ReadWriteEnterprise

How Advanced Fraud Detection Services Work

David Strom — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 12:03:00 -0800

As anyone who has ever had a valid credit card charge questioned knows, there is a lot of fraudulent use of cards, and the Internet has made it even easier for the bad guys to exploit them. According to comScore, last year ecommerce in the U.S. reached record levels of spending with more than $160 billion in transactions. With all this activity, it is like looking for the proverbial needle in a very large haystack to try to track down fraudulent transactions. But a look into a couple of new fraud detection and prevention technologies shows that perhaps the good guys are making some inroads in this war.

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First is the news that MasterCard is working with Silver Tail Systems to map abnormal Web traffic flows on ecommerce sites. MasterCard has its own detection algorithms that handle things it observes across its payment processing network, but this shows that more effort is needed to understand the ways that fraud happens online too. Expect to see more of these partnerships in the years to come.

A second company that is working in this area is Norse Corporation, a St. Louis-based company that monitors the Internet looking for fraudsters. Their IPViking customers are the banking and payment processors that want more intelligence about who is buying goods and services online, before the transactions hit the payment networks to be processed.

Norse places millions of monitors around the global Internet, looking for anomalies in transactions that are being attempted on various ecommerce sites. Its approach is similar to what Network Box does for general managed general security exploit detection. Take a look at this transaction, which originated from a Brazilian IP address that has been used in the past to launch denial of service attacks and is associated with Brazilian organized crime. The transaction was done on a French ecommerce site and the payment was supposed to be handled by a US-based processor. Norse caught it in time and the payment was refused.

Here is another example of their intelligent network in operation. They found, over a series of weeks late last year, a set of transactions that originated with Chinese IP addresses using proxy services in Russia, France and China. This means that the originating IP address had been hidden thanks to the proxy. These seemingly random transactions wouldn't normally be grouped together. Yet all of the transactions were for funeral home services, and appear to be a situation where someone is testing a card number to see if it can be used for more extensive fraud.

You can see that by detecting these and other patterns, such as a batch of transactions hitting the same ecommerce site within a few seconds of each other (indicating a potential bot net), they can provide a tremendous intelligence to the site owners and help to stop fraud before the transactions are even processed.

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European VP Suggests FRAND Patent Fairness May Require Enforcement

Scott M. Fulton, III — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 09:00:00 -0800

Could the growing number of device manufacturers demanding intellectual property royalties of somewhere around 2.25% per device sold be establishing a de facto cartel, establishing fees that collectively render it impossible for new competitors to enter the field? That would appear to be the subject matter to which European Commission Vice President Joaquin Almunia alluded during a speech in Paris last Friday.

Comm. Almunia now has the job made famous by Comm. Neelie Kroes during her relentless pursuit of Microsoft as Commissioner for Competition. During Friday's speech, Almunia appeared to suggest that a new enforcement mechanism may be necessary to prevent manufacturers from establishing barriers to entry under the guise of "FRAND" - fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory - licensing terms.

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But the Commission has led us to the edge of this cliff before, without coming up with a way to scale it. Almunia acknowledged that patent fee abuse can be a problem, but a careful read of the speech fails to shed any light on how the enforcement solution might work, beyond the imposition of more fines - the kinds of fines that result from years of investigation, long after the alleged damage has already been done.

Is FRAND 0-for-3?

The question, essentially, boils down to whether the standards process has been re-engineered to enable companies that contribute concepts that become standards to leverage their monopolies to keep too many competitors from using those standards. It sounds like the opposite of what a standards process should be, but legislators worldwide have seen ample evidence not so much that standards processes are being abused, but that they may actually have been established with this kind of leveraging in mind.

"When monopolies and tight oligopolies are allowed to occupy a market, they tend to resist change and often end up caring only about the preservation of their business models," Almunia stated. A fair market, he went on, is one that's "contestable," which he defined as enabling new players a chance of success. "Once a standard is adopted," he went on, "it becomes the norm and the underlying patents are indispensable. Owners of such standard essential patents are conferred a power on the market that they cannot be allowed to misuse."

One part of a solution, he suggested, was to make the standards process more transparent. In many situations, standards are negotiated between stakeholders in secret. However, since those standards belong to private industry, those stakeholders have argued, it is not up to any government regulator to dictate how those stakeholders should converse with one another.

Almunia went on to assert that once a standard has been declared, its licensing on FRAND terms must be ensured. He then added, "This is crucial if we want industries and businesses relying on such patents to develop freely to their utmost potential. I am determined to use antitrust enforcement to prevent the misuse of patent rights to the detriment of a vigorous and accessible market. I have initiated investigations on this issue in several sectors and we will see the results in due time."

The investigations Comm. Almunia refers to include one opened against Samsung a few weeks ago, in response to claims of unfair licensing by Apple, among others. Samsung's pledge to honor so-called FRAND terms comes in the wake of its own complaint last year, filed in multiple E.U. member states concurrently, claiming its own rights had been infringed by a variety of manufacturers.

Et tu, Neelie?

One problem that any legislative or regulatory body must face is that the perceived market value of any competitive company's technology portfolio is established by how much money the patents in that portfolio would likely garner through jury awards and favorable settlements. Many smaller companies bolster their own legal expertise as a way of offsetting their manufacturing deficiencies - what they can't earn in revenue off the street, they might make up for in settlements. If a regulatory body were to open up the standards process to complete transparency, and also dictate the process by which royalties are negotiated, companies may be faced with the prospect of raising the baseline fee for what they consider "FRAND" to compensate for the lessened amount of what they can obtain in court.

And if FRAND fees are limited, then those same companies may consider raising their street prices.

The European Commission has been down this road a few times before, stopping short of taking the critical step of influencing the market and triggering the avalanche that would inevitably follow. In 2007, the company considered the "poster child" for FRAND manipulation was Qualcomm. While the E.C. investigation began with plenty of bluster and fanfare, at the point in October 2009 where it had to make a decision more about what to do, rather than what to say, then-Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes notoriously backed off, suggesting that her government's role should instead be more advisory than enforcement.

"In my view, there are a number of ways to assess whether there has been an excessive pricing abuse under Article 82 EC and the methodologies used will depend on the factual matrix," Comm. Kroes stated, invoking another famous metaphor. "Any antitrust enforcer has to be careful about overturning commercial agreements without a clear and coherent evidence base. But if standards are set in an open and transparent manner, industry can concentrate on delivering products which comply with these standards and which bring benefits to consumers, rather than devoting their energies to litigating in front of courts and competition authorities. Whilst it is for industry to choose what type of scheme is best suited to its needs, the Commission is ready to give inputs to ensure that standard setting is efficient and in line with the law."

