ReputationDefender
Press Room

WITH the kind of passionate enthusiasm only a US entrepreneur could manage, Michael Fertik bounced into Liverpool and instantly became an ambassador for its technology scene.

Mr Fertik, founder of ReputationDefender, visited the city last week to mark his company’s move into the UK market with the purchase of Liverpool-based Reputation 24/7.

With the Government promoting East London’s Tech City as a world-leading centre for digital excellence, ReputationDefender could have been forgiven for following the international herd and opening a UK base in the South East.

But Mr Fertik insists, that would not be an “entrepreneurial” solution.

That, he said, is finding a regional city with a strong technology sector and a big talent pool – a city, in other words, such as Liverpool.

Liverpool and other regional cities are also, of course, cheaper than London. Wages are lower, as are accommodation costs.

Price, however, isn’t everything – and the seemingly ever-enthusiastic Mr Fertik says Liverpool’s universities and growing tech sector will help ReputationDefender to grow as it beds in to the UK market.

Manchester, thanks in part to MediaCity and the Sharp Project, has positioned itself as the UK’s leading regional digital hub.

But Liverpool is already strong in some areas, particularly gaming and music. And its technology scene has attracted investment from the UK and overseas – Finnish web technology firm Hammerkit, for example, opened a Liverpool Science Park office in 2010.

And Mr Fertik’s words of praise for Liverpool will surely be music to the ears of those charged with attracting hi-tech investment.

Liverpool Vision says it has recently seen a rise in inquiries from tech firms considering Liverpool. Mr Fertik, to judge from his high-octane visit last week, will be happy to talk to those potential investors about why they should look beyond London when expanding into the UK.

ReputationDefender specialises in helping people and companies to protect their privacy online. And too many tech entrepreneurs, he said, are fixated on London’s reputation as a tech hub to open their eyes to other opportunities.

“They cannot consider anywhere else,” he mused.

“You should have heard the hoots I got from my peers in London when I said I was coming to Liverpool.

“It’s obnoxious. It’s short-sighted. And it’s not entrepreneurial.

“It does not help to pay so much more per square foot. That’s not good for your company.

“To have sales and marketing in the UK, you have to have some sort of presence in London. But it doesn’t mean you cannot have the majority of operations elsewhere. And Surrey is not elsewhere.

“I might get invited to nicer parties in London, but that’s just simply not the point.”

Any business moving to the UK will need to tap into London’s vast market, and Mr Fertik says he loves working there.

“But there’s a point of view with some of the tech guys in London,” he added,  “that unless you’re 50ft from a world-famous barista that does a great flat white coffee, it doesn’t count. But what happens when you get to seven guys and you can’t afford the rent?

“You get the same attitude in Silicon Valley. ‘Unless you’re in downtown Palo Alto’… it’s dumb, in my view.

“We’re here to make a profit. The more we make, the more guys we can hire.  The more we spend on rent in, say,  SW1, the less money we have to hire guys.”

When considering the Reputation 24/7 deal, Fertik and his team had to consider whether Liverpool was right for the business.

He said: “We did some research on the university, the population here, and the public and private sector investment that has been happening.

“We found a very good university, which seems to be the jewel in the crown of local higher education.

“In our experience, having a university is very helpful. With that comes a motivated workforce, and the ability to scale up from there.

“Everything comes from  excellent colleagues. We already have some awesome talent.

“You also have a multi-national population. Maybe it’s a function of the great history of this place.

“That’s valuable in itself, but it also gives us good multi-lingual support for any future entry into Europe – and that is our plan.

“You have a well-motivated, wages competitive, reasonably permanent workforce.

“I’m bullish. I’m long on the British economy and I’m long on Liverpool. All the ingredients are here for long-term success.

“It’s good that other companies want to come here. We’re in Silicon Valley for a reason.

“I think,” he added with a smile, “we’ll call this the Silicon Pool.”

THE chairman of Hammerkit, meanwhile, says the company has gone from strength to strength since moving to Liverpool.

Howard Joseph said being in the city “has given Hammerkit the edge” as it develops the products it sells to the UK’s thriving PR market.

