Paul Berry of Rebel Mouse: Social Media Aggregation

Social media has proved to be very beneficial to small business.  Wouldn't it be wonderful to take that a step further by having all of your social media broadcasts available at a glance to you and your followers?  Tune in as Paul Berry, former CTO of Huffington Post and Founder of Rebel Mouse, joins Brent Leary to share how this can be done.

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Small Business Trends: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background?

Paul Berry: For the last six years is I was the CTO of Huffington Post where I ran product and design. When I joined, there were a couple of people on my team and three million unique visitors a month.  Which felt big, but by AOL acquisition, we were 45 million unique.  When I left, we were 145 million unique and I had 300 people on my team.

Small Business Trends: So I just have to ask, where did the name come from?

Paul Berry: In testing a bunch of names on friends, family, and extended people, co-workers, colleagues etc., there were a few things that really worked with Rebel Mouse.

Also, I like that it doesn't define itself so that I would be stuck in the word choice that I had made in the beginning. We have space the way Google did, to be able to be a lot of things, but it is memorable. I also felt it was humble, but ambitious.

Small Business Trends: How is it different today to create a presentable Web page compared to previous years?

Paul Berry: You want Twitter and Facebook followers, but you also know you need a domain name.  But the Web has made it way too hard. If you get the design right, which is a very small percentage of people who feel they love their design, then with blogs you start to feel really like this content is old.

There are people that feel that pressure more than ever. It used to be a blog post from three weeks ago was fine, but now it is slightly embarrassing and you stop promoting it.

Rebel Mouse wants to power many millions of domain names, and make that an experience of being social, and actually giving you returns.  Because now, you have this place that shows off who you are. Whether you're a company or an individual, all the things you have been doing doesn't get lost because it is hard to find. But also more importantly, you get to choose what are the most important things on the page. Technology will never know what is the most important thing.

Small Business Trends: Maybe you can talk a little about the importance of making sure, from a Rebel Mouse standpoint, that you are taking care of folks who are going to be viewing your Web presence from a mobile device?

Paul Berry: Being able to adapt to all the different devices really takes a lot of work, so we are doing all the hard parts. When we are fully there, you should be able to get an app from us that you submit to the appstore as yourself â€" you will have native apps. We are doing that first for Techcrunch. We did Crunch Scroll, they came up with the idea, and it took us a day to do it, it is CrunchScroll.com. We will give them an app.  They can submit it to the market place as themselves, called the Crunch Scroll.

Any business who wants to have their website powered by Rebel Mouse also will have the options to have native apps.  But beyond that, you also have a really good mobile Web view which we have adapted to whichever device you are seeing a page in the browser.

Small Business Trends: How does the company use your platform with eCommerce?

Paul Berry: There is a lot of stuff that we have learned from media about how things click, and how you would like to organize a page that can be applied to eCommerce; as a layer on top.  Rebel Mouse can drive your front page and drive recirculation models, but drive it to your shopping cart.

Small Business Trends: So you are also able to help because it is a matter of not just creating good content, but creating it in a way that is visually pleasing and easily presentable?

Paul Berry: Yes, it has to look really sharp.  You have to look at it and be really proud.  And that design, we don't think, has to be overwhelmingly unique and creative for each person, because the content should shine.  It should shine in a way that the design let's the content shine.

Small Business Trends: People will actually be able to point their domain to their Rebel Mouse page?

Paul Berry: Exactly.  So if you are someone who is, for example, a social media manager, or community manager, or an entrepreneur who has been focusing on the Twitter and Facebook side, those efforts you are doing will actually be amplified all of a sudden by having the website taken care of. That is what I think is one of the most exciting things for us.  Showing people how that can work and then having it go viral.

Small Business Trends: Is there any future in terms of integrating with a backend contact manager, or a social relationship management system?

Paul Berry: Actually, I think Rebel Mouse profile pages integrated into a CRM can give a much more fun and dynamic view of a person. Where you are actually seeing the articles that person has curated and the stuff that they have shared, you are able to get a view of that person.

