Another day, another mini storm as global tech leader moves HQ from marginal ecosystem to one where they get better access to the things they need. Nice to be reminded that this happens all over the world, not just in Shoreditch.
Most common password used by hacked Tesco accounts is Charlie.
These are the 50 most common passwords of 2,240 odd used to target Tesco customers to steal their Loyalty Vouchers. The emails and passwords of the hacked accounts have been posted on the internet.
The emails and passwords were harvested from other ecommerce sites then hackers used them to log in to Tesco.com by taking a wild guess that most people will use the same email and password for every site they shop on. I think Tesco have behaved very reasonably on this and have replaced any vouchers lost by those effected and the only way to protect consumers more from their own stupidity from an attack of this type would be two-factor authentication though this is probably going to put a lot of their customer base off.
‘Charlie’ was by far the most popular password on the list though no one using ‘Charlie’ as a password had the name Charles or Charlie in their email address.
Just a reminder that it is a REALLY bad idea to use the same log in details for everything you do.
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Guest blog post from Andrew Yeoman, CEO of Concirrus who shared his definition of the Internet of Things when we spoke recently, the first time I have heard someone define IoT in terms of BUSINESS, not TECHNOLOGY.
“The Internet of Things allows you to know information that you previously couldn’t economically know. With that knowledge, you can operate a different business process.”
He also got us thinking about the unintended consequences and was kind enough to write this. Food for thought.
As the Internet of Things boom starts on its way we are bombarded with the ‘sense of possibility’. We’ve all seen the estimates on how many connected devices are going to be out there (100s of billions) and the massive profits that this will generate ($trillions) and there is no doubt that the IoT will have a profound impact on the way we live our lives and the way that business is done today.
From cars to fridges, from smart meters to oil tanks, our businesses, assets and lives will be monitored, managed and optimised. We can be certain that our lives and businesses will be impacted in ways we could never have imagined. Being successful in the use of these technologies does require us to consider both the returns and the risks. Each of these requires a change in our thinking.
We believe that in the future there will be two types of businesses – those that embraced the Internet of Things (or whatever it is called at that time) and those that used to exist. However in the enthusiasm to embrace this technology its important to consider the ‘unintended consequence’ of this technology.
Take for example, car insurance – we see a rush to adopt telematics (an early part of IoT) in the underwriting process. The use of this technology is fascinating, by observing the driving behaviour of the policy holders, the insurer can ‘see’ who is a good risk and who is not. Using this information they can actively manage their ‘book of risk’ by pricing out or forcibly ejecting those that are ‘high risk’. This marketing is surging… and why not as the improvement in underwriting returns is frankly staggering.
However, the law of unintended consequence is equally busy at work…
Prior to telematics, an insurer operated with hindsight and knew only of incidents and accidents some time after they occurred. However now they are ‘connected’ they receive information in near real-time. So when a car crashes and ends up on its roof, the insurance company ‘knows’ about this even in the middle of the night. What obligation now exists on the insurer to act? When the occupants of that vehicle sue for injury and suffering because they lay in ‘that field’ for several hours what liability exists? For sure, we can be certain that this will be tested in court?
When a driver has an accident and it can be shown that this driver had been driving recklessly for weeks prior to the accident and yet the insurer failed to act then who has what liability?
So where else do we see this?
How about in houses and homes? This year has seen the acquisition of Nest by Google but what could possibly go wrong? When your meter readings are hacked and it can be seen that your reduced consumption shows that you are on holiday who could be liable for the consequential loss? When the thermostat incorrectly assesses your presence and switches on heating unnecessarily using gas/oil/ electricity then can you claim that from them?
What the Internet of Things is, is another new set of technologies and much like the last revolution we say, with the Internet, it is not utopian. Like the very best business plans both the opportunities and the risks need to be considered and addressed.
Bring on the information revolution… it’s been 10-years since we saw the last one.
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If you are interested in the Internet of Things and what it can do for you – as a business, an investor or an entrepreneur – two dates you should be aware of:
CEO Tales, 2nd April, 6-9pm, London. The Internet of Things and Big Data – cutting through the hype.
It might seem crazy – with all the column inches devoted to the Internet of Things – but we are constantly coming across new – or even established – businesses who we think should have more exposure. No doubt they feel the same.
So, to promote some diversity and highlight some unsung heroes of the IoT, entries are now open for IoT14 showcase. Five minutes in the spotlight in front of an influential audience of IoT entrepreneurs, funders, corporate interests and opinion formers, to turbocharge your networking and start the conversations you want to have.
You can get some insight into the breadth of applications from last year’s presentations. It doesn’t matter if you are hardware, software, platform or application, if you are building an exciting business in the IoT and you think the world should know more about you, we want to see you apply.
It’s a simple process – register for the showcase here, answer the questions about what your market is and how you are meeting its needs, and we will let you know by early April if you have made it onto the list. Just remember that an application does not guarantee a delegate place: you only get one of those if you win.
Good luck, we look forward to meeting you on the 15th April.
