RSA Conference

Moscone Center, San Francisco

http://www.rsaconference.com

Giga Om is reporting that Mark Spencer, the originator of the open source PBX Asterisk is stepping down as CEO of Digium.

Digium was founded by Mark Spencer back in 1999 as a consulting company to contain consulting revenue he was generating while at university. This company, Linux Support Services, grew into Digium - which was created to provide support and associated hardware for Asterisk.  read more »

You’re in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.

You’re in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.

Have you ever felt that way at a high tech trade show? In no time flat almost every booth looks the same and almost every sales pitch sounds like the voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher in a Peanuts cartoon. What does that tell you about the state of marketing in most high tech companies? Customers shouldn’t have to work that hard to grasp a positioning message and clearly understand what makes a product different and compelling.  read more »

Did you know that Time magazine has made "YOU" their Person of the Year 2006?
We’ve now entered the era where the web is providing previously unseen capabilities to the masses. The result is a myriad of new communication and information service providers and hundreds of new logins and passwords.

The growth of these silos of ‘Unmovable Identity Data’ (e.g.: usernames and passwords accounts locked into vendor silos) is being replaced with a new breed of identity-centric technologies now being called Identity 2.0.  read more »

David Recordon, one of the originating developers of OpenID, noted in his blog that social bookmarking service ma.gnolia has posted some initial statistics on new user adoption of OpenID.

Per the ma.gnolia newsletter, since the ability to log in via OpenID was enabled, 15% of all new users use OpenID as their primary method of logging in.  read more »

The last five years have witnessed fundamental shifts in customer buying patterns which have changed the marketing strategies employed by companies today. Traditional advertising in print publishing and audio / visual media like radio, newspapers, magazines and television are slowly diminishing. The emergence of satellite and internet radio is negatively affecting radio advertisements. Pay-per-click online advertising from Google, Yahoo and MSN are eroding newspaper and magazine advertisement revenue.  read more »

Most technology marketing people I know love lots of data.  Most are engineers by training, so they’ve been taught to crave it.  I’m an engineer too, but somewhere along my career journey I stepped out of bounds.  I still crave data.  I just don’t trust most of it anymore.  Especially marketing data.  read more »

Typically, when a company goes through a big acquisition, you end up with either a hybrid hyphenated name or a new name all together - or the acquired company just gets enveloped in the new parent's name:

De-Branding

• Genesys + VoiceGenie = Genesys
• Verizon + MCI = Verizon
• Intervoice + Edify = Intervoice

Hyphenated names:

• Alcatel + Lucent = Alcatel-Lucent
• St. Paul Insurance + Travelers = St. Paul Travelers Group

New Names:  read more »