Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Daniel Raskin, VP of Strategy at ForgeRock (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m not convinced about what you’re saying. The horizontal stuff is commodity, but the real differentiation of what the user experience can be for an automobile that is IoT-enabled is where the interesting opportunity is.

Daniel Raskin: It’s going to be companies like Toyota or others like that who are building those next generation platforms using the software platform of the future.

Sramana Mitra: You can say that but the automobile players suck at designing software and user experience.

Daniel Raskin: I can only judge from the experience of what I see at ForgeRock. There may be other conversations you have where you see that happening. We’re very engaged with the analysts on who the players are and who’s part of the conversation and who’re the thought leaders in terms of building out these use cases. It’s not coming from verticals. We’re spending a lot of time educating. They want the APIs to be built around their specific use cases. They don’t want to be responsible for building the stack itself. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Rich Kahn, CEO of eZanga (Part 1)

Click fraud in online advertising is a huge issue. This interview explore the subject in some depth.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to eZanga.

Rich Kahn: I’m CEO and co-founder of eZanga.com. We’ve been an online marketing firm for the past 12 years. I’ve actually been in the space for more than two decades. With eZanga.com, we’ve been focusing heavily on click traffic. We’re driving traffic to people’s websites. More recently, we’ve gotten into the call space as well. One of our key focus is making sure that traffic coming through our network is clean for our clients so they don’t have to deal with fraudulent traffic issues when buying traffic from us.

Sramana Mitra: Is there a lot of fraudulent traffic that comes in through these clicks?

Rich Kahn: The whole Internet, as a whole, has a lot of fraudulent traffic floating around including some of your best sources like Google and Yahoo!. They all have issued with fraudulent traffic for a number of reasons. We can get into some technical reasons later. Everybody is dealing with some level of fraud. Depending on the source that you read, it’s typically around a third of the traffic on the Internet. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Daniel Raskin, VP of Strategy at ForgeRock (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take those uses cases in automobile and transportation. Can you give us your perspective of what you’re observing in those industries when it comes to IoT adoption? What is happening in IoT adoption in the automobile industry? What is happening in the IoT adoption in the container business?

Daniel Raskin: There are two things that are happening. There’s a great article by Michael Porter in Harvard Business Review that talks about connected things. He does a really great job of talking about where we’re at. Where I see we’re at is the whole concept of creating the next generation software platform. We’re spending a lot of time with vendors like Intel that are trying to figure out how to construct the next generation stack for those enterprises to consume and implement. With the Toyotas of the world, what we’re seeing is they’re focused today on implementing basic IoT use cases. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: At the core, your innovation and what you’re doing with your company is around how the human brain learns. It’s not about mobile. It’s not about social. It’s not about sales. It’s really an innovation on how the human brain works. You’re applying it using mobile and social user interfaces on a specific business problem which is sales training and on-boarding.

Duncan Lennox: That’s absolutely correct. We talk about what we do as science-based and data-driven. That’s fundamentally our approach. It’s quite different from the classic approach to learning or education. You’re right that our technology and our methodology could be applied to anything. We’ve chosen to apply it in the area of sales but I think an important point is it’s true we don’t need mobile to do what we do. It’s also true that mobile turns out to be the perfect form factor to deliver our methodology. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Daniel Raskin, VP of Strategy at ForgeRock (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s actually do some use cases. You can pick what use cases you want to share. The first context you should settle is that why was the story pitched as an Internet of Things story.

Daniel Raskin: You look at all the big areas of growth in digital today. You have cloud, IoT, and Big Data. All those things are very hot topics that people are constantly talking about and the foundation for doing all three of them is identity. You can’t do Internet of Things (IoT) without being able to register a machine or device and associate that machine to a user to be able to authorize or revoke data from that device.

The traditional identity world was focused very much on web applications and how you manage that, but with the digital transformation, there’s a massive need and opportunity to use technology that transforms how people engage with the world. That’s been a core goal of ForgeRock. How do you take identity and how do you go through the whole lifecycle management of, not only humans, but devices and things as well? >>>

 Bootstrapping Using Services from North Carolina: Ateb CEO Frank Sheppard (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How fast were you able to course correct on that? I imagine that when you saw that things were not working out, you fired the CEO. When did that happen?

Frank Sheppard: Late 2003, I believe. We were probably short of bankruptcy, but like all good entrepreneurs, we were too stupid to do that. It took us probably 18 months to get fully back. By 2005, we were back to a very healthy and well-run company.

Sramana Mitra: The business went back to your original pharmacy solution?

Frank Sheppard: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What was the revenue level in 2005? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox (Part 3)

Duncan Lennox: Another classic case for us would be on-boarding. Like a lot of our technology companies, customers are very fast-growth companies. They’re bringing on board a lot of sales people all the time. They’re also acquiring companies. When they acquire a company, they get a new set of sales people with that as well. The issue is what we would call time to productivity. How quickly can you get those new sales people up to speed on your products, selling methodology, and sales tools so that they can get out on the field and be effective?

Typically, that’s a process that can take eight to nine months with traditional approaches. We’ve been able to do a certain amount of that material up front with Qstream, in perhaps two or three months. Then get you out into the field faster and use Qstream to drive your capability and effectiveness once you’re out in the field.

Sramana Mitra: Is your customer base enterprise customers largely? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of games are they playing when you talk about gamification. I think what you’re saying is the concept of games as a method of sales training, yes?

Duncan Lennox: I think it’s a lot more than that, but that’s certainly a key part. When you talk about gamification, it’s important to drill into it a little bit. Because there’s a lot of people talking about gamification, but they don’t really know what they’re talking about. It’s a marketing exercise because it’s a hot topic. When we talk about it, we mean using proven scientific techniques to engage people and get them to participate in your application. It’s not meant to be cutesy or novel. It’s not meant to be a trick. How do we make the process of engaging in our application fun and interesting for them to participate? If they then participate, with the science and the way our methodology works, we will get the long-term retention and behavior change. >>>