The company opened its office here in 2010  following a campaign by economic development agency Liverpool Vision to attract Finnish hi-tech investment to Liverpool.

Since arriving in the city it has focused on developing its CloudStore system, which allows PR and creative firms to  show off and store their digital work online.

Hammerkit was given a further boost in January 2012 when it secured a  funding package, worth a total of £1m, from the North West Fund for Venture Capital,  the North West Fund for Digital & Creative,  Finnish state-backed bodies Veraventure and Tekes.

CloudStore has now been taken to market and has already been sold to Edelman and Hill & Knowlton, two of the biggest PR firms in the world.

It is now working with other big UK PR firms after developing four “digital PR webinars” for the sector, and expects to grow still further this Mr Joseph, said: “Liverpool Science Park is full of young and growing companies and, in fact, the whole area, so close to the universities, has a real buzz to it.

“That is just the sort of environment a company like Hammerkit needs and our access to skilled people and similar companies, combined with the support of the North West Fund, makes Liverpool a natural home for us.”

Will Jones, sales executive at Hammerkit, added: “Liverpool is a hotbed of creative and digital talent.

“Networking events in the city have helped Hammerkit integrate into its surroundings.

“Events run by ACME and Kin have helped Hammerkit to meet their digital and creative peers in the area. It’s been a real eye-opener for everyone at the company.

“A lot of people we want to be talking to and doing business with are right on our doorstep.”

Kevin McManus, head of creative and digital at regeneration agency Liverpool Vision, said the city was attracting more interest from technology and creative firms.

He said: “We have in the last two months been involved in discussions with two or three tech companies who are seriously considering moving here.

“We’ve been showing them round properties and showing them the offer in the city.

“It’s positive that people are coming here and seeing some of the other companies that are active in the creative and digital community.”

Original articlet Why tech firms could move to Liverpool instead of London – Business News – LDP Business – Liverpool Daily Post http://www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk/ldpbusiness/business-local/2013/02/11/why-tech-firms-could-move-to-liverpool-instead-of-london-99623-32789411/#ixzz2R8rdgczO

In the fall of 2012, Sally Ike, a senior at Columbia High School in Maplewood, N.J., heard from a friend about a hilarious new app you could download on your smartphone. Snapchat was free, her friend explained, and allowed you to share photos. And like a lot of photo apps, it was simple: just shoot and send. The hook was that when your friend opened the message, the photo self-destructed within 10 seconds.

At first, Ike thought Snapchat was pretty dumb. She was applying for college, co-editing the high school newspaper, and playing on the ultimate Frisbee team. She was busy. Snapchat seemed pointless. Yet as the fall semester turned into winter, Snapchat grew more and more popular at Columbia High. All day at school “snaps” were flying in every direction. Kids loved to send them back and forth in class. Some teachers banned smartphones during instruction, so you had to be careful. But if you cupped your phone in your palm under the desk with the screen facing up at you, it was no problem.

People kept sending Ike snaps, and the more she played with the app, the more it grew on her. Now she uses it all the time like everyone else. Opening a Snapchat, she says, feels like unwrapping a present. You never know what you’re going to get. Since the messages quickly disappear, there’s no pressure to look cool. People send pictures of themselves making ridiculous faces, smiling like maniacs, sticking out their tongues, giving the stink-eye, sprouting feathers (you can doodle on Snapchat pictures), whatever. You can send videos, too. If someone cheats and tries to take a screenshot of your snap for posterity, the app notifies the sender. Getting caught, says Ike, is a major faux pas. “I was thinking about it today, how next year when I go away to college it will be nice,” she says. “You actually get to see the friend’s face for a quick 10 seconds. It’s more personal than a text.”

In the U.S., Snapchat was the second-most popular free photo and video app for the iPhone in early February, just behind YouTube and ahead of Instagram. It was the 19th-most popular free app overall, according to App Annie, an analytics company. Snapchat’s website claims that more than 50 million snaps are sent every day.

