done many episodes lately it is another great resource. Most of the episodes are interviews with leading authors giving their own suggestions.
WritingCareer.com has a series of podcasts that are more career-oriented, as you might suspect, including becoming a successful travel writer, or what you need to do to get into freelance speech writing. On their website there are also links to two other podcast series on copyrwrite law and book publishing.
Writing Excuses has 15 minute episodes that are produced weekly by four writers “who are not that smart” (or so they claim) but very engaging: Brandon Sanderson, Mary Kowal, Howard Tayler, and Dan Wells. For example, once you finish a project how do you start the next one? Having four perspectives is both amusing and annoying, depending on the topic.They are in their seventh “season” so there is a lot of ground to cover.
Finally, if you are in need of grammar or syntax help, then check out Mignon Fogarty’s The Grammar Girl. You can also read the transcripts of her podcast too on the site. She has produced more than 300 episodes.
I gave this keynote at the StampedeCon conference in August in St. Louis and was well received. If you are interested in having me talk about the many use cases for Big Data for your next event, let me know.
Sending and receiving encrypted email with sensitive data should be a lot easier to do. But it ends up being something painful, and as a result we tend to avoid this protection. Haven’t we all been schooled that sending emails is like having a post card plastered to the wall of your local coffee bar? Haven’t all the various exploits with stolen credit cards and hackers breaking into various Web-based email services been warning enough? Apparently not.
Today I will be part of a webinar showing the issues surrounding mobile email and the solution that Voltage has with its product. You can tune in here. You can also watch a short three minute video screencast review that I have done showing how their iPad and Android app works here.
I will be doing a free webcast for Voltage Security entitled, “Simplified email data security for mobile smartphones and tablets” on July 12. You can register here. Joining me will be Mark Schweighardt, director of product management at Voltage. We’ll be talking about some of the challenges posed by current mobile device security solutions for securing email communications on smartphones and tablets and how their new mobile client solves these issues.
Also in July I will be speaking at the Department of Defense-oriented TechNet America conference outside of St. Louis. My talk is entitled, “Why You Shouldn’t Email Your Sensitive Documents” and will review some of the alternatives to using email to protect the transfer of sensitive information. You can download my slides here and register for the conference here.