Hoopla Digital is based in Toledo, Ohio proving that you don't have to be in Silicon Valley to come up with great business ideas. Hoopla has pulled off a stunning achievement, it has managed to negotiate the right for local libraries to lend digital versions of Hollywood movies and music as if they were physical artifacts on their shelves -- and library members can view them on Hoopla's smart phone and tablet apps.

Here's my notes from a recent conversation with Hoopla founder Jeff Jankowski (above, showing off the smart phone and tablet apps):

- About $11 billion is spent on public libraries and their budgets, every year in the US. California spends about $12 per resident on public libraries, New York has the highest at $53. 

- Hoopla is financed by its parent company Midwest Tape, which was founded in 1989 to distribute cassettes and other forms of media to public libraries, complete with each library's labeling and index information printed and attached. Jankowski called it a light manufacturing operation.

When Jankowski joined it had $200,000 in annual revenues, he helped build revenues to $150 million and create relationships with nearly every public library in the US. This long and trusted relationship with public libraries is a big advantage for Hoopla Digital and why it has had a positive reception from librarians.

- How it works: Anyone with a library card and a local public library that has joined Hoopla, can borrow a digital movie, music album, or audio book. Typically, public libraries allow up to ten items to be borrowed per member. 

- There are no limits on how many people can borrow a specific title as is the case with the physical objects themselves: DVDs, CDs, etc. 

- Jankowski is proud of his agreements with studios and music publishers because of the limitless lending provision. Licenses for lending media to others have generally treated each digital version as if it were a physical object that has to be "returned" before anyone else can borrow it. Hoopla has managed to convince publishers that there is no sense in creating a false scarcity when it comes to meeting demand from people "borrowing" their titles. 

- The libraries are charged a fee of $1 to  $2.99 per movie or music album and can set limits so that their lending stays within their monthly budgets.

- Hoopla has signed up all the Hollywood studios except Sony. It's an impressive feat but the deals require minimum monthly payments so Hoopla is keen to roll out its services as quickly and as widely as possible. 

- The Hoopla web site and its mobile and tablet apps look great. They were developed using a team of about 13 developers located around the US and led from Toledo. 

- E-books are coming but the progress is slow. There are also plans to showcase local music and movie producers in each public library town.

- San Francisco public library offers Hoopla Digital to its members. There are more than 50,000 movies available. 

- Jankowski notes that public libraries are terrible at any form of publicity and that means Hoopla has to get the message out in each town and city. 

- I mentioned that it would be great to have the public library and its events and message board better represented on the Hoopla web site for each user, creating a tighter connection between the library service and its community.

Foremski's Take: It's a good idea and looks to be well executed so far. The apps are top class and well designed. It proves you don't need to be in Silicon Valley and you don't need VC money to launch an ambitious consumer digital media service.

Its biggest challenge is the national marketing effort required to promote the service because local public libraries are terrible at promotions of any kind. The monthly minimum royalty payments Hoopla has to make to Hollywood will quickly become a heavy burden if its marketing budget fails to rouse enough users. 

Hoopla is an example of how we are moving into a post technology world where the idea and its execution is what matters. The underlying technologies of the web and the connected mobile device have become near ubiquitous and powerfully simple to use -- what will we use them for? That's when tech stories become interesting again, and move beyond tech product stories. 

I recently met with Shawn Riegsecker, the CEO and founder of Centro, a large ad network and technology company based in Chicago. It's doing extremely well but there's been shockingly little coverage of the company -- even in Chicago. 

Centro has been profitable for more than a decade and has revenues of about $300 million a year, with more than 500 staff. Riegsecker is very driven to help reverse the shrinking fortunes of the media industry, and journalism in particular,  by helping publishers rebuild revenues.

The successful new media business model is what I call a "Heinz" business model - 57 varieties of revenue.  Not every media company needs 57 but each company has to develop and manage many different revenue streams to prosper. Centro has several products to help media companies add new revenue streams and improve existing ones. 

Riegsecker's background as a journalist, and his belief that the "Fourth Estate" is essential to a healthy society, underpins much of his company's vision and strategy.

It's rare to meet a CEO who understands both businesses -- media and advertising -- and sees the connection between the two, and that each is dependent on the good health of the other, which is not true today: both industries are in trouble.

Riegsecker has also crafted an interesting corporate culture. Centro is founded on the idea that the happiness of its employees is the best metric of a successful company.

It has an inspiring manifesto. ("The future of our lives, our community, and our country lie in our hands, and we have the ability and responsibility to change them for the better.")

And it has been named the best place to work in Chicago four years in a row by Crain's - no company has ever won this accolade even two years in a row.

Centro is a company that richly deserves far more recognition than it's had so far. 

