Granted, I test a lot of apps as part of my work as a technology journalist, but I was shocked to discover that I had more than 100 apps that could access my Twitter and Facebook accounts, and  some 70 that could get to LinkedIn. I couldn't even recall what many of them did, given that I probably used each one once, found out that it wasn't up to snuff, and moved on to testing something else. But like most people, I never bothered to revoke access to my account for any of these apps.

So don't wait until your Twitter account is hacked. Take some time right now to clean things up and eliminate the apps that you no longer use or find relevant to your social networking way of life.

To make it easy, here are links to the three places that will allow you to peruse your apps and alter what services they can access:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

Of the three, LinkedIn makes it the easiest to eliminate unknown or uninteresting apps: You just go down the list and check off the ones you want to remove from your home page and profile page, and prevent them from accessing your LinkedIn data. . There are actually two sections on the LinkedIn page: First, the actual apps that typically display something on your main LinkedIn profile page or interact with content in your profile (such as Slideshare presentations or blog posts) that appear on your profile. These have links so you can investigate them further to decide if you want to keep them. The second section covers external websites, but doesn't offer hot links or any information about the external site, which is somewhat lacking.

With Twitter and Facebook, you have to revoke access to each app one by one.

Facebook actually has done some good work here (despite it reputation for selling your privacy data). For each app, it has the helpful but eventually annoying message that even if you revoke access, there is probably some residual data that is lurking on the app's own data center that you will have to spend lots of energy to try to remove completely. Facebook also lets you edit the specific access that each app has to your account: it tells you what data the app collects from you, who has access to this information on your timeline, and when it last accessed your information. That is all very useful, but somewhat time consuming if you are really serious about revoking access.

Twitter offers the least information for each app, and just a binary decision: allow or revoke. Each app is shown with the level of access to your account: read, write or sending direct messages. You can't adjust these once you have approved the app.

So take a few moments now and clean up your social media accounts! Your connected life will be safer, cleaner and less cluttered.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

I wrote an article for ReadWriteWeb this summer about a way to replace those annoying CAPTCHAs with a miniature game. They are annoying because website operators put them in place to check for bots or spammers who are trying to gain access, perhaps to set up a bunch of accounts automatically.

Computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University developed CAPTCHAs in 2000 and they have been popping up pretty much everywhere online ever since.

Many spammers use various methods to defeat them, including paying virtual slave wages to real people to input the values or through the use of special optical character recognition (OCR) software. As the bad guys get better at defeating them, they've sparked a continuing war of technology to differentiate the bad actors from the legitimate site visitors.

The CAPTCHA tests have had to get harder to read and parse out. That means they run the risk of keeping real visitors from the sites that are running the tests. So there's been a full-on search for better ways to make the distinction than reading a few distorted letters.

In my earlier article, I mentioned Play Thru, which invites users to solve a game, such as figuring out what ingredients are used to make pancakes. One programmer wrote about a way around the Play Thru system last week.

The Moral Equivalent Of A Robot

But now we're taking the concept to a new level - using complex moral problems to establish humanity. (The idea is not exactly new, as shown by this XKCD comic that attempts to play on arcane human knowledge.)

It makes a certain amount of sense, since CAPTCHAs are probably the best known of a class of problems called the Turing Test, which try to differentiate a human from a computerized source.

The tests are named after Alan Turing, a brilliant mathematician and code breaker who developed many of the original tenets of computer science well before we had actual computers, let alone ones that would fit in the palms of our hands. Turing played a key role in the decoding of the German codes during World War II and the development of early computational algorithms. The CAPTCHA is actually the reverse of the Turing test: it determines if an entity is a bot.

Beyond simple letter recognition, though, as CAPTCHAs become more complex, they take on the dimensions of the fictional Voight-Kampff Test - the question-and-answer field-test that cop Harrison Ford used in the movie Blade Runner to try to determine if the subject is man or machine. (The Voight-Kampff Test was also used some 10 years ago to determine if San Francisco mayoral candidates were actually human - one candidate actually recognized the test. He didn't win.)

The Next Step For CAPTCHA

In this post on the Sophos Naked Security blog, there are some pretty funny examples of really difficult tests that most of us would have a hard time passing.

But last week there was another innovation, what is being labeled as "CAPTCHAs With A Conscience." The idea, from the Swedish activist organization Civil Rights Defenders, is to pose a political question asking the viewer how a loaded question (prisoners being tortured, or gay-bashing) makes them feel?

That's currently beyond the scope of most bots - but frankly it seems that the real goal here is political awareness, not bot protection. Of course, soon enough we will have computers that can correctly interpret human feelings, but it is an intriguing approach nonetheless.

How do you feel about this approach? And can you prove that you are really human when you reply?

I found No Easy Day an interesting read, along with his interview on 60 Minutes on Sunday (see video below). And I thought it was worth teasing out some of the takeaways that IT managers and staff can learn from the SEALs:

1. Collaborate and communicate. It is all about the team, not just about you. In his book Owen mentions how his motivation for writing came from hearing the distorted narratives around the raid as well as the dissatisfaction of his fellow SEALs in getting their own story out. What impressed me about his descriptions were that weren’t “individual egomaniacs” but instead were “team players who tried to do the right thing.” The various deployments that Owen describes in his book involve a lot of careful coordination and constant communication about methods and results, something that we all can learn from. How often do we say we are going to collaborate on some project but what that really means is that I am taking over and you are just going to rubber-stamp my work?

2. Don’t go into unknown territory with guns a blazing, but proceed with caution and deliberation. Several times Owen was faced with a completely unknown landscape in searching for terrorists or potential suicide bombers and he and his cronies would carefully move into position. He makes it clear that the old cowboy stereotypes no longer apply.