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[Data Visualization] GE and the Internet of Turbines

David Strom — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 18:03:00 -0800

The next time you have to get an MRI or CT scan you might not know it but if the equipment is made by GE it is phoning home. No, the actual scan data is still between you and your doctor, but the broad stats of when and where the scan was taken is reported back to GE. In the true spirit of the Internet of Things, everything has an IP address, even an MRI machine. The analysts at GE have created some interesting data visualizations. About 125,000 scans are taken each day around the world with their equipment, and you can see time series information and other interesting stats on their blog.

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Medical scanners aren't the only GE products to phone home: their gas turbine generators, used to produce electricity, also provide stats on their operations and the 700-some collection has also been analyzed and visualized. You can watch the turbine visualization here:

There is a lot more nifty info on the GE Visualization blog here, including a series of crowdsourced infographics produced at a series of coding marathon events held around the world last year.

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First Glimpses of Office 15 Are Minus the Ribbon

Scott M. Fulton, III — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:15:00 -0800

As part of a carefully timed preview of the forthcoming Windows on ARM (WOA) operating system, which borrows the new "Metro-style" usage model from Windows 8, Microsoft released a video showing WOA running what were described as technical previews of four "Office 15" applications - Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. But the key question for which Desktop application developers have been seeking an answer may have been obscured: As Microsoft adopts a new usage model with elements gleaned from the "Metro" style, will Office be moving away from the ribbon? The first clips of the new Office in action deliberately obfuscate the answer.

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What we do see from shots of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as demonstrated by Windows Principal Program Manager Scott Seiber, completely obscures the title bar, assuming one is even present. Along the top edge are menu categories that are now presented, for the first time, in ALL CAPS, reversing a design decision made a quarter-century ago to avoid making software seem like it was SHOUTING at its user.

The full-color shading for the File menu suggests that Microsoft will continue its full-screen approach to loading, saving, and converting files, which premiered in the current Office 2010. Such an approach would be in keeping with the company's new "Metro" design approach, where options are made very clearly visible with plenty of white space.

But as these screenshots clearly show, Office 15 will not be a "Metro-style app," running in the fast and fluid new WinRT-driven environment being grafted onto Windows 8. Although technically these shots do not show an Office 15 preview for AMD- or Intel-based PCs, they were described by Microsoft Windows Division President Steven Sinofsky today as fully feature-compatible as their x86/x64 PC counterparts.

"The new Office applications for WOA have been significantly architected for both touch and minimized power/resource consumption," Sinofsky wrote. "This engineering work is an important part of being able to provide Office software with WOA, as these are not simply recompilations or ports, but significant reworking of the products with a complete and consistent user experience and fidelity with their new x86/64 counterparts."

At one point, the video (snapshot above) does depict the user right-clicking on a graphic object in PowerPoint (which, in multitouch, is accomplished by a tap-and-hold). This brings up a drop-down list, but also makes a pastel-shaded "FORMAT" menu appear. This behavior appears consistent with how PowerPoint 2010 works today. When you right-click on a graphic object, a new "Format" category appears, under a main heading "Drawing Tools" that extends into the title bar area. In the clips provided today, the title bar was obscured, so the "Drawing Tools" heading may actually be present and may also have been obscured.

Also in Office 2010, the Ribbon may be minimized until needed by way of an up/down carat button that appears in the upper right corner. That button does not appear in any part of today's video, though conceivably it may also have been moved to the obscured portion of the title bar.

The Ribbon screen device, which first premiered with Office 2007, is not exactly compatible with the "Metro" layout approach, and for some users has proven to be more difficult with multitouch than it is for the mouse. Rather than the traditional drop-down menu that at one time was "written in stone" by the Common User Access specifications, the Ribbon divides a horizontal strip into segments by category, and places command buttons of varying sizes into each segment. The size apportioned to each segment may vary according to the width of the window, and may shrink itself as that width is reduced.

The reasons this issue is so important are twofold: 1) Developers of functions and add-ons for Office 2010 need to know whether they must begin the long, arduous process of redesigning for Office 2013 - or instead just give up and develop for some other platform. 2) An entire industry devoted to training employees depends on the stability of the Microsoft Office platform. If Microsoft made cosmetic changes to the Ribbon that we're just not privileged to see yet, publishers can use in-house staff members to make new screenshots and quick rewrites. If it instead they scrapped the tool altogether in favor of a menu bar that looks more like Metro, those publishers will have to make significant new investments in completely rewritten content.

A Microsoft spokesperson declined all further comment on Office 15-related issues for now.

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Oracle Claims Taleo's Cloud-based Talent Management Jackpot

Scott M. Fulton, III — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:00:00 -0800

In the 20th century, corporations recruited talented professionals but then nurtured them and integrated them into their organizations. Talent was part of their business foundations. In the more intricate economy of the 21st, talent is something perceived to be possessed by individuals. Corporations recruit these people, and then undertake what's called compensation management in an effort to retain them as long as possible, and to let go of talent that doesn't perform up to scale.

The value of a single, global database for evaluating the dollar value of individual talent on a real-time scale was affirmed today in a very big way, with the announcement of Oracle's intention to acquire cloud-based talent management system Taleo.

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Taleo's database has been perceived as the mother lode of talent evaluation. It brings in information from professionals (perhaps including yourself) looking to expand or even change their careers. That information is then shared with recruiters who use Taleo's service to match qualified, skilled workers with the right position, for the right compensation.

But that process generates a new tier of input, enabling human resources managers to track personal performance across an entire organization. This process has grown just in recent months to an unanticipated scale, introducing HR personnel to an analytics-based system for talent and compensation management that works not unlike Web publishing - bringing freelancers on-board, tracking their traffic and revenue generation on an hourly basis, and dispensing with low performers.

Taleo calls this system pay-for-performance, and it's converting the talent management structure of large enterprises into something like the NFL.

As a brochure for Taleo's popular Compensation tool reads (PDF available here), "Many companies have found that they can save millions by increasing the accuracy of their compensation calculations. Taleo Compensation's ability to dynamically update budgets when employees leave or change departments has paid for their compensation projects several times over. Other solutions require customers to do considerable data manipulation before uploading compensation data into the solution, which increases costs and delays changes to compensation policies... Taleo Compensation enables companies to focus the right pay on the right people with a unique, rules driven approach that replaces customization with configuration."

Taleo gives HR managers a cloud-based dashboard whose design and operation appear directly inspired by data center management tools for IT administrators.