It’s made rivals anxious enough to build similar products. In December social networking giant Facebook (FB) unveiled a Snapchat-like app called Poke that allows users to send self-destructing media. Instead of burying Snapchat, however, the competition from Facebook appears to have made the upstart stronger. In January tech industry blog TechCrunch named Snapchat the “Fastest Rising Startup” of 2012.

Snapchat was born in the spring of 2011 in a frat house. At the time, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy were undergraduates at Stanford University and brothers at Kappa Sigma. Spiegel was studying engineering; Murphy, computer science. The pair envisioned making a smartphone app for their friends who wanted to socialize online with no lasting record or repercussions. They were inspired, they would later explain, by anguished stories they’d heard over the years about people scrambling to delete or de-tag unflattering photos before the snapshots circulated too far on social networks and appeared on search results forever. (Spiegel, who runs the company out of his dad’s house in Pacific Palisades, Calif., did not respond to several interview requests. Murphy could not be reached; e-mailed requests to the company for comment were not returned.)

Spiegel and Murphy’s timing was excellent. As they worked on a prototype over the summer, then-Congressman Anthony Weiner was in the news because of some indiscreet photo-sharing with women he met on Twitter, and career-immolation-by-selfie was on everyone’s mind. Snapchat launched on Apple’s (AAPL) App Store that fall and downloads soon soared. “Snapchat isn’t about capturing the traditional Kodak moment,” Spiegel wrote on the company blog in May 2012. “It’s about communicating with the full range of human emotion—not just what appears to be pretty or perfect. Like when I think I’m good at imitating the face of a star-nosed mole, or if I want to show my friend the girl I have a crush on.”

Adults have long warned kids that if they weren’t careful, questionable behavior would end up on their permanent record. Over the decades, that record has become larger, more searchable, and more available to the public. With cloud computing, the digital space for it has expanded exponentially. Just one institution, the Library of Congress, is busy archiving more than 170 billion tweets.

The business model of today’s free social media networks and search engines, of course, is collecting and storing behavior and interests of every kind, and selling that information to marketers. And companies are getting better at organizing and finding out about every last bit of a user’s social life, whether it’s a party picture or a preference for a certain kind of shoe. Last month, Facebook began rolling out Graph Search, a tool to retrieve details from the pasts of its billion users.

In this environment, unease about one’s permanent social record is logical. Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research (MSFT), says it’s not surprising that teenagers would be the first to appreciate the advantages of impermanent social media. “This cohort has grown up with the expectation of surveillance by people who hold direct power over them,” says Boyd. “It’s not about surveillance from companies or the state. It’s surveillance from their teachers, their college admissions officers, their parents.”

When Snapchat launched, Spiegel and Murphy used images of comely young women smiling devilishly to promote the app. The winking suggestion was not lost on the media. Whatever else Snapchat proved good for, everyone soon agreed, the boys at Kappa Sigma had created the people’s champ of smartphone peep shows.

Patchen Barss, author of The Erotic Engine: How Pornography Has Powered Mass Communication from Gutenberg to Google, says that for centuries new ways of sharing naked images have pushed forward the evolution of communications technology. The theory, says Barss, is that fans of erotica are quick to embrace any new technology that allows them to check out the goods in a more convenient setting with greater anonymity and lower risk of exposure.

Over the years, says Barss, early adopting horndogs have helped drive the advancement of everything from the printing press to the VCR to pay-per-view TV to streaming video to faster cellular networks. “Now we might be seeing it happen again with Snapchat,” he says.

Many new forms of communications technology seem seedy and absurd when mainstream audiences first find out about them and later prove to have much broader applications. “I’m not a guy who’s going to be doing any sexting,” Barss says. “But right now there are no pictures of my two young kids on the Internet, because I don’t want to lose control of the images. It’s a permanent record. If there were an app where I could share pictures of them with family members, and then the photos would disappear forever after a set period of time, I might be willing to adopt that technology. So you could see how this app might be able to springboard into a more mainstream usage.”