Here are some notes from our conversation:

- Centro was founded in 2001 and has been profitable for more than ten years. Riegsecker has avoided taking VC investments too early and waited until late 2010 before raising a $22.5 million Series A round from San Francisco based VC firm FTV Capital, a small amount compared with Silicon Valley ad tech startups. The capital was used to expand its salesforce, and add to its 18 offices, which work with advertising agencies and brands.

- Centro's key distinction is that it doesn't just work with advertisers, it can see very clearly that ads work best when they are paired with high quality, trusted media. It has created an invitation-only network of more than 1900 media companies, all of which must employ journalists and other media professionals -- rather than employing bots to scrape and steal content and then buying low-end traffic to scam ad revenues. 

[Rival advertising networks are riddled with such scraper "media" sites, netting as much as  $18 billion a year.  I'm shocked that media companies aren't up in arms and raging about these massive losses. It demonstrates how little they understand the economics of their digital business.]

- Auditors Trust Metrics gave Centro's ad network a quality rating of 93% compared with the industry benchmark of just 22% -- it means that 4 out of five sites can't be trusted. I asked why do media buyers put up with such low quality ad networks? He said it's very cheap and there's a huge inventory. [Media buyers seem more interested in high numbers rather than real conversions.]

- Riegsecker is betting that brands will soon get smarter about their media buys and Centro's Brand  Exchange publisher network is in the right place at the right time to earn premium advertising rates, which flow back to the publishers, who use the money to create more quality content. [It's a virtuous cycle that constantly creates content and which brands can use for their ad campaigns -- instead of having to learn how to be their own media companies and feed the beast with daily content.]

- Centro closely monitors advertisers so that they can't use cookies to collect valuable data from publishers and then resell it. He says that brands and publishers are often unaware that third parties are using ad networks to collect valuable data on their customers and visitors, and are selling it to competitors.

- Publishers aren't profiting from their own visitor data, which is why Centro created a data exchange, a data market that provides a new revenue stream for media companies.

 - Riegsecker is not a fan of native advertising because it can erode reader trust however, Centro's technology supports native advertising media buys. 

- Riegsecker says the best outcome for brands is when they can map their own 1st party data with 1st party data from the publisher instead of using 3rd parties. Third party cookies are a blunt instrument. 

- He says most ad networks take 60% or more to serve ads, which is too much money for too little value. Centro takes less than 20% and offers publishers higher ad rates, at least twice as much as Google's (troubled) AdSense. 

- Coming up next from Centro is a universal media buying dashboard integrating all types of  advertising formats such as video, mobile, etc., It will work with all ad networks. It will also be possible to buy directly from media companies, which will cut out middlemen and return more money to publishers.

- Riegsecker believes that publishers will become smarter over the next few years  and plug some of the revenue losses that companies such as Google and Facebook have managed to exploit because of their broader geographical reach.

- He is hopeful for the future of journalism but says that the next two to three years will be tough but eventually publishers will figure out a sustainable business model.

- Riegsecker doesn't see much value in all the data collection on consumers, he says he hasn't been able to find a single good case study where it can be shown that it has helped brands sell more products. [I agree and I've written about this issue, that despite all the data collected -- brands haven't become any better at selling products, tracking isn't selling.]

- Centro will likely seek an IPO within the coming year. It will use the capital to make acquisitions. 

- Being headquartered in Chicago is an advantage in terms of finding talented people without having to pay Silicon Valley wages.

- Its unique company culture has  fostered a very loyal workforce. Centro has an incredibly attrition rate of just 4%.

- Riegsecker is very concerned about the continuing loss of journalists. He believes that a healthy society needs a healthy fourth estate and that his company's success will revive journalism by improving advertising revenues and enable media companies to build new lines of business.  

Foremski's Take: I'm impressed with Riegsecker and his company. Because of his background as a newspaper journalist he understands the problems media companies are facing but he also understands the challenges brands have in finding and engaging with a real audience. 

Like Riegsecker, I believe brands will become smarter, and they will rediscover the unique value that independent media companies provide. [Please see: Content Marketing Problems Will Lead To A Revived Media Industry]

New tools and better monitoring will enable brands to recognize the value of Centro's carefully vetted publisher network. Quality will always trump quantity, which is why publishers should be careful about diluting their editorial standards and chasing pageviews. 

Riegsecker is motivated by civic responsibilities and the opportunity to make a big difference in the world. The leadership of rival ad tech companies is narrow in vision and mundane in ambition.