In perhaps the most contemporary of ironies, financial analysts recently perceived Taleo as growing too big for its britches - as having built a product that was too big for its own executives to keep a handle on. Last December, in the wake of SAP's acquisition of talent management competitor SuccessFactors, and in a process that could conservatively be described as "blatant," Taleo made available its CEO, Mike Gregoire, for an interview with AllThingsD. In that interview, he praised Oracle for its expertise in acquiring the right companies (citing RightNow as one example), and stopped just short of hiring an auctioneer and setting a minimum bid price.

"The No. 1 expense in businesses is people," Gregoire told Arik Hesseldahl. "We see the news about the unemployment rates, and then we see that companies can't hit their productivity goals because they don't have the right people in the right jobs. It's absolutely crazy. That's the problem we solve. Talent management is about getting the right people into your company, having them work on the right things, because you've got performance goals, measuring those goals, tying that to pay-for-performance and compensation. And, by the way, the chances that person has the right skills at the right time is about zero, so you want to tie those goals to a learning management system, and making that happen in real time, and then providing intelligence about the whole ecosystem of employees. That moves the needle with respect to business performance."

That learning management system Gregoire referred to was Learn.com, which Taleo acquired in 2010. Just a few quarters thereafter, Taleo's positive cash flow increased by a factor of six. It was an indication that while talent management was Taleo's selling factor, talent nurturing is in much higher demand among a workforce desperate to cultivate new skills in a more volatile economy.

In a presentation to investors this morning, Oracle's depiction of adding Taleo to its talent pool looks less like a nurturing process and more like something out of an '80s video game.

"Taleo's cloud manages 15% of all US hires and is one of the world's largest cloud deployments with nearly 16 billion transactions per year," Oracle's statement to investors reads. "Together, Oracle and Taleo expect to create a comprehensive cloud offering for organizations to manage their Human Resource operations and employee careers. The combination is expected to empower employees and managers to effectively manage careers throughout their entire employment, enable organizations to retain talent and optimize costs, and improve the employee experience through faster on boarding and better collaboration with team members via social media."

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Akamai Invests in Obliterating America's Broadband Speed Deficit

Scott M. Fulton, III — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:30:00 -0800

Last week, my colleague David Strom reported on the latest annual "State of the Internet" report from content delivery network Akamai. The report showed that while Americans are finally experiencing faster average broadband speeds on a quarter-by-quarter basis, those speeds only began eclipsing those of Sweden in the second half of 2010, and still have about 40% of gap to close if it hopes to achieve par with Japan - which, at this rate, it might do in about a decade.

If Web connection speeds are, as Google has said so often in touting the performance of its Chrome Web browser, essentially a product of end user perception, then perhaps any technology that applies itself solely to improving that perception will be at least as worthy of investment, if not more so, than investing in the Internet backbone itself. That's the conclusion Akamai itself has reached in its buyout of two-year-old Web front-end optimization service Blaze.

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The big problem with Web content (and we should know) is that it's an amalgam of hundreds of cobbled-together resources, often from diverse sources. As analysts from Blaze told our Dan Rowinski last year, fewer than half of all Web sites are optimized for display on mobile devices.

Blaze's core service is content optimization. It literally connects to CDNs like Akamai to fuse together high-traffic pages whose content is made up of tons of little bits, with the result being bigger chunks that get downloaded faster. For some, the Web will have gotten so fast they'll forget they're in America.

In a corporate blog post for Akamai today, Blaze CTO Guy Podjarny made it clear the acquisition was not just a play for assets, that Akamai is getting Blaze's engineers as well. The Blaze philosophy is being welded to the Akamai ethic.

"Modern browsers are practically operating systems, exposing powerful and complicated capabilities to websites, supporting desktop-like experiences over the Web," Podjarny writes. "This new world brings with it new bottlenecks which require new solutions. These solutions can't just live on the network. They have to get inside the browser and change the way it sees and processes the page. New systems need to understand HTML instead of TCP headers; JavaScript instead of routing; CSS instead of caching. Such systems are at the core of Front-End Optimization (FEO), and are a natural next step for a CDN today. There's no doubt caching and DSA will remain critical for the foreseeable future, but without FEO, you can only go so far. The combined solution of CDN and FEO is what's really exciting - accelerating every step between the server and a usable page."

Some of Blaze's optimization technologies utilize HTML5 methodologies, even if your Web site isn't even really HTML5. For example, its adaptive cache technique collects many of a page's resources, especially the ones that get reused multiple places, into a single client-side cache that can be polled using HTML5 markup. When multiple pages tend to use the same resources, Blaze can generate a persistent cache using HTML5's method for generating up to 5 megabytes of local storage that doesn't expire automatically.

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Grovo How To Do SEO Video Series

David Strom — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:33:00 -0800

We've written earlier about Grovo, an online video e-learning site that conducts a lot of celebrity interviews. Some of them are more interesting than others. Today they have a new series with Zach Ciperski, the Director of SEO for EliteSEM and also serves as Vice President of CoffeeForLess.com. He has built sites for some major retailers and teaches SEO at New York University, among other places. His series is on How To SEO, and is worth watching if you are still struggling with the basics, or need some help before you go forth and try to hire an SEO specialist. Here is one five-minute segment on making small tweaks to your site.

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There are some very basic tips in this video segment, such as keeping titles short, using keywords in the filenames in the actual URL, constructing meta tags and meta descriptions, and how SEO has changed over the past decade. "SEO at the end of the day is an art form. But you want to test it and give it a shot and see what happens when you put extra keywords there," he says. You can watch the rest of his series here at Grovo's site.

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Rambus, Nvidia Wisely Put Patent Dispute Behind Them

Scott M. Fulton, III — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 10:00:00 -0800

When a corporation stakes its reputation on the competitive value of its patent portfolio, it can't afford to watch that portfolio go down in flames. Although the novelty of most any patented technological concept perhaps warrants some re-examination, three patents assigned to memory maker Rambus were recently invalidated by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, in a dispute with graphics device maker Nvidia over whether the act of rendering functionality on a single chip is a novel idea or just an obvious improvement.

This morning, both companies announced they've settled all disputes over the remaining, still-valid Rambus patents, with Nvidia being granted a five-year license to the formerly disputed technology. But this Nvidia win will have implications throughout the industry, as the competitive value of nearly all technologies integrated into a single circuit, may have just decreased.