In the life cycle of a startup, Snapchat is in the larval stage in which the company focuses on the consumer experience while adopting a pose of apathy toward the brands and marketers it will court when it someday gets around to making money. (This is also the stage where bigger, more established tech companies might be eager to make an offer to buy a startup.) In December the tech blog GigaOm reported that venture capital firm Benchmark was closing in on an $8 million investment rumored to value Snapchat at $50 million. Matt Cohler, the Benchmark general partner handling Snapchat, did not respond to an interview request.

As for marketers, they’re waiting for an invitation before they jump in. “If one of our clients asked us for a point of view on this today, I would say don’t completely ignore it but be realistic,” says Ken Burbary, chief digital officer at Campbell Ewald, a U.S.-based marketing and communications firm. “What Snapchat is right now is pretty cloudy.”

Whether the app ever blossoms into a revenue-generating business, its rapid growth demonstrates a huge business opportunity—namely, services aimed at the increasing number of people worried about their social media footprints.

Michael Fertik, chief executive officer of ReputationDefender, a California-based company that sells online reputation and privacy services, says his customers have grown by 1,000 percent in the past two years. The increase, he says, reflects concern among consumers about how their data are being harvested. “The data are so valuable now,” he says. “Everybody wants them.”

Fertik says consumers increasingly realize that postings such as photographs and status updates might have an infinite lifetime online. Once a lamentable image is released into the world and stored on a social network’s server and your friends’ smartphones, it can be hard to delete. What the public has yet to realize, he says, is that their data are not only being archived but also analyzed and scored.

One product that ReputationDefender experimented with was a Web browser extension that encrypts everything you put on Facebook. To see photos or status updates, friends needed a special key to decode the encryption. No data ever reached Facebook’s servers. The product also allowed customers to set finite life spans on their updates. “You could say, ‘Everything I post blows up after 20 minutes’ or on Jan. 1 or on graduation day,” says Fertik. “It got like a million people downloading it within a few weeks. Clearly there’s a pent-up demand.”

ReputationDefender has since discontinued the product, says Fertik, to concentrate its resources on more lucrative services. Now, he says, the company is focused on collecting large archives of data about consumers’ habits online and allowing individuals to control how that data gets sold.

“We are collecting data and then enabling our customers to expose the data, electively to third parties, in an open and transparent transaction of which they are completely aware,” Fertik says, “as opposed to being digitally exploited every day without your knowledge or permission by people you can’t identify for purposes you’ll never know. It’s like digital serfdom vs. digital liberty.”

Surveys suggest that the privacy concerns underlying the growth of Snapchat and ReputationDefender are pervasive. Last year a Pew Research Center survey found that 57 percent of all app users “have either uninstalled an app over concerns about having to share their personal information, or declined to install an app in the first place for similar reasons.” A January 2013 study by the Ponemon Institute, a research organization focused on privacy and security issues, found social media to be among the least trusted industries when it comes to protecting customers’ privacy online.

Amid the heightened anxiety, many consumers young and old say they’re ready for the government to intervene. In a 2010 survey, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley found that although young Americans are often portrayed as having a devil-may-care attitude toward social media, they’re as anxious as their parents about their permanent social records. Some 88 percent of participants from ages 18 to 24 responded that there should be a law requiring websites and advertising companies to delete all stored information about an individual upon request. The survey found that 94 percent of people from 45 to 54 also supported the idea.

The widespread concern over the permanence of data trails is already fueling so-called right-to-be-forgotten movements around the world. In 2009, Argentine pop star Virginia Da Cunha sued Google (GOOG) and Yahoo! (YHOO), demanding that the companies stop including links in their search results to websites featuring racy pictures of her that had leaked online. A judge ruled in her favor. The companies appealed, and in 2010 a higher court overturned the initial ruling. Dozens of similar cases are making their way through the Argentine courts.

In January 2012, Viviane Reding, vice president of the European Commission, proposed privacy legislation that contained a right-to-be-forgotten provision. Broadly defined, the right would affect Internet usage in 27 countries. It has touched off a wave of criticism from technology executives and legal scholars, who argue it would end up creating more problems than it would solve.

