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Perspectives on the wonderful world of tech

This is why you want to recruit the best possible people to your team.

This is a great illustration of why you want to recruit the best possible people to your team.

11 Norwegian professional footballers vs 22 Sunday League players.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfkBZNptbqY

You don’t always need MORE people, sometimes you want BETTER people.

The BLN is now Business of Software

Business of Software runs conferences for people that build great software businesses and products. To access talks online, hear about new events, contact speakers and stay in touch with great ideas, share your email address with us.

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Shockingly straight talk from Machine Zone CEO, Gabe Leydon on the advertising industry

Machine Zone CEO, Gabe Leydon’s talk at ReCode Conference left the audience of advertising people shocked, angry and confused. Largely because while gabe uses a lot of TV advertising, he uses far more of his dollars online and knows more about measuring the effectiveness of advertising than the rest of the room put together.

The advertising industry will have to change.

The BLN is now Business of Software

Business of Software runs conferences for people that build great software businesses and products. To access talks online, hear about new events, contact speakers and stay in touch with great ideas, share your email address with us.

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Professor David MacKay. Polymath, explainer, author, inventor.

Very sad to hear of the death last week of Professor David MacKay, author of, ‘Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air‘ a book he self published with £10,000 of his own money in 2008. Bill Gates described the book as,

“One of the best books on energy that has been written”

He sold 40,000 copies of the book and the free version he published online was downloaded over 500,000 times.

Here he is doing what he did brilliantly. Making the complicated and complex understandable.

Good obituary in the Grauniad. Few people could claim to have done so much in such a tragically short life.

The BLN is now Business of Software

Business of Software runs conferences for people that build great software businesses and products. To access talks online, hear about new events, contact speakers and stay in touch with great ideas, share your email address with us.

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Why Are Bald Men Under-Represented in Senior Management?

Why Are Bald Men Under-Represented in Senior Management?

Cambridge Ring Award winner, Rosemary Francis, CEO Founder of Ellexus, was awarded ‘Product of the Year’ at this year’s annual dinner. She is the first female award winner and there was much discussion amongst the men present about how more women could be encouraged into the software industry.

Here’s Rosemary talking on that very subject…

Rosemary Francis, CEO, Ellexus, Why Are Bald Men Under-Represented in Senior Management?

http://businessofsoftware.wistia.com/medias/8olzow7w6r?embedType=async&videoFoam=true&videoWidth=640

The BLN is now Business of Software

Business of Software runs conferences for people that build great software businesses and products. To access talks online, hear about new events, contact speakers and stay in touch with great ideas, share your email address with us.

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Do People Really Plug USB Drives They Find Into Their Own Laptops?

Yes.

Scary, fascinating stuff. Research shows that people are generally nice and well meaning but this leaves them open to being hacked.

USB Drives | Abstract—We investigate the anecdotal belief that end users will pick up and plug in USB flash drives they find by completing a controlled experiment in which we drop 297 flash drives on a large university campus. We find that the attack is effective with an estimated success rate of 45–98% and expeditious with the first drive connected in less than six minutes. We analyze the types of drives users connected and survey those users to understand their motivation and security profile. We find that a drive’s appearance does not increase attack success. Instead, users connect the drive with the altruistic intention of finding the owner. These individuals are not technically incompetent, but are rather typical community members who appear to take more recreational risks than their peers. We conclude with lessons learned and discussion on how social engineering attacks—while less technical— continue to be an effective attack vector that our community has yet to successfully address.

Image links to full paper.

The BLN is now Business of Software

Business of Software runs conferences for people that build great software businesses and products. To access talks online, hear about new events, contact speakers and stay in touch with great ideas, share your email address with us.

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“Data is the New Oil” is the New, “Henry Ford and Faster Horses”

“Data is the New Oil” is the New, “Faster Horses”

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Henry Ford

No he didn’t. (This is a great article in Harvard Business Review that both dispels the myth whilst pointing out that Henry Ford did indeed ignore his customers to the significant long term detriment of the business). I hate it when this quote is run out by ‘Thought Leaders‘ and ‘International Keynote Speakers‘ (according to their LinkedIn profiles anyway) at conferences as proof that to be innovative you have to be bold or whatever. I have banned speakers from using it at our events.

The new meaningless phrase that is tweeted, quoted and bandied about with absurd regularity is:

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Apple vs the FBI | Only the Paranoid Will Survive

Only the Paranoid Will Survive.

So much misinformation, propaganda, marketing hype and general BS about the Apple vs FBI iPhone discussion it is beginning to resemble a political ‘debate’ about the election of a new President or whether Britain should leave the EU…

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Hillary Clinton Speech Payments | Salesforce get better deal than Qualcomm

Hillary Clinton’s speech payments.

This is a list of paid speeches (where payment was over $100,000) made by Hillary Clinton in 2013-14.

Still, over $500,000 in a single day from tech companies isn’t bad going.

Qualcomm, Cisco and eBay compete with the Jewish United Fund, the Biotechnology Industry Organization and the National Automobile Dealers Association to pay the most for her words but Knewton, the education-focused startup paid $225,000 for a talk in 2014 – lobbying is an expensive business.

The BLN is now Business of Software

Business of Software runs conferences for people that build great software businesses and products. To access talks online, hear about new events, contact speakers and stay in touch with great ideas, share your email address with us.

Read more