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The Nvidia argument that inevitably won the day pertained to the obviousness of changing the timing with which resources interconnect with one another in a system, in order to integrate those resources into a single chip. The most important hardware milestone over the last 20 years remains single-chip integration of multiple components. It has made most mobile technology possible, and the way this integration happens has itself been the subject of patents, including those assigned to Rambus.

But what had been considered, at the time of its arrival on the scene, an unquestionable innovation is, in the light of re-examination, becoming perceived as just an obvious improvement. Federal Circuit and Supreme Court decisions have raised the bar for "innovation," redefining it to not necessarily apply to whomever is the first to do something that all its competitors are trying to do.

One of the most valuable patent portfolios related to systems-on-a-chip (SoC) belongs to Qualcomm. In a brochure last November explaining its business model to prospective investors, Qualcomm touted its value proposition with these words: "Building on its success in advanced modems, Qualcomm has become a leader in microprocessor technology, and its ability to bring together modem, microprocessor, GPS, graphics and multimedia solutions into a highly integrated 'system-on-a-chip' product is unparalleled... Nearly two decades after introducing the concept of mobile data, feature phones utilizing Qualcomm's patented technologies are making mobile Internet browsing possible for large numbers of people worldwide."

The implication here is that Qualcomm has perfected a method to integrate multiple components into something as small as a feature phone - a method whose perfection is itself protected by patent. Qualcomm's Snapdragon SoC platform provides the foundation for many Android smartphones, especially from HTC.

The two biggest sources of competition for Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 platform this year are perceived to come from two sources: Intel, whose Atom Z2460 processor (PDF available here) is actually an SoC that incorporates its patented Graphics Media Accelerator and Image Signal Processor; and Apple, whose process for integrating components into its A4 and A5 SoC units - used in iPhones and iPads - has already come under fire from one-time Intel competitor Via Technologies - which some would say has nothing left to lose.

All these companies depend on investment; and investors depend upon the competitive value of their holdings' respective portfolios to establish the value of their investments. Should the novelty of the SoC approach continue to be proven negligible under re-examination, investors could pull out, stock values could decline, and actual innovations - such as the production of new smartphones that customers would happily stand in line to purchase - could be delayed.

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Study: PDF May Be Creating More Paperwork Than It Saves

Scott M. Fulton, III — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:30:00 -0800

In 2008, a UK-based Adobe Acrobat engineer remarked, "I believe in striving to minimize the use of paper, but I do believe that we will probably never reach a position where paper is eliminated from our workplaces." This morning, his predictions were clearly confirmed by a study published by the information professionals organization AIIM.

The study shows that while the exchange of PDF files as e-mail attachments has reduced the volume of paperwork traded between IT professionals, that reduction is not only minimal, but quite possibly made up for. Over three-quarters of IT professionals surveyed say one of the first things they do with a PDF-based invoice... is print it out.

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And after those 77% of AIIM's 395 respondents print out their invoices, some 16% then scan them right back into the system for use as PDF attachments... some 77% of whose recipients print them right back out again.

Of the 358 respondents who provided detail for AIIM's study, entitled "The Paper Free Office: Dream or Reality?" some 10% said they actually print out their PDF invoices multiple times. And 10% say they print out at least one copy for archival purposes.

"Although many of the larger companies are pressing to have all-electronic billing and payment systems, we are still a long way from this ideal," the study reads. "Around a quarter or respondents are able to feed PDF invoices and fax images directly into a capture and/or workflow system. Another fairly common paper-intensive practice with faxes, especially with contracts and application forms, is to print the fax, sign it, and feed it back into the scanner or fax machine."

Ironically, some 45% of the documents being printed on paper originated, respondents said, not from scanned paper to begin with but from a word processor.

AIIM's respondents tended to fall into two groups: those whose companies do not scan their paper-based forms (including invoices) prior to their being processed, and those who do. Both groups were asked to list all the costs involved in the handling process, including labor. For the former, the average cost for processing each paper form prior to mailing it was $3.63 per form. For those who do scan, the cost falls to $2.83 per form.

So companies look at the 80¢ they're saving per form, and conclude they have the right to proclaim themselves "green." As AIIM noted, these businesses are failing to recognize that their business processes continue to revolve around paper. One astounding finding is that almost 30% of respondents scan their mail upon arrival, ostensibly for archival purposes, but many of them with the intent of printing out the scans since businesses tend to believe paper storage to be more permanent than electronic.

The study makes this... fairly obvious suggestion: "Keying the data at source into a Web form or a mobile device, rather than filling out a paper form, will save all of these costs."

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PR for Developers 101: How to Bootstrap Project Coverage

Joe Brockmeier — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:00:00 -0800

One of the things that I'm often asked by developers at conferences is "how do I get coverage for my project?" I had that conversation with several people at Monktoberfest, and thought it might make for a good talk at Monki Gras.

Specifically, the talk was for individual developers, small groups working on open source projects or startups (to a point). It's not meant for people looking to grab press coverage for a business, but for developers largely interested in finding more users and developers for their project.

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Why?

Why do I care specifically about developers? First, It's far more enjoyable. All other things being equal, if I have to choose between talking to a PR-trained executive or a developer, I'll choose a developer every time. There are few things less interesting than listening to someone reciting the talking points they've gone over with 10 other reporters while they tap-dance around anything that might be perceived as even slightly negative. Developers will usually be pretty blunt about the limitations of projects and the roadmaps for their projects, because they have little interest in being opaque.

Many developers are working on interesting projects that deserve attention, but don't have the resources to hire a PR person to get the word out. The truth is, they don't really need a PR person to get the word out – and the best PR person in the world won't do much good if the project isn't fantastic anyway.

The other reason to work directly with developers? Businesses already have a PR machine in place to see to their interests. I get plenty of pitches from companies, but not enough from developers. Some corporate pitches are interesting, and I jump on those. Most aren't even in my coverage area, but that doesn't stop folks from carpet-bombing me with emails.

Do Wonderful Things

The best way to get coverage? Do something really good. Yeah, easier said than done. But if you want to snag interest from the press (or anybody else), you have to be doing something that's really good.

Case in point, Jenkins. As I mentioned in the Monki Gras wrap-up, Kohsuke Kawaguchi started the project as a one-man show. It grew slowly but steadily. Why? Because developers seem to find Jenkins absolutely wonderful. I've been hearing about Jenkins for years from developers that were really excited about what they could do with it.

Let's Go

The first thing that developers need to do is decide who their audience is and then figure out the publications that are best suited for their project. This should be pretty obvious, but I've run into plenty of projects that are not entirely clear on their target audience. When I was working with Novell on openSUSE, for instance, they were not at all sure who the target audience was or should be for openSUSE.