Among other concerns, the provision would transform Google, Facebook, and other Internet companies from free platforms into global censors. Writing in the Stanford Law Review last year, law professor Jeffrey Rosen of George Washington University called the proposal the “biggest threat to free speech on the Internet in the coming decade.” The right to be forgotten, he noted, “could make Facebook and Google, for example, liable for up to 2 percent of their global income if they fail to remove photos that people post about themselves and later regret, even if the photos have been widely distributed already.”

At the moment, the default setting for almost everything people share online is that it will live for eternity in the cloud. In Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a lawyer and a professor at the University of Oxford, argues that this inevitably creates problems for individuals and societies that need the ability to forget in order to move forward. A perfect memory, he writes, can be paralyzing, trapping people in the past and discouraging them from trying new challenges.

Mayer-Schönberger argues that all information created online should come with customizable expiration dates. Not every piece of data would have to expire after a few seconds as photos on Snapchat do. The key, says Mayer-Schönberger, is to include some form of a self-destruct button in everything created online and to give consumers the power to tinker with the settings from the outset.

Snapchat is not the first company to experiment with the concept of sharing impermanent media with friends. While researching his book, Mayer-Schönberger says he interviewed the executives of a startup file-sharing company called Drop.io, founded in New York in 2007. Among other features, Drop.io included an easy way for users to specify how long their shared files would last before being destroyed. The founders were surprised, they told Mayer-Schönberger, by how popular the expiration dates were with customers.

In 2010, Facebook bought Drop.io and subsequently shut the whole thing down. Sam Lessin, a Drop.io co-founder who now works for Facebook on product management, declined to be interviewed.

“People have always asked me, ‘Why hasn’t the market responded?’ ” says Mayer-Schönberger. “Snapchat and others are responding. Snapchat is a perfect example of creating ephemerality. There is a real demand out there. Facebook has really failed on this front because Mark Zuckerberg, in his DNA, thinks that all data has hidden value and preserving this stuff is really, really important. He’s trying to hold onto everything, forever.” A spokesperson for Facebook declined to make anyone from the company available for an interview.

The consumer reception to Poke, the Snapchat-like app Facebook released in December, has been lukewarm. In early February, it was the 634th-most popular free Apple app in the U.S., according to App Annie. “The reason I don’t think Poke could ever succeed is that people don’t trust Facebook for that,” says Boyd. “No one can frame it as anything other than an attempt to kill off Snapchat.”

In her work for Microsoft Research, Boyd often studies teenagers in their natural habitats, watching closely as they navigate various social media networks. Not long ago, she interviewed a teenage girl who had grown frustrated with Facebook. The problem, the teen explained, was that people in her social circle kept dredging things out of the recent past and using the old photos or comments or status updates to start fights or make fun of one another. The girl abhorred the friction. Status updates from a month ago, she told Boyd, make zero sense when you transplant the cursory thoughts to the present day.

Rather than abstaining from Facebook altogether, the teen adopted another method of self-protection. Every day she would go about her normal business on Facebook—writing status updates, sharing pictures, commenting on her friends’ posts. And then every night she would go back and delete everything she’d just created. The goal was to scrub her Facebook wall clean. Limiting the past, she reasoned, would limit the future drama. “She would try to keep things as ephemeral as possible,” says Boyd. “She called it the process of ‘white-walling.’”

Destroy-your-own media is becoming much more readily available. In the summer of 2012 a team of data security experts in San Francisco launched Wickr, a free mobile app that allows users to send each other an array of impermanent media—including self-destructing text messages, videos, audio files, and PDFs. Like Snapchat, users customize how long their messages will live on the recipient’s device (lasting up to several days) before disappearing.

Nico Sell, a co-founder of Wickr, says media expiration dates are not limited in appeal to paranoids and perverts. “The early adopters of Snapchat are teens in the U.S.,” says Sell. “The early adopters of Wickr are celebrities, royalty, reporters, doctors, lawyers, bankers, cops, feds, freedom fighters, privacy advocates, security geeks, and the tech elite around the world.” The services may also appeal to criminals who in recent years have been hit with a large uptick in mobile surveillance by law enforcement. White-collar criminals in particular will surely appreciate having that much less material for prosecutors to subpoena.

