Uncategorized – Page 180

How the APMP Body of Knowledge (BOK) benefits Bredemarket’s NON-proposal clients

(Updated 4/16/2022 with additional benefits information.)

Presumably you saw my earlier post, “I just re-rejoined the Association of Proposal Management Professionals. So what?” This post is a follow-up to the “So what?” part, specifically addressing clients of my consulting firm Bredemarket (marketing and writing services for biometric, technology, and general business firms) who DON’T use me for proposal services.

I said the following in that prior post:

But there are benefits for my Bredemarket clients who DON’T depend upon me for proposal support, but instead depend upon me for content marketing or other marketing and writing services. The same strategies and tactics that contribute to a more effective proposal can be extrapolated to apply to other areas, thus contributing to better white papers, better case studies, better blog posts, better social media posts, better marketing plans, etc., etc., etc. Again, this can help my clients win business.

(Yes, I intentionally used the words “win business.”)

Of course, now I’m in the initial process of making use of my new/old APMP membership by soaking in APMP things (while ALSO hopefully contributing things) that will benefit me and my clients.

I’ll talk about live webinars, the APMP Body of Knowledge, and the benefits for Bredemarket’s non-proposal clients.

Live webinars! Well, sometimes

My first opportunity to obtain value from my APMP membership came on Wednesday July 28, when the Western Chapter (a merger of the California Chapter and other chapters) scheduled a webinar entitled “Persuasion Through Page Architecture.” The presenter, Nancy Webb, offers over 30 years of design expertise. I recall the name, so I’ve probably attended a previous presentation of hers during my second (or perhaps even my first) stint in APMP.

Sadly, I was unable to learn from Nancy Webb on July 28. A major requirement for a webinar is the ability to access the web, and when we all logged into the webinar on Wednesday, we learned that Webb’s Internet connection was out and that the meeting would have to be rescheduled.

By Monoklon – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75697420

Ah, technology.

The APMP Body of Knowledge

But MY Internet connection is working, so on Thursday afternoon I was able to visit the APMP website and poke around some more.

Which led me to the page describing the APMP Body of Knowledge (BOK).

Not a body OF KNOWLEDGE, but this illustration was created by Leonardo da Vinci, so the SMA folks will like it. By Leonardo da Vinci – https://www.metmuseum.org/special/Leonardo_Master_Draftsman/tour_gallery4.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1744423

And yes, I’m going to call the Body of Knowledge the BOK from now on. Bok bok bok.

By Andrei Niemimäki from Turku, Finland – Friends, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3769100

It’s no surprise that the proposals world has a slew of acronyms (more on that later).

One important thing you need to know about the APMP BOK; it’s only for APMP members.

The APMP Body of Knowledge (BOK) is available to all APMP members in good standing.

Well, I haven’t done anything to lose my good standing yet, although if I were to log in to the BOK, copy all of the content, and post it here in the Bredemarket blog, I would obviously get in a heap of trouble. For one thing, Wordman would come after me.

Wordman. From https://wordmanspeaks.com/about-wordman/. Fair use. **NOT** created by Leonardo da Vinci; *Wordman avatar created by* *Sean Jones* (**www.knitestudios.com**)

As it turns out, Wordman could come after me in multiple ways. In addition to his superhero status, Wordman (Richard “Dick” Eassom) chairs the APMP Western Chapter, and is also an executive with SMA, Inc. (which I previously joined). I could get kicked out of the APMP AND SMA in one fell swoop!

(I could go off on a tangent and say why Moses was the most evil man in the Bible, but I really shouldn’t.)

(Moses broke all Ten Commandments at once.)

Um, John, let’s get back to the BOK

So I’m NOT going to go behind the firewall and redistribute the internal content of the APMP BOK.

But I CAN note what the APMP publicly says about the BOK.

TL;DR: as I’ve noted when talking about the brouhaha, the BOK and the APMP itself talk about topics that have applicability far beyond the creation of a proposal.