Once you've figured out the target audience and publications, make a short list of the writers who are on your beat. This might just be the guys over at the High Scalability blog (one of my favorites), or it might be a list of 10 folks who cover Linux and FOSS regularly.

Bootstrapping coverage

View more presentations from Joe Brockmeier

Take some time and email the folks who you'd like to work with. Just introduce yourself, and give a brief intro of what your project is/does and why it's a fit for their beat if it's not obvious. Brief is key because most anyone working in IT in any capacity is going to be buried in email. This is especially true for press, because we get a ridiculous number of pitches every day. Note, if you don't hear back right away, don't be discouraged or offended. See above, re.: ridiculous amount of email.

But, if possible, establish a relationship with the press that address your audience before you have an announcement. This makes it much more likely that when you do have an announcement you'll be able to get attention. It's also more likely that your project will be mentioned in other stories where it might be relevant.

Web Site

Even if you reach out to some of the press, other folks might pick up on your project as well. Many project sites have little or no information. Make life a bit easier for press, and help ensure that stories about your project will be as accurate as possible. Keep the site up to date with releases, screenshots, prominent developers, licensing, and so on.

This is good for more than press, of course. It's good for users and prospective developers to learn about a project and decide if they want to get involved.

Announcements

When you have something that you think is newsworthy, send an email a few days (I'd recommend at least three) before your announcement. You do not need a formal press release. A simple email that states what's happening, why you think it's important, and includes relevant details is plenty.

The audience at Monki Gras, day two

Provide a contact who's ready to hop on the phone or at least answer questions via email.

If you don't want coverage until a certain date, you can ask reporters to honor an embargo. Some publications and reporters are better than others at this, so if you really don't want something published before a specific time, be very specific about embargoes and which reporters you work with. Also? Be sure to specify time zones if you do set embargo dates.

Once you do get coverage, it's a good idea to follow up with the folks that write about your project. It helps to know that the people you're writing about actually read the coverage. I also recommend spreading the word by sharing the coverage on social media, your project's site, etc.

If you notice some bugs in the story, do feel free to point them out politely. Everybody makes mistakes (do you write bug-free code?), and the press are no exception.

Everything is PR

If you're working on an open source project, blogging about your project, chatting on social media or talking at a conference, you're doing PR. Whether you like it or not, everything you do in public might wind up in a story.

And when I say everything, I do mean everything. It could be something as obvious as a post to the project, or a comment in a bug tracker or a commit message. Never say anything you wouldn't want to see quoted the New York Times or on the front page of Hacker News.

Become the Media

Speaking of Hacker News, it's not necessary to wait for someone else to write about your project. A link on the front page of Hacker News can net you quite a lot of attention without ever being featured in the press.

As I mentioned at Monki Gras, though, a single burst of attention isn't sufficient. For best results, you want sustained coverage. That means links on Hacker News, being mentioned regularly in "official" tech press and keeping contact with your audience directly.

It takes very little effort to set up a blog and post updates about your project. This is particularly useful for project updates that might not be worth a full story here on ReadWriteWeb, but will still be interesting to users and developers involved with your project. Speaking at FOSDEM, for example? That's nice, but so are hundreds of others. It's not usually newsworthy unless Steve Ballmer does a keynote at FOSDEM. (He might find a less than receptive audience, though...) But your users and potential developers that live near Belgium or plan on attending the show would care.

Have questions? Drop a note in the comments, shoot me an email or give me a shout on Twitter. I'm always thrilled to hear from developers doing interesting things.

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The Online Ad Fails at the Super Bowl

David Strom — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:31:00 -0800

While most of us know the results of yesterday's Big Game, the results of the online ad campaigns from the dozens of companies spending multiple millions are less clear. Fortunately, monitoring firm Yottaa is here to lead the way and let us know who scored and who missed serving up online content to complement their TV spots.

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The company monitoring 46 different vendors' websites yesterday and found three big losers:

The Coke Polar Bears Facebook page and main website was unavailable in five languages, as you can see in the screen capture below:
Act of Valor had a very impressive ad, but their website was less so. According to Yottaa's monitoring, it seemed every time the spot ran the site crashed, with more than six outages of five minutes each. The site was also five times slower yesterday during game time.
Acura cars had problems too. "The launch of their new performance car was met with poor performance from their website." Their home page was fine, but the call to action pages were saturated with traffic on Sunday.

Cars.com, TaxACT.com, GoDaddy.com and History.com all fared really well during the Super Bowl, according to Bob Buffone, writing on Yottaa's blog. He emphasizes that live stress testing is critical at this big event-driven moments, and instrumenting what is going on during the event is essential if the sites are going to meet the anticipated demand.

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What You Missed at Monki Gras

Joe Brockmeier — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:02:00 -0800

If you didn't make it to London for Monki Gras, the follow on conference to Monktoberfest, you missed out on quite a lot of great content and beer.

The conference is organized by RedMonk, an unusual analyst firm. Their conferences, reflecting the analysts at RedMonk, are unusual as well. The Portland, Maine event was primarily organized by RedMonk co-founder Stephen O'Grady, who resides in Maine. This time around, the event was primarily organized by RedMonk co-founder James Governor.

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Conference as a Joke

Some industry events have a very serious air about them. Things like VMworld or the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC) have a very button-down feel about them, and tend to be highly skewed towards sponsor-driven content. Read: sponsors get speaking slots, and it shows. Many of the talks are little more than extended commercials, and tend to be about as interesting and informative as reading sales brochures.

James Governor paces the stage at Monki Gras

The RedMonk conferences, on the other hand, started as a joke. When the RedMonk folks joked about combining a beer and developer conference, though, they found that people weren't laughing. They were asking "when," "where" and "how much"?

The price for a two-day conference, which included catered lunch and dinner with a generous and interesting selection of beer? The tickets ranged from £99 to £140, depending on when you purchased the tickets. (Disclaimer: As a speaker, I did not pay for a ticket for the event. I did pay my own travel.)

Diversity and Expanded Agenda

Some of the speaking line-up was carried over from Monktoberfest, which is OK since few of the attendees who attended Monktoberfest were likely to attend Monki Gras. Matt LeMay reprised his talk on "kitteh vs. chikin", Greg Avola of Untappd was back (though with a different talk) and Donnie Berkholz (now a RedMonk analyst) gave his "Assholes are Ruining Your Project" talk.

But there quite a few new talks as well, especially since the agenda was expanded to two days at popular demand. I particularly enjoyed the CTO vs. vice-president of engineering talk between Jason Hoffman and Bryan Cantrill of Joyent. It was not your typical, dry and dull conference fare.