Snapchat’s self-destruct feature isn’t foolproof. Since the app’s debut, a minor genre of articles has flourished online showing people how to save snaps on a phone without the sender knowing. Sell says Wickr offers its users military-grade protection. “To make something self-destruct for real is very difficult,” she says. “I would say Snapchat only offers the illusion of self-destruction.”

So far, Wickr has failed to rival Snapchat in popularity. According to App Annie, as of early February, Wickr ranked 174th in the U.S. among social networking apps for iPhones and iPads. Even so, Wickr doesn’t see itself as a niche service. “Whenever I ask someone, do they want control over the messages and media that they send to others, the answer 100 percent is yes,” says Sell. “There’s no question that this has mainstream appeal.”

Where Snapchat tends to pitch itself as a safe way to goof off, Wickr promotes itself in loftier terms. Sell talks of private communication as “a universal human right” that largely doesn’t exist in the current digital landscape in which big data companies are continuously harvesting and mining information about our every online utterance. “Unarchived communication is our most primal form of communication,” she says. “It’s natural for us to go back to it for things like communicating with our friends and family, and not having to think about the fact that the Internet is forever. Ephemeral data is the future.”

Original article: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-07/snapchat-and-the-erasable-future-of-social-media#r=auth-s

Do you care about losing your wallet? Or is it what’s inside your wallet that’s more important?

When you phrase the question that way, the answer becomes pretty obvious. You worry about your driver’s license and credit cards and, in particular, the information contained on those pieces of plastic. Wallets and credit cards are really just vehicles for valuable data.

At the same time, those vehicles come in handy when you’re in the checkout line at Target.

This two-part relationship is an essential element in the evolution of what you could call the storage fabric. The storage fabric consists of the ability to access data nearly anywhere at any time, as well as a superstructure of hardware, software and services to deliver and manage it. It’s much like your relationship with electricity — you probably didn’t buy a diesel generator to get electricity into your home: You plugged into the grid.

In the ideal storage fabric, consumers and businesses will store oft-needed information on their smart phones and notebooks for rapid access and better performance. Services like Amazon Cloud Services, Dropbox, or our own eVault, meanwhile, will archive your personal history, filter out redundancies and unnecessary information and gather new material that you might find interesting.

Applying for mortgages, sharing medical information and confirming educational and employment history will be far easier because your history — and the history of those you’re dealing with — will be at your fingertips through secure connections and permissions. Information brokerage services like those being created by ReputationDefender will allow you to selectively give your information to marketers.

Your personal devices and the cloud, along with being plugged into the fabric, would also continually study your habits and act in the background to keep you up to date. If your phone falls into a storm drain, you can just switch to a new one: It will have everything you need. If the cloud stalls or there is a security breach, you’re not locked out.

Apple, and companies like those listed above, has started to take initial steps with services like automatic syncing, but we’re still a long way away. Some of these services are for hardware customers only. Sharing can require several steps. In the future, companies will install local storage islands around cities for smoother, faster streaming. Software will be required to help you navigate, prioritize and edit the growing stack of information.

It is easy to forget, but superstructure — hardware — is a crucial part of the equation to make everything easy. Google renamed its document service GDrive for a reason.

A movement toward a storage fabric like this represents the next logical step in the history of information. For the first five thousand years of civilization, information was largely tied to physical media: scribes carved directives from the king in tablets and third grade teachers resorted to the copy machine for homework assignments.

The advent of digital and magnetic technologies in the second half of the 20th Century marked a watershed moment, because they dramatically eliminated a substantial portion of the physical bulk and legwork required to store information. Documents and datasheets could be edited on the fly. Just as important, archiving and managing data became fundamentally easier: file clerks, once a substantial portion of the workforce, suddenly were as common as blacksmiths.

Still, only finite copies of most documents existed: things could easily be lost.