The choice to bootstrap growth for nearly ten years must have required tremendous discipline but it was very smart move. It's allowed Centro to craft a long term competitive strategy without investor interference - VC money is rarely "smart" money. [The Majority Of VCs Harm Startups Says Leading Silicon Valley VC]

To revive the fortunes of the media industry will require a larger vision than any individual media company can muster.  Which is why media projects funded by billionaires, such as Pierre Omidyar's First Look Media, and Jeff Bezos's Washington Post, cannot change the business of journalism. It requires a systemic analysis and a solution that can scale the entire economy of media and advertising.

Centro's opportunity is to become the largest provider of media technologies and services for media companies and brands. Its media technologies could become core infrastructure for a radical new media and advertising platform.

This is exactly what's needed to take on Google, Facebook, and other tech-enabled Silicon Valley media companies, who rely on free content, and employ bots rather than journalists.

There's an opportunity beyond serving ads. Centro publishes ads but why not media content, too? Why should newspapers and other publishers have to develop and maintain their own IT? 

Centro's long term opportunity is in building a sophisticated publishing platform for all types of media and not just advertising. This platform could then support developers creating new types of media and advertising applications (I have several ideas).

And since every company is a media company -- there are sales to be made into the lucrative enterprise software sector. Corporations have large IT budgets and they will need a lot of media technologies over the coming decade.  

Centro seems to have the right strategy,  the right leadership, and the time is right. I rarely come across companies that tick so many boxes and are this impressive. [Please see: Delphix.]

- - -

More info:  

Shawn Riegsecker | Centro

Shawn is a member of the YPO, a founding board member of The Centrist Party, a new political party for moderate Americans, and sits on the advisory board for TechWeek. He is also on the selection committee for 1871, a community of Chicago-based digital start-ups, and an angel investor in the FireStarter Fund, a group of Chicago founders supporting the next generation of entrepreneurs.

Related stories: 

You Have To See This: Centro's CEO On The Business Case For Happiness

InPowered Founders Interview: Trusted Content Is 4 Times More Effective Than Native Ads

Skimlinks Says Affiliate Payouts Short-Change Publishers

I recently met with Vineet Jain, (above) CEO and co-founder of Egnyte, which offers file sharing for enterprises, with a hybrid cloud and data center model.

My recent post about startups having to sell because they can't get to scale, caught the attention of Jain's team and we met to discuss the company's strategy. It is competing against some extremely well funded companies such as Box and Dropbox.  Here are some notes from our conversation:

- Egnyte has raised total funding of $61.5 million. This compares with Dropbox, total $607 million; and Box with $414 million and it has plans for an IPO valued at $250 million.

- Jain recognizes that his rivals are very well funded but he says he can build Egnyte by concentrating on the enterprise and offering a highly secure service focused on the needs of large companies. By building for long term value he believes Egnyte can survive and prosper.

- His competitors are is well funded but their freemium business models cost a lot of money to maintain and they are burning through cash, which is why they've had to raise large amounts of capital. Egnyte's business model doesn;t have the same freemium costs as Box or Dropbox and it is close to profitability.

- He says that by offering enterprise IT a hybrid file sharing model, where companies can either use Egnyte's cloud storage or run the software in their own data centers, is exactly what IT management wants. The cloud alone is not enough. 

- He says the timing is good because enterprises recognize the value of cloud computing and storage. The company's software lets the IT managers control file access and security across internal enterprise systems and external cloud storage.

- The company makes its money from software and not by charging for data storage, which has rapidly become a commodity business. It charges per seat.

- Finding engineers is hard but the company has about 32 developers in Poland and it is very pleased with the quality of Polish programmers. 

- Google Ventures, the venture capital arm of Google is an investor and the company's offices are right next to the Google campus in Mountain View. 

- Jain has more than 20 years of business experience at KPMG, and Bechtel, and prior to co-founding Egnyte in 2006, he founded Valdero, a supply chain software company.

- He has had several offers to sell Egnyte but says he turned them down because he wants to build a large and independent company. It's rare to find a CEO with a determination to stay independent and prosper despite extremely well funded competition.

Egnyte - Management

Egnyte provides deployment models to solve any use case including cloud file sharing, private file sharing, cross-office collaboration, and fast local file access. Users can have a single view of all the files they have permission to access, regardless of where files are stored -- on the user's computer, in local storage in their office, on storage devices in remote offices or in any cloud.

- - -

Please see: 

Co-founders of InPowered and NetShelter: Peyman Nilforoush and Pirouz Nilforoush.

InPowered today launched a free version of its trusted content discovery and promotion services as a way of gaining new customers for its core service: the promotion of trusted stories.

I saw a preview of the service last week and was impressed at the many features and tracking metrics offered for free. The company is making a big bet that users will become customers of its paid services, which promote positive stories through advertising.

