Identity/biometrics/technology marketing and writing services
There was once an old storyteller who sat by the fire near the beach, sharing his stories with the young.
Then one day the storyteller was rightsized in a move to generate efficiencies and optimize outcomes.
This is not fiction.
Who will tell your stories? Bredemarket can try (learn about my content-proposal-analysis services here), but in the end I will probably be forced to construct new ones that lack the depth of the old ones.
Hardly anything is permanent. And this applies to boxing AND to B2B sales.
Perhaps you heard what Mike Tyson said a few days ago.
I don’t know, I don’t believe in the word “legacy.” I just think that’s another word for ego. Legacy doesn’t mean nothing. It’s just some word everybody grabbed onto.
It means absolutely nothing to me. I’m just passing through. I’m going to die and it’s going to be over. Who cares about legacy after that?
We’re nothing. We’re just dead. We’re dust. We’re absolutely nothing. Our legacy is nothing.
With the life that Tyson has lived, it’s understandable why he’s echoing Ecclesiastes in this interview.
But you don’t have to have had Tyson’s experiences to realize that legacy does not last.
In business (and in life), there are companies (and people) who don’t need you or want you.
This may be temporary. The company that doesn’t need you today may urgently (and importantly) need you tomorrow.
Or it may NOT be temporary. There are companies that will NEVER need you or want you.
I recently ran across three such companies that will never need Bredemarket.
Perhaps you noticed Bredemarket’s “six weeks” promotion over the weekend. It was addressed to companies that may have a final project that they want to complete before the year ends in six weeks. (Now 5 1/2 weeks.) I emphasized that Bredemarket can help companies complete those content, proposal, and analysis projects.
The promotion included a blog post, a LinkedIn post, a Facebook reel, an Instagram reel, a YouTube short, and appearances in other online locations. Which is probably overkill, since the promotion is already outdated and can’t be used again until possibly November 2025.
I also included email in this campaign, targeting prospects whom I haven’t worked with recently, or whom I’ve never worked with at all. I didn’t go overboard in my emails; although I have over 400 contacts in Bredemarket’s customer relationship management system, I sent the email to less than 40 of them.
As of this morning, none of the recipients has booked a meeting with me to discuss their end of year needs.
And I discovered that three companies (four contacts) will NEVER need or want Bredemarket’s services.
How did I discover that?
Via four “delivery status notification” messages.
So I visited the web pages in question, and they no longer existed.
I’ve been building up my CRM for over four years, so it’s not shocking that some companies have disappeared.
But one of the companies (“Company X”) DID exist a mere eight months ago.
I know this because I prepared a presentation on differentiation (see version 2 of the presentation here), and two representatives from Company X received the presentation in advance of a conference.
After the conference organizer distributed the presentation, I offered to meet with the companies individually (no charge) to discuss their content and differentiation needs, or anything else they wanted to discuss.
While some conference attendees took advantage of my April offer, the representatives from Company X did not.
And now in November, Company X no longer exists.
Could Bredemarket have created the necessary content to keep Company X afloat? Who knows?
But EVERY company needs content to differentiate it from its competitors. Otherwise the competitors will attack you. And your competitors may not be as merciful with you as Jake Paul was with Mike Tyson.
If you need Bredemarket’s help with content, proposal, or analysis services, book a meeting with me.
Perhaps I was a little agitated or excited this afternoon.
After applying for said job, I was reading the company’s website to learn about its identity management product when the company’s bot kept on messaging me.
At 2:30 pm Chat Bot says: Hello, this is an AI Rep from [COMPANY]. If you need any assistance, feel free to ask.
At 2:30 pm Chat Bot says: Saw that you’re interested in our SaaS management and identity governance software. Any questions?
Being the curious type (after all, I worked for IDEMIA), I wondered how the chat bot would deal with what I REALLY wanted to ask about.
At 2:47 pm I say: With 30 years’ identity experience and 9 years as a PMM, I just applied for your Sr PMM Identity Management role. So the only question that I have is when you will interview me.
Yes, 30 years. Not “over 29” years. See my prior post.
