The pillaging of private data by mobile apps may be coming to an end as users are becoming more vigilant and savvy. Look no further than the growing backlash from the most recent update of the LinkedIn Android app. About a week ago, LinkedIn released an update with the note in the changelog, “Fixed several bugs reported by our members”, but said nothing about changing permissions. Bad move. The app’s user rating is taking a major hit.

While providing no new features or benefits, the app now requires “Read Sensitive Log Data”, which allows the application to access general information about what the user is doing with the device.  This could include personal or private information. But who knows what info they’re pulling or why? …LinkedIn doesn’t tell us.

With the growing spotlight on data and privacy issues, consumers are moving away from blind trust and more towards vigilance.  Like the public’s rejection of Path Intelligence’s tracking of cell phones in the mall, users are uninstalling the LinkedIn app and flaming it in their reviews.  Mobile app developers and firms like Path Intelligence could learn a few lessons from the browser cookie. While Path’s system and LinkedIn’s app take user information and offer no explicit benefits to the customer, cookies provide a more personalized, user-friendly web experience because of the data.  And they can be disabled. Privacy is a two way street. People are willing to give up some personal information to a trusted partner with the understanding that they’ll get something in return—and their information won’t be abused.

LinkedIn’s rating is dropping like a rock because they took their users for granted and figured they would install any update and accept any permission, even if there was no tangible benefit.  They have also failed to respond to the community’s feedback. It’s been over a week and they have yet to change the description of the app.

To fix this debacle, LinkedIn needs to jump in immediately and update their description with a solid explanation as to why they need these new permissions, and put it in user focused terms. However, rolling it back altogether would show a greater interest in protecting the privacy of their customers (who are, in essence, their products).

This is a lesson to all app developers, but especially those dealing with social features: The users are starting to pay attention. You need to treat your community with respect. Take only what you need and give more than you take… or get ready for the backlash.

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4 Billion isn’t cool, you know what’s cool? 340 undecillion.

With our old IPV4 (what happened to ipV5?) scheme we were limited to 4 Billion IP addresses, that was cool when we had 5 computers on the ‘Internet’, forward looking even. That was probably one usable address for every person at the time. Well now, we are 6 Billion strong and every person seems to have 4 Internet connected devices, and every connected device has dozens of networked resources it accesses.

With IPv6, we will have 340 unctrillion addresses available. That’s 340 x 10 to the 36th power. for perspective, every man woman and child can have a billion or so IP addresses each.

So what does it mean for you?

Not much really, at least not for now. It’s going to take a while to implement, but when it’s fully adopted, we’ll have better security, faster routing and better control over the priority of traffic on the network, which means better coexistence of synchronous and asynchronous data — voice, video and data living together happily on the Internet!

But it can also mean problems. There are bound to be routing and compatibility issues.  We are, after all, completely changing the core system of the Internet.

But don’t freak out.

It won’t all happen at once. We’re just beginning to try out this massive change. June 8th is IPv6 day and some big players are going to test out compatibility on their sites. from Internet society, the main sponsor of IPv6 day:

On 8 June, 2011, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Akamai and Limelight Networks will be amongst some of the major organisations that will offer their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour “test flight”. The goal of the Test Flight Day is to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 addresses run out.

It should be a smooth test, adversely affecting an estimated 0.05% of the population, but be on the look out for connectivity issues and let us know if you see anything!

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We launched a beautiful social product review website recently and chose to use Facebook as our sole user registration and authentication system. Since we launched we’ve seen that it can be a little controversial with the user-base.  For most it’s made joining the site fast, easy and a rich experience, but a few have been a little hesitant to connect.