3. Training is essential to any smoothly run operation. Make contingency plans when things fail, and rehearse them before the failure happens. The raid on bin Laden’s compound was practiced close to 100 types in a special life-size mock-up facility on a base in North Carolina so the team could get used to working together and having the mental memory of what they needed to do. As we all know by now, those plans went awry almost from the start as one of the helicopters crashed inside the compound and the team had to improvise. How many IT projects get this kind of rehearsal? Not as many as should be.

4. Know the limitations of your equipment and what it can’t do for you. But also don’t be afraid to ask for the best gear either. For their various deployments, the SEALs could requisition whatever tools, guns, and other devices they needed, no questions asked. Granted we all live in the real world and budgets prevail, but how many times have projects been aborted because of some aging server or defective network card? Get the gear that you need for your job up front.

5. Don’t fall victim to the “good idea fairy.” Owen mentions in his book this concept, when large committees get caught in suggesting ideas to supposedly improve an already solid plan. “Officers and planners [who have too much time on their hands] start dreaming up unrealistic scenarios that we may have to deal with on a mission. She isn’t our friend.” Know when enough is enough and don’t get taken into her clutches. “If we had all the time back we wasted fighting the fairy, we might regain a few years of our lives,” he says.

Lead image from CBS News Video.

Genentech/Roche

How do you grow your internal mobile app portfolio to 112 different apps over time? Paul Lanzi, the mobile apps team manager for Genetech/Roche, likes to give his apps cute names, such as "Peeps" for the corporate personnel directory and "Kudos" for employee rewards.

Lanzi set out to make the company's knowledge workers the best mobile-equipped workforce in biotech. Genentech/Roche currently supports more than 13,000 iPads, 10,000 iPhones and 18,000 Blackberries. Half of its users have more than 55 apps, and some have more than 300 apps on their devices. The company took a long-term view towards creating a solid application infrastructure that could be reused, which is why it has so many internal apps. It used a mixture of custom code and commercially available apps to provide access to existing SharePoint and SAP back-end systems that were already in popular use.

Eli Lily

Lilly, another big pharma company, wanted to meet the needs of a mobile salesforce that is present in 125 different countries. It chose more commercial apps, and focused on "simple apps that do one thing, and do it well," said Tom Nienhaus, part of the company's mobility team. "We were trying to provide Web access to various enterprise data platforms to our iOS users," he said. Lilly's architecture relies more on Apple's security and data protection APIs, as you can see in the architecture diagram below.

Northern Trust Bank

Northern Trust's client managers -- the people who work with very wealthy individuals - wanted to be able to bring a client's portfolio and review what actions the bank should take with a client's investments. They wanted to do this on the iPad, no matter where their clients were located. "We frequently have our managers get on private aircraft or yachts with our clients, and needed an app that would work under those circumstances, regardless of connectivity and Internet access," said Chris Price, one of the bank's vice presidents and a system architect. The bank designed an iPad app for this disconnected situation from the start.

Each of the three companies had to make a variety of decisions in building their apps. For example, they had to choose whether to code a native iOS app or not, what middleware and APIs to use, how to implement the various security requirements and what kind of internal app store to use to deploy their app. Adding up all these factors means handling lots of different pieces of technology.

"We typically build Web-centric apps because they are easier and quicker than native iOS apps, but in this circumstance we wanted the iOS app to make it more secure, particularly when it was in online mode," said Northern's Price. The bank was worried about various Web-based attacks like cross-site scripting and SQL injection that could compromise their data. Also, the native app could be made more efficient with its use of local storage.

Enterprise iPad Lessons Learned

All three companies shared some key lessons they learned from rolling out corporate iPad apps:

• Get the first app right. Genentech's first app was a SalesForce.com add-on that took close to eight months to develop because of all the various infrastructure pieces, including security, middleware gateways, authentication and identity management. But once all this was in place, the company's second app took much less time. "Indeed, we were able to leverage 80% the non SalesForce-related Web services that we built for the first app," said Lanzi.
• Know your middleware. Northern Trust Bbank and Eli Lilly both employed middleware from Layer 7. Both wrote some additional custom middleware code to work with their back-end systems. Genentech also used a commercial middleware solution.
• Plan for the worst case security scenario, especially when your users are roaming all over the world on untrusted networks. All three companies worked to make sure that even if an iPad was lost or stolen, none of its data would be compromised.
• Invest in your user experience design. There is a difference between interface design and user experience, and make sure your developers know how to distinguish the two. Lanzi mentioned Genentech's early experience with an "On the Road" app as an example of what not to do.
• Foster inter-department code sharing. Lanzi spoke about "fostering" the coding that was already developed for Genentech apps so that others in the organization could more readily build their own mobile apps. "Even if I could scale my team to three times its current size, I still could not meet the demand of all the mobile apps that my users want me to build." He put in place a series of common code libraries for his iOS native apps for functions such as jailbreak detection, identity management and authentication, and gave these out to all of the company's internal developers. Genentech is working on common HTML5 libraries and other Web services too.

Your company may not have as many internally developed apps as Genentech does, but your apps will be better from following its principles. "We have no tolerance for bad apps around here," said Lanzi.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The Air Force began its transition to IPv6 earlier this summer, and expects to have its entire network migrated by the end of September 2014, the deadline self-imposed by the US government for all of its network operations. The move to IPv6 will also let the Air Force support more ad hoc networks in the field - making it more operationally agile and better able to support machine-to-machine communications.

A Complex Mission

Several years ago the Air Force established a Transition Management Office (TMO) at Scott Air Force Base, located outside of St. Louis, to help coordinate the effort. ReadWriteWeb visited with Doug Fry, Network Engineer, Air Force Network Integration Center and engineering lead for the TMO. His role is to develop network policies and operational procedures that will be carried out by the various Air Force base engineers around the world. Fry is giving a talk at the upcoming New York City Interop this fall.

One of Fry’s biggest issues is maintaining the security of the network as it makes its transition to IPv6. “We can’t let unknown traffic traverse our networks, of course, but the security tools that we have in our inventory aren’t fully v6 compliant yet.”