Successful software professionals know this: the quick way to progress your career is to show your excellence by becoming essential to a ‘rocket ship’ company. The Business Leaders Network is on the launchpad, ready for rapid growth in the next 12 months, but we need a chief engineer. If you have the skills to develop critical web based business processes for us, then join us and share in our success.
About Us:
The Business Leaders Network (BLN) runs high quality events for technology entrepreneurs and innovators including the Internet of Things Forum and the Business of Software Conference. If you want to meet and learn from high quality people growing high quality businesses, software entrepreneurs, technology innovators and funders, come to a BLN event (better yet, help run one!). Our reputation and market is growing and we want to take advantage of that.
About You:
There’s a long list of interesting attributes below, but in a nutshell we need a bright self starter with strong technical skills in web based business tools (especially WordPress, PHP and mySQL) who has a knack for breaking complex problems down to manageable chunks. You could be in a fairly junior position, but if you are creative and have an urge to see tangible bottom line results from your work, then you will probably get a kick out of this job.
This Role:
You will be responsible for automating business processes, including email marketing, social media, analytics, SEO and CRM. In addition to development, the role will encompass the day to day administration of the events website – including SQL and system maintenance, user configuration, task server administration and report design and execution.
As the technical ‘go-to’ person in the BLN, your work will be critically important to the company’s growth, in an environment where you will be mixing with software entrepreneurs and finding out about leading edge developments from some of the best connected people in the market.
What you’ll be doing:
• Set up and adapt WordPress to meet business requirements
• Discover new online channels for customer acquisition and improve existing ones
• Ask questions about what drives growth, build analytics tools to capture relevant data and offer actionable answers and insights as a result
• Monitor application performance and identify any technical problems
• Turn project briefs into actionable plan and provide accurate price quotes
• Create wireframes and design mock-ups
• Discuss technical requirements with team and provide innovative solutions
• Work on internal projects to optimise current processes
• Maintain a high awareness of industry’s issues and trends
• Work both independently and in conjunction with other project team members
• Thorough quality assurance testing of all web projects
• Managing email marketing and SEM. Potentially also, display advertising, and retargeting
What you will bring:
• 2+ years commercial experience of WordPress development
• 3+ years experience with the core elements of the WordPress stack: PHP & MySQL
• Excellent written and oral communication skills
• Excellent analytical and problem solving skills
• Experience with Responsive Design
• Experience with WordPress Theme & Plugin Development
• Excellent HTML5, CSS3 programming skills (Expert)
• Excellent PHP Programming Skills
• Excellent jQuery & Javascript Skills
• Experience with different CMS, such as Magento etc
• Experience creating and maintain MySQL databases
• Strong understanding of how to build and maintain email and social media marketing lists. No spammy crap though.
• A track record of making things happen
Will also consider part-time/contractor in first instance though we want to find someone who will learn, grow and be part of the company for a long time into the future.
Please, no calls or emails from agencies
Salary: In-line with market rates and dependent on experience
If you are growing a software business in Europe, the chances are that you are constantly being taken out of your comfort zone. What are you going to do about customer acquisition, building your culture, building your team, setting your strategy, customer support? About product management? Pricing?
It may seem endless, but others have been through it before and have actionable, specific advice for you. Business of Software is an event dedicated to helping software entrepreneurs learn from their peers: to exchange hard won wisdom on what works. It is a place for founders to work on, not in their business.
Over 2.5 days, in a single track conference, you will hear from great speakers with practical tips to offer on all aspects of the entrepreneurial journey. Just as important is the hallway track, where you can meet, learn from, and help people growing great software companies – from seedling start ups to millions of users.
Business of Software has run for seven years in the US, where it has developed an outstanding reputation as the place to discuss tactics and strategy for fast growth ISVs. Many delegates have come back year after year, many have asked us for a European version.
This is BoS UK. 25 – 26th June, Cambridge (UK).
For more details, please see the site for the event. Or you can register here.
Investors and media are already unanimous that 2014 will be a great year for IoT and there is much talk of the potential combined with Big Data.
This CEO Tales considers the reality and the opportunity for businesses and for the CIOs expected to implement new initiatives based on these trends. We’ll be asking those at the coal face for their views on a number of key questions: How can CIOs embrace IoT data? Does a company need to adopt agile innovation practises? What will accelerate and what will retard the development of new applications? What are the implications for security and privacy of data?
Our speakers will offer their own perspectives on the opportunities and pitfalls that we face today before an open discussion. Expect to hear from IoT entrepreneurs, CIOs of large scale businesses, and Big Data specialists. Joining us to give their thoughts on the current market are:
Wolfgang Emmerich, CEO, Zuhlke Engineering
Wolfgang Emmerich is CEO and Chairman of Zuhlke Engineering Ltd. He is also one of the founding partners and shareholders of the Zuhlke Group. Wolfgang serves on the Group’s executive board and chairs the software engineering committee of the Zuhlke Group, where he is responsible for driving Zuhlke’s software engineering innovation.
In the past two years, Zuhlke has focused on “Connected Products”.