First let me tell you why we chose Facebook for registration and then try to capture the sentiment of some folks. We use Facebook Oauth2 for a few reasons:

• We wanted to focus our efforts on core features and building a beautiful site, not a registration platform
• We didn’t want to ask our reviewers to find and connect with their friends in a new place all over again
• The world doesn’t need yet another username and password floating around (see Gawker debacle)
• With permission, we wanted to simplify the registration process – pulling in the person’s full name, email, list of friends and photo

Facebook authentication helped us achieve all these goals relatively painlessly. We realize that people have some concerns mainly around privacy of their and their friends personal data. A few things that we’ve heard:

• I don’t want a site having all my personal data
• I don’t want my friends getting spammed
• I don’t want an application posting to my wall

The fact is that we don’t ask for, or access that level of personal data, but the practices of some companies –social gaming companies and advertisers I’m looking at you!– have begun to tarnish the reputation of Facebook as a reputable authentication service. We give users controls about how frequently –if at all– we post to your wall and make these options really easy to access and understand.

To fix this public perception issue, Facebook needs to clearly brand a more-limited Facebook connect platform that is clearly designated for use as an authentication system with core social features like a friends list –things that benefit the user– but exclude potentially troubling access like access to photo’s or friend’s personal information.

Having a centralized social networking service maintaining your registration information and ‘social graph’ for multiple sites is an amazing thing, and for a small fast moving startup, not having to build a registration platform or a new social network saves precious resources for the core product. I just hope Facebook reels it in before people get turned off by the service.

Maybe it’s just the NYC technorati getting huffy about it – what do you think is Facebook authentication– convenient or creepy?

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Friendsourcing: the act of asking a friend for something – I swear I just coined that.

Old concept, new medium. And lots of folks like Paul Kedrosky and Dan Rose “Facebook exec” are all excited about it.

I see the argument as something like this:

• Search is getting too spammy with algorithm hijackers and sponsored content
• Crowdsourcing is great for huge amounts of data crunching, not so much for personal decisions
• And recommendation engines are interesting but create a feedback loop; after the first few good insights they offer, you start to go around in circles and get that vacant call-center auto-attendant feeling

Enter Friendsourcing – “Hey CK, where did you get those shoes?”

We trust our friends, or at least we know which of our friends we trust. We know where they come from, what they stand for — and what their budget is.  We know what they are good at — really good at — and what they think they are good at (of course we wont tell them, because we are, after all, their friends).  Dan knows cameras inside and out. If I ever need a recommendation on a single-speed bike, I’m going to ask Eric or Nick. And my mom is 100% definitely going to ask me which laptop she should buy.

The trick is exploring our social connections so that we can discover which friends are experts in different domains and then benefit from their expertise and experience.

That’s what fav.co is all about. We give passionate consumers a place to rave and rant about products they love, or maybe ones that have let them down. At the same time it becomes a place for friends and family to find products that have been researched and vetted by their trusted inner circle.

It’s pretty much what humans have done forever, but we’ve made it fun and easy to explore the knowledge of our ever-growing circles of friends and find cool products and maybe even find something out about our friends that we didn’t know before (Lisa is awesome with baking!)

Friendsourcing, amazing stuff. Just don’t ask me to help you move.

-c

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OK, I’m actually sick of snappy cloud titles, so apologies for that, but it had to be done. AWS moves really fast –  from their newsletter today:

Dear Amazon S3 Customer,

We are excited to announce that Amazon S3 has increased the maximum size of an object from 5 gigabytes to 5 terabytes. You can now easily store and reference high resolution videos, large backup files, scientific instrument data or other large datasets as single objects. To store objects larger than 5 gigabytes, use the Multipart Upload feature, which allows parallel uploads and streaming of large objects into Amazon S3 as they are being created.

Sincerely,

The Amazon S3 Team

That’s an nice 1000% amazing 99,900% (!) increase without any price increase or unnecessary ceremony.  I remember reading this blog post by Fred Wilson about the ‘10 Characteristics of a Great Companies‘. The line that stuck with me is that “Great companies are constantly innovating and delighting their customers/users with new products and services.”  I guess the word delight never sat well with me because it’s something my grandmother would say, but after rolling it around, it really is the right word for it.

Amazon is continually ‘delighting’ it’s customers. And we’re continually figuring out ways to use these services to bring new products to market, in turn striving to delight our customers.