The Air Force has 130 bases and about 100 of them are IPv6 capable and ready, according to Fry. He is working on the rest right now.

The Air Force base furthest along in the transition process is Eglin in the Florida panhandle, which also happens to be the service’s largest base - covering more than 600 square miles and employing more than 30,000 people. To give you an idea of the size of the base, it has 30,000 individual IP addresses assigned, to a wide mix of both computing and embedded equipment. There are two core networks, 14 access layer devices, and 5000 in-building switches. That is a lot of gear to migrate over to the new networking protocols.

But Eglin’s lead role is more a matter of circumstances than anything else: the base’s aging Cisco routers and switches were due for a major refresh at the same time that the Air Force was planning the IPv6 transition.

8 IPv6 Lessons Learned

So what are some of the lessons the Air Force has learned so far?

1. Don't go with your first address plan, but think about ways that you can make it more hierarchical and improve it. "We are on our fourth iteration of our address plan," said Fry.
2. Make sure your core and IOS routers are all IPv6 compatible and can run dual stack protocols. This seems obvious but it is worth mentioning.
3. Make sure all your monitoring equipment is up to snuff. Eglin uses homegrown IP address assignment and monitoring programs, and of course these will have to be upgrade to handle the longer IPv6 addresses.
4. Now is the time to make sure your entire network documentation actually reflects what is actually deployed. "Some Air Force bases are better documented than others," said Fry.
5. Upgrade your router firmware or replace them to handle IPv6.
6. Build a test lab that replicates your entire network if you can afford to. "I wish we had the budget to build a lab from the beginning, it would have been helpful to learn more about IPv6 before we got down the road," said Lee Tran, a technical advisor for the Operational Infrastructure Branch and part of the Communications Squadron for Eglin. (You can read a ReadWriteWeb a white paper about this topic here.
7. Understand how things will change when you add new desktops or network infrastructure to your IPv6 network. "You don't want to introduce any new vulnerabilities," said Tran. One issue for the Air Force is being able to automatically push out security patches to its routers over an IPv6 network. "Right now we have to do this manually," he said. Another implication is how your desktops will come with support for IPv6, and whether you want this active or not before you actually cut over to IPv6.
8. Finally, participate in the next World IPv6 Day in June and other experiments to prove out your installation and deployment plans."This was incredibly helpful for us, and I was glad to see that our IPv6 servers didn't have any issues then," said Fry.

Good luck with your own IPv6 transition plans.

Lead image and Air Force medallion courtesy of Shutterstock.

Bottom image courtesy of the US Air Force.

Chattanooga's gigabit fiber network wasn't installed in the name of civic progress, or as a calling card to attract IT-related entrepreneurs, or to improve city services or to encourage telecommuting - all things that are happening as a result of the network.

Instead, it began as a project from the municipal electric utility, EPB, to improve power delivery to its customers. Chattanooga suffers many violent storms that can knock out its power grid for hours or days. The utility wanted to increase the reliability of its operations through having a smarter grid that could minimize these outages.

As part of the effort, EPB automated 1,200 power switches and added technology capable of anticipating potential transformer overloads by measuring power flows every 15 minutes using the fiber network. This smarter grid has cut the number of power outages by more than 40%. The utility says it has also saved money.

But the same infrastructure that provides the control network for the utility can also be used to deliver Internet connectivity, and once the fiber network was in place, the utility became a fast Internet service provider.

Take Me To The (Digital) River

Chattanooga Mayor Ron Littlefield says, "Think of what we did as putting in place a digital equivalent of the Tennessee River." That's an apt analogy for the city.

Chattanooga has always leveraged the Tennessee to its advantage. Back in the early 1900s, for example, it used its place on the Tennessee River to attract the first bottling plant for Coca-Cola as well as smokestack industries. The fiber network is just a different kind of river.

The utility's smart-grid efforts have made the area more of an employment magnet and given it new ways to attract talent. The city's IT department, for example, has filled its past 10 jobs with out-of-towners, a post-fiber development. Major employers are encouraging telecommuting.

"We now have a very balanced economy between industrial and clean jobs," said Littlefield. "We have something no one else in North America has, and something that will sustain our future development."

New Uses for Fast Internet

The city has continued to build on its gigabit fiber network. For example, it put together a series of initiatives to monitor and control downtown areas. At one downtown park, the police can adjust the lighting to discourage flash mobs from gathering, as well as scan license plates on cars that are parked in the lot. This helps increase the perception of safety, not to mention discourage potential criminals. "People now know not to park in the park if they have a stolen car," says the mayor.

Speaking of street lighting, city engineers are in the process of replacing the 28,000 traditional halogen lights with LED lights and sensors that adjust their output based on ambient light. And traffic signals can be controlled by the police or first responders to move emergency vehicles through the city.

In the works is the installation of more than 400 different wireless road sensors. In the past, the city needed to send out construction crews to dig up the road and install the common wire loops that are seen across cities around the world. The newer battery powered sensors are the size of hockey pucks and take just minutes to bury.

All told, the city has built more than 50 apps to use the fiber connections, and more are on the way. "Fiber makes bring-your-own-device strategies possible," says Mark Keil, the city's CIO. "We will have three times more devices on our network next year than before we had the fiber, and we have made it easier to monitor and manage them, too."

