Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Benefits and Detriments of…um…Targeting

I’ve previously stated that Bredemarket is not the ideal content provider for B2C lifestyle brands. I’ve targeted a target audience of B2G/B2B identity, biometric, and technology firms instead.

Precise targeting can be very good…or it can be very bad.

A Targeted Weapon

Efficiency and progress is ours once more
Now that we have the Neutron bomb
It’s nice and quick and clean and gets things done

From the Dead Kennedys

Some of you may not remember the neutron bomb…and some of you do.

Since 1945, the common depiction of nuclear devastation was of catastrophic damage to people and buildings within a large area.

But then the concept of the neutron bomb was developed. Britannica explains:

“A neutron bomb is actually a small thermonuclear bomb in which a few kilograms of plutonium or uranium, ignited by a conventional explosive, would serve as a fission “trigger” to ignite a fusion explosion….

“Its blast and heat effects would be confined to an area of only a few hundred metres in radius, but within a somewhat larger radius of 1,000–2,000 metres the fusion reaction would…be extremely destructive to living tissue….”

As the popular press summarized it, neutron bombs, unlike older uranium or hydrogen bombs, would spare the buildings and kill the people.

What was missed was that the neutron bomb will kill fewer people in a smaller area.

The benefit of the neutron bomb?

The limited damage area promoted a theory in which neutron bombs could be used on the battlefield to target a limited group of enemy troops. This limited range would theoretically confine the damage to military targets without damaging “a whole civilization.”

But this benefit is also a detriment, as Britannica notes.

“However, other military strategists warned that fielding a “clean” nuclear weapon might only lower the threshold for entering into a full-scale nuclear exchange…”

And of course some opponents objected to the very idea of killing ANY people while leaving the buildings intact. Capitalist values at the forefront?

If you’ve never heard of the neutron bomb, they pretty much disappeared after the end of the Cold War.

Which is odd when you think about it, because the end of the Cold War made countries more likely to conduct small-scale wars against each other. From a military tactical perspective (ignoring the strategic or moral issues), neutron bombs seem perfect for such exchanges.

When a Prospect Is Not Really Invested

Have you ever run into an old friend you haven’t seen in years? Both of you say “we should get together.” But you don’t.

Now assume it’s not friendship but a seller/prospect relationship that never moves down the funnel to conversion.

Jan McInnis sells a service, comedy. And how do comedians market their services? By performing. The comedian performs at one venue, and someone from another venue sees them and books them.

Google Gemini.

McInnis was performing in Michigan when she was spotted by a big-time manager (“one of her clients is currently selling out Madison Square Garden”) who saw Jan’s five-minute set. Afterwards the manager approached Jan and said the magic words:

“You were great.”

Then the manager’s office called and requested a meeting, asking McInnis to bring writing samples. Now a meeting itself is no assurance of getting a job, but it’s a possible step toward getting one. So Jan prepared for that meeting, spending her Thanksgiving polishing up her writing samples.

Google Gemini.

But…

“The next day, her office called to postpone the meeting.”

Lather, rinse, repeat. The manager’s office would schedule a meeting, then postpone it. In the end, the manager never met with McInnis, who pivoted away from the comedy clubs and focused on corporate speaking engagements as “The Work Lady.”

And who knows? Maybe some huge tech company will ask her to headlines a gigantic corporate event at Madison Square Garden.

But no rush on writing Knicks jokes yet.

Google Gemini.

The Reality of Sales Enablement

Whenever product marketers create materials for others—whether for external or internal audiences—they need a feedback loop to ensure the audiences can, and will, use the materials.

Google Gemini.

Those who know me know that I am drawn to complexity like a moth to a candle, and constantly have to resist the urge to detail.

  • My draft 0.5s that go through severe cutting before anyone sees draft 1.0.
  • My Incode team’s 80+ “battlecards” that were four pages long.

Regarding the latter, I should have learned the lesson from my MorphoTrak days. I was creating sales playbooks for one of our products that were much more than four pages long. Detailed playbooks that went into detail about the product, the market, the competitors, and everything else.

Sales did NOT like them. I was told the truth about HOW salespeople would use these playbooks.