The free tool is very compelling in what it offers: discovery of what has been written about a product or brand; the ability to share that content to your social networks; a filter that only surfaces independently written content free of any commercial taint; metrics on sharing; and on number of people that read the entire article -- not just the headline.

The company is very much focused on discovery of content that is trusted, that hasn't been paid for by any vendor or manufacturer.

The founders, (two brothers, above) are very savvy about media and sold their ad display network last year to Ziff Davis. They are also very much opposed to the native advertising trend because it dilutes readers' trust in articles.

Here is my recent interview with them here.InPowered Founders Interview: Trusted Content Is 4 Times More Effective Than Native Ads -SVW

- - -

SF Creators media salon will be meeting at InPowered's San Francisco HQ on March 13.

- - -

www.inpwrd.com/about

"It is increasingly difficult to find credible information from trusted third-party sources in an ocean of ads and branded content. inPowered is changing that.

At inPowered, we help brands discover and amplify credible, trusted content so that they can contribute to a more informed marketplace. And when you help educate consumers so they can be better informed, you establish your brand as one worthy of consumers' trust.

As a result, consumers can easily cut through the noise and get access to the most credible information, enabling them to make more informed decisions."

Co-founders of InPowered and NetShelter: Peyman Nilforoush and Pirouz Nilforoush.

Yesterday I argued that the New York Times had committed a grave error in judgement by allowing the publication of native ads on its website. Native ads are OK in some specialist publications but certainly not in a newspaper such as important as The New York Times.

Labeling some content that largely looks and feels like your own, independently produced journalism, is an extraordinarily bad idea.  

I'm shocked that The New York Times, and its advisors,  are so blind to the erosion of trust that will inevitably follow from their readers.

At the very least, native ads do nothing to improve readers trust.  At their worst, readers will tune out trusted content just as they tune out other advertising.  Why would the management of The New York Times agree to anything that doesn't help promote reader trust?

This is especially important in today's widening world of the web where trust in content is vanishing at an astounding rate. Many readers think nearly everything they see is corrupt in some way, by monied interests.

Surely, publishers would want to amplify their trust rating because it is rare. And rarity has value while an abundance of crap has very little. 

For those brands and agencies taking advantage of The New York Times' gullibility, I say they are killing a golden goose. By actively eroding the readers trust, they are eroding the value of their advertising -- both native and normal -- in publications that matter. It's lose-lose for both sides. 

I spoke with Peyman Nilforoush, CEO of InPowered, and co-founder of the NetShelter advertising network. He feels as strongly as I do about the harm the trend of native advertising will have on trusted content.  

I've been a long-time admirer of Peyman Nilforoush and his brother Pirouz Nilforoush, the co-founders of the NetShelter ad network, which they sold to Ziff Davis last year. They now focus their energies on InPowered, based in San Francisco, which helps brands by finding great content written by trusted authors who are independent of any paid influence, and then they help distribute that content.

The brothers grew up in Iran and their family managed to escape to Canada when they were in their early teens. They created one of the very first blogging networks, often falling into debt supporting their publishers by paying for their servers and bandwidth, and later, in many other ways with tools they developed that provided insights that helped their publishers grow.

They know the value of trusted content first-hand because they saw how it boosted their advertisers campaigns.

Advertising always works best when it associates itself with trusted publications. There's a bit of trust that rubs onto the advertiser's brand in the reader's mind when they see it in a respectable publication.  

Google's PageRank works the same way with web sites. You always want to have a high PageRank. Google will punish your position in its search index if it sees you do anything that erodes that trust. 

Here's some notes from my conversation with Peyman Nilforoush:

- I believe there is no bigger opportunity on the web than trusted content -- it could potentially be bigger than search. What else is meaningful?

- Publishers only have one thing and that is their readers' trust. Anything that erodes that trust has to be avoided. 

- Readers want trusted content and its trusted content that helps brands sell products. Native advertising is not trusted content. It is trying to deceive readers.

- I've been on panels where people were arguing over which native ad was better but it was all about format and typeface, and the look of native ads, as if that's the important thing. It's not. It always has to come down to the content -- can the reader trust it?

- Growing up in Iran we remember what happened to the media. It became state controlled and you couldn't trust it. You never know what was going on. You can never regain that loss of trust even if the censorship is lifted.

- Metrics is an issue. I've seen fights break out at conferences over metrics but no one knows what to measure, or they measure things that have little to do with anything. The multiplicity of metrics muddles things even further. No one is linking measurement to business outcomes.

- There's lots of issues with native ads that people aren't talking about. The cost of producing it, for example. Another important point is that native ads aren't scalable. [Great point: They are locked into one look and feel.]

- Native ads won't help when there's not much good to say about a company. Bad news travels a lot faster than native ads can publish. 