Which brings me to an important point. The RedMonk conferences are a bit more rowdy than other conferences. Nobody had a "perform like a pr0n star" moment, and none of the talks were offensive at all. However, speakers did drop some f-bombs and were generally much more casual than other shows.

One of the things I dinged Monktoberfest on was the lack of diversity. The speaking line up had no women, and there were few women in attendance as well. I spoke to Governor and O'Grady about the line-up and their response was that they were aware of the problem, but had invited a few women to speak but they were not available on the date for Monktoberfest. They did assure me that they'd make an effort to have a diverse line-up for the next event, and were good at their word.

Laura Merling of Alcatel-Lucent, UX guru Leisa Reichelt, and Bocoup's Irene Ros were all on the agenda. Was it equal time? Not quite, with two days of talks Monki Gras had a lot of speakers and most were men. However, it's notoriously difficult to recruit women to speak at tech conferences. I spotted a lot more women in attendance at Monki Gras, as well, so I think that the organizers are doing what they can to provide a solid set of talks with a diverse set of speakers.

Talk Highlights

Kohsuke Kawaguchi of CloudBees had a short slot to talk about building a community around an open source project, based on his experience with Jenkins. Stop me if you've heard this before: A lone developer starts working on something as a hobby, and ultimately creates a project that's used by a huge community. Jenkins may not be quite as ubiquitous as Linux, but for a project that started as a one-man show in 2004, it's grown impressively.

How do you get contributors to your FOSS project? Kawaguchi suggests that developers "think about the conversion funnel." Usually reserved for marketers and sales folks, Kawaguchi reminded the audience that "every developer starts as a visitor." Visitors have to be able to find the resources they need to become users, before they become developers.

Kawaguchi also asks developers to make sure their code is modularized. It's easier for people to hack small pieces than one big blob. Some developers may only care about a small part of a project. And "it's good software engineering anyway." The division of labor is greater than collaboration, says Kawaguchi.

The PhoneGap talk by Andre Charland and Dave Johnson was also interesting. Charland and Johnson went through the history of PhoneGap through its purchase by Adobe. The lesson they learned around PhoneGap? You don't need sales people, you don't need marketing. If you have a really strong FOSS project like PhoneGap "people just start calling you."

If you remember the Apache considered harmful post and O'Grady's "you won't get fired for using Apache" post, then Mike Milinkovich of Eclipse had a talk that was a must-see. Not surprisingly, Milinkovich wasn't in agreement with the anti-foundational messaging in the Apache post, or O'Grady's somewhat weak defense of foundations. He made a pretty strong case for foundations as a vendor neutral place for development that provides governance, IP management, project lifecycles, community oversight and norms, etc. Unfortunately, due to the nature of Monki Gras, a lot of talks were very short. This is good in that it's hard to have a terribly boring talk in 20 minutes. It's bad, though, when someone like Milinkovich probably could have gone longer and had more interesting things to say. All good things come to an end, though.

Day two at Monki Gras

After day one's programming came to an end, the attendees were treated to a catered dinner and a beer tasting contest led by beer expert Melissa Cole. Each table was designated a "team captain" and attendees were taught a bit about beer and then led through a practice round of tasting and trying to identify beers.

Obviously the Monki Gras attendees were enthusiastic about beer, but are they knowledgeable? Well, certainly moreso now than before. I think we found that a lot of beer fans are experts on what they like, but not necessarily at identifying types of beers.

The selection of beers during dinner was interesting, and featured six British and three Belgian beers. This includes treats like Thornbridge Jaipur, Freedom Pilsner, Oakham JHB and Trappistes Rochefort 8. Note that attendees were served amounts appropriate to tasting during dinner, not nine full pints of beer. After dinner, attendees may have consumed that or more, as the beer was flowing pretty freely and there was apparently an after-party that went until past 4 a.m. In the interests of being prepared and awake for my talk the following day, I didn't make it to that one.

Day two featured a slightly smaller crowd, slightly the worse for wear, at a different venue across town.

Day two's content was just as strong as day one. In fact, I think that Why Most UX is Shite by Reichelt was probably my favorite talk. Why does most UX suck? According to Reichelt:

Leisa Reichelt at Monki Gras

Organizations don't make decisions. Users have to make them instead. (Too much fear in deciding.)
You think your opinion counts. Reichelt makes the point that all too often designers are influenced too strongly by the people they work closely with, instead of the people they're designing for. (But don't interact with as often.)
You don't measure it. Reichelt says that "companies don't have good acquisition metrics or retention metrics or engagement metrics, let alone cohort analysis." The things they track are not ideal for actually making good products.
You don't really care. Companies talk a good game, but they're not designed around user experience.
UI is a symptom of organizational culture. "All of these things are hard and most of them start much higher up in the organization than the average UX designer ever gets to. Good UX is cultural. If you want to hire a freelancer to 'do UX' , it's like putting a plaster on gangrenous leg."

Worth the Trip?

Following the shorter agenda on the second day, the attendees adjourned to the bar next to the venue to continue talking and trying beers. It's a testament to the strength of the conference that so many folks hung around to talk to one another afterwards.

As I've said before, the most significant track for any event is the "hallway track," and the RedMonk team have generated a really strong one. Software developers and people that need to work well with developers should seriously consider attending the next event, if it's feasible. Monki Gras is easily one of the best events I've been to for actually connecting with other folks and learning about what's going on in the rest of the industry. Cap that off with good beer and food, and what else could you want from a conference?

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A Ludicrous Value Proposition, If Not From Facebook

Scott M. Fulton, III — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:30:00 -0800

Some weeks ago, I happened to drive by an evangelistic church whose outdoor marquis speaks about as well of the present times as any I've come across. "And there followed hail and fire mixed with blood," it read, "and they were cast upon the Earth. Like us on Facebook!"

The initial public offering of Facebook stock, now likely to come in May, is as much a test of faith as any corporation has ever given its prospective shareholders. To Facebook's credit, its prospectus, as given in its Form S-1 filing yesterday, makes its plea completely and carefully. Many companies provide a perfunctory paragraph to investors under the "Risk Factors" heading. Facebook's entry reads like a self-indictment.