“I will glance at your playbook five minutes before meeting with a prospect.”

I could wish upon a star that the salespeople would spend four hours in intense study, but just because I wish for it doesn’t mean it is going to happen.

Now I wish…that my Incode battlecards had been shorter.

Trying to Fly Without REAL ID: Today’s Phrase is “Orbital Blowout Fracture”

Don’t get violent at a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoint. If you do, you may not fly anywhere…or drive or walk anywhere either.

Here’s the story of a man named Idress Vinay Solomon who was preparing to board a Southwest Airlines flight from Dallas’ Love Field to Oakland on March 10. Somehow Mr. Solomon missed the memo that you need a REAL ID or equivalent to board a plane. Something that has been discussed for decades, since passage of the Real ID Act of 2005.

But as readers of the Bredemarket blog know, despite years of declarations that you must have a REAL ID to fly, you don’t need one. The TSA launched ConfirmID this year, an alternate identity confirmation service for those who don’t have approved identity documentation. You pay $45, and TSA confirms your identity via other methods.

Or tries to.

In Solomon’s case, ConfirmID didn’t work either.

Solomon was not happy.

“[T]he Oakland resident allegedly started reacting aggressively and attacked the officers present. During this incident, he punched a [Dallas Police Department] officer multiple times, resulting in the officer suffering an “orbital blowout fracture” in his left eye.”

U.S. Department of Justice.

For those of us who aren’t health professionals, the Cleveland Clinic explains what an orbital blowout fracture is.

“A blowout fracture is the most common type of orbital fracture. This fracture is a break along the floor or thin inner wall of your eye socket. Getting hit in the eye with something like a fist or a baseball most often causes blowout fractures.”

The Cleveland Clinic does not indicate whether iris identification is affected by blunt force trauma.

But let’s return to “Love” Field.

The police officer was hospitalized, and Solomon remains in custody. If convicted, he could face up to 20 years in federal prison, as confirmed by the Department of Justice.

“Violent conduct perpetrated against TSA and law enforcement officers will never be tolerated in the Northern District of Texas,” said U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould.  “We will prosecute such offenses to the fullest extent to seek justice for the victims here and to deter others from resorting to aggressive attacks against officers responsible for ensuring the public’s safety while traveling.”

Just get the REAL ID, folks.

My Three Word Response to My Latest Scammer

This afternoon I received an email from the very verbose ViVi Brown.

It began with the standard “I hope this email finds you well.” Then the pitch begins.

“I came across your profile on LinkedIn and noted your public contact information, which is why I am reaching out to you directly.”

I couldn’t find Brown’s own LinkedIn profile, by the way. The pitch continues.

“I am currently the Founder of a San Diego-based startup, primarily responsible for managing and assisting our team in establishing connections with industry leaders like yourself. Our company is backed by TPG Capital, with business sectors encompassing Artificial Intelligence, Energy Systems, Semiconductors, and Algorithmic Platforms.”

Now this sounds impressive. TPG backing, multiple high-tech business sectors. It’s a little odd that Brown didn’t mention her company name, but I knew I could deduce it from her corporate email address.

Um, 429? At least it’s not 420.

Unless someone is an independent consultant, there’s no need to use a Gmail address that doesn’t have your name and ends in a number. Especially if you are the Founder (and, as we will see, other things) of a TPG-backed multi-sector high tech firm.

Brown continued her pitch, which went on and on and on. Paragraph after paragraph of corporate-speak, such as a reference to “the intersection of Global Supply Chain and Systemic Accountability.” Because obviously my LinkedIn profile screams global supply chain.

Translating corporate-speak to English, apparently ViVi Contras Belleville Brown 429 wants to chat about a Global Strategic Operations Partner position. And to get to know me via a deeper conversation.

She then closes her email with a signature block listing her positions (but again not her company name).

Signature block?

So she is the Founder, the CEO, the Managing Partner, the Chief Revenue Officer…and the Project Lead? That’s more job titles than I have at Bredemarket—even when you include “Senior Nespresso Operator.”