Gigabit Takeaways

Here are five lessons to be learned from the gigabit experience of Chattanooga:

• Don't build a fiber network just for Internet connections. What made Chattanooga's gigabit fiber network work was the backing of its electric utility. Once this physical plant was in place, the utility was able to offer gigabit service for $350 a month to residential and business customers.
• Symmetrical service is key. Having both a gigabit up and download speed is important for a variety of applications that rely on user-generated content to receive the same benefit as downloaded Web pages. A local group of radiologists built their own app so that doctors could view digitized scans whenever and wherever. That wouldn't have been possible without a symmetrical network.
• Focus on both big and small employers. The region was able to attract a new Volkswagen auto assembly plant and an Amazon.com distribution warehouse, but these success stories were matched with smaller firms. The mayor is effusive in his support for the various entrepreneurial efforts around the region in bringing in smart, tech-savvy people. City CIO Keil mentions that the city asked for some programming help from several Google developers from Atlanta. By the time the project was finished, at least one of them was packing up to move to Chattanooga because of the gigabit network. And this summer several private companies put together the city's first Demo Day to feature eight tech companies who agreed to move to the city in exchange for a chance to win a $100,000 grant. One of them moved from Ireland to participate in the program. Banyan, the ultimate winner, provides integrated productivity tools.
• Find or create a university-based commercialization partner. Chattanooga was fortunate in having a branch of the University of Tennessee, and was able to establish a supercomputing center and a non-profit commercialization entity to help license the technologies developed by academia. Several of their apps are being used in disaster management and large-scale urban planning simulations, for example.
• Finally, don't rule out many unexpected benefits. "We got into robotics and energy development when they were popular many years ago. But our fiber network is like having the first city that discovered fire," says Littlefield. The city is just beginning to see lots of new apps on its network and is still discovering new uses for the universal connectivity. 

Barracuda has put together an infographic (see below) that looked at dealers who sell fake Twitter accounts and the various people who have stuffed their Twitter followers with fake users, including one guy running for president. Most of the time these fakes are easy to spot: the abuser (the person paying for the fakers) has a big jump in their followers, and they are mostly comprised of users who have recently joined Twitter. On top of this, the newbies are following no one else and have never Tweeted themselves.

Twitter of course isn't just sitting around: the company has algorithms to try to catch and terminate these fakes, but like email spammers, it is a tough war to win.

Where do you go to buy your fake followers? On eBay, of course. Right now you can find 20 different sellers, and if you Google the term you can find plenty more people that are willing to take your money and set you up with a long list of phonies. The going rate is $18 per thousand, which is probably why the average abuser has more than 48,000 fake followers.

That is pretty depressing. But perhaps it was bound to happen.

How to Spot Fake Followers

It can be hard to tell the fakes from the real people sometimes, especially if you aren't looking carefully at what is going on. That
is one problem with Twitter in general: it is hard to parse your Tweet stream as the number of abbreviations and leet-like speak is quite dense. Sometimes you need a secret decoder ring.

The fake follower issue brings up the subject of Twitter analytic tools (see Top Twitter Analytics Tools). There are probably dozens of different tools that you can use to analyze suspect accounts. If you haven't used any of these before it is worth taking a closer look at a couple of them, they can provide some interesting stats for both your own Twitter usage and to see if your potential followers (and people to follow) are legit.

Tips to Get Real Followers

Other than careful screening, what else should you do if you want to build up your following legitmately?

First off, build them slowly. Don't try to add batches of them all at once.  The slower your numbers rise, the slower they will decline. 

Second, try to remember that Twitter it isn't just about you. Retweet and link to other things besides your own content.
(I should do this more, I know.)

Next, try to follow more people. Otherwise, you look like a dilettante. (ditto)

Reuse your tweets. Nothing wrong with sending out the same tweet a few different times over the course of a day or a week. Not everyone is paying attention when you want to inform the world about your latest brain storm.

Finally, if you are looking for a great Twitter marketing book to get more of these practical suggestions, I would recommend The Idiots Guide to Twitter Marketing, co-written by my colleague Esther Schindler.

Here is the Barracuda Labs Infographic:

Recent good financials were aided by the sale of more than $1 billion worth of patents to Microsoft. Had it not made that deal, AOL would have lost more than $30 million last quarter. Like Yahoo, it's a big company that has lost its way. And no better example of that strategy is the update of their webmail (below) that is being brought online in the next week. 

The update is the first major overhaul of AOL mail in nearly five years. In that time, AOL has bled email customers to Gmail and others. comScore says the free AOLmail service has 24 million users, which contrasts with the numbers of paid AOL subscribers at fewer than 5 million. At AOL's peak, it had about 27 million paid subscribers.

(Whether you believe these numbers or not, there still are lots of folks with inactive AOL.com accounts. I probably have four or five AOLmail accounts, none of which I have checked in probably 10 years.)

 The company said that its new email interface is cleaner, but it's still pretty cluttered compared to Gmail and even Hotmail. AOL execs also claim the backend infrastructure is faster and more stable. That's nice, but it's something that they should be working on continuously.

Probably the most noticeable new email feature is Facebook messaging that is integrated with AOL's Instant Messenger and SMS texts. And the messaging center is right on the email screen, in the same position as Google's integrated chat window. Did it really take them five years to figure this out?

AOL had been an email leader in the early days. Back in 1992, it had one of the earliest and most connected email gateways to CompuServe, MCI Mail, AT&T Mail, AppleLink, Sprint Mail and other Internet-connected systems. A year later, it was the only online provider with a palm-top software client. This was back when we all used dial-up.

AOL was also the go-to IM network when IM was the defacto teen communications tool. Too bad this generation has since moved on to texting and sexting.

AOL sowed the seeds of its decline with the buyout of Compuserve, Netscape and, eventually, Time Warner. It couldn't decide whether it was a media or a technology company. In the past several years it has bought numerous content properties, such as HuffingtonPost, Engadget, TechCrunch, Patch and my favorite video-streaming site, 5min.com.

It has more than a billion dollars in cash still on hand, so expect it to buy more content providers. And their ad sales are improving, basically replacing the revenue from all those dial-up customers and people who have turned off their $20 monthly Internet service.

All of this may be too late to save AOL email. Regardless of what the Web interface looks like, having an email address at aol.com is akin to broadcasting that you live in a shabby neighborhood where few people tend their lawns. And while it is great that AOL has a renewed webmailer, it isn't going to bring people back.

Let's face facts: If you've got mail, you are reading it somewhere else.

