Government Technology posted an article on a ransomware attack that affected Ardent Health Services facilities in multiple U.S. states, including Texas, Idaho, New Mexico, Oklahoma, New Jersey, and Kansas over Thanksgiving Day, requiring some ambulances to be diverted and some services suspended.
The Thanksgiving timing of the attack is unlikely to be coincidental. Hackers are believed to see holiday weekends as an opportunity to strike while network defenders and IT are likely “at limited capacity for an extended time,” the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has noted.
And it’s not like the hackers are necessarily having to pass up on their turkey dinner. Few if any holidays are universal, and over 7 billion people (including many hackers) did NOT celebrate Thanksgiving last Thursday.
Does this mean that companies need to INCREASE security staff during holiday periods?
My decision making process relies on extensive data analysis and aligning with the company’s strategic objectives. It’s devoid of personal bias ensuring unbiased and strategic choices that prioritize the organization’s best interests.
Mika was brought to my attention by accomplished product marketer/artist Danuta (Dana) Deborgoska. (She’s appeared in the Bredemarket blog before, though not by name.) Dana is also Polish (but not Colombian) and clearly takes pride in the artificial intelligence accomplishments of this Polish-headquartered company. You can read her LinkedIn post to see her thoughts, one of which was as follows:
Data is the new oxygen, and we all know that we need clean data to innovate and sustain business models.
There’s a reference to oxygen again, but it’s certainly appropriate. Just as people cannot survive without oxygen, Generative AI cannot survive without data.
But the need for data predates AI models. From 2017:
Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani said India is poised to grow…but to make that happen the country’s telecoms and IT industry would need to play a foundational role and create the necessary digital infrastructure.
Calling data the “oxygen” of the digital economy, Ambani said the telecom industry had the urgent task of empowering 1.3 billion Indians with the tools needed to flourish in the digital marketplace.
Of course, the presence or absence of data alone is not enough. As Debogorska notes, we don’t just need any data; we need CLEAN data, without error and without bias. Dirty data is like carbon monoxide, and as you know carbon monoxide is harmful…well, most of the time.
That’s been the challenge not only with artificial intelligence, but with ALL aspects of data gathering.
The all-male board of directors of a fertilizer company in 1960. Fair use. From the New York Times.
In all of these cases, someone (Amazon, Enron’s shareholders, or NIST) asked questions about the cleanliness of the data, and then set out to answer those questions.
In the case of Amazon’s recruitment tool and the company Enron, the answers caused Amazon to abandon the tool and Enron to abandon its existence.
Despite the entreaties of so-called privacy advocates (who prefer the privacy nightmare of physical driver’s licenses to the privacy-preserving features of mobile driver’s licenses), we have not abandoned facial recognition, but we’re definitely monitoring it in a statistical (not an anecdotal) sense.
The cleanliness of the data will continue to be the challenge as we apply artificial intelligence to new applications.
Last Saturday I hoped to gain inspiration so that I could shoot a video or capture an image to promote Bredemarket’s technology writing services—namely, writing blog posts, case studies, white papers, or other content to empower technology firms.
By mid-morning, with no inspiration, I captured a technology image of…something.
Chaffey High School, Ontario, California, November 11, 2023.
As I confessed in my “behind the scenes” video that day, I have no idea what this thing is, or whether this is used for water, gas, or something else entirely.
Chaffey High School, Ontario, California, November 11, 2023.
Why I did not know
And do you want to know WHY I couldn’t describe what I saw?
Because I failed to get a collaborator to work with me.
If an appropriate person from Chaffey High School presented themselves to me, they could have described:
Why this technology was necessary.
How the technology worked.
What the technology was.
You’ll notice that I asked the “why” question BEFORE I asked the “how” and “what” questions. Because “why” is most important. If a student or staff member sees this thing on the Chaffey campus, they naturally want to know why it’s there. They don’t really care if it pumps 100 liters of whatever per second.
How I can produce the right words for your technology firm
And that’s how I will work with YOUR technology firm when Bredemarket creates content. We work TOGETHER to create the content you need.
Do you need to create content that converts prospects for your technology product/service and drives content results?
In the “war” against competitors, your company needs “boots on the ground”…especially for on-premise deployments.
I’ve known a couple of companies that didn’t realize that they lacked boots on the ground…and that they had no plan to get the boots on the ground that they definitely needed.
This doesn’t just affect a company’s products. It also affects a company’s content.
Company X brainstorms
Company X was a new software solutions provider that had an internal brainstorming channel, and one person made the following suggestion:
Why stop at providing software solutions to our customers? Why not provide complete solutions with both software and hardware?
Now you NEVER want to totally shoot down a brainstorming idea, but it’s appropriate to consider the positives and negatives of any brainstorm. I won’t delve into ALL the negatives of shifting from a software solution to a software/hardware solution (profit margins, delivery times, etc.), but I will focus on one:
If you deploy integrated software and hardware solutions, you are responsible for MAINTAINING them.
What does this mean?