The topics are grouped into seven categories, which represent key practice areas for improving an organization’s business development focus:
Understand business development
Focus on the customer
Create deliverables
Lead a team
Manage processes
Train staff
Use tools and systems

Obviously, all seven of these categories apply to the creation of a proposal.

Benefits for my NON-proposal clients

And all seven of those categories just as easily apply to the creation of a blog post, case study, white paper, corporate strategy, or ANY deliverable for a customer-facing firm.

(4/16/2022: For additional information on benefits, click here.)

Again, I can’t speak about BOK specifics, but I spent part of Thursday afternoon reading about a topic which would have benefited me greatly in one of my NON-proposal positions with IDEMIA/MorphoTrak/Motorola/Printrak. Well, better late than never.

There are a number of helpful pieces of content in the APMP BOK, including…a list of common proposal acronyms. (CPAs??? No.)

For those who don’t know this, the major purpose of acronyms is to allow people of a small group to exchange secret communications in the presence of the non-initiated. “When you complete the response to the RFP for DoD, ensure that the collected KPIs align with the BD-CMM.” (In truth, many of these acronyms are used outside of the proposal profession, but the acronym list collects some of the important ones in one place.)

So I anticipate that I’ll be spending some significant time in the future reviewing the APMP BOK. And if all goes well, I’ll actually RETAIN something from these BOK content reviews that will result in better written content for ALL Bredemarket clients.

(And yes, Dick, I know that there’s also an SMA body of knowledge to which I have access…)

Another acronym is CTA

Incidentally, if you are a biometric (identity) or technology firm that needs a proposal (or content) consultant, feel free to contact Bredemarket.

Send me an email at john.bredehoft@bredemarket.com.
Or go to calendly.com/bredemarket to book a meeting with me.
Or go to bredemarket.com/contact/ to use my contact form.

Franchisees and BIPA

In other contexts, I have written about the relationship between franchisors and franchisees, which in some respects is similar to the way gig drivers work “with” (not “for”) Uber, Lyft, and the like. In many cases, the products that are advertised by a particular company are not made by that company, but by a franchisee of that company who is entirely separate from the parent company, but who is responsible for doing things the way the parent company wants them done. If you’re a franchisee, you CAN’T…um…”have it your way.”

This Whopper probably wasn’t made by Burger King itself, but by a franchisee of Burger King. By Tokfo – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37367904

Speaking of which, here is an example of an article that confuses franchisor and franchisee. The Buzzfeed article, in typical Buzzfeed style, is entitled “This Is What Happened After A Bunch Of Employees At A Burger King Quit.” (Because of malfunctioning air conditioning, a number of employees put in their two weeks’ notice, leaving a “We All Quit” sign as they left.) You have to read ANOTHER article (from NBC) to find this little statement:

“Our franchisee is looking into this situation to ensure this doesn’t happen in the future,” a Burger King spokesperson said.

Yes, the employees’…um…beef wasn’t with Burger King itself (or its Brazilian/Canadian/American parent Restaurant Brands International), but with whoever manages the local franchise.

Well, now this world of franchisors and franchisees has entered the biometric world, according to a post in Greensfelder, a self-described “franchising & distribution law blog.”

Greensfelder’s post starts by explaining to its readers what BIPA is (something you already know if you read MY blog) and how franchisees are affected.

Plaintiffs are suing both franchisors and franchisees. Franchisors are being sued for collecting the information themselves for their own employees and also for the actions of their franchisees on theories of joint and several liability, vicarious liability, agency and alter ego. A recently filed case alleges that a franchisor mandates and controls virtually every aspect of its franchise locations, including the use of certain equipment that collects biometric information to track employees’ time and attendance and to monitor cash register systems for fraud.

This benefits the lawyers, who get to collect double the damages by claiming that both the franchisor and the franchisee are separately liable.

Greensfelder’s takeaway for franchisors:

Franchisors should be careful about mandating franchisee use of biometric procedures and devices without first checking applicable law and also making sure that their own policies and procedures are in compliance with those laws.

I’m not sure who is providing takeaways for franchisees.

Other than the usual advice to read the franchise agreement very, very carefully.