Let's say your team was good enough - and lucky enough - to make it to the finals of one of these events - or maybe you even won the grand prize. After you have had a chance to get some sleep and gather your thoughts, then what?

As a judge at Microsoft's tenth annual Imagine Cup, the question was more than theoretical. At the student software contest, Microsoft invited former contestants from around the world to talk about what they have been doing since their participation in previous Imagine Cups. 

They shared hard-earned tips on how they made the transition from the contest to becoming a successful company:

1. Use the time at the contest or conference to network with the right people. Many of the returnees stressed how networking was the real benefit of being at the contest. Sally Buberman, the director of Buenos Aires-based Web conferencing and online education vendor WormholeIT, participated in the 2007 Imagine Cup. "You should be spending time with the judges one-on-one to hear what they have to say once the contest is over, and follow up with them on their opinions of your presentation," she advised. Her partner, Ignacio Lopez, agreed: "You have to talk to as many people as possible, and break out of your shell and force yourself to network, even if it goes against your nerdy nature."
2. It isn't all about the prize. $25,000 in prize money (or whatever the winner receives) can seem like a lot of dough to someone living on a student budget. But it won't last long for a company. "Be prepared to live off of rice and ramen, and go without furniture while you are working on your business," warned Buberman.
3. Don't forget about your college years. Ironically, for young entrepreneurs who have just graduated from college, going back to school can be fruitful. "Look at those universities who are offering entrepreneurship classes outside of their business schools," Lopez said. "Entrepreneurship can be for everyone, and especially for engineers."
4. Baby steps matter. Sebastien Monteil, who started the French social gaming site Kobojo, said, "Don't be afraid to take baby steps and fail quickly. That is how you learn, and it also isn't that costly." But don't model your company too closely on your college experience. "Universities punish failure; that is their culture," said Lopez. "For an entrepreneur, failure is a way of life. You need to embrace it."
5. Don't be shy about communicating your needs. "Don't be afraid to ask for help," said Buberman. "People are happy to help but they don't know your needs, so if you can be as precise and clear as possible, that works."
6. Think carefully about your team's long-term composition. Vinny Lohan, who started New Zealand-based big data analytics company OneBuzz, said "Your existing team that participated in the contest might not be the right team for you to build a business around. Think about where the gaps are in your team. Do you have a business-oriented person? Do you need to license your technology? Do you have someone on your team with marketing experience?" Lohan also spoke about building cross-discipline teams. "Just having a bunch of engineers working together isn't useful. You need lots of other skills to build a great company." Mohammad Azzam, who started Jordanian OaSys, added, "When you participate in a contest, you think about getting a product together for the judges. But this is very different from starting a company and running a business."

Disclosure: As a contest judge for the Imagine Cup, my travel expenses to the event were covered by Microsoft.

I was fortunate to be selected as one of this year's judges for the contest. I got to see more than a dozen of the teams as part of the process and meet dozens more students during my stay in Sydney. The teams that advanced from round to round all had several things in common:

• Basic English communication skills. The contest was conducted in English. Given that many of the contestants didn't speak English as their native language, this presented a challenge, and some of the teams relied on their best English speakers to be presenters and translate the questions from the judges. If the developer wasn't fluent in English, some things got lost in the translation. If founders have an accent or aren't comfortable with speaking in front of an audience, they should make sure to get lots of practice.
• Great presentation skills. Each team had just minutes to present its slides and demonstrate its solution. The better teams structured their presentation to match the judging requirements and also rehearsed their speeches to make sure they could deliver them in the allotted time. On the other end of the spectrum, some presenters sat in their chairs when addressing the judges. Entrepreneurs who aren't polished presenters should go to their local Toastmasters branch or take a course in public speaking at a community college.
• They got to the point, quickly. Some of the losing teams took too long to set up their solution, focusing on matters that weren't germane to the judging criteria. Founders need to be ruthless when trimming slide decks to make them as crisp as possible. When you are pitching an investor or potential partner, make sure you hone your own presentations so that they are succinct and on-point. Think Twitter: If you can't formulate your message in less than 140 characters, work on another message.
• Solid video production skills.  Video is very compelling and should be a part of any startup's marketing effort. But a bad video is worse than no video at all. The first judging round had each team submit a short video that explained their solution. Some of the videos were very slick - almost too slick: They didn't really explain the actual solution and focused on pretty images and annoying background music that drowned out the narration. Don't get so enamored with video production that you lose sight of what you are trying to accomplish.
• They understood how to put together code. Some of the teams put an architecture diagram in their slide decks that didn't make any sense whatsoever. Others took the time to show their code when questioned by the judges, and prove that their demos weren't all smoke and mirrors. Don't be afraid to dive in if your audience wants to know the bits and the bytes.
• They knew what business they were in. One team that didn't make it into the finals couldn't decide what business they were in: Were they going to sell their solution directly or use a reseller? Another team didn't understand what a balance sheet was or how they were going to make money. I have seen lots of entrepreneurs who make these same mistakes. Make sure to clearly state your financial assumptions and what you are asking from your audience.
• They had fewer moving parts. Many of the teams put together some very elaborate demonstration systems involving a laptop PC, a Kinect motion sensor, a mobile phone and code running in the cloud, which may be intellectually interesting but also quite fragile if something breaks or if Internet access goes wonky. Resist the urge to add nonessential pieces and follow Thoreau's advice to simplify your solution.

Watching all these brainy kids was a real treat and a great learning experience in itself. Here is a video of the Singapore team that is working on a way to help people with dementia:

Disclosure: As a judge, my travel expenses to the event were covered by Microsoft.

South Bend was facing more than $600,000 in potential government Superfund fines to bring its system up to par and had also experienced a series of regular overflows. Rather than build expensive new capacity, the city embarked several years ago on a project to do a better job monitoring its sewer conditions in both dry and wet weather. To do this, it needed to invent cheaper and better sensor technology that it could literally insert into the pipes and connect to a real-time monitoring system.