- At InPowered we are very much focused on the credibility of the writer. We focus on promoting the best content that we can find. 

- We've run some reader tests. We compared the effectiveness of two types of content, one was sponsored/native and the other was trusted content. Readers were asked what was the likelihood they would buy the product? The paid content generated a 17% likely to buy, but 65% of the trusted content readers said they were likely to buy the product. That's nearly 4 times more!

- We are at a fork in the road. It could all crash. We need to highlight the serious issues with native advertising.

One of my favorite media technology companies is BrightTalk, based in San Francisco and London.

Co-founded in 2002 by Paul Heald and Charlie Blackburn, this privately-held company offers an easy platform to create and distribute live audio and video broadcasts/podcasts. It also helps deliver the audience, with a stellar in-house lead generation team under James Miller. This is BrightTalk's secret sauce because it helps boost potential audience numbers way beyond a company's own networks of contacts, and increases the quality of customer leads.

I'm proud to say that I helped kickstart BrightTalk's online summit business a couple of years ago, which is now a thriving multi-million dollar business group.

I recently met with CEO Paul Heald (above) in San Francisco. Here are some notes from our conversation:

- Our customers are large companies presenting on key topics. They can start a broadcast from their desk, and with our platform they have all the tools they need to promote and share their event, gather questions, and target the best leads.

- We work with customers to deliver highly targeted audiences that have shown they are interested in key topics, and help them convert them into customer leads.

- The platform is designed to encourage audience engagement,  during the broadcast events, and in the forums. Plus the content is archived so that people can use the archive as a knowledge resource.

- Our online summits are doing very well, they provide an easy way for people to take part in day-long conferences without having to travel beyond their desk.

- We've made some major upgrades to the platform over the past year to make it even easier to use. And also to make it more into a destination site.

- We are building up an impressive collection of content around key topics especially in the enterprise computing space. People can revisit videos and presentations and take part in communities based around  their interest.

- We have very good relations with large professional associations, which are also a great source of audiences.

- We employ many community managers so that there is always new, interesting things to see, and to discuss.

- Our customers love the platform because they manage to get high-quality leads, which saves them money compared with their other marketing programs. 

- Our users are becoming much more comfortable doing live videos, they aren't as self-conscious as some people were a few years ago.

- There's lots more features coming this year, such as better integration with LinkedIn. 

- We also are increasingly producing original content with long video interviews with key thought-leaders that we edit down to just two minutes.

- - -

Here is a recent video interview with me produced by BrightTalk's talented young team, on my favorite topic: EC=MC - Every company is a media company - the transformative business equation.

2 Minutes on BrightTALK: Every Company Is a Media Company 

- - -

Additional info:

At BrightTALK, we believe that people learn the most when they hear directly from those who know the subject best. We also believe that this experience is enhanced through a dialog between speakers and the audience. Our online event tools offer a dynamic environment for everyone involved. It is the interactions we witness and the advancement of knowledge in our online communities that excites us the most.

You can join BrightTALK's vibrant exchange of ideas as either a viewer or a presenter. We offer viewers live, interactive access to businesses' top thought leaders. You identify the topics most relevant to you by searching communities, channels, summits or individual webcasts and are introduced to new experts via their timely and relevant presentations. Your comments, your ideas, and your voice will not only influence how others think, but can shape future events available for your viewing and participation on BrightTALK. In addition, webcasts are available on-demand for future viewing and for sharing with your peers and colleagues.

(My readers are familiar with my "every company is a media company" mantra but how do companies become media companies? They need media services and technologies to help them and this will become  a core focus here at SVW - reporting on the intersection of technology and media since 2004.)

I recently met with Scott Kellner (above), Chief Marketing Officer, at INXPO, a platform that lets clients easily set up video broadcasts to internal staff, or an external audience. 

I'm very much interested in companies such as INXPO, companies that provide media technology services to other companies. When every company is a media company it's the ones that have an effective arsenal of media technologies to draw upon that will win out over their competition.

INXPO has pivoted somewhat from a virtual trade show focus a few years back. It's now a sophisticated broadcasting platform used by large corporations to run internal and external meetings, along with advanced audience engagement metrics.

Here are my notes from a recent conversation with Scott Kellner:

- INXPO is about 9 years old. Decided three years ago that webcasting services were over-crowded so developed a platform that enables companies to run their own live video channels called "Social Business TV."

- We are creating channels around topics, so that people can participate in live events around their interests and also return to browse through reference materials.

- Live is important because it helps involve people rather than something that can be seen later. Live drives engagement.

-Most clients are large corporations and they use it mostly for internal communications, which is tough at a multinational, we help with that. It's important to make sure that everyone at your organization is on the same page. We have about 110 people across different locations, we know how tough it is for a company our size, it's much more difficult at large corporations.