I don’t know what 429’s scam is. Data harvesting? Identity theft? Financial fraud? For all I know it may be a romance scam. (Run by a 40 year old guy.)

I knew I was going to write about this scam email in the Bredemarket blog and on LinkedIn. Employment fraud is a hot topic on both platforms. But how should I respond to the scammer?

My usual “As an anti-fraud professional, I require that you please provide your corporate email address” would take too much time. So I aimed for surprising brevity:

KYB Fraud Failure

Dang scammer.

Strategy for Marketing One or Multiple Products

Back when dinosaurs ruled the earth I was a technical writer at a software company. These were the days when software came with printed user guides, which I wrote.

I was NOT the de facto product marketer at this software company; the owner was. But during my tenure I observed how he marketed the evolving line of products through three distinct phases. I’m presenting these phase in the chronological order of the company, not the logical order.

Phase One: Multiple Related Products

When I joined Logic eXtension Resources (LXR), the company was transitioning from consulting work to becoming the leading software provider for users of the THEOS (formerly OASIS) operating system (Wikipedia). THEOS could be configured as a multi-user operating system that could run on (souped up) microcomputer hardware, and thus was an attractive alternative to minicomputers running UNIX.

And LXR provided the business applications: multiCALC for spreadsheets, multiWRITE for word processing, multiMAIL (which I recall nothing about), and multiPERT for project management.

Speaking of dinosaurs, this was when Lotus 1-2-3 was prominent in PC-DOS and MS-DOS circles. You may recall the key word associated with Lotus: integrated. (One prospect at a trade show asked if multiCALC was integrated—it wasn’t—but I doubt he even knew what the word meant.) But in the mind of the consumer, Lotus and the future Microsoft Office caused these seemingly disparate software packages to be regarded as a unified offering.

Google Gemini.

So the four products I mentioned were loosely related, inasmuch as all of them were business applications, and all ran on THEOS. “Hey, you know that spreadsheet you have? We have a word processor also!”

So we had customers using all four products, and I was eating my own wildebeest food and writing all my user manuals in multiWRITE.

Until I didn’t.

Phase Two: Multiple Unrelated Products

Behind the scenes, LXR shifted to the Macintosh computer for internal work, including my user manuals. We all admired the elegance of the Mac for developers and users alike.

At the same time, the owner decided to pursue his personal interest in education and launched a product that didn’t fit on THEOS and didn’t fit in the “multi” product line.

Enter LXR*TEST, an educational measurement/test generation software package for the Macintosh that created test banks of questions incorporating text and graphics. Questions from the test banks could then be incorporated into individual tests. And if you didn’t want to create your own test banks, third parties were creating test banks in LXR*TEST format.

So, how did the owner/product marketer market LXR*TEST along with all the “multi” products?

Google Gemini.

He didn’t.

The two product lines served two completely different target audiences. THEOS business prospects didn’t care a whit about test generation, and educators on Macs had no use for a THEOS word processor.

So LXR marketed separately to its target audiences, addressing their individual needs.

Phase Three: One Product

Eventually I left LXR and after a few years drifted into the wonderful world of biometrics.

I can’t remember exactly when LXR discontinued its THEOS products, but eventually it concentrated exclusively on LXR*TEST, bowing to the inevitable and releasing a Windows version to complement its Mac version.

Google Gemini.

Even after LXR was acquired, the parent company continued to offer LXR*TEST for years afterwards.

Of course this allowed LXR to devote its product marketing attention exclusively to the testing market.

Until LXR*TEST, and LXR itself, faded away.

Like several of my other employers that no longer exist in their initial form.

NIST Implements Color Coding to Visually Identify High False Positive Facial Recognition Values

With the exception of colorblind people, the use of colors in dashboards makes information more accessible, particularly in populations where green means “good” and red means “bad.”

(Even if your name IS Bamber.)

The National Institute of Standards and Technology understands the importance of consistent colors, having worked on traffic light colors since the National Bureau of Standards days (PDF).

For more modern applications such as biometrics, NIST recently incorporated a color coding display change to one of its tabs for the “Face Recognition Technology Evaluation (FRTE) 1:N Identification” results. Specifically, the “Demographics: False Positive Dependence” tab.