Then the other thing is being able to launch events and concepts, and get customers responding to that. Rebel Mouse will make it incredibly easy to launch any page that is driven by a hash tag, that is announcing a certain event, that is a new concept someone wants to work on, just by starting to curate through Twitter and Facebook. Bookmark writing and blog posting suddenly starts to become this very vibrant thing.

Small Business Trends: People can go to Rebel Mouse to learn about what you are doing and also to pick up their account?

Paul Berry: Yeah, we are accepting everybody on signup.

This interview is part of our One on One series of conversations with some of the most thought-provoking entrepreneurs, authors and experts in business today. This interview has been edited for publication. To hear audio of the full interview, click the right arrow on the gray player below. You can also see more interviews in our interview series.

Whether you're growing your business or starting a new venture, BlackBerry solutions provide you with the freedom you want and the control you need. [Series sponsor]

Paul Berry â€" Rebel Mouse by smallbiztrends

3 Apps That Can Help You Keep Track Of Your Contacts

There's no concrete data available on how often people change their phone numbers in the United States, where people often get carrier plans as opposed to going pre-pay. But we see it happen all around us at some points in our lives. You might get an email, text message, or phone call once in a blue moon from a person you know notifying you of a change that person made, like a new email, phone number, address, or tie color. Upon receiving the news, you now have to immediately update your contact list before you forget.

It's frustrating to try to contact someone who no longer uses that phone number or email. In the midst of the boom in smartphone development and “appoholism,” new apps started to appear around the smartphone/cloud spectrum that might solve these problems or reduce the amount of battering your contact list receives:

• VIPorbit is an app that lets you organize your contacts into roles and relationships, also allowing you to schedule events with them. This nifty application makes it easier to organize people not only with meetings, but also lets you organize their identities into simple categories and groups that make your list more transparent. Instead of having an “A to Z” contact list just like any other phone does, VIPorbit allows you to track down people by their relationships to you. This app is available on any iOS device.
• TAPP takes things a step further. It enables you to receive updates to contact details that are outdated. When you exchange a TAPP ID with another individual, you can associate this person's entry on your list with his or her ID. From then on, you'll just receive update notifications when a contact decides to change things around. It makes the process a whole lot easier for both, since you no longer have to update your contact list manually and your contact doesn't have to add a whole list of email addresses to a “Send” field in an email to notify everyone of the change. TAPP is available for Android, iOS, and BlackBerry.
• Plaxo has something a bit interesting also. You organize contacts much like you would with VIPorbit, but you also get notified when Plaxo finds out that a contact has changed something or joined a new social network. This app is cloud-based and is available on virtually any device as a consequence.

The moments your contacts start changing their game on you, you'll be one step ahead of them as long as you use intelligent solutions to keep them organized. Just pick a flavor and download it!

HSBC confirms DoS attack but denies customer data was affected

HSBC has admitted that it suffered a denial of service (DoS) attack on its servers yesterday which caused service issues for users.

While it said that the attack did not affect any customer data, a statement said that it did prevent customers using HSBC online services, including internet banking, for some time.

It said: “We are taking appropriate action, working hard to restore service. We are pleased to say that some sites are now back up and running. We are cooperating with the relevant authorities and will cooperate with other organisations that have been similarly affected by such criminal acts. We apologise for any inconvenience caused to our customers throughout the world.”

Paul Lawrence, vice president of international operations at Corero Network Security, said that this attack and others against banks in the US, show the false sense of security from financial organisations in thinking that traditional means of defence like firewalls will combat the threat.

“Unfortunately it's often only when they're the victim of attacks, like HSBC, that they realise that firewalls are unable to cope with such large volumetric attacks,” he said.

Owen Cole, vice president EMEA at ExtraHop Networks, said: “The latest attack on HSBC reinforces the need for organisations to take a proactive approach to application performance management. Proactively monitoring networks can help any potential attacks to be spotted early, minimising damage and preventing website downtime, which can have serious implications for an organisations credibility and reputation.