- Now we're moving more into external communications with our platform, for producing lead generation. 

-Our analytics is important because we can tell how viewers are reacting, what they are interested in, what they share. That is very valuable because it can show clients who is engaged and who isn't.

- We define someone as engaged if they touch their keyboard at least once every two minutes. And we advise clients on how best to organize their presentations, design engagement, and on length, content type etc. These are actionable metrics.

- We don't help out with lead generation, etc, we are solely focused on being a platform. But we do have a consulting group that helps clients create their channels and how best to design engagement.

- Some of our best practices are keep presentations to below 30 minutes, which includes a 10 minute Q&A. Before noon is the best time. Keep text to a minimum. Tell people upfront what they will get from your presentation, and then say it three times. 

- We provide all the sharing and collaboration tools so that people can reach out to their contacts and make it easier for them to share upcoming events further.

- All the live sessions are archived for return viewing.

- An unlimited channel costs about $4,000 per month or single sessions can also be bought for around $1500 each.

- - -

Additional Information:

Webcasting, Online Events

Social Business TV - Social Broadcasting for Business

Recent news:

- News - Press Releases: INXPO Makes Simple Delivery of High Definition Quality Video to Business Desktop and Mobile Device - INXPO

Founded in 2004, INXPO has delivered nearly 3,000 social business broadcasts worldwide for brands including Autodesk, Cisco, Freeman, George P. Johnson, Hilton, HIMSS, P&G, PCMA, TechTarget, UBM and the U.S. Department of State. The company is headquartered in Chicago.

I'm a big fan of the team behind today's launch of Swipp, a service that aggregates people's rating of any product, service, person, city ... anything.

Swipp's ambition is to become a global platform that connects and collects the world's "social intelligence" about anything that can be named. A "swipp" is a vote on a plus five to minus five scale.

I recently met with Swipp's co-founders Don Thorson (above) and Charlie Costantini. They've worked together in previous ventures, the most recent was Ribbit, sold to British Telecom for $105 million in 2009.

 Here's some notes from our conversation:

-The idea for Swipp started about two years ago. They wanted to know what people were thinking about anything, the economy, San Francisco, etc. 

- The Swipp team believe that they have produced a unique platform for "social intelligence" that combines people's need for social expression with people's knowledge about some things.

- The launch is very ambitious, it has people in 45 countries, and five languages, launching and evangelizing the service. 

- The team behind Swipp has been at the birth of four multi-billion dollar platforms and technologies over the last three decades. At Atari as the video games industry was born; at Apple when the PC industry was forming; at Netscape for the rise of the web, at Jajah and Ribbit for the rise of IP telecoms. Swipp is at the start of the rise of what is expected to be the next big thing :"Social Intelligence." 

- Swipp is topic based not people based. Only one vote per person is counted therefore it cannot be gamed easily because it requires a Facebook identity to register.

- There are a range of tools that analyze Swipps based on gender, location, and other factors. Large retailers are interested in embedding Swipp into their websites to combine with their internal databases and better track sentiment about their products.

- Autocomplete is important because it helps standardize the names of things and place names. Additional information is brought to users about the things they swipp based on what's available in Google's Freebase, a Wikipedia-like collection of information.

- Swipp also finds relevant photos, videos, and other copyright-free information.

- Future plans include an easy to build app system for anyone to create "Swipplists" it will act as a survey tool or other type of information aggregator. It could also be used for competitive intelligence.

- The API is very important and the startup has taken the approach that it builds everything around the API, a real one.

- There is a chicken and egg problem at launch but this should be temporary as millions of people around the world start swipping and populating the database. People that are the first to swipp a topic are featured on the topic page as an incentive for them and others to add more topics to the 10 million at launch.

- People cannot be the target of swipps unless they are public figures. This is to stop any online bullying. 

- There are three types of potential users of Swipp, those that are expressive and active across many social channels; those that want social discovery; while a third group is interested in social learning.

- Open data is a very important and is a core philosophy at Swipp. Also, real time data is important.

- Swipp is in discussions with very large retailers to license its platform.

- The company hopes that "swipp it" will become a common term in conversations.

Foremski's Take: 

It'll be interesting to see how Swipp fares. I don't see myself as the target market because I'm not that interested in what people think about Johnston & Murphy shoes, a Sony camera, or San Francisco. And I'm not interested in broadcasting to others what I think about those products even though I own them, and live in San Francisco.

A single number rating says very little -- it's a small bit of general data in a big data world where personalization is the goal. Swipp's rating system is the least interesting thing about the service to me. 

