Author Archives: bredemarket

Marketing and writing services.

Yelping About Google Business Listings

The Google Business Listing service sellers are almost as bad as the 17x professional resume writers.

A bit of history: when I started Bredemarket I also set up a Google Business Listing, which also included a free ugly Google website to promote my business. I poured my energies into bredemarket.com instead.

Bredemarket’s geographic market as of April 2021, according to my Google business listing page. The old link now redirects to a general Google search for Bredemarket.

I’d occasionally add content to my Google Business Listing, but sometimes Google would flag the content for some unknown reason, and eventually Google flagged the entire Google Business Listing for some unknown reason. (Google: “You violated our TOS, but we won’t tell you why. You figure out what you did.”) By this point I was happy to be rid of the thing.

But I’m still getting calls at least once a week from companies that want me to get my Google Business Listing properly verified. When I tell these companies that losing my Google Business Listing was the best thing that ever happened to me, they usually hang up.

Usually.

My “Google” review (which wasn’t about me, and wasn’t on Google)

Today the caller was persistent, mentioning at one point that Bredemarket had five star reviews saying “I was blown away with this service”…from a resume writing service. I asked for the date of the review, and the caller couldn’t tell me. And you know how I feel about some resume writing services anyway.

After this caller finally gave up on selling their services, I searched Google for a five-star review of Bredemarket.

I ended up at Bredemarket’s Yelp page…which has no reviews. But if you scroll down, you see sponsored content about OTHER websites…including
KStar Professional Resume Writing Services, for which a reviewer wrote “I was blown away with this service.”

From https://www.yelp.com/biz/bredemarket-ontario as of November 4, 2024.

So instead of a five star Google review of Bredemarket, there is a five star review of a completely separate resume writing service that appears in the sponsored ads for Bredemarket’s Yelp page.

Secure is a Verb

How can you anticipate the unexpected?

  • Such as a plane that isn’t in the sky, but lodged in a skyscraper?
  • Or a pressure cooker that isn’t inside in a kitchen, but outside in a backpack?
  • Or an illness that suddenly appears when no such illness previously existed?
  • Or something that mimics a bodily illness, such as a computer virus or denial of service attack?

To anticipate the unexpected, you need to plan beforehand, assess during, and quickly correct afterwards.

What is on tomorrow’s calendar? And why are you pushing it out to next year?

Treat “secure” as a verb, not an adjective. A critically important verb.

(Pressure cooking image CC BY-SA 2.0)

California Knows How to Party (California mDL)

Well, it took long enough.

In part because when I first tried to get a mobile driver’s license (mDL), I used my OLD physical driver’s license AFTER I had renewed my driver’s license online (but before I received the new physical license). Data mismatch. Rejected.

And in part because I kept on forgetting to perform the additional steps to confirm my identity.

And in part because I didn’t truly NEED the mDL—I haven’t flown anywhere since April 2023, and for some strange reason no vendor of age-controlled products has insisted on carding me.

California mobile driver’s license (mDL).

But I now have a California mDL. After talking about mDLs for years as a former IDEMIA employee.

I’ve previously espoused the benefits of mDLs. For example, when a retailer DOES check my age before I buy a beer, the retailer doesn’t learn my address or my (claimed) height and weight. The retailer only needs to confirm that I am old enough to buy a beer.

Oddly enough, I had to block out certain information on my displayed mDL in the image above. Because MY privacy requirements obviously don’t conform to California’s privacy requirements.

725

While updating my resume today, I discovered that I have now written over 700 blog posts on the Bredemarket site alone. This is number 725, in case you’re keeping score.

And that doesn’t count the myriad of blog posts I’ve written for consulting clients or employers, plus the posts I’ve written for other blogs over the years dating back to 2003.

So in case you’re wondering: yes, I’ve written blog posts before.

And I can augment your company’s resources by writing blog posts (for example, via the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service) that drive awareness, consideration, and/or conversion.

Talk to me about your needs.

(Town crier image Public Domain)

Don’t Miss the Boat

Bredemarket helps identity/biometric firms.

  • Finger, face, iris, voice, DNA, ID documents, geolocation, and even knowledge.
  • Content-Proposal-Analysis. (Bredemarket’s “CPA.”)

Don’t miss the boat.

Augment your team with Bredemarket.

Find out more.

Don’t miss the boat.

Contraction

While the words “consolidation” and “contraction” have a similar sound and are often linked, they are actually two separate conditions, as you can see in the identity/biometric industry.

  • Consolidation occurs when separate entities become one. Ping Identity and ForgeRock (Ping Identity). Sagem Morpho and Motorola’s Biometric Business Unit (MorphoTrak). Digital Biometrics and Identix and Viisage and Visionics and Iridian and ComnetiX and don’t forget the ID part of Digimarc and many others (L-1 Identity Solutions).
  • Contraction occurs when an existing entity becomes smaller. Hikvision’s reported layoff of 1,000 employees is a recent and relevant example.

“Ah, but Hikvision is a special case,” you may be saying. “They’re linked to human rights abuses and sanctioned by Western governments. Many identity/biometric players are not sanctioned.”

But I’m not hearing loud celebrations from these other firms.

I’ve privately heard three separate stories, one of which I just heard on Monday, involving major identity/biometric companies. All three stories involve firms that are not sanctioned. In all three cases the firms perform major business with Western governments. And all three stories involve contraction which would have been unthinkable a mere five years ago.

Not too long ago I compiled a list of four significant events that positively impacted the identity/biometric industry. That list included 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombings, Apple’s Touch ID, and COVID.

I’m starting to wonder whether that last event was, in the long term, a net positive or a net negative.

(Tumbleweed image public domain)

Knowledge Ain’t Dead

Do you believe in intentional ignorance, stupidity, and idiocy?

Let me put it another way:

Do you believe in the “death of passwords”?

The rationale behind the decades-long death of passwords movement is that passwords do not provide 99.99999% security, therefore NO ONE should EVER EVER EVER use a password, or ANY other form of knowledge (PIN, first pet, what a traffic light looks like, college GPA, favorite RGB value).

I have a different view.

Knowledge CAN be part of a robust multi-factor identity verification or authentication solution.

Just like biometrics CAN be part of a robust multi-factor identity verification or authentication solution. Oh, you think biometrics should be the SOLE (geddit?) factor? I hate to break this to you, but biometrics do not provide 99.99999% security either.

And for the simpler use cases (such as garage sale money boxes), knowledge-based authentication such as a combination lock is a viable security system.

Don’t rely on passwords alone…

…but don’t completely ban them either. Knowledge ain’t dead.

Because advocating for the death of the password is as stupid as advocating for the death of the bicycle.

Make sure your bicycle has a wheel, spokes, seat, and drink holder, and don’t use any of the last six bicycles you previously used. By Havang(nl) – Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2327525

(Executioner image CC BY-SA 3.0)

Zip Code: The Factor of Disqualification

Not enough attention is paid to the critical importance of zip codes for U.S. tech product marketing job applicants. Identity experts know that geolocation can serve as one of the five factors of authentication. But geolocation (via zip code) can also serve as a factor of disqualification.

This video doesn’t directly have to do with Bredemarket—my clients ARE remote-friendly—but since it involves my status as a biometric product marketing expert I thought I’d share it here.

For more detail, see my LinkedIn post from earlier this morning.

Zip code (from a “91” person).