Musings of an Internet Marketing Consultant
Musings of an Internet Marketing Consultant

Saturday, February 22, 2003


Long gap here...

Over the past few months I have had the opportunity to explore marketing isssues associated with a variety of technologies. In spite of a weak investment climate, the genius of our engineering and software development community has not been waning. Here are a few examples:

One company has a product for the automation of IT processes, with special emphasis on the (daily) consolidation of remote data gathered from subsidiaries, branches, or retail channels for reporting of sales, purchase orders and inventories and then distributing information on, say, a daily basis to keep their remote systems current. Great product but need to understand how to build channel relationships.

Another had a unique technology for collaboratively browsing websites directly from a hyperlink starting point. No client download and fully secure via https. Yet, they needed to listen to their market as to how to interface this technology in a user friendly manner and also what the development priorities should