Far more valuable is the platform itself, a global interconnected social back-end that could be used for far more than a rating system.

Ratings could be just one use, just one app, there is a lot more that Swipp will be able to do once it connects up the universe of things and people. 

I can't count how many times I've been pitched about identity management systems over the past two decades and it's still happening to my great surprise because you'd think it would be a standard solution intrinsic to every enterprise environment.

Clearly, it's not easy to produce an ID management system that works well, or that doesn't have high implementation and admin costs. And with the added complexity of semi-open but always-connected corporate IT systems, there's a universe of identity tasks that have to be handled outside the firewall, in addition to the traditional internal needs of large organizations.

I recently spoke with Ranjeet Vidwans, VP of Marketing and Business Development about how SCUID was developed and how the cloud and a core focus on user interface design promises a breakthrough in ID management systems.

Here are some notes from our conversation:

- The startup has recruited an impressive executive team of Identity management industry veterans who've worked at large vendors and integrators, such as Oracle, IBM, PricewaterhouseCoopers, CRT Group, Thor Technologies, and Oblix.

- SCUID stands for Secure Cloud-based Unified Identity. It is designed to be one-tenth the cost, and take a fraction of the time to deploy by leveraging the cloud and preconfigured setups that eliminate the need for expensive consultants and integrators. This means it can be rolled out in a matter of weeks compared with the traditional IT process of implementation and testing new systems, which can take up to a year or more before they can be used and begin payback.

- Customization is greatly simplified through the development of 30 frameworks based on 150 use cases, designed to provide standard features from the outset while being easy to customize with additional features.

 - The frameworks are designed for the needs of companies in specific industries, including detailed support for regulatory compliance rules for those industries. This helps companies abide with regulatory laws that often have high penalties for non-compliance and avoid accidentally missing important safeguards.

- Ongoing maintenance costs are considerably reduced because the application is updated and run by a large staff of top IT specialists at Indentropy, which makes sure it is always optimized and working at its best performance.

- Administration of SCUID is made easier because of the companies focus on designing user interfaces that are easy to understand, and pre-configured to make it easy to carry out routine tasks. 

- Identropy is very proud of its user interfaces, it spent six months perfecting the design before starting the software development. The user interface us based on the company's executives' long experience with how enterprises use ID systems, and on focus groups testing the interface.

- Identropy is betting that its approach should be a winner because the cloud-based system provides fast, low-cost implementation, it has  low admin costs, and it removes updating headaches. This all adds up to considerable savings in total cost of ownership that can be less than one-tenth of traditional implementations.

- Many organizations have blind spots in implementing their ID systems. For example, interns within financial organizations can often accumulate clearances for nearly the entire organization -- more than almost anyone in the entire organization -- because they work for short periods in many departments. Identropy's ID system prevents such lapses in security by looking out for common ID management mistakes.

- SCUID constantly searches for unusual activities and either blocks the activity or alerts administrators.

Foremski's Take: SCUID appears to tick all the boxes in terms of what is needed in a modern ID management system that has to deal with a masses of identities within and outside the enterprise, while taking advantage of considerable benefits of a cloud-based IT solution.

Identropy might find it challenging in getting the word out about its near off-the-shelf approach because large integrators and consulting groups have far smaller roles and less incentive to promote SCUID.

However, the SAAS approach also makes it easy for enterprises to quickly test and taste SCUID before rolling out larger installations. 

ID management systems are crucial to the security of any company and their importance will grow tremendously because they touch everything that is core to every business, and in the activities of all types of commerce -- inside and outside the enterprise.

The complexity of managing IDs will grow as enterprises themselves become hybrid entities, cloud-like and nebulous. Identropy takes away a big chunk of complexity by allowing businesses to outsource the technology, and simplify daily admin tasks. IT staff can then focus on making sure that their ID management systems are protective without becoming obstacles to the smooth the running of crucial business processes.

Tufin is interesting because it is rethinking the way firewalls should be managed. It's because of rise in the number of applications being produced by enterprises.

Firewall administrators are spending more of their time dealing with application related change requests. Yet the app developers know little about firewalls and potential conflicts, or security holes. Earlier this year, Tufin launched SecureApp, a suite of admin tools to help manage this important security relationship between apps and firewalls.

This application centric approach to enterprise security is a different way of thinking about security. Here are some notes from our conversation:

- Our latest survey shows that nearly half of all firewall changes are related to application connectivity. And most companies report that they don't have confidence in their IT staff being able to fully address the compliance and security risks that arise when managing application connectivity.

- We realized that the best approach is to address security through the app layer first, to document the resources an app needs and how it behaves, and then to communicate what's needed in the firewalls. Our new product helps to automate this process. And it's integrated with our two other firewall products, SecureTrack and SecureChange.