Biometrics IS the financial sector

“Have to update my chart again.”
C. Maxine Most of Acuity Market Intelligence. From https://twitter.com/cmaxmost/status/1418306725510193152

Since I’m treading into financial territory here, I should disclose that Bredemarket has financial relationships with one or more of the companies mentioned in this post. This is not investment advice, do your own due diligence, bla bla bla.

CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=243386

I don’t monitor the market enough to know if this is part of an overall trend, but there has been a lot of biometric and digital identity investment recently. Both Biometric Update and FindBiometrics (and other publications such as FinLedger) have written about some of these recent investments, and IPVM has published its acquisition analysis (for subscribers only). Here’s a partial list of the biometric and/or digital identity companies who have received new funding (via investors, IPO, or acquisitions) recently:

I am not a financial expert (trust me on this), but I suspect that these companies are benefiting from two contradictory factors.

The apparent WANING of the COVID threat suggests better market performance in the future.
Some biometric and digital identity investments are very attractive precisely BECAUSE of the COVID threat, and the resulting attractiveness of remote and touchless technologies.

Of course, markets run in cycles, and it’s hard to predict if this is just the beginning of money flowing to biometrics/digital identity companies, or if all of this will suddenly come to a grinding halt. Remember how hot so-called “fever scanners” were a year ago, until their deficiencies were identified? And remember how Microsoft was prompted to divest from Anyvision not too long ago?

It’s possible that a number of external factors, such as an increase in government bans of facial recognition use, consumer resistance to digital identity, or the entry (or re-entry) of much larger players into the biometrics and/or digital identity markets, could dampen the revenue hopes for these funded companies.

Of course, investors are used to analyzing risk, and in many cases the investments with higher risk can yield the greater rewards.

It’s all just a game.

From https://ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=1966. Fair use.

You will soon deal with privacy stakeholders (and they won’t care about the GYRO method)

(Part of the biometric product marketing expert series)

I’ve written about the various stakeholders at government agencies who have an interest in biometrics procurements- not only in this post, but also in a post that is available to Bredemarket Premium subscribers. One of the stakeholders that appeared on my list was this one.

The privacy advocate who needs to ensure that the biometric data complies with state and national privacy laws.

Broken Liberty: Istanbul Archaeology Museum. By © Nevit Dilmen, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1115936

If you haven’t encountered a privacy advocate in your marketing or proposal efforts…you will.

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox has appointed Christopher Bramwell as the Department of Government Operations’ first privacy officer….As privacy officer, Bramwell will be responsible for surveying and compiling information about state agencies’ privacy practices to discern which poses a risk to individual privacy. He will also work with the personal privacy oversight commission and state privacy officer to provide government privacy practice reports and recommendations.

Obviously this affects companies that work with government agencies on projects such as digital identity platforms. After all, mobile driver’s licenses contain a wealth of personally identifiable information (PII), and a privacy advocate will naturally be concerned about who has access to this PII.

But what about law enforcement? Do subjects in law enforcement databases have privacy rights that need to be respected? After all, law enforcement agencies legally share PII all the time.

From https://www.facebook.com/UplandPolice/photos/pcb.5828261687245780/5828261513912464/

However, there are limitations on what law enforcement agencies can share.

First off, remember that not everyone in a law enforcement database is an arrested individual. For example, agencies may maintain exclusion databases of police officers and crime victims. When biometric evidence is found at a crime scene, agencies may compare the evidence against the exclusion database to ensure that the evidence does not belong to someone who is NOT a suspect. (This can become an issue in DNA mixtures, by the way.)
Second off, even arrested individuals have rights that need to be respected. While arrested individuals lose some privacy rights (for example, prisoners’ cells can be searched and prisoners’ mail can be opened), a privacy advocate should ensure that any system does not deny prisoners protections to which they are entitled.

So expect to see a raised concern about privacy rights when dealing with law enforcement agencies. This concern will vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction based upon the privacy (and biometric) laws that apply in each jurisdiction, but vendors that do business with government agencies need to stay abreast of privacy issues.