The Group has delivered a number of exciting products that populate the Internet of Things, including high-end gas boilers that store usage statistics in the cloud, smart utility meters and intelligent home devices that enable controlling lighting and heating from mobile devices. Prior to joining Zuhlke UK, Wolfgang was Head of the Software Systems Engineering Group and he still is Professor of Distributed Computing at UCL, where he supervised a number of research initiatives in mobile computing and sensor networks. Wolfgang holds a Doctor of Science from the University of Paderborn and a Diploma in Computer Science from University of Dortmund. He is a Chartered Engineer and a Member of the IET and ACM.
Andrew Yeoman, Concirrus
Andrew is the co-founder of Concirrus and is responsible for the overall strategy and leadership of the company. In a short amount of time Concirrus has built an impressive list of reference customers using their IoT platform. Before starting Concirrus, Andrew was a Managing Director at Trimble Navigation (NASDAQ: TRMB) where he led a number of fast growth telematics and M2M businesses – creating and executing a series of strategies that saw annual worldwide revenues grow to more than $300m. Prior to Trimble Andrew has led many businesses in M&A, fast growth and turnaround situations both in Europe and USA.
Giles Pavey, dunnhumby
Giles is dunnhumby’s Chief Data Scientist and spends his days working with the data science team to help clients (examples include Tesco, Kroger, Macy’s, P&G, Coca-Cola) see the world from their customer’s point of view, using in-depth data insights that dunnhumby collects and analyses.
The data science team at dunnhumby cover projects including recommendation systems, social network analysis & big data, predictive analytics, optimization, machine learning and behavioral psychology and economics.
Outside dunnhumby, Giles is a frequent speaker at industry conferences on the subjects of customer insight, big data and multi-channel retailing
Niall Murphy, Evrythng
Niall is CEO & Founder or EVRYTHNG. A technologist and serial entrepreneur he co-founded European WiFi network The Cloud in 2003, acquired by BSkyB (a subsidiary of News Corporation) in 2011, and was also recently CEO of multi-platform gaming software firm Marmalade.
Niall founded one of the first ISPs in Africa in a joint venture with Sprint in 1994, later acquired by UUnet. He subsequently founded three digital media businesses in South Africa, he later sold. He also co-founded The Digital Thinking Network, a future scenario planning organisation based in Amsterdam.
As ever, we’ll bring together entrepreneurs, investors and established corporates to meet and do business as well as educate each other. It promises to be a great evening, and registration is now open so join us.
We’ve very grateful to our sponsors for the evening – Taylor Wessing and Zuhlke – experts in the implications of IoT and Big Data. Their commitment to helping entrepreneurs and corporates meet and learn from each other has helped make this event happen.
Interesting piece on who owns the data in the Internet of Things. Lots of companies seem to think that the value of their ‘thing’ will come from the Big Data exhaust produced by e.g. home thermostats, car driving habits etc so this is timely.
The data are hugely valuable. But who owns them? The answer is: no one – there is no property right in a piece of data itself. The owner of a smart thermostat does not, for example, own the data about how he uses it. The only thing that is ‘ownable’ is an aggregation or collection of such data, provided there has been a relevant investment in carrying out that aggregation or collection (the individual user is very unlikely to have made that investment). It is that investment and who carries it out that are the focus of this article.
For someone to ‘own’ the data, you need to establish a ‘Database Right’ (this is an EU specific thing designed to incentivize investment in storage and protection of data.
For a database right to exist:
Well worth looking at the full article at TW Tech Briefs. It seems pretty clear though, that the issues are not well understood at the moment, companies need to take the time to understand the issues and incorporate them into the business models they are building and they will be keeping lawyers around the world busy for a long time to come.
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This year’s IoT forum will look at the problems that are most worth solving for the Internet of Things and what it takes to build a successful business to solve those problems.
We’re building a schedule with a mix of perspectives – the serial entrepreneurs, the analysts, the funders and the big brands – all of whom have practical experience of the sector and the disciplines needed for commercial success.
So it’s a delight to welcome our first batch of speakers:
JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at Salesforce, on the collision between consumers and the IoT
George Yianni, Head of Technology at Philips Connected Lighting and Hue, on his IoT product development journey
Matt Hatton, Director at Machina Research, on where he’d be putting his energies if he were an entrepreneur
Stan Boland, CEO of Neul, on the most important thing any entrepreneur should know when building an IoT business
Disciplined dreamers, all of them. We’re looking forward to hearing from them.
Company presentations from 2013 IoT Forum featuring Unioncy, Xively, Concirrus, Electric Imp, SigFox, Etherios, Thingworx, Berg, Clickslide Abacus, Datownia
One of the highlights of the IoT Forum 2013 were the competitively selected company presentations. You can see some of the presenting companies below or get excited about the fact that we are looking for companies to present on April 15th at the 2014 IoT Forum event.
Between them they gave a great summary of the huge range of businesses that are springing up to serve, and to use, the internet of things. Here are some of the presentations from that day.
Details about the process for applying to present this year or contact Hermione at thebln.com if you have any questions.
Unioncy
Xively
Concirrus
Electric Imp
SigFox
Etherios
Thingworx
Berg
Clickslide Abacus
Datownia
More information about this year’s IoT Forum, to be held 15th April 2014 in Cambridge, England.
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