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Most of its money is made from a source that is unreliable, with no guarantee of long-term viability. That's not my second-rate financial analysis of the matter; that's Facebook's own explanation. From Facebook's Form S-1:

The substantial majority of our revenue is currently generated from third parties advertising on Facebook. In 2009, 2010, and 2011, advertising accounted for 98%, 95%, and 85%, respectively, of our revenue. As is common in the industry, our advertisers typically do not have long-term advertising commitments with us. Many of our advertisers spend only a relatively small portion of their overall advertising budget with us. In addition, advertisers may view some of our products, such as sponsored stories and ads with social context, as experimental and unproven. Advertisers will not continue to do business with us, or they will reduce the prices they are willing to pay to advertise with us, if we do not deliver ads and other commercial content in an effective manner, or if they do not believe that their investment in advertising with us will generate a competitive return relative to other alternatives.

READ ALSO: Facebook's Biggest Risks Explained by Dan Rowinski

Sure, it garners some 845 million active users per month. (That's no longer someone else's marketing estimate, or some figures from a marketing brochure, but a disclosure that would carry penalties if it were false.) But the reason they're there is to have fun with each other, which is an activity that unto itself does not generate revenue. What does generate revenue, and certainly more of it now than before, is advertising. But historically, the value of that advertising business was fleeting, only sending the company into the black with $229 million of net income in 2009.

Only in April 2010 - not even two years ago, when Facebook's user base reached a mere 431 million monthly users - did it actually engineer some way of galvanizing and potentially harvesting its traffic: the Like button. Whereas most consumer products manufacturers since the dawn of history have had only limited success with their own brand-centric, customer outreach programs, along comes a unified, one-button approach to associating one's identity with a product that consumers would actually want to use. Potential future shareholders who already felt Facebook's value proposition was overdue, got their answer in spades. "Like" is perhaps one of the most successful customer outreach initiatives in all of global corporate history, as important a creation to the evolution of technology as the iPhone.

"Like" is perhaps one of the most successful customer outreach initiatives in all of global corporate history, as important a creation to the evolution of technology as the iPhone.

But its milestone is not nearly as well founded in terra firma. Sure, "Like" has created the mother lode of all consumer intelligence, a nerve center for the personal interests of more people than live in most countries. How to monetize that creation remains a topic with a question mark at the end. Advertising is the most obvious route. Yet as Facebook's own S-1 points out in the most unambiguous language one would ever hope to see from a public corporation, it's stuck. Most of its users are moving to a mobile platform, one whose usage model is not conducive to advertising.

We had more than 425 million MAUs [monthly active users] who used Facebook mobile products in December 2011. We anticipate that the rate of growth in mobile users will continue to exceed the growth rate of our overall MAUs for the foreseeable future, in part due to our focus on developing mobile products to encourage mobile usage of Facebook. Although the substantial majority of our mobile users also access and engage with Facebook on personal computers where we display advertising, our users could decide to increasingly access our products primarily through mobile devices. We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven. Accordingly, if users continue to increasingly access Facebook mobile products as a substitute for access through personal computers, and if we are unable to successfully implement monetization strategies for our mobile users, our revenue and financial results may be negatively affected."

The only quality this explanation lacks is succinctness; it drips with sincerity. Let's put it like this: The source of 85% of this company's wealth is in danger of virtual extinction in the next few years: personal computer-based browsing. Sure, you may own a PC in 2014, but there's a good chance it'll run Windows 8. And assuming there's a Facebook "Metro-style" app for Win8 (a safe bet), who will want to use Internet Explorer or Firefox? Users will prefer one usage model for all platforms, and will probably demand the mobile-style model because it's the easiest to learn, and because it's portable from device to device.

While gaming makes up most of the other 15% of the company's revenue, an incredible four-fifths of that chunk comes from one source alone: Zynga, whose Farmville game has addicted tens of millions of virtual farmers in the pursuit of non-existent vegetables and livestock.

So a lot of what sustains this company is image. Again, I'm only mildly rephrasing what the S-1 literally says. The belief that Facebook is a beneficial and productive platform is largely in the public mind. And what stays in the public mind depends, to a surprisingly large extent, upon me. No, not you, me. As in, the person writing articles about Facebook for dozens of you to read.

We have in the past experienced, and we expect that in the future we will continue to experience, media, legislative, or regulatory scrutiny of our decisions regarding user privacy or other issues, which may adversely affect our reputation and brand... Maintaining and enhancing our brand may require us to make substantial investments and these investments may not be successful. If we fail to successfully promote and maintain the Facebook brand or if we incur excessive expenses in this effort, our business and financial results may be adversely affected.

So do invest in us, if you would, please. We thank you for your attention. This is how the prospectus might have ended, if it weren't for one obvious fact: This is Facebook we're talking about. While it could have filed for an IPO three or four years ago, back when its business model was not so much cloudy as non-existent, it prudently waited. What Facebook has now are the ingredients for something huge. It has the talent, it has the technology, and it certainly has the audience.

But, to borrow a term from football, it must convert. The scale of this conversion must be enormous, otherwise the tower of cards, as Facebook describes itself, will fall. What form could this conversion take? Imagine a mobile platform where not only is one's entire social activity portable, in the cloud, moving from device to device - from smartphone to tablet to PC to TV - but one's functionality as well. Think of Facebook encapsulating everything that people do with computing or, as Salesforce's CEO puts it, Facebook eating the Web. It is not outside the realm of feasibility.

It is indeed possible to believe. All you need are about $5 billion in fresh investor capital, and a miracle straight out of Revelations.

Photo credit: Shutterstock Images

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[Case Study] Lessons in High Performance Computing with Open Source

Erik Segur — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 12:00:00 -0800

Providing adequate software and tools for researchers has always been of great importance to organizations, but has often come at a great cost. In an era of constantly evolving technology and rapidly dwindling budgets, my IT team has had to work with a large pool of researchers to provide cost-effective solutions that meet the ever-growing demand for innovation and computing power.

I am an Information Technologist for the Department of Statistics and Probability at Michigan State University. The Department is home to award-winning faculty with a wide variety of expertise in fundamental and interdisciplinary research, and over 100 graduate students from all over the world. Keeping the faculty and students ahead of their research is a constantly evolving challenge for my team and I.

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Evolution of Statistical Software

Erik Segur is an Information Technologist for the Department of Statistics and Probability at Michigan State University.

For many years, most statistical analysis in our department was done in Matlab, S-Plus, SPSS or SAS. Even with a Higher Educational discount, most of the software required yearly renewal fees that quickly devoured our IT budget. Things started to change when the R language, which was first developed in 1993, began to gain traction in statistics communities in the early 2000s. R is an open source programming language and software environment that is used for statistical computing and data analysis. Several years ago, we began the transition at Michigan State to R; today, it is used for the majority of the research in the department--as well as being a central focus of our statistics curriculum. By switching to the free, open source version of R, our department has been able to cut thousands of dollars each year in software costs and have focused more on fueling and expanding research.