A little more about stakeholders, or actors, or whoever

Whether you’re talking about stakeholders in a government agency, stakeholders at a vendor, or external stakeholders, it’s important to identify all of the relevant stakeholders.

Or whatever you call them. I’ve been using the term “stakeholders” to refer to these people in this post and the prior posts, but there are other common terms that could be used. People who construct use cases refer to “actors.” Marketers will refer to “personas.”

Whatever term you use, it’s important to distinguish between these stakeholders/actors/personas/whatever. They have different motivations and need to be addressed in different ways.

When talking with Bredemarket clients, I often need to distinguish between the various stakeholders, because this can influence my messaging significantly. For example, if a key decision-maker is a privacy officer, and I’m communicating about a fingerprint identification system, I’m not going to waste a lot of time talking about the GYRO method.

My time wouldn’t be wasted effort if I were talking to a forensic examiner, but a privacy advocate just wouldn’t care. They would just sit in silence, internally musing about the chances that a single latent examiner’s “green” determination could somehow expose a private citizen to fraud or doxxing or something.

This is why I work with my clients to make sure that the messaging is appropriate for the stakeholder…and when necessary, the client and I jointly develop multiple messages for multiple stakeholders.

If you need such messaging help, please contact Bredemarket for advice and assistance. I can collaborate with you to ensure that the right messages go to the right stakeholders.

Send me an email at john.bredehoft@bredemarket.com.
Or go to calendly.com/bredemarket to book a meeting with me.
Or go to bredemarket.com/contact/ to use my contact form.

Three recent #DNA stories

By Zephyris – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15027555

Over the last few days, I’ve run across three stories that deal with two aspects of DNA collection: familial DNA, and DNA mixtures.

Familial DNA

(This case was mentioned on Forensics and Law in Focus, a recommended read for all sorts of forensic techniques.)

Of all of the biometrics, DNA has a property that the others don’t: the similarity of DNA between family members. Someone finding my child’s fingerprints won’t necessarily be able to find me, and even someone who finds my child’s face won’t necessarily be able to find me.

But 84 year old Raymand Vannieuwenhoven is on trial for a 1976 murder because of DNA similarities in families.

Vannieuwenhoven is accused in the July 9, 1976, murders of a Green Bay couple who was camping at McClintock Park in the Town of Silver Cliff. David Schuldes, 25, and Ellen Matheys, 24, were shot and killed at the campground….
A DNA profile obtained through evidence was already on file with the State Crime Lab, according to previous testimony….
Baldwin explained how a breakthrough came in 2018 when Parabon Nanolabs of Virginia developed new technology to examine DNA evidence, which could provide certain genetic characteristics of possible suspects through DNA….
On Dec. 21, 2018, Parabon contacted Baldwin and informed him that a possible suspect was found through the DNA testing. He said they gave him a Green Bay-area family—the Vannieuwenhovens—that had four sons and four grandsons who possibly could be a match.

The detectives then had to test the relatives and compare their DNA to the crime scene DNA. But not ALL of the relatives: this was solely used as an investigative lead, and there was no point in testing the grandsons for a 1976 murder. Raymand was one of those whose DNA was collected (by having him lick an envelope to seal it), and the probabilities indicated a match.

Obviously this technique has controversy in some quarters, since the family members who originally provided the DNA had no idea that it would be used to arrest (or, in some cases, exonerate) another family member in this way. But the technique is being used.

By the way, Vannieuwenhoven was found guilty, and the 84 year old may be sentenced to life in prison.

DNA mixtures

The other story concerns what can be found when a DNA sample is collected. The DNA sample may contain a lot of things, from a lot of people.

With improvements in DNA testing methods, we don’t need much DNA to make a profile and see perhaps if I am a likely contributor to that sample or if you have contributed — even if you never touched the table directly. That level of DNA profiling is useful for many different types of crimes, but also brings up the issue of relevance. We aren’t explaining how DNA got to a location.

As an example, a single item at a crime scene may include the DNA of the person who committed the crime, the crime victim, an innocent bystander who touched the area in question before the crime was committed, and (if the police officer was careless) the police officer investigating the crime.