And yes, my assumption that the company would immediately drop everything and interview me may have been a little overconfident. But it’s better than imposter syndrome.
And after all, this was just a bot. I assumed that the bot would be completely confused by my question, so no harm would come from overconfidence.
You know what they say about people who assume?
At 2:47 pm Chat Bot says: Thanks for applying for the Sr PMM Identity Management role! Could you provide your email address so we can follow up on your application status?
One note here: the bot parroted my response back to me. The company’s job description does not include a job title with the “PMM” acronym.
Regardless, I was pleasantly surprised. The bot was trained to respond to job applicants. So I provided the email address that I used for my job application.
That’s when I was UNPLEASANTLY surprised.
At 2:47 pm Chat Bot says: Thank you for your interest. Please provide a business email address so we can follow up on your application status.
Apparently the training wasn’t thorough enough. Think about it; if you’re an individual applying for a job, why would you apply with a “business email address”? Which one? From your current employer? THAT is not a good idea.
But as it turns out, I DO have a business email address-the one for Bredemarket. So I entered that, even though that email address does not appear anywhere on the job application that I had just submitted.
At 2:47 pm Chat Bot says: Thank you for providing your email. Our team will review the conversation and follow up if necessary. How else can I assist you today?
So it will be interesting to see whether the company contacts me at both of my email addresses.
(Post image generated at craiyon.com)
You missed Brian May’s collaboration with the Weebl folks.
This resonated with me because in mid-September I spent some Instagram time thinking about the word “flash” (as in how fast a human can create content).
(NOT part of the biometric product marketing expert series)
Friction is bad.
I know some people think that friction is good, because if you tolerate the friction to get to the thing, then you must really want it.
But more often than not, friction is bad.
Which is why when I create a reel, I try to post the native reel in all places where appropriate.
Take my most recent 8 second “biometric product marketing expert” reel.
But you don’t have to leave this blog post to see the original reel.
See how easy a frictionless experience can be?
More here.
You’ve probably noticed that I’ve created a lot of Bredemarket videos lately.
But…
Even Bredemarket’s “short” 15 second videos may be TWICE AS LONG as they should be.
In 2015, Time magazine reported on the results of a Microsoft study:
Researchers in Canada surveyed 2,000 participants and studied the brain activity of 112 others using electroencephalograms (EEGs). Microsoft found that since the year 2000 (or about when the mobile revolution began) the average attention span dropped from 12 seconds to eight seconds.
As many noted, a goldfish’s attention span is 9 seconds.
Some argue that the 8 second attention span is not universal and varies according to the task. For example, a 21 minute attention span has been recorded for drivers. If drivers had an 8 second attention span, we would probably all be dead by now.
But watching a video is not a life-or-death situation. Viewers will happily jump away if there’s no reason to watch.
So I have my challenge.
Ironically, I learned about the 8 second rule while watching a LinkedIn Learning course about the 3 minute rule. I haven’t finished the course yet, so I haven’t yet learned how to string someone along for 22.5 8-second segments.
(Part of the biometric product marketing expert series)
I remember the first computer I ever owned: a Macintosh Plus with a hard disk with a whopping 20 megabytes of storage space. And that hard disk held ALL my files, with room to spare.
For sake of comparison, the video at the end of this blog post would fill up three-quarters of that old hard drive. Not that the Mac would have any way to play that video.
That Mac is now literally a museum piece.
And its 20 megabyte hard disk illustrates the limitations of those days. File storage was a precious commodity in the 1980s and 1990s, and we therefore accepted images that we wouldn’t even think about accepting today.
This affected the ways in which entities exchanged biometric information.
The ANSI/NIST standard for biometric data interchange has gone through several iterations over the years, beginning in 1986 when NIST didn’t even exist (it was called the National Bureau of Standards in those days).
When I began working for Printrak in 1994, the image interchange standard in effect was ANSI/NIST-CSL 1-1993, the “Data Format for the Interchange of Fingerprint Information.”
Yes, FINGERPRINT information. No faces. No scars/marks/tattoos. signatures, voice recordings, dental/oral data, irises, DNA, or even palm prints. Oh, and no XML-formatted interchange either. Just fingerprints.