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It’s been a gold medal month for CG’s clients.  While we can’t take credit for the accolades, we can live vicariously through these achievements.  These have been some of our favorite projects to work on and we agree with the judges: we think they’re pretty special too.

VH1 won a Broadcast Designers Association Gold award for their Beacon channel redesign! Check out the reel.

Walker Digital won the Gold medal at the Gaming Technology Summit.

And NEP Studios, who host the Daily Show and The Colbert Report at their Control Group-readied HD studios were nominated for a CIO 100 award from CIO Magazine.

Doing what you love, with great partners, and getting industry respect for it: what more could you ask for? What a great start to the summer! Congrats all.

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We’ve been working with Walker Digital Gaming on their Perfect Pay and Elite Baccarat platforms since its inception, so it feels really good to have some outside validation as to its sheer awesomeness — Walker Digital just took the Gold medal for one of the most innovative casino games at the 2009 Gaming Technology Summit.

I think you have to go back 10 plus years to find a gaming platform (I’m thinking wide area progressives?) that has altered the landscape as much as the Walker Digital platform; To quote the press release:

With integrated RFID technology, a card-reading shoe and Walker’s Core Game Technology, the system provides an upgradeable, networked game platform that exactly tracks turnover, hand outcomes, wagers, payouts and player ratings in real time. It also eliminates losses due to dealer error, cheating and counterfeiting and increases game speed, precisely assessing player value and providing detailed reporting on game speed, bet mix, table occupancy, turnover, theoretical win and actual win.

To boot, the ‘Elite’ version of the game adds a whole bunch of new and exciting bets — knowing the game, the cards, and the chips allows the system to present wagers never before possible. Say hello to bigger wins and more exciting wagers for the players and better house advantage to the Casino on one of the most popular card games in the world.

Of course the Judges were ‘duly impressed’ who wouldn’t be?

“This product would resolve many of the problems casinos currently deal with regarding very high-end baccarat play,” said one. “It automates many of the functions of administering baccarat play, but does so in a manner that would not be intrusive to the serious high-end customer.”

Another judge noted the product would “work well in high-volume baccarat markets where the clientele prefers to handle the chips.” The features he liked best included the combination of accurate real-time bet recognition and optical card reader. “Together they allow for complete tracking of game play,” he said.

Congrats to the WDG team for pulling it off!

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi50KlsCBio]

First off, Buzz has some serious potential. Google gained an incredible amount of ground on Facebook and Twitter with this launch, and I do sense a shark-jumping moment for Facebook. Once the Google App ecosystem takes off, and social games and e-commerce get integrated, there will be a huge erosion in Facebook market share.  People want one thing, one place to go, and Gmail is already mandatory.

1. Lets start off easy here: Mobile. Google, you own the platform, how hard would it be to launch with an Android app? In the time it took to do the marketing piece on the mobile site, Google could have developed a full-fledged app. Instead I have an “above ground only” slow-loading mobile web page. HTML5 isn’t quite here yet – and Android 1.6 is not supported.
2. Two way integration! Getting Tweets in Buzz is great, but I still have to go out to Twitter or TweetDeck to post. If I had the option to choose which networks my updates appeared on from within Buzz (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc), I would never have to leave Gmail… except for…
3. Where is Facebook? They have a strong API and a straightforward authentication service. Connect to Facebook and never make me go there again. Aggregate and publish (see above).
4. Buzz for Biz. I know it’s coming for Google Apps, but get it going already! How about full integration with LinkedIn – a CRM app would be a really interesting mash-up, as well as bringing all my connections into my address book. No more stale email addresses or phone numbers.
5. OK, I saved crazy for last. Google Profile. I am the strongest believer in an open information society – if everyone knows everything about everyone, then we are all equal. I understand that’s a little overboard, but why should I hide my information when it will only make the web more relevant to me, and get us to our ultimate destination quicker.  But with Buzz, your Google Profile went from obscurity to super relevant. So, quick inventory: Google has information about my friends, my browsing/search history (not to mention DNS info), my purchase history, my communications, the news I’m reading, and my documents. Now they want to know my age, sex, where I grew up? Are you crazy? Google is holding ALL the cards now. They keep repeating “don’t be evil” but you know what they say about absolute power… (did I mention my location?)