This means that you have to hire employees with hardware maintenance expertise, or you have to hire managers who can oversee subcontractors with hardware maintenance expertise.
For certain products (such as those Company X sold), customers demand fast response times. Maybe a 2-hour response. Maybe a 5-minute response.
Customers won’t wait a week for a maintenance technician to show up at their site. Broken hardware grinds business to a halt, and customer’s won’t tolerate that.
And they DEFINITELY won’t send the hardware off to a distant facility for repair.
As a pure software firm, Company X had few if any people qualified to perform the necessary maintenance activities.
But at least Company X had SOME people to consider these issues. Company Y wasn’t so fortunate.
Company Y sells
Company Y was also a software solutions provider. Company Y wanted to break into a particular industry in a particular country. I won’t reveal the industry, but I will reveal the target country: the United States.
Company Y developed and delivered a sales pitch that talked about the importance of the industry in question, and how the company could deliver a solution for that industry in the U.S.
But it glossed over one thing: Company Y had very few people in the U.S. at the time. Oh, they were working on hiring some more people in the United States, but at the time they didn’t have many.
And it was painfully obvious that Company Y’s U.S. presence was lacking. While talking about the expectations of different generations of people in the industry, the company rep referred to “Generation Zed.” For anyone listening to the sales pitch, that sent up an immediate red flag.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that American English may not be considered the most advanced English in the world. After all, we spell many words with an abundance of z’s…whoops, I mean an abundance of zeds.
If you’re going to do business in the United States, you have to speak our language. And we Americans will be criticised (with an s) when we don’t speak another country’s language.
So when do you buy boots?
If you need boots on the ground to fight your competitors, you have to…well, you have to obtain boots on the ground. But when?
One option is to wait until you need them, and THEN buy the boots. Wait until someone actually buys your software/hardware solution, or wait until you actually have a U.S. contract in your industry. No need to spend money on resources if you never use them, and if you do need the resources later, they’ll be able to ramp up quickly…right?
The other option is to take the risk and put the boots in your closet NOW, so that when a customer calls upon you to deliver, you don’t embarrass yourself. This financially costs your company, but you’ll be primed and prepared to move forward when the business does come.
So let’s talk about your content
You don’t only need boots on the ground to deploy your products. You need boots on the ground to create the content that will entice prospects to BUY those same products.
You’ve been meaning to create that content for a while, but just haven’t gotten around to it. After all, there’s a financial cost in hiring an employee or a contractor (like Bredemarket) to create the content, and there’s an opportunity cost in taking one of your existing employees and tasking them with content creation.
So you haven’t created the content you need for your business.
And you’re probably not going to create it next week either.
Or next month.
Or next year.
Unless you move forward NOWand bring in some boots on the ground, namely Bredemarket, to work with you and create the content you desperately need.
You can express a single thought on multiple channels. And as far as I’m concerned, the more the merrier.
Me on “expert” advice on social media channel adoption
Incidentally, that’s why I object to the “expert” advice that I master one social media channel first before branching out into others.
If I adopt that strategy and ONLY market on LinkedIn and ignore Instagram and TikTok, I am automatically GUARANTEEING that the potential Instagram and TikTok audiences will never hear about my offer.
“How I Expanded 1 Idea into 31 Pieces of Content”
I’ve expressed my thoughts on this social media “expert” advice before:
The latter post, entitled “How I Expanded 1 Idea into 31 Pieces of Content,” described how…well, the title is pretty self-explanatory. I created 31 pieces of content based on a single idea.
The 31 pieces of content, published both through the Bredemarket channels (see above) and via my personal channels (including my jebredcal blog and my LinkedIn page), all increased the chance that SOMEONE would see the underlying message: “Your prospects don’t care about your technology.” Each piece of content was tuned for the particular channel and its target audience, ensuring that the message would resonate.
Speaking of repurposing, I’ve already adapted the words above and published them in four different ways (this is the fourth)…and counting. No TikTok video yet though.
Can Bredemarket help you repurpose or create content?
And if I can do this for me, I can do this for you.
Bredemarket can help you create content that converts prospects and drives content results. Why?
If you’re sold on using Bredemarket to create customer-focused messaging (remember: your prospects don’t care about your technology), or even if you’re not and just want to talk about your needs, there are three ways to move forward with your content project. Or you can just join the Bredemarket mailing list to stay informed.
Book a meeting with me at calendly.com/bredemarket. Be sure to fill out the information form so I can best help you.
Technologists, you know how tough it is to create a technology product.
You have to assemble the technology, or perhaps create the technology yourself.
You have to work on the most minute details and make sure that everything is just right.
It takes a great deal of effort.
What if your product story is ignored?
But when you want to tell the story about your product, and all the effort you put into it, your prospects ignore everything you say. You might as well not be there.
Because they don’t care about you. It’s all about them.
People want to satisfy their own needs
But the “it’s all about me” attitude is actually a GOOD thing, if you can harness it in your messaging. Let’s face it; we all have an “it’s all about me” attitude because we want to satisfy our needs.