Back in 1993, there were only 9 logical record types.
For purposes of this post I’m going to focus on logical record types 3 through 6 and explain what they mean.
In the 1993 version of the ANSI/NIST standard:
Incidentally, this brings up an important point. The series of ANSI/NIST standards are not focused on STORAGE of data. They are focused on INTERCHANGE of data. They only provided a method for Printrak system users to exchange data with automated fingerprint identification systems (AFIS) from NEC, Morpho, Cogent, and other fingerprint system providers. Just interchange. Nothing more.
Now let’s get back to Types 3 through 6 and note that you were able to exchange binary fingerprint images.
Yup, straight black and white images.
Why the heck would fingerprint experts tolerate a system that transmitted binary images that latent fingerprint examiners considered practically useless?
Because they had to.
Two technological constraints adversely affected the interchange of fingerprint data in 1993:
So as a workaround, the ANSI/NIST standard allowed users to interchange binary (black and white) images to save disk space and modem transmission time.
And we were all delighted with the capabilities of the 1993 ANSI/NIST standard.
Until we weren’t.
The current standard, ANSI/NIST-ITL 1-2011 Update 2015, supports a myriad of biometric types. For fingerprints (and palm prints), the focus is on grayscale images: binary image Type 5 and Type 6 are deprecated in the current standard, and low-resolution Type 3 grayscale images are also deprecated. Even Type 4 is shunned by most people in favor of new friction ridge image types in which the former “high resolution” is now the lowest resolution that anyone supports:
We’ve come a long way.
Now that you’ve read this whole thing, I’ll share my video which covers everything in 25 seconds.
By the time I upload this video to Instagram, I’ll probably use Instagram’s music facilities to add this song as background music.
When your company attends events, you’ll want to maximize your event return on investment (ROI) by creating marketing content that you publish before, during, and after the event.
This is how you do it.
Including:
And I’ll spill a couple of secrets along the way.
I’m going to share two secrets in this post. OK, maybe they’re not that secret, but you’d think they ARE secrets because no one acknowledges them.
The first one has to do with event attendance. You personally might be awed and amazed when you’re in the middle of an event and surrounded by hundreds, or thousands, or tens of thousands of people. All of whom are admiring your exhibit booth or listening to your CEO speak.
But guess what?
Many, many more people are NOT at the event.
They can’t see your exhibit booth, and can’t hear your speaker. They’re on the outside, TRYING to look in.
And all the money you spent on booth space and travel and light-up pens does NOTHING for the people who aren’t there…
Unless you bring the event to them. Your online content can bring the event to people who were never there.
But you need to plan, create, and approve your content before, during, and after the event. Here’s how you do that.
Yes, you can just show up at an event, take some pictures, and call it a day. But if you want to maximize your event return on investment, you’ll be a bit more deliberate in executive your event content. Ideally you should be:
Before the event begins, you need to plan your content. While you can certainly create some content on a whim as opportunity strikes, you need to have a basic idea of what content you plan to create.
Once you have planned what you want to do, you need to do it. Before, during, and after the event, you may want to create the following types of content:
Make sure that your content approval process is geared for the fast-paced nature of events. I can’t share details, but:
So how are you going to generate all this content? This brings us to my proposed solution…and the second secret.
The rest of this post talks about one of Bredemarket’s services, the Bredemarket 2800 Medium Writing Service. For those who haven’t heard about it, it’s a service where I provide between 2,800 and 3,200 words of written text.
“But John,” you’re asking. “How is a single block of 3,200 words of text going to help me with my event marketing?”
Time to reveal the second secret…
You can break up those 3,200 words any way you like.
For example, let’s say that you’re planning on attending an event. You could break the text up as follows:
For $2,000 (as of June 2024), you can benefit from written text for complete event coverage, arranged in any way you need.
So how can you and your company receive these benefits?
First, read the data sheet for the Bredemarket 2800 Medium Writing Service so you understand the offer and process.
Second, contact Bredemarket to get the content process started well BEFORE your event. Book a meeting with me at calendly.com/bredemarket. Be sure to fill out the information form so I can best help you.