“With attacks like these becoming commonplace, proactive monitoring and early warning is something companies can't afford not to have.”

Darren Anstee, EMEA solutions architect team lead at Arbor Networks, said that as recent attacks use multi-vector tactics, utilising a combination of volumetric and application layer attack vectors, these include TCP, UDP and ICMP packet floods combining HTTP, HTTPS and DNS application layer attacks.

“Attackers are doing this because they know it makes the attacks more difficult to deal with, but not impossible if we have the right services and solutions in place,” he said.

“With the increase of DDoS attacks it is extremely important that organisations take best practice defensive steps to ensure they are adequately protected if, or more likely when, they become the target of a DDoS attack. Organisations should minimise their threat surface as much as possible using their network infrastructure to control the traffic reaching their service infrastructure, and they should ensure that they have well documented, and tested, incident handling processes.”

A group calling themselves ‘Fawkes Security' who describe themselves as ‘ethical hackers and social engineers', said in a Pastebin statement that it was responsible. In a YouTube video, it said it was holding back on revealing the reasons for the attack ‘as we would like to take this time to warn greedy banks'.

According to TechWeekEurope, HSBC was hit on five fronts, including the UK, French, Canadian and US customer-facing sites. FawkesSecurity said that the sites were downed for at least 20 minutes and that the attacks started around 10pm last night.

IBM launches solutions to meet mobile and cloud access demands

IBM has announced the launch of new products and services to address three of the key ‘mega trends' - Big Data, mobile and cloud computing.

With a firm interest in access and data security, the company has launched four solutions including mobile access, endpoint management for mobile devices, cloud access and ‘smart cloud' for patch management.

Speaking to SC Magazine, Darren Argyle, global security solutions leader at IBM, said that data security was the way the company was working today having recognised the challenge the need to define it.

He said: “What this new range of products is about it trying to address key challenges and mega trends with solutions that are not only needed, but integrate also. A collaborative framework that brings things together.”

Utilising technology acquired in recent years from Guardium and Big Fix, the solutions are focused on data security and access, and mark the largest set of security software capabilities announced to date by IBM.

The mobile authentication product is centred around integrating access management into mobile application development and deployment and enhanced mobile device control. Argyle said that this was about addressing the malware and data threat for applications and managing user access.

Also launched is a comprehensive Mobile Security Framework to help organisations protect data on the device, at the access gateway and on the applications.

For cloud access, IBM has announced security portfolio enhancements specifically to meet those challenges, including providing improved visibility, increased levels of automation and patch management to help demonstrate compliance, prevent unauthorised access and defend against the latest threats using advanced security intelligence.

Its SmartCloud for Patch Management solution manages patches automatically, regardless of location. Also the addition of its security intelligence threat platform with the QRadar technology, a unified architecture for collecting, storing, analysing and querying log, threat, vulnerability and security related data, will provide deep insight into the cloud to enable risk-aware business decisions.

Also in this space, IBM has announced new and enhanced identity and access management solutions, including the IBM Security Privileged Identity Manager to proactively address insider threat concerns and help demonstrate compliance across the organisation and IBM Security Access Manager for Cloud and Mobile, for risk-based access control to cloud applications from mobile devices.

Finally the InfoSphere Guardium provides real time monitoring and automated compliance reporting for Hadoop-based systems, such as InfoSphere BigInsights and Cloudera. It said that built-in audit reporting can be used to generate compliance reports and organisations can also automate the detection of database vulnerabilities and suggest prioritised remedial actions. In addition, IBM offers data masking to de-identify sensitive data as it moves into and out of big data systems.

Argyle said: “It is about bringing together security intelligence. We see it is as a key between different products to bring them together, generate actionable evidence and give forensic analysis.”

Asked about the new range, Argyle said it was not just a new suite, but a range that integrates well. “If you produce products in isolation, integration is not possible, so we looked at the data and where is resides and applied intelligence into a single pane of glass,” he said.