If history is any indicator of the future, Google will evolve and add features and services. They have done so consistently since inception, and people will choose convenience above all else, including quality and privacy. And I guess I’m one of them. See you on Buzz.

And if you disagree, see you in the comments!

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Were getting ready for an event with Google and Mozy that we have dubbed “CloudSourcing”, taking a note from Gartner and tweaking it a little.

Tom Mills from Google and Sean Finnegan from Mozy will be giving an in-depth review of their offerings and how they fit into an agile, post-recession office technology strategy.

I’ll be giving a brief overview of how I think we arrived at this point in IT and what it means for creative, innovative firms that are trying to do more with less.

In an effort to get my thoughts together and get some feedback, I’m using this blog post as a draft for the event.

Let me start off by giving a brief overview of our services, and then a little history about the evolution of our offerings:

We provide a number of technical services for our clients in the areas of infrastructure, application development, and industry-focused workflow consulting. As this is New York, we work with a number of creative firms; media, architecture, publishing, and design companies, as well as some key clients in the financial sector. We strive for long-term relationships with our clients, many of whom we’ve worked with for close to a decade. We have installed and managed hundreds of servers, network devices and application suites, but more recently we’ve been focusing on helping our clients select, migrate to, integrate, and manage Cloud-based services.

Since the 1990s and the introduction of pervasive bandwidth, we’ve gone through a number of permutations of the remote server/client model, and much has been written about the benefits and the irony of the shift back to the mainframe/thin client structure of the 1960s. Now everyone is talking about the future of ‘The Cloud‘; a vast array of computing resources, abstracted and presented as a single source to the consumer.

At the turn of the century, we found most small to mid-sized businesses with a pure Local Area Network (LAN), typically comprised of in-house mail – most likely Exchange – and a few other local services: file, print, etc.  A lot of these firms had an internal IT staff or a dedicated consultant to manage their servers, tape backup, networks, and desktops. Only a few were pushing the envelope by leveraging Application Service Providers (ASPs) to deliver back office services.

The risks with this situation were obvious. These systems mostly depended on a single Internet connection, a single building, and a single individual, prone to career changes and untimely vacations.  Remote access to these in-house services was expensive to do right and applications rarely worked as well remotely as they did in the office.

Over the next five years, we saw a gradual shift towards ‘Hosted Applications’. This typically came in the form of a service provider taking a LAN-based solution like Exchange or SharePoint out of the office and putting it in a data center. In conjunction with this change, we saw the IT services industry begin to shift its focus from in-house IT, or consultants, to managed services – companies providing regular systems management remotely.

There were some benefits to this offering: critical applications were not dependent on intermittent Internet connections or over-heated server rooms. Flaky consultants were traded for predictable management services and cost became as regular as the electric bill.

But there were still problems. We had the same old model of doing things, only it was moved out of the business’s office and into the provider’s.  Services that were built for an onsite installation and LAN speeds were shifted to a remote location – not always producing the best results. Access to applications designed for the LAN was sometimes unacceptable because of bandwidth and latency. In a similarly narrow view of the problem, Managed Service companies focused on monitoring systems and patching software, maintaining the status quo, without looking at the big picture, or driving the business forward.

Now the next generation of IT services is coming along and delivering on the promise of on-demand, scalable solutions. These services are web-native, built for the Cloud and multi-tenant environments.

As services like Google Apps and Mozy were built for the web – not re-purposed LAN applications – they deliver exceptional performance and remain very flexible. Control Group has designed our support and project services in a similar way. Our services are built to function efficiently remotely – scaling up when our clients need it, and going away when they don’t – and also to be flexible and innovative, driving business forward rather than maintaining the status quo.

Using the cloud paradigm, we act as a single source of technology for our clients. We help them run more efficient, profitable businesses by weaving an ever growing selection of web-based services, traditional IT, and industry expertise together, to provide an flexible, competitive business platform.

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