Alternatively, you can
But don’t wait. If your event is in September…don’t contact me in October.
Beginning May 2, Bredemarket is on fewer social channels. The information in this post is not new.
But rather than dwelling on the negative aspects of the social channels where Bredemarket has suspended activity, I’m going to concentrate on the social channels where Bredemarket is still active.
Here they are. Be sure to follow or subscribe!
Yes, it’s definitely a shorter list than the old one. But I feel a lot better.
And maybe I’ll return to the other platforms at a later date. You never know.
As further proof that I am celebrating, rather than hiding, my “seasoned” experience—and you know what the code word “seasoned” means—I am entitling this blog post “Take Me to the Pilot.”
Although I’m thinking about a different type of “pilot”—a pilot to establish that Login.gov can satisfy Identity Assurance Level 2 (IAL2).
I just mentioned IAL2 in a blog post on Wednesday, with this seemingly throwaway sentence.
So if you think you can use Login.gov to access a porn website, think again.
From https://bredemarket.com/2024/04/10/age-assurance-meets-identity-assurance-level-2/.
The link in that sentence directs the kind reader to a post I wrote in November 2023, detailing that fact that the GSA Inspector General criticized…the GSA…for implying that Login.gov was IAL2-compliant when it was not. The November post references a GSA-authored August blog post which reads in part (in bold):
Login.gov is on a path to providing an IAL2-compliant identity verification service to its customers in a responsible, equitable way.
From https://www.gsa.gov/blog/2023/08/18/reducing-fraud-and-increasing-access-drives-record-adoption-and-usage-of-logingov.
Because it obviously wouldn’t be good to do it in an irresponsible inequitable way.
But the GSA didn’t say how long that path would be. Would Login.gov be IAL2-compliant by the end of 2023? By mid 2024?
It turns out the answer is neither.
You would think that achieving IAL2 compliance would be a top priority. After all, the longer that Login.gov doesn’t comply, the more government agencies that will flock to IAL2-compliant ID.me.
Enter Steve Craig of PEAK.IDV and the weekly news summaries that he posts on LinkedIn. Today’s summary includes the following item:
4/ GSA’s Login.gov Pilots Enhanced Identity Verification
From https://www.linkedin.com/posts/stevenbcraig_digitalidentity-aml-compliance-activity-7184539504504930306-LVPF/.
Login.gov’s pilot will allow users to match a live selfie with the photo on a self-supplied form of photo ID, such as a driver’s license
Other interesting updates in the press release 👇
And here’s what GSA’s April 11 press release says.
Specifically, over the next few months, Login.gov will:
Pilot facial matching technology consistent with the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Digital Identity Guidelines (800-63-3) to achieve evidence-based remote identity verification at the IAL2 level….
Using proven facial matching technology, Login.gov’s pilot will allow users to match a live selfie with the photo on a self-supplied form of photo ID, such as a driver’s license. Login.gov will not allow these images to be used for any purpose other than verifying identity, an approach which reflects Login.gov’s longstanding commitment to ensuring the privacy of its users. This pilot is slated to start in May with a handful of existing agency-partners who have expressed interest, with the pilot expanding to additional partners over the summer. GSA will simultaneously seek an independent third party assessment (Kantara) of IAL2 compliance, which GSA expects will be completed later this year.
From https://www.gsa.gov/about-us/newsroom/news-releases/general-services-administrations-logingov-pilot-04112024#.
In short, GSA’s April 11 press release about the Login.gov pilot says that it expects to complete IAL2 compliance later this year. So it’s going to take more than a year for the GSA to repair the gap that its Inspector General identified.
Once I saw Steve’s update this morning, I felt it sufficiently important to share the news among Bredemarket’s various social channels.
With a picture.
For those of you who are not as “seasoned” as I am, the picture depicts the B-side of a 1970 vinyl 7″ single (not a compact disc) from Elton John, taken from the album that broke Elton in the United States. (Not literally; that would come a few years later.)