“We have a good understanding about protecting data across multi-perimeter and big enterprises to secure products to give security intelligence on where the highest risks are in the environment to protect against new threats.”

Call made for PCI requirement on setting policies to be more prominent

Requirement 12 of the payment card industry data security standard (PCI DSS) needs to become requirement one.

According to Mathieu Gorge, CEO and founder of Vigitrust, requirement 12, which states ‘Maintain a policy that addresses information security' should be far more important to businesses than its low position on the 12 steps suggests.

Speaking at an event in London, Gorge said that he welcomed new guidance introduced among version 2.0 at the start of 2012, but being so low down meant that it may not be seen as a priority, and he called upon the PCI's special interest groups to ensure that it has more of an influence in the next version of the standard.

He said: “It can be a tick-box exercise, so I would like to see requirement 12 be higher and an exam needs to be done, but you cannot secure the human brain of the employee and you need them to work.”

Talking to SC Magazine, Gorge said that the requirement, talking around setting policies and awareness training, would be obsolete if a firewall were to be misconfigured or instructed to ‘accept all'. He said: “It should only accept with a change request and get rid of a test rule, but a practical approach will reduce risk and I totally support.

“What worries me is that it is not good enough. You put solutions in place with controls but the way the business is working, with processes in place and good technical security, you are securing against yesterday's threats. How can you improve your technical security score if you don't know the score?

“You can put in a firewall, log management and put in proper policies to say what to do. The ISO standard starts with policy, the PCI council should leave the practical approach as it is but move requirement 12 so it is first.” He later said that it should be moved to requirement two or three as while it is at the end, people may not see it.

Jeremy King, European director of the PCI security standards council (SSC) said that the standard was not  produced as a prioritised approach, as they were never written as a list to act upon.

“They are different requirements for you to do some from all, not just all from one,” he said. “If you get one right you will fight 92 per cent of the attacks and risks. It is about people, process and technology. You cannot throw technology at it but if you don't have policies you cannot do all three.

“We are working on getting better at understanding for smaller merchants as the standards were written for security organisations with full-time security teams and we are trying to simplify.”

The future of mobile managment will be away from the device and more about applications

The next stage of mobile management will less about devices and more of a move to application security.

Speaking to SC Magazine, MobileIron CEO Bob Tinker said that the mobile control market is changing to enable users to choose and access email and applications in a secure way.

He said that the first phase was how to enable device choice, from the perspective of an IT manager, and that is where mobile device management (MDM) came in. The next is now about how to enable mobile applications and content, establishing the content of 'mobile IT'. “This is about how to enable applications and the content inside, it is not just MDM, it is turning into a bigger market,” he said.

“We believe in mobile application management; that is the next generation of mobile IT where access is to email and devices to enable application access and content. Applications that change a business to make your life easier. With mobile content, the biggest thing is access to applications and content.”

Tinker said that he could see a big shake-up of the market as many vendors are entering the MDM market without the capability to offer secure access to applications. “Our technology is so dynamic that it is really about moving to the security of the application. To be successful in mobile you need to focus on mobile, as many are struggling to keep up,” he said.

Alan Giles, managing director EMEA at Fiberlink, told SC Magazine that the concept of bring your own device (BYOD) doesn't have to be about providing for big business as small and medium enterprises are also opting into the policy.

He said: “A 'containerised' approach will not work as it affects the user experience. If you take that away, the policy does not work so you want more of a lighter touch so the user can use the device as they want to but have secure access to corporate assets. However the IT manager needs to be safe in the knowledge that it is done securely.

“Most vendors in the space are still growing, but we see more maturity in policy setting. Everyone knows that you can save money with BYOD and it is convenient, but companies are getting away from saving money as the driver to moving from it being a capital expenditure to an operational expenditure.”