The change, announced in an email, is as follows:

“The false positive identification error rate tables now include color-coding to highlight anomalously high values.”

In this context, “anomalously high” is bad, or red. (Actually dark pink, but close enough.)

But let’s explain WHY and HOW NIST made this change.

Why does NIST highlight demographic false positive dependence?

NIST has of course explored the demographic effects of face recognition for years, and the “Demographics: False Positive Dependence” tab provides additional tracking for this.

Why does NIST do this?

“False positives occur when searches return wrong identities. Such outcomes have application-dependent consequences, which can be serious.”

Serious as in arresting and jailing innocent people. I previously mentioned Robert Williams.

How does NIST highlight demographic false positive dependence?

Anyway, NIST created the “Demographics: False Positive Dependence” tab.

“The table shows false positive identification rates (FPIR), the fraction of searches that should not return gallery entries above a threshold, but do. The threshold is set for each algorithm to give a FPIR of 0.002 (1 in 500) or less on searches of women born in Eastern Europe.”

And for algorithms that have “anomalously high values” in other demographic populations, NIST has added the color coding.

“A cell is shaded by how much larger FPIR is than that: yellow if FPIR is 20 times larger; pink if FPIR is 40 times larger; and dark pink if FPIR is 80 times larger.”

What does the highlighting look like?

Let me illustrate this with the results from the three algorithms Omnigarde submitted.

Data captured April 8, 2026. Omnigarde.
  • Omnigarde’s first two algorithms, submitted in 2023 and 2024, exhibited high FPIR values for south Asian females, and the second algorithm also exhibited a high FPIR value for east Asian females. See the color coding.
  • The third algorithm, submitted in 2025, had lower FPIR values for these populations and thus no yellow color coding.

Even the less-stellar algorithms show improvement over time.

Data captured April 8, 2026. Anonymized (but you can figure it out if you’re curious).

Final thoughts

Both vendors and customers/prospects can rightfully question whether this is helpful or hurtful. I lean toward “helpful,” because if the facial recognition algorithm you use provides high false positives for certain popularions, you need to know.

And as always, law enforcement in the United States should NEVER solely rely on facial recognition results as the basis for an arrest…even for Eastern European females. They should ONLY be an investigative lead.

In the meantime, take care of yourself, and each other.

Jerry Springer. By Justin Hoch, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16673259.

When Certuma’s Messaging Seems Contradictory: “AI Doctor” or “Physician-Verified”?

I don’t have access to Forbes, so I’m relying on this LinkedIn message from Certuma:

“We raised $10M in seed funding led by 8VC to build the first FDA-approved AI doctor.”

The way that sentence is worded, it sounds like the goal is to have the FDA approve a doctor who can…well, doctor. Like my fictional Dr. Jones. (See the 2013 version in tymshft.)

““I don’t mind answering the question,” replied the friendly voice, “and I hope you don’t take my response the wrong way, but I’m not really a person as you understand the term. I’m actually an application within the software package that runs the medical center. But my programmers want me to tell you that they’re really happy to serve you, and that Stanford sucks.” The voice paused for a moment. “I’m sorry, Edith. You have to forgive the programmers – they’re Berkeley grads.””

But Certuma’s website tells a more cautionary story in which the “AI doctor” is NOT in control.

“Certified clinical decisions at machine speed. Physician-verified and fully auditable.”

And the workflow indicates that this “doctor” is more like an intern, or even a student.

“Certuma routes every in-scope plan through physician verification. That workflow is the point: fast turnaround without removing accountability….

“Red flags, contraindications, interaction checks, scope limits, and uncertainty thresholds run through the deterministic verification layer. If something is emergent or out of scope, the system escalates instead of guessing.

“Clinicians see structured intake, highlighted risks, and a draft plan with supporting evidence. They approve, edit, or escalate; changes are captured with reason codes and a durable audit trail.”

Now there is clearly some benefit in having the bots grind out the plan, provided that the bots don’t hallucinate. There are potential time savings, and a real doctor reviews the final results.

But an “AI doctor” who can doctor independently is NOT on the horizon.

At least not yet.