"We needed sensors which were more economical and higher-definition than our traditional systems," said Gary Gilot, a member of South Bend's Board of Public Works (BPW). The city eventually built a monitoring system of more than 100 sensors, conceptualized by city engineers and developed in Notre Dame's engineering school, and deployed them throughout South Bend's 500 miles of sewers.

Like many sewer districts, the South Bend BPW had been using 50-year-old mechanical valve technology to operate the system and direct water flows through the city's pipes. The new technology (pictured above) enables the city managers understand the demands and actual real-time usage and flows. "At a glance, we can see in real time what is happening across our entire system," Gilot said. "We are also able to examine how our system behaved in previous years when we had an inch of rain, so we can be better prepared now."

Spend $6 Million, Save $120 Million

The annual sewer operating budget is about $30 million; South Bend invested about $6 million in the monitoring project and estimates it has saved $120 million in infrastructure improvements. Not a bad return on investment! The city is now able to do a better job predicting and responding to basement backups in low-lying areas; using its new residential basement “heat map,” South Bend can now direct utility cleaning crews to areas where they are most likely to be needed. And through the new monitoring capabilities, the city has also been able to reduce the flow of water through its treatment plants by up to 10 million gallons of water per day.

The city didn't just decide to instrument its sewers overnight. "We had to convince the mayor, and it took some time," Gilot said. "We first set up our sensors in the lab and then next tried in the lakes near Notre Dame." When these demonstration projects were successful, the sewer department set up a trial at one place in the system that had some overflow problems.

The trials allowed South Bend to work out problems before a full deployment. For instance, placing the sensors inside pipes buried in the ground meant that it was hard to get radio signals out of the sewers. "We had to use our manhole covers as transmitters so we could get the sensor data out of our pipes," Gliot said. The city also needed to work on parsing all of the sensor data and creating visualizations to make the information useful and actionable.

The South Bend project represents the next stage of the Internet of Things - individual sewer pipe valves that can be tracked and controlled, with the added layer of data visualization to make it manageable and actionable. The city government is now looking beyond its sewers and seeing what else it can instrument to save money and deliver better services to its residents. That has certainly caught the eye of many other sewer and water districts facing similar circumstances.

Palo Alto conducted network traffic assessments in 2,036 organizations worldwide between November 2011 and May 2012, and found that streaming video bandwidth consumption increased more than 300%. Since its last report covering the time period from April to November 2011, "total bandwidth consumed by streaming video quadrupled to 13% of all bandwidth on enterprise networks and now represents a more significant infrastructure challenge to organizations." And this jump doesn't even take into account this summer's Olympics, which may push the numbers for streaming video even higher.

The issue is pervasive, too. Palo Alto found streaming video use across 97% of its customers, using both Netflix and P2P video streaming services. In the Americas, YouTube, Netflix and generic HTTP video were the top three consumers of bandwidth. Almost half of this traffic was found on nonstandard ports (other than ports 80 and 443), making this traffic more difficult to potentially block. This is probably not due to users understanding how to hop among ports, but rather to more sophisticated streaming software that can find unblocked pathways to the Internet, as Skype and other file-sharing programs currently do. This means that monitoring and blocking tools are going to have to improve to keep track of this usage.

Palo Alto also found a similar, major jump in P2P file-sharing usage: "P2P filesharing bandwidth consumption jumped 700% to represent 14% of overall bandwidth observed, growing more than any other application category."

At least one browser-based file-sharing application was detected on 89% of the participating organizations’ networks, and an average of 13 different file-sharing apps were found on each customer's network. What is even more sobering is that the takedown of popular file-sharing site MegaUpload in January 2012 didn't really put a dent in this kind of traffic. Palo Alto found that Putlocker, Rapidshare and Fileserve each benefited from the demise of Megaupload, with big jumps in usage after the takedown.

You can find the full study results here.

Their new visualization tool can be found here.

You can navigate to various screens that show you a "radar" plot of different protocols and data types from the data they have collected. This screenshot shows you the rise of P2P traffic that they have observed.

What does this mean for enterprise network admins? They will have to get better and more efficient at running their networks and squeezing as much bandwidth as they can from their existing connections. Video and peer sharing isn't going away, and the use of both is only going to continue to grow. And those admins that don't employ tools like Palo Alto's and others probably need to start gaining some experience with them very soon.

Strata is put on by O'Reilly twice a year and is held concurrently with Hadoop World in New York starting October 23. The basic pass is $900, but there are lots of add-ons and specialized tutorials. One of the keynotes is by Nora Denzel, who is Intuit's senior vice president for big data, social design and marketing. As in past events, there is a long list of vendors who will be participating.

StampedeCon claims its focus is "on the role of Big Data, its business value, potential cost savings, and Big Data use cases at Facebook, Nokia, Kraft Foods, Monsanto and more." It has more presentations from actual end users than vendors, unlike some of the other conferences. For example, Frank Cotignola, the consumer insights manager of Kraft Foods, will demonstrate how to use social media to research important brand topics and provide in-depth insights to new product development, segment analysis and broader topics that companies might not previously have had the funds to research. It is a single-day event on August 1 that is the least expensive of the conferences we've seen: A pass will run $250. (I'll also be speaking there.)

St. Louis will see another conference that isn't exclusive to Big Data but certainly will cover some of its technical underpinnings this fall with Strange Loop, starting on September 23. It is already sold out, but its previous sessions are well worth taking a look. We wrote about one session on NoSQL at last year's conference here.

Another Big Data conference worth checking out is mainly for government workers. It begins September 18 in Washington, D.C., and will cost at least $1,290 for a pass. Scheduled speakers include CIOs and CTOs from numerous three-lettered federal agencies, along with key vendor representatives.

And TDWI will be held starting July 29 in San Diego. It starts at $2,430 for a three-day pass and is run by computer publisher 1105 Media. There are numerous add-on tutorials and other pre- and post-conference sessions that can extend your Big Data learning experience to nearly a week and is co-located with a business intelligence conference, which seems like a natural combination.