By the way, while the original orchestrated studio version is great, the November 1970 live version with just the Elton John – Dee Murray – Nigel Olsson trio is OUTSTANDING.
Back to Bredemarket social media. If you go to my Instagram post on this topic, I was able to incorporate an audio snippet from “Take Me to the Pilot” (studio version) into the post. (You may have to go to the Instagram post to actually hear the audio.)
Not that the song has anything to do with identity verification using government ID documents paired with facial recognition. Or maybe it does; Elton John doesn’t know what the song means, and even lyricist Bernie Taupin doesn’t know what the song means.
So from now on I’m going to say that “Take Me to the Pilot” documents future efforts toward IAL2 compliance. Although frankly the lyrics sound like they describe a successful iris spoofing attempt.
Through a glass eye, your throne
From https://genius.com/Elton-john-take-me-to-the-pilot-lyrics.
Is the one danger zone
For you young whippersnappers who don’t understand why the opening image mentioned “54 Years On,” this is a reference to another Elton John song.
And it’s no surprise that the live version is better.
Now I’m going to listen to this all day. Cue the Instagram post (if Instagram has access to the 17-11-70/11-17-70 version).
The Digital Trust & Safety Partnership (DTSP) consists of “leading technology companies,” including Apple, Google, Meta (parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp), Microsoft (and its LinkedIn subsidiary), TikTok, and others.
The DTSP obviously has its views on Ofcom’s enforcement of the UK Online Safety Act.
Which, as Biometric Update notes, boils down to “the industry can regulate itself.”
Here’s how the DTSP stated this in its submission to Ofcom:
DTSP appreciates and shares Ofcom’s view that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to trust and safety and to protecting people online. We agree that size is not the only factor that should be considered, and our assessment methodology, the Safe Framework, uses a tailoring framework that combines objective measures of organizational size and scale for the product or service in scope of assessment, as well as risk factors.
From https://dtspartnership.org/press-releases/dtsp-submission-to-the-uk-ofcom-consultation-on-illegal-harms-online/.
We’ll get to the “Safe Framework” later. DTSP continues:
Overly prescriptive codes may have unintended effects: Although there is significant overlap between the content of the DTSP Best Practices Framework and the proposed Illegal Content Codes of Practice, the level of prescription in the codes, their status as a safe harbor, and the burden of documenting alternative approaches will discourage services from using other measures that might be more effective. Our framework allows companies to use whatever combination of practices most effectively fulfills their overarching commitments to product development, governance, enforcement, improvement, and transparency. This helps ensure that our practices can evolve in the face of new risks and new technologies.
From https://dtspartnership.org/press-releases/dtsp-submission-to-the-uk-ofcom-consultation-on-illegal-harms-online/.
But remember that the UK’s neighbors in the EU recently prescribed that USB-3 cables are the way to go. This not only forced DTSP member Apple to abandon the Lightning cable worldwide, but it affects Google and others because there will be no efforts to come up with better cables. Who wants to fight the bureaucratic battle with Brussels? Or alternatively we will have the advanced “world” versions of cables and the deprecated “EU” standards-compliant cables.
So forget Ofcom’s so-called overbearing approach and just adopt the Safe Framework. Big tech will take care of everything, including all those age assurance issues.
DTSP’s September 2023 paper on age assurance documents a “not overly prescriptive” approach, with a lot of “it depends” discussion.
Incorporating each characteristic comes with trade-offs, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Highly accurate age assurance methods may depend on collection of new personal data such as facial imagery or government-issued ID. Some methods that may be economical may have the consequence of creating inequities among the user base. And each service and even feature may present a different risk profile for younger users; for example, features that are designed to facilitate users meeting in real life pose a very different set of risks than services that provide access to different types of content….
Instead of a single approach, we acknowledge that appropriate age assurance will vary among services, based on an assessment of the risks and benefits of a given context. A single service may also use different
From https://dtspartnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/DTSP_Age-Assurance-Best-Practices.pdf.
approaches for different aspects or features of the service, taking a multi-layered approach.
So will Ofcom heed the DTSP’s advice and say “Never mind. You figure it out”?
Um, maybe not.
Bredemarket