The Internet took things a step further by breaking the relationship between information and its physical media. Hotmail, the one-time king of email services which Microsoft recently transformed into Outlook.com, probably deserves some of the credit for convincing customers about the benefits of remote access. When Hotmail was founded in 1996, email was still a thing: you downloaded software onto your computer to receive email and all of your messages were stored on your laptop or desktop. With Hotmail, users could suddenly easily access messages anywhere, not just from a particular PC. Consumers no longer owned the drives and computers where their messages lived. The information was theirs, but the superstructure wasn’t.

Flickr, YouTube, and Facebook soon followed. From a user’s perspective, you could make infinite copies and get unlimited access to anything. This split, however, introduces a new set of challenges. Users are no longer responsible for the health and maintenance of the systems that store their data: they expect companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google to do it for them. And while these companies have created state-of-the-art data centers and backup systems that function at incredibly high levels of reliability, reality sometimes intrudes. Crashes occur, and instead of one person in a cubicle complaining about a lost file, it’s a whole swarm of angry, impatient consumers. Security demands will grow as sensitive information shifts finally from paper to active files.

Remote access also potentially means a gargantuan increase in data packets. To keep networks humming, service providers will have to develop caching, recovery and de-duplication strategies to minimize the volume of traffic and the distances individual bits have to travel.

Finally, managing the massive and never ending increase in structured and unstructured data has its own inherent challenges. Which data goes where? When does the consumer want to access that data and how? Companies like Seagate and many others will look to tackle that challenge and deliver on this concept called the storage fabric. Consumers won’t have to worry about the back-end technical gymnastics and complicated algorithms that are managing their data. They only need to focus on a single view of their digital world, regardless of their device.

The hard work, however, will pay off. It will lead to what people think of when they think of the “cloud.” Not the reality of millions of machines anonymously churning away. Instead, it will just be the data, which is more valuable than any individual device.

You won’t have to think about a storage fabric. It will just be there.

With so much professional information and commentary — posted by physicians and others — in the social media realm, is there a potential for identity theft or misrepresentation? Social media experts say yes.

“Social media identity fraud is definitely a concern to me, especially as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest become more mainstream,” said Michael Sevilla, MD, a Youngstown, Ohio, family physician and social media enthusiast who founded the “Family Medicine Rocks” website and podcast. Dr. Sevilla said he has had blog content copied and reposted without his permission on other websites. In at least one instance, he said, the site that took the copy responded to reader contents posing as him.

Often the issue is someone posing not as the doctor but as a patient — and spreading misinformation that way. By 2014, an estimated 15% of social media reviews are expected to be fake, according to the technology research firm Gartner Inc.

“There may be a competitor who posts fake physician reviews,” said Brent Franson, vice president of ReputationDefender, an online reputation management company serving physicians, consumers and businesses. “We see that across the board with doctors and other professionals.”

Eighty-five percent of consumers conduct online research before making a purchase, according to a Harris Interactive study. The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 61% of Internet users look online for health information.

An expensive problem

No one has surveyed physicians to see how many have been victims of social media fraud. A survey of corporate executives by the accounting firm Grant Thornton found that the occurrence was infrequent, but exacted high costs in money and time when it happened.

One big issue, according to the survey, is that 58% of the 141 executives surveyed said their companies did not train anyone to identify and report social media fraud, leaving themselves open to becoming a victim. So a proactive approach is critical to optimizing and protecting a physician’s social media and Internet identities, according to social media experts, who offer the following tips:

Aggressively monitor and manage your digital footprint. Physicians have to take control of their digital footprint — their profile and the other professional information that is available on the Internet and through social media, said Bryan Vartabedian, MD, a pediatric gastroenterologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston who writes the blog “33 charts,” which looks at issues related to medicine, health and social media.

Said Franson: “It’s important for doctors to be really proactive, so that when they Google themselves, the information that appears is representative of the reality.”

This includes physicians managing their own websites, ensuring that the information posted on physician review and information sites is accurate, and asking for patients to post positive feedback and reviews to “spread information across the network,” said Bradley H. Crotty, MD, a researcher at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston who has co-wrote studies on physicians and social media. Physicians also should perform regular “electronic self-audits” through Google searches and by setting up Google alerts with their name and practice to monitor social media and online dialogue.