Asked if he felt that MDM was 'last year's technology', Giles said it was in terms of blocking and wiping, but a year ago application management took off for Fiberlink as it was about being security-centric. “Half of our business is application management so the corporate can decide what they allow from what is bought in-house and what is developed by a third party,” he said.

“The distribution of apps is based on access right and need, and you can build a profile based on what goes where and how. On a personal device you cannot say 'you cannot use Angry Birds' but on a corporate device you can. You need to separate consumer from professional applications.”

Analyst Alan Goode said that he had never been a fan of MDM, but felt that this was a maturing market as the wave of devices coming into the workplace continued. “We are getting reports of C-level executives and down wanting mobile management and wanting to use their own device,” he said.

“We see instances with a sandbox for access to email and corporate applications in a silo and you authenticate into it, then the user experience is very poor. Do users like a client on their own device? Probably not. The market is maturing as it is another tool and a burden. We will see MAM coming more from vendors to improve the user interface to fix the inadequacies of MDM, and I think we will see that going into the platform.

“Application management makes sense as it is understanding mobility and it will improve the development of applications in the lifecycle and how code is tested.”

White House review clears Chinese IT maker of spy threat

A White House-commissioned study of Huawei Technologies has concluded the Chinese networking equipment provider has not posed a cyber espionage threat to the United States.

The 18-month White House probe determined that there is no evidence that Huawei was involved in spying on behalf of the Chinese government, according to a Thursday Reuters report, which cited two unnamed officials familiar with the investigation.

The findings go against a US House Intelligence Committee report issued last week which recommended Huawei - and fellow Chinese manufacturer ZTE â€" should not be permitted to sell telecom products there.

The White House review suggested that there are still legitimate risks presented by Huawei, such as vulnerabilities in its products that could be exploited by adversaries. But the Reuters article did not say whether those bugs may be purposely placed there.

According to the story, a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry said the report proved the Congressional committee's claims were unfounded.

The spying allegations first surfaced in August 2010, when a group of eight Republican senators warned the Obama administration to be wary of Huawei winning a bid to sell equipment to American telecom giant Sprint Nextel.

They argued Huawei had supplied equipment to Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq and Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard. They also said that because the company reportedly had ties with China's People's Liberation Army (PLA), the selection would "present a national security threat for technology leakage or enhanced espionage against the United States."

An email sent to Huawei for comment by SCMagazine.com was not immediately returned.

Google Stock Drops By 9 Percent, But Mobile Earnings Grow

From time to time every business experiences a bump in the road. That's what happened to search giant Google yesterday, when premature release of third quarter earnings turned out well below projections. The stock exchange reacted badly, but as we'll see, Google is experiencing growth in a whole new arena: mobile. Whatever the hiccup today, Google remains critical to any business that depends upon online traffic or uses its tools. Let's see where things stand with the company now.

Nervous Nellies

Slip and slide. The early release of Google's third quarter earnings Thursday was a slip up that caused the company's stock to slide down about 9 percent.  Analysts had expected earnings of $14.7 billion but the report showed $14.10 billion instead, well below projections. Google blamed financial printer RR Donnelley for accidentally posting the earnings report prematurely, and promptly suspended trading. Tech Crunch

Still moving on mobile. In an apparent effort to blunt the disappointment over the company's overall failure to meet earnings projections, Google CEO Larry Page pointed out in a sales call later in the day, that not all the news is bad. Specifically, Google reports robust growth in its mobile revenue, largely from advertising. Earnings have increased from just $2.5 billion last year to over $8 billion today, an impressive rise. The Next Web

Tools You Can Use

Author, author! A Google feature called Author Rank allows you to take credit for your content, no matter where on the Web it might appear. If you create great online content, Author Rank can help you become an authority in your niche by having your name and avatar pop up next to your content in search, says social media marketing consultant and strategist Niall Devitt. Here's how it works. Tweak Your Biz

What's in your wallet? Google Wallet offers a whole new way to to pay. Customers can store credit and debit card information into a contactless card application on their mobile devices and use it to make payments at any point of sale. But what happens if a customer's Wallet ID is hacked or stolen? Does Google have sufficient security in place to prevent a culprit from using it to access cards a customer has added? Buyer Zone