Last year, we wrote about how undergraduate colleges are using social media. The same group from University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth's Center for Marketing Research, led by Dr. Nora Barnes, has recently taken a look at graduate MBA programs.

In phone interviews, Barnes and her researchers spoke to 70 of the top B-school directors or deans in charge of their programs. Missing were some of the top 10 schools, but the sample was still statistically valid over the more than 400 MBA programs across the U.S. Here are some of the interesting results:

• All 70 schools are using Facebook, and most are also using Twitter and LinkedIn to market their programs. Three-quarters also maintain a blog. More than half of the schools use five or more social media tools. The Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona is a real social media butterfly: They are using 14 different social media tools!
• While only 16% of schools are using downloadable mobile apps, these are rated among the most effective tools studied. You can see the results in the chart above of the schools' judgment on effectiveness of each social network. Interestingly, LinkedIn - which might be thought to have the closest ties to career aspirations of any of the social media tools - isn't near the top.
• The majority (65%) of schools don't track the number of perspective applicants who have found out about their programs through social media connections.
• And perhaps most surprisingly, 94% report recruitment is the No. 1 goal of their social media efforts, yet the top measures of effectiveness do not include tracking prospective applicants. Instead, they are looking at the numbers of fans or followers, or other metrics such as page views or the number of comments.

Clearly, social media is in a state of transition for business schools. Many said they would increase their involvement or expand to additional social networks in the coming year, with a third planning to buy additional software and nearly as many investing in new training or new hires. Still, as the study states: "Being able to measure whether these prospects actually apply to the program is something schools may be looking to do, but have not yet mastered. Without this piece of information it is difficult to really assess the effectiveness of the social media plan and to know where future investments should be made."

Let's look at the more notable new features. First is the ability to bring in up to 20 different data sources and run queries on them concurrently, as long as you're only crunching up to 200GB of data in that one pass. What this enables is a lot more analysis, and two vendors (QlikView and Bime) have already stepped up to provide more visualizations. Take a look at this infographic from QlikView first, which interactively examines American birth statistics from more than 100 million public records dating from 1969 onwards. You can click on the various query parameters, such as being able to view all California births or the ratio of married to unmarried women by their age, and in seconds, you'll see the display. You could use this to find the answers to such questions as "What's the average age of a mother in New York vs. in California?" (graphic)

Bime is the other vendor working with Google, and they’ve built a slick UI on top of the Google BigQuery platform that allows users to slice and dice 432 million rows of business data along with the birth dataset, too. There is no hard-coded SQL syntax, and it is also simple to explore the relationships involved in these huge data collections.

You don't have to be a Big Company to use BigQuery, and Google makes it easy to get started with smaller datasets for free, as we mentioned in our May article. Like many other SaaS and PaaS-based tools, all you need is a Web browser. Check out Google's discussion group for more of the latest enhancements to BigQuery.

It is time for your kids to start learning about Hadoop, the formless data repository that is the current favorite of many dot-coms and the darling of the data nerds. Indeed, the younger the better. The Hadoop ecosystem is a big tent and getting bigger.

To grok it, you have to cast aside several long-held tech assumptions. First, that you know what you are looking for when you build your databases: Hadoop encourages pack rats to store every log entry, every Tweet, every Web transaction, and other Internet flotsam and jetsam. The hope is that one day some user will come with a question that can't be answered in any way other than to comb through this morass. Who needs to spend months on requirements documents and data dictionaries when we can just shovel our data into a hard drive somewhere? Turns out, a lot of folks.

Think of Hadoop as the ultimate in agile software development: we don't even know what we are developing at the start of the project, just that we are going to find that proverbial needle in all those zettabytes.

Hadoop also casts aside the notion that we in IT have even the slightest smidgen of control over our "mission critical" infrastructure. It also casts aside that we turn to open-source code when we have reached a commodity product class that can support a rich collection of developers. That we need solid n.1 versions after the n.0 release has been debugged and straightened out. Versions that are offered by largish vendors that have inked deals with thousands of customers.

No, no, no and no. The IT crowd isn't necessarily leading the Hadooping of our networks. Departmental analysts can get their own datasets up and running, although you really need skilled folks who have a handle on the dozen or so helper technologies to make Hadoop truly useful. And Hadoop is anything but a commodity: There are at least eight different distributions with varying degrees of support and add-ons, including ones from its originators at Yahoo. And the current version? Try something like 0.2. Maybe this is an artifact of the open-source movement that loves those decimal points in their release versions. Another company released its 1.0 version last week, and they have been at it for several years.

And customers? Some of the major Hadoop purveyors have dozens, in some cases close to triple digits. Not exactly impressive, until you run down the list. Yahoo (which began the whole shebang as a way to help its now forlorn search engine) has the largest Hadoop cluster at more than 42,000 nodes. And I met someone else who has a mere 30-node cluster: He was confident by this time next year he would be storing a petabyte on several hundred nodes. That's a thousand terabytes, for those that aren't used to thinking of that part of the metric system. Netflix already has a petabyte of data on their Hadoop cluster, which they run on Amazon's Web Services. And Twitter, Facebook, eBay and other titans and dot-com darlings have similarly large Hadoop installations.

Three years ago I would have told you to teach your kids Wordpress, but that seems passé, even quaint now. Now even grade-school kids can set up their own blogs and websites without knowing much code at all, and those who are sufficiently motivated can learn Perl and PHP online. But Hadoop clearly has captured the zeitgeist, or at least a lot of our data, and it poised to gather more of it as time goes on. Lots of firms are hiring, too, and the demand is only growing.

Cloudera has some great resources to get you started from knowing nothing about it: they claim 12,000 people have watched or participated in their training sessions. You can start your engines here with a good video tutorial (registration required). And James Kobielus, now with IBM, goes into more detail in his blog post here about BigData skills that will be required in the near future.