You want to satisfy your own needs because you only care about selling your product.
I want to satisfy my own needs because I only care about selling Bredemarket’s services. (I’ll get to the selling part later.)
And your prospects want to satisfy their own needs because they only care about their problems. And because of your customers’ self-focus, they’re only going to care about your product if it solves their problems.
So when it’s time to tell the story about your product, don’t talk about your technology.
Yes, I’m stealing the Biometric Update practice of combining multiple items into a single post, but this lets me take a brief break from identity (mostly) and examine three general technology stories:
Advances in speech neuroprosthesis (the Pat Bennett / Stanford University story).
The benefits of Dynamic Media for Adobe Enterprise Manager users, as described by KBWEB Consult.
The benefits of graph databases for Identity and Access Management (IAM) implementations, as described by IndyKite.
Neuroprosthetics “is a discipline related to neuroscience and biomedical engineering concerned with developing neural prostheses, artificial devices to replace or improve the function of an impaired nervous system.
Various news sources highlighted the story of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) patient Pat Bennett and her somewhat-enhanced ability to formulate words, resulting from research at Stanford University.
Because I was curious, I sought the Nature article that discussed the research in detail, “A high-performance speech neuroprosthesis.” The article describes a proof of concept of a speech brain-computer interface (BCI).
Here we demonstrate a speech-to-text BCI that records spiking activity from intracortical microelectrode arrays. Enabled by these high-resolution recordings, our study participant—who can no longer speak intelligibly owing to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—achieved a 9.1% word error rate on a 50-word vocabulary (2.7 times fewer errors than the previous state-of-the-art speech BCI2) and a 23.8% word error rate on a 125,000-word vocabulary (the first successful demonstration, to our knowledge, of large-vocabulary decoding). Our participant’s attempted speech was decoded at 62 words per minute, which is 3.4 times as fast as the previous record8 and begins to approach the speed of natural conversation (160 words per minute9).
For Bennett, the (ALS) deterioration began not in her spinal cord, as is typical, but in her brain stem. She can still move around, dress herself and use her fingers to type, albeit with increasing difficulty. But she can no longer use the muscles of her lips, tongue, larynx and jaws to enunciate clearly the phonemes — or units of sound, such as sh — that are the building blocks of speech….
After four months, Bennett’s attempted utterances were being converted into words on a computer screen at 62 words per minute — more than three times as fast as the previous record for BCI-assisted communication.
Now let’s shift to companies that need to produce marketing collateral. Bredemarket produces collateral, but not to the scale that big companies need to produce. A single company may have to produce millions of pieces of collateral, each of which is specific to a particular product, in a particular region, for a particular audience/persona. Even Bredemarket could potentially produce all sorts of content, if it weren’t so difficult to do so:
An Instagram carousel post about the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service, targeted to voice sales executives in the identity industry.
A TikTok reel about the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service, targeted to marketing executives in the AI industry.
All of this specialized content, using all of these different image and video formats? I’m not gonna create all that.
But as KBWEB Consult (a boutique technology consulting firm specializing in the implementation and delivery of Adobe Enterprise Cloud technologies) points out in its article “Implementing Rapid Omnichannel Messaging with AEM Dynamic Media,” Adobe Experience Manager has tools to speed up this process and create correctly-messaged content in ALL the formats for ALL the audiences.
One of those tools is Dynamic Media.
AEM Dynamic Media accelerates omnichannel personalization, ensuring your business messages are presented quickly and in the proper formats. Starting with a master file, Dynamic Media quickly adjusts images and videos to satisfy varying asset specifications, contributing to increased content velocity.
A graph database, also referred to as a semantic database, is a software application designed to store, query and modify network graphs. A network graph is a visual construct that consists of nodes and edges. Each node represents an entity (such as a person) and each edge represents a connection or relationship between two nodes.
Graph databases have been around in some variation for along time. For example, a family tree is a very simple graph database….
Graph databases are well-suited for analyzing interconnections…
To see how this applies to identity and access management (IAM), I’ll turn to IndyKite, whose Lasse Andersen recently presented on graph database use in IAM (in a webinar sponsored by Strativ Group). IndyKite describes its solution as follows (in part):
A knowledge graph that holistically captures the identities of customers and IoT devices along with the rich relationships between them
A dynamic and real-time data model that unifies disconnected identity data and business metadata into one contextualized layer
Yes, I know that every identity company (with one exception) uses the word “trust,” and they all use the word “seamless.”
But this particular technology benefits banking customers (at least the honest ones) by using the available interconnections to provide all the essential information about the customer and the customer’s devices, in a way that does not inconvenience the customer. IndyKite claims “greater privacy and security,” along with flexibility for future expansion.
In other words, it increases velocity.
What is your technology story?
I hope you provided this quick overview of these three technology advances.
But do you have a technology story that YOU want to tell?
Perhaps Bredemarket, the technology content marketing expert, can help you select the words to tell your story. If you’re interested in talking, let me know.
Bredemarket 