- It's a paradigm shift and it might take some time for this to be understood but you have to tackle security first through the app layer not the network.

- Here's why: Large enterprises have a high degree of complexity because of multiple locations, multiple IT systems and hundreds of firewalls to manage with multitudes of rules. Developing new applications is tough because they must work across all of a corporations firewalls.

- The situation becomes more complex when changes are made to an application and those changes have to be communicated to hundreds of firewalls.

- If firewalls aren't configured right, apps will fail. But the apps developers have to be better at communication, and documenting, how their apps behave, so that the right changes can be made by the network security teams.

- Anytime you change the configuration of firewalls, other things can break. A key feature of SecureApp is that you can simulate the entire network and test changes safely.

- CIOs want to deploy apps faster but this can compromise security if there is little communication between the app developers and the security teams.

- There's often a cultural problem within large corporations in that the apps developers don't understand the security issues and the security people don't understand the apps.

-There is often little or no documentation, and when people leave a company, a lot of knowledge about an app leaves too. SecureApp makes sure that there is documentation and that knowledge isn't lost when people leave.

Foremski's Take: Tufin's application centric approach to improving enterprise security makes sense and it won't take corporations long to realize its the right approach.

What will take longer is the internal shift in culture, in the app developer teams, which traditionally have not been very security minded.

It's a leadership move by Tufin and one that's well timed. The explosion of apps in the consumer web is driving a tremendous amount of app development in the enterprise. Firewalls can quickly become brick walls or leave security holes open because of badly designed apps.

Managing hundreds of firewalls while trying to support a deluge of apps will quickly turn into a nightmare unless the whole process of application development can be mapped against an organization's firewalls. The app and the firewall have to be in sync and that requires new sets of tools.

Tools such as Tufin's not only provide an easy interface for managing security policies and compliance but they can also be used as an agent of cultural change within organizations because they offer a common ground for the apps and security teams. It helps them communicate with each other, which should lead to better apps.

Early on ... he gave "T.co" to Twitter to use as it's URL shortener, which the folks at Twitter were eager to do. He did a deal with AngelList ... now uses Angel.co. [Dave] McClure's 500Startups runs on 500.co, Jason Calcanis's Launch runs on Launch.co, and on and on. These are influential places to spread your message.

I had an excellent morning, drinking coffee at the Apollo cafe, and chatting with the co-founders of uberVU, a London-based startup. Vladimir Oane and Dragos Ilinca are young serial entrepreneurs on their second startup.

I missed them on my trip with the Traveling Geeks last summer to London, so this was a good opportunity to finally meet in person.

They are from Romania, and met at the University of Bucharest. They sold their first company, a web marketing company, and founded uberVU in 2008, winning the 2008 Seedcamp, a UK based funding competition. They have funding from UK investors and are in town this week to lay the foundation for moving their company to San Francisco.

Their service offers "social media monitoring" with a wide variety of tools and reports, monitoring comments, Twitter, social networks, and other sites for any brand or subject.

They offer a freemium model and so far, things are going well. But they are looking for new opportunities for what they have -- which is a large database of social media content going back a couple of years, and which could be mined for trends and other valuable information.

They said they were keen readers of SVW, and they were interested in my position that a lot of tech companies are essentially media companies. They are starting to see themselves as a media company rather than a data company, and they are looking for ways of publishing some of their data, possibly focused on verticals, such as finance.

Here are some notes from our conversation:

- London has a good startup scene but 90 per cent of uberVU traffic and users are in the US, that's why they want to move their company. Their UK investors were against it at first but now understand why it is a good idea.

- They have a 6 person development team in Romania, which means their development costs are low. They use Amazon to host their service.

- The startup scene in Romania is similar to that of Germany - mostly clones of US online businesses but the domestic market is small, it is difficult to succeed. Everyone is a blogger and also a big user of Twitter.

- uberVU has an API but they haven't been pushing it heavily, at least not yet.

- Their service is near real-time, and they don't see many use cases for having true real-time monitoring. They made the point that the recent Citibank incident, when the bank suspended the bank account of Fabulis, was a multi-day event, and that Citibank was able to respond after three days and gather positive publicity. [Fabulis vs Citibank - the numbers behind the story]

- Their service also does automatic sentiment analysis, which they estimate is about 70 per cent accurate. Which isn't bad because people doing sentiment analysis are about 80 per cent accurate.

I like the team and I like the company. They are sitting on a lot of data that could be turned into profitable business services -- social media monitoring is just one aspect of their business. But they do need partners, with an 8 person team there is only so much you can do.

(The above photo is from their business cards, Vladimir Oane (right) and Dragos Ilinca.)