Lesson #1: The Shortcomings of Open Source

As more people began to use R and the analysis became increasingly complex, researchers began to face a large problem: time. Research was taking several months to complete in terms of processing jobs. Often, there is a need to run the calculations several times to ensure accuracy; waiting three months for one to complete was simply not feasible. It was taking R this long to process the jobs because the iterations were computed in serial, one right after another, using only one processor core at a time.

Bo Cowgill from Google once said "The best thing about R is that it was developed by statisticians. The worst thing about R ...is that it was developed by statisticians."

Until the spring of 2010, R was a 32-bit application and could only access a limited amount of memory. The maximum amount of memory that could be accessed by R was only 3GB. When dealing with large datasets researchers were quickly running out of memory as well as discovering they needed a solution to deal with large data efficiently.

Bo Cowgill from Google once said "The best thing about R is that it was developed by statisticians. The worst thing about R ...is that it was developed by statisticians." Even though R was--and still is--constantly evolving, the department needed a solution that could keep up with hardware technology and compute calculations in an efficient, scalable manner.

Lesson #2: Find Commercial Enhancements for Open Source

Our search for a more effective version of R ultimately brought us to a product called Revolution R Enterprise by Revolution Analytics, which provides commercial support and software for open source R. It takes advantage of multiple processor cores by using optimized assembly code and efficient multi-threaded algorithms that use all of the processor cores simultaneously. Although this addressed a lot of the issues of open source R, professors were only using Revolution R on their desktops. The next question was, how we could combine the power of our servers to dramatically decrease our computation times?

Lesson #3: Expanding to Infinity and Beyond

Open Source R is a memory-bound language. This means that all of the data, matrices, lists etc. need to be stored in memory. Issues quickly arose when data sets became several gigabytes large and were too big to fit into memory. This required implementing parallel external memory algorithms and data structures to handle the data. These challenges were tackled by Revolution Analytics as they developed the R language for a High Performance Computing (HPC) environment.

In 2010, Revolution Analytics offered Revolution R Enterprise free for academic users and shifted the focus of their enterprise software to big data, large scale multiprocessor computing and multi-core functionality. Revolution Analytics was going to tackle everything the department needed. The evolution was complete: open source R went from an inefficient single core program to a HPC environment.

Once the department could schedule R jobs in an HPC environment, the demand began to drastically increase. The HPC cluster is now scheduling more than four times the amount of jobs that were scheduled in previous semesters, from 200 jobs over a year ago to over 800 jobs this past semester. Jobs that were taking over three months to complete on open source R were completed in less than a few days with Revolution R. Computational jobs are now run multiple times with significantly higher levels of accuracy than ever before.

Conclusion

There are often great pieces of software created through open source, but they generally lack key features needed for an enterprise environment. Combined with commercial backing and expertise, these projects can be further developed and expanded to meet the needs of large-scale enterprise environments. IT departments can provide enhanced solutions to their users that adapt to the expanding world of cloud and High Performance Computing environments--all while minimizing the impact on a shrinking budget.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Anti-Patterns for Technical Leaders

Joe Brockmeier — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 06:01:00 -0800

What's the difference between a CTO and a vice-president of engineering (VPoE)? According to Jason Hoffman and Bryan Cantrill of Joyent, the lines are blurry. At the Monki Gras conference in London on February 1st, Hoffman (CTO) and Cantrill (VPoE), shared the stage and talked about the differences in their roles.

In keeping with the generally boisterous nature of Monki Gras, the conversation with Hoffman and Cantrill was a bit more bare-knuckle than your average conference presentation. Perhaps it's a result of their joint suffering under Sun Microsystems' "Somali warlord style of management" (as Hoffman put it).

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Hoffman and Cantrill's session was sort of like watching a drive-time radio program. They'd frequently speak over the other, so rather than attempting to attribute quotes to one of the other and getting it wrong, I've just left the quotes unattributed.

Difference Between CTOs and VPoEs

Particularly for startups, it can be difficult to tell when to bring on a VPoE and how the job should differ from the CTO role. When a company is small, one person can do the job. As the roles split, you have to decide what each person is going to do.

One thing to note is that one the VPoE isn't necessarily subservient to the CTO (or vice-versa). The pair needs to work together. Most likely the CTO will be the technical co-founder of the company, and will establish the "vision and culture" of the company. The CTO also needs to be "as technical as required to validate the vision and culture" for the company.

The CTO, say Hoffman and Cantrill, is outward facing and should be extroverted enough to enjoy traveling and meeting customers. In general, the CTO will also be the one explaining the company vision to press and the rest of the world. The VPoE, on the other hand, should be an engineer that the team feels comfortable talking to and looking to for advice. They'll be responsible for building the team and take responsibility for distilling the company vision into products and making sure they ship.

Anti-Patterns for CTOs and VPoEs

Having suffered under the yoke of Sun management, Cantrill and Hoffman had a lot to say on the wrong way to be a CTO or VPoE. The broad strokes? CTOs fail when they think they're "engineers and not communicators." VPoEs fail when they think "they are managers of people, not creators of useful things."

It's hard, they say, to proscribe the exact way to do the jobs. However, they have several "anti-patterns" for the roles that represent "common failure modes."

The Critic – This CTO anti-pattern is always explaining why things won't work.
The Process Queen – "Is there a ticket? We can't have this conversation without a ticket." Process can be good, but too much is deadly. As they say "funny story, process doesn't write software."
The Control Freak – Pretty self-explanatory. Micro-managing people is just no way to run a business.
The "No-Op" – Non-technical middle management types that have lots of ideas about what others should be building. They don't understand what they're doing "and can be toxic."
The Xenophobe – You can't be a CTO and not visit customers. If you're not eager to visit customers on their turf, you're probably not CTO material.
The Upward Manager – "When you manage up, you're disconnected from reality." Here Cantrill reminded the audience to pick two of the following: schedule, quality, features. You can't have all three.
The Space Ranger – Some CTOs "lose track" or "lose their tethering" and "achieve escape velocity" when it comes to what they think the company can do. Hoffman and Cantrill suggested Bill Joy as an example of the space ranger.
The Nay Sayer – Sort of the opposite of the upward manager. Says no to almost every request. While the VPoE should be protecting engineers and keeping them focused, they need to be "optimistic enough to help out" without telling everyone no.

Most of this seems like common sense, but if you've worked for a company of any size you probably recognize some (if not all) of these management types. In fact, you might have a few more. Any anti-patterns that they missed?

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