Selling your site. Google could be researching a service that would require users to pay for reading specific content online. We were surprised to see this post by full-time blogger Amanda DiSilvestro, though according to her, Google has yet to confirm the project, putting it on the level of a rumor. The question is whether the new service might be another way for authors to monetize at least some of their content. It is also uncertain whether customers would pay for it. Get Busy Business

The Secrets of Search

Pandas and Penguins. While some tweaking of algorithms at search engines like Google affects few sites, others, like Google's Panda and Penguin updates, are huge, game changing events and can damage an online business severely. There are a number of tips online business owners and entrepreneurs need to keep in mind if they find they have been affected. Brick Marketing Blog

Disavowing all knowledge. We all know that linking to spam or low quality sites can be a bad idea for any online business. This is partly because visitors will judge your site by the resources to which you link, and also because connecting to such locations can drag your site down in the eyes of the search engines. Unfortunately, now a similar thing can happen when spammers link to you. Here's what to do about it. Cube Online Marketing

Focus And Timing Are Key

Being a cartoonist means worrying about every sentence, every word, every punctuation mark. Brevity is wit after all.

For example, I'm still unsure as to whether this cartoon would be funnier with an exclamation point after the first sentence. Which is funnier:

“Focus, people! Or Focus, people.”

It's hard to know. I tend toward a more understated approach, but then again, they're jack-o-lanterns that know the end is near. Maybe both sentences need an exclamation point.

In the end, it probably isn't going to make or break a cartoon.  But years later, I still look at this cartoon and wonder.

Five Ways Google Tag Manager Can Improve Your Marketing

For businesses with a website, tags are an important part of improving visibility. But most small business owners rely on pre-designed themes or outside contractors to create and update a website. Google's new Tag Manager is providing a way for small business owners to easily manage tags without paying for website enhancements.

To use Google Tag Manager, you'll simply create a container that provides code you insert into every page of your website. Anytime you want to update the code, you update your container.

“Google Tag Manager took one big chunk of time out of the tagging process,” QuinStreet's Ameet Arurkar said. “What took 2 weeks now takes less than a day-sometimes just hours. We, the campaign managers, now make the call on which tags to use, and we can implement the tags ourselves. Google Tag Manager just makes business sense. Why would we want to manually add hundreds of tags for our pages?”

For small businesses, Google Tag Manager can help out in five major ways:

• Save moneyâ€"Most web developers charge a fee for changes. If you have to go back to your developers every time you need your tags updated, you'll spend a fortune. Using Google Tag Manager can free up those funds for something else.
• Avoid campaign downtimeâ€"If you have to wait for someone to update your pages every time your tags change, your campaign will lag. Google Tag Manager lets you update your tags immediately, every time your campaign changes.
• Stay in control of your siteâ€"Nobody knows your business better than you do. Google Tag Manager puts you in control, allowing you to change your campaign regularly without worrying about your page not keeping up. Rule-driven tags can be created to deploy at certain times, such as when a visitor follows through to make a purchase.
• Avoid errorsâ€"Google Tag Manager has a preview mode that allows you to see a snapshot of your changes, viewing which tags will fire before committing to the them. Version history stores changes until you're ready to publish them. Because a container must be saved before being published, you'll always have a saved history of every version of site's tags.
• IT friendlyâ€"Your IT provider can also use Google Tag Manager when setting up your pages. They'll be able to set up user permissions to let multiple people in your organization update tags.

Because Google tags launch in synch with other page elements, visitors won't have to wait for pages to load because tags are slowing them down. Plus, because the interface is designed using Google's design principles, it won't take an IT expert to learn how to make changes.

To get started, simply set up your account with Google Tag Manager. You'll likely need only one account for your small business unless you plan to have multiple people in your organization update your tags. If you need help setting up your tags, a Google Certified Partner can assist you.