Now you have to look at the DNA sample that was collected. With DNA mixtures, this gets tough.

If single-source DNA is like basic arithmetic and a two-person mixture is like algebra, then a complicated mixture is like calculus!

The quotes above are from John Butler of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, who has a concern about how all of the different laboratories interpret DNA mixtures. Ideally, all labs should work together to have a consistent, verifiable way to interpret these mixtures.

We wanted to see if there were established methodologies that worked better than others when tested, and where those limits were being drawn. What we found is that there is not enough publicly available data to enable an external and independent assessment of the degree of reliability of DNA mixture interpretation practices.

NIST, as it does in other areas, seeks to advance the science, and is urging stakeholders to work together to do so.

But wait; there’s more on DNA mixtures!

While NIST has been conducting the work above, the National Institute of Justice have been funding other work.

Michael Marciano, research assistant professor and director for research in the Forensic and National Security Sciences Institute (FNSSI) within the College of Arts and Sciences, and Jonathan Adelman, research assistant professor in FNSSI, have invented a novel hybrid machine learning approach (MLA) to mixture analysis (U.S. patent number 10,957,421). Their method combines the strengths of current computational and expert analysis approaches with those in data mining and artificial intelligence.
Marciano and Adelman received funding from the National Institute of Justice to further develop their idea in 2014. Although this intellectual property has not been fully developed for commercial use, they are pursuing funding to transition the technology. Once this is done, they are hopeful that the new method will be used throughout the law enforcement and criminal justice communities, specifically by forensic DNA scientists and the legal community.

Actually, once the intellectual property has been developed for commercial use, it will NOT be used THROUGHOUT the law enforcement and criminal justice communities. It will be used by PORTIONS of the law enforcement and criminal justice communities, while OTHERS within the community will use commercial products from competitors.

Commercialization of a product actually works AGAINST universal acceptance, except in very limited cases. Take commercialization of fingerprinting products. As Chapter 6 of The Fingerprint Sourcebook details, independent research was performed in four separate countries (France, Japan, the UK, and the US) which, after commercialization, led to three (now two) separate fingerprinting products: NEC’s product from Japanese research, and IDEMIA’s product from separate French (Morpho) and United States (Printrak) research. This initial research, combined with subsequent research that led to additional products, led to an interoperability issue, despite efforts from NIST to advance greater inoperability.

Will NIST have to do the same thing to reconcile competing DNA mixture analysis methods?

Technology without a revenue plan will not survive

This tweet is trending.

From https://twitter.com/ConfidentlyZay/status/1419350233507631107

And while Confidently Zay is missing the old MySpace, I myself run in circles that miss the former social service FriendFeed.

So what happened to these two innovative services?

Well, Tom may be long gone, but MySpace still exists today. It is branded as part of the “People / Entertainment Weekly Network.” And there are a number of people on the network, like a guy with the name Kanye, another guy with the name Avicii (yes I know he’s dead, but he has a MySpace profile), and others.
As for FriendFeed, if you try to go to friendfeed.com you end up at facebook.com. The service survived for several years after Facebook acquired it, but Facebook finally shut down the servers in 2015.

Let’s dig into the details of why these services are not what they used to be.

So what happened to MySpace?

At one point MySpace was the king of all social media, having acquired the title from Friendster. After being founded in 2003, it boasted one million members in 2004 and 16 million users in 2005, and was recognized as the social network until Facebook surpassed it in users in 2008.

From https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/timeline/myspace-2007

MySpace offered several advances over Friendster, including an emphasis on scalability and the inclusion of various tools to allow people to build their own personal communities.

Yet MySpace’s founders chose to sell the service to News Corp. (Rupert Murdoch’s outfit) in 2005 for $580 million. A few years later, in 2011, News Corp. sold it again…for only $35 million. Tom, who stayed with the company after News Corp. acquired it, retired in 2009.

Why did Tom et al sell the service to News Corp. in the first place? And why did News Corp. buy it?