The oldest and perhaps most linked-to template, the Social Media RFP Template and Bill of Rights, comes from Maggie Fox's Social Media Group. My one-time podcasting partner and current social media guru Paul Gillin had this to say about it: "The Bill of Rights makes for interesting reading. It provides guidance for marketers to consider in publishing RFPs that are fair to the bidding agencies. I get the sense that this guidance is born of some painful experience, which makes its teachings all the more relevant."

Sprinklr provides social media management tools for enterprises, so it isn't a completely disinterested party in the RFP process. Still, the company's document, which isn't a template in the sense of Fox's but more a collection of requirements, has a load of great suggestions for questions to ask prospective social media providers, including

1. How any social media tool can use a single platform to manage inbound and outbound communications on all of the primary social platforms?
2. How the tool is able to accelerate response times with automated, customizable, and flexible rules, filters, actions and alerts?
3. How the tool can be used for managing a distributed or global staff and across departments?
4. How the tool integrates with other existing analytics tools?
5. How the tool uses dashboards and other metric?

RFPs are most useful if you are willing to take the time to assemble the right document and to be as specific as you can about your enterprise's needs and requirements. Part of the problem here, though, is that because social media management is still new to many companies, you don't necessarily know what you don't know. In those cases, it may be prudent to try out a few tools first to see what they measure and how they do it before going into a more formal RFP process.

But corporate intranets are mostly historical artifacts now. What happened?

No one saw it coming at the time, but in retrospect the failure of the corporate Intranet offers a classic lesson in how even popular categories of products can be quickly made obsolete by seemingly unrelated technological advances and social changes.

TCP/IP Happened

So, what killed the Intranet? TCP/IP was the first culprit. Back in the mid-90s, corporate networks used a hodge-podge of protocols, including SNA and Netware. No one talks about those anymore.

Having an all-IP network made it easier to adopt more Internet-native technologies. Remember when sending emails from one company to another was a chore and not always successful? Now we take it for granted that we can communicate with anyone.

Second, the tool sets got better. Many companies migrated their Intranets to Wikis or Wordpress blogs when it became clear that these products were easier to maintain and use.

And then a whole class of products now called enterprise social networks arrived. These solutions include ready-made discussion groups, microblogs, news streams and social media. For example, you can share files with comments attached to them, which is useful if a team is collaborating on a presentation slide deck. Or use them for customer support actions. Or tracking competitors. All the things that worker bees once used Intranets for.

Then Twitter took off, and many of these products modeled their user interface on the simple 140-character “what are you doing now” dialog box. That made it dirt simple to add content and for a work team to collaborate together.

Free Social Networking

The final nail in the Intranet coffin may be an announcement this week from Socialcast. The company is offering a fully featured version of its software for free and forever for up to 50 seats. Expect that competitors will jump on board this model.

These enterprise social networking tools mean more than a “Like” button on a particular page of content: they are a way to curate and disseminate that content quickly and easily. This class of products is distinguished by several features:

• Team workspace. You can segregate your work teams by project and have all the materials for that project in a single place for easy access. These spaces can be persistent to serve as an archival record for completed projects, too.
• Activity stream. The Twitter-like stream is useful to keep track of what your colleagues are doing in any given day.
• Presence detection. Like corporate Instant Message tools, you can keep track of when your co-workers are in the office or ask them quick questions via text or video chats.
• Document collaboration. You can edit documents in real-time to shape a particular deliverable for a client without having to do serial emails.
• External services connections. Many of these products can search and interact with CRM systems, SharePoint servers, Salesforce, emails and other external services.
• Mobile clients. Most products have specialized clients that have been optimized for iOS and Android phones.
• Public or private deployments. You can start with a public cloud deployment of the product to try out, and then move your system to your own server behind a firewall for the ultimate security.

So say goodbye to Intranets. It was nice to know them. Certainly, the new breed of social network products makes it easier for workers to communicate and collaborate. But that still doesn’t mean that most employees actually use them.

 Image courtesy of Solodov Alexey / Shutterstock.com.

Bio-sensors have lagged behind other kinds of sensors. Robert McCray, the CEO of the Wireless Life Sciences Alliance, mentioned how many sensors could be found in your average car or phone, which eclipse what is available in the life sciences market. For example, your typical cellphone includes sensors such as a camera, a microphone, a GPS, haptic/touch and an accelerometer. The alliance claims to be the only trade organization focused exclusively on identifying collaboration opportunities within the wireless health sector, and was holdng its annual conference this week in San Diego.

As with other of its prizes, this one attempts to stimulate a revolution and create an ecosystem of innovators in the bio-sensing area. "We want to give inventors a platform to show their stuff to the entire planet to help expand health care to move beyond disease management," said the CEO of X Prize Foundation Peter Diamandis (shown) at the launch of the new competition. Entries will be judged on several metrics, including validity, usability, originality and affordability. Sensors can be developed in several categories, including biofluids, kinematics, body physics, mood and emotion detection.

This contest is partnered with the Tricoder competition. Diamandis mentioned that the sensors coming out of the Nokia challenge could be put into handheld consumer devices that will be developed for these Tricorders. So far, 185 teams from 25 countries have signalled that they will be entering the Tricorder contest, which was announced in January at CES in Vegas.

According to the contest website, "As sensing is an enormous, heterogeneous field, there will be no specific benchmarks established for any of these criteria. Instead, the Nokia Sensing X CHALLENGE will rely on the judges’ expert knowledge and the teams’ submitted material to establish notability."

We've written many articles on the need for using social media to engage your customers, including the analysis of Oracle's acquisition of Vitrue earlier this week and this infographic we linked to last year that shows customers want to use social media for support. Maybe it is time you re-examined your own policies to make these tools both easier and more popular in your enterprise.

CA Technologies' CHIEF & CHUCK is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at http://www.ca.com/cdit.