In addition, Dr. Vartabedian said, physicians should “claim your name when you can” on Web addresses and new and emerging social media applications, even if you’re not going to use them right away, to prevent other people or organizations from misrepresenting or diluting your identity.

Don’t feel you have to respond to someone whose identity you can’t figure out. Although you can and should deny a suspicious Facebook request, physicians have no control over who follows them on Twitter. Knowing who is following you is relevant only if “you are in some sort of committed engagement,” Dr. Vartabedian said. “You have no obligation to communicate with someone who does not reveal their identity.” And today, “you should be able to find out who people are. Most people have digital footprints.”

If a physician can’t use common tools such as Google to figure out the identity behind a tweet or a review, it’s possible that the “voice” comes from a bot or someone who has ill will at heart, such as a phishing scam to extract or get access to sensitive personal information, experts said.

Use available privacy tools. Social media sites can be an open book for potential scammers if precautions aren’t taken to ensure that personal information is protected as much as possible through privacy settings.

“Facebook, Twitter and [Google’s] Gmail generally do a good job with privacy,” Franson said. “Facebook is good in that you can easily make changes to your privacy setting to make sure that information is available to a smaller group of people. You want to be conscious about making sure that you adjust those settings to maximize privacy.”

Original article: http://www.amednews.com/article/20130121/business/130129985/7/

How do you bring a vision to life?  Michael Fertik talks innovation and entrepreneurship at the 2012 Blouin Leadership Summit.

How do you bring a vision to life?  Michael Fertik talks innovation and entrepreneurship at the 2012 Blouin Leadership Summit.

How do you bring a vision to life?  Michael Fertik talks innovation and entrepreneurship at the 2012 Blouin Leadership Summit.

How do you bring a vision to life?  Michael Fertik talks innovation and entrepreneurship at the 2012 Blouin Leadership Summit.

How do you bring a vision to life?  Michael Fertik talks innovation and entrepreneurship at the 2012 Blouin Leadership Summit.

REDWOOD CITY, CA., January 29, 2013 – ReputationDefender, the market and technology leader in online reputation management and digital privacy, announced its global expansion with the acquisition of Reputation 24/7, a United Kingdom-based online reputation management firm.          

“With this acquisition, ReputationDefender is expanding Silicon Valley to the United Kingdom and opening the door to a strong market for future growth,” said CEO and Founder Michael Fertik.  “Reputation 24/7 exemplifies the best of the U.K.’s robust tech industry and its capabilities align nicely with our core strengths.  This acquisition supports our growing international presence, which includes customers in more than 100 countries.”

Now known as ReputationDefender (U.K.), the former Reputation 24/7 will offer ReputationDefender’s suite of consumer and business-focused online reputation and social media management solutions to European customers.  ReputationDefender will also invest in the U.K. operation, enabling it to grow significantly over the next year.

“As a global company, we’ll continue the mission we adopted since ReputationDefender’s inception in 2006: to empower individuals and businesses with innovation that supports digital privacy and online reputation management,” said Fertik.

ReputationDefender’s business products enable both small and medium businesses as well as FTSE 100 companies to manage their online reputations, including monitoring online review sites and social media outlets, analyzing content to understand customer perception trends, and creating customized outreach campaigns.  Customers can also use ReputationDefender’s patented scoring technology to obtain their reputation scores, which show how a business measures up against local and national competitors in the eyes of their customers.

ReputationDefender also offers consumer-focused solutions that empower individuals to manage all aspects of their online reputation, from removing personally identifiable information, to monitoring social media photos and content to optimizing their search results.

About ReputationDefender

ReputationDefender was founded in 2006 to give individuals and businesses the power to control their digital privacy and reputation.  The company continues to pioneer patented solutions that safeguard and remove personal data from the Internet, monitor and respond to online reviews, build a positive and accurate Web presence for clients, and help businesses proactively engage customers.

ReputationDefender is a World Economic Forum Global Growth Company and multiple award winner, including the recent Silver for the Best in Biz Awards for “Most Customer Friendly Company” in 2012.  It is funded by top-tier venture capital firms and has customers in 100 countries.

###