For the owners of Intermix (the company that ran MySpace), the attraction was money. MySpace wasn’t a big money-maker; recorded monthly revenues in March 2004 were $135,000. Presumably it made more money in future months, but even as late as December 2004 the service was only valued at $46 million. After the sale to News Corp., Tom Anderson signed an employment agreement giving him $30 million.
As for News Corp., it didn’t acquire MySpace for MySpace. It acquired MySpace because it added value to the Fox properties.

“Intermix is an important acquisition for News Corp., instantly doubling the number of visitors to our sites and providing an ideal foundation on which to meaningfully increase our Internet presence,” News Corp.’s Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch said in a statement.

Basically, MySpace was worth more as a feeder to Fox Sports et al than it was as a standalone service. And it became worth even more when it inked a lucrative $900 million advertising deal in 2006.

But as MySpace enjoyed the profitability it never had in its first year, its original users were being driven away.

MySpace became inundated with intrusive ads, many of which led to dubious pages asking users to sign up for credit cards and other services. Money was hemorrhaged out of developer resources as a “massive spaghetti-ball mess” of sections were created to try and generate revenue that would meet News Corp’s unattainable targets. Ultimately, a failure to focus on what its community wanted and the usability of the site saw users leave for other platforms.

Now the common version of the story is that Confidently Zay’s MySpace utopia was ruined by Murdoch’s takeover. In this version of the tale, Moneygrubbing Murdoch killed the golden goose.

The truth, however, is that the utopia of MySpace was ruined by its founders BEFORE Murdoch came on the scene. After all, if the original MySpace had enjoyed nice profits, Tom et al would never have had to sell the service to Murdoch in the first place.

Let’s face it: the Confidently Zay version of MySpace that had no ads was never going to survive anyway, unless the founders had come up with another monetization method. They didn’t.

When Murdoch’s company sold the firm, and when it was sold again, MySpace was rebranded as a music site, and survives as such today. But Tom’s out taking scenic photos, so he’s happy. Maybe he even bought a new t-shirt.

Whoops, I guess he didn’t.

And what happened to FriendFeed?

As News Corp. was working on monetizing MySpace, and Mark Zuckerberg was planning for Facebook world domination, other social media services entered into the fray.

In 2006 and 2007 alone, three notable services were launched: Twitter, Tumblr, and FriendFeed. Today Twitter is by far the most popular of the three, Tumblr is still around somewhere, and FriendFeed no longer exists.

Even those of us who used FriendFeed often forget this, but FriendFeed actually started as a feed aggregator. It wasn’t known for content creation, but was instead known as the place where you could share all of your social content from other services. The benefit was that readers didn’t have to visit every single walled social service to see your content; they could see all of it on FriendFeed. This in itself was a relatively new concept, as “lifestreaming” became a thing.

Eventually FriendFeed expanded from resharing content from other places began to host original content…coupled with new innovations:

When I post something to FriendFeed, all of my friends see it. If one of them comments on it or “likes” it, then two things happen that don’t happen on Facebook. First, our conversation suddenly appears in the news feed of all the friends of the person who commented on my item – whether they know me or not. That doesn’t happen on Facebook. I can see the names of people who comment on my friends’ items – but if my friends comment on items shared by their friends I don’t know – there’s no notification of that in my news feed.
Second, whenever anyone comments on or “likes” any item that’s appeared in my stream of friends’ updates – it’s pushed back up to the top of my FriendFeed page. That makes it all the more likely that I will comment on it again or for the first time.

This 2009 comment highlights two things that are common in social media today, but were rarities 12 years ago.

Liking things. Yes, FriendFeed pioneered the “Like” button, although other companies (including Facebook) quickly copied it. There used to be a video that noted one FriendFeed user had amassed tens of thousands of likes. Now everyone does it.
Dynamic feeds. Previously, feeds were chronological and static, but FriendFeed advanced some changes to the feed, including one that was very unpopular with certain segments of the FriendFeed community: updating of those static feeds as new content was posted. And, as noted above, comments and likes could also push old content to the top of the feed.

When dynamic feed updates, Michael Arrington (who was still with TechCrunch at the time) talked about it.

From https://techcrunch.com/2008/10/15/friendfeed-built-the-ultimate-live-blogging-tool/

Of course, the impact of the innovation is dampened somewhat when you read the post today, because FRIENDFEED NO LONGER EXISTS. But you get the drift.

So FriendFeed was clearly innovative. In addition to the advances that I noted above, FriendFeed was also extremely stable, especially when compared to “fail whale” Twitter.

Revenue-wise, however, FriendFeed was subpar. During its existence before its acquisition by Facebook, FriendFeed had only participated in one funding round, and in that case the funding was from the founders. In terms of establishing a constant revenue stream, FriendFeed claimed to be ahead of other “lifestreaming” services (Plaxo, Iminta, Socialthing, Lifestream.fm and Zude). But FriendFeed had other competition:

However, Facebook, MySpace and Google are all ahead in the battle to become the preferred aggregators of social data, which is crucial if they are to build any significant revenue streams.

And while MySpace wasn’t exactly innovating at the time, Facebook and Google definitely WERE, with Facebook experimenting with the like and eventually acquiring FriendFeed itself. Google, of course, would launch Google+ in 2011 in an attempt to create a social network that united all of Google’s disparate services.

As it turned out, FriendFeed’s founders decided to cash out rather than try to keep FriendFeed independent. The founders stayed with Facebook for a while before leaving, but worked on projects other than FriendFeed for their new corporate overlords: Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed was clearly a talent acquisition, although most of the talent (Benjamin Golub being a notable exception) has long since departed.

FriendFeed’s founders were clearly cool technologists. Ironically, they were such cool technologists that they could have lived on their past glories (Gmail, Google Maps) and didn’t NEED for FriendFeed to make money. Perhaps that’s why a revenue model never really entered the equation.

How Facebook was different

In the Internet world, companies fail more often than not. Those companies that survive and thrive for years are rare. For every Microsoft and Apple (formerly Apple Computer) there is an Ashton-Tate or Lotus.

And in the world of social networking, Facebook (and probably Twitter) are unusual.

Why did Facebook survive while MySpace declined and FriendFeed disappeared?

While technological advances and scalability obviously contributed, the important thing about Facebook is that it established a recurring revenue stream. Five years after Facebook was founded in a dorm, it turned a profit from “from applications sold through the website and online advertising.” This ability to generate its own profits, rather relying on funding from outsiders, allowed Facebook to continue to expand. While short-term profits were bumpy around the time of Facebook’s IPO, the company weathered this storm. These days, revenues are…pretty good.

From Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/268604/annual-revenue-of-facebook/

The founders of MySpace and FriendFeed could only dream of such revenue numbers.

Or, more accurately, they DIDN’T dream of those revenue numbers.

This is just a reminder of something that I’ve seen in a lot of situations: the coolest technology won’t amount to anything if it doesn’t produce revenue.

Biometric (and other) authentication CAN be spoofed…but it isn’t easy

A few days ago, Liam Tung of ZDNet wrote an article entitled “Windows 10 security: Here’s how researchers managed to fool Windows Hello.”

Those who read the title of the article may conclude that biometrics is a terrible authentication method because it can be spoofed.

Just a picture of candy. Nothing special. By Jebulon – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27753729

Well, until they come to the third paragraph of the article.

The attack is quite elaborate and would require planning, including being able to acquire an infrared (IR) image of the target’s face and building a custom USB device, such as a USB web camera, that will work with Windows Hello. The attack exploits how Windows 10 treats these USB devices and would require the attacker to have gained physical access to the target PC.

Of course, if the target is a really important target such as a world leader, it might be worth it to go to all of that effort to execute the attack.

However, the difficult attack would be much more difficult to execute if the authentication system required multiple biometrics, rather than just one.

And the attack would be even more difficult still if the authentication system employed multiple authentication factors, rather than the single “something you are” factor. If you have to spoof the fingerprint AND the face AND the driver’s license AND the five digit PIN AND the geolocation, and you don’t know in advance WHICH factors will be requested, it’s still possible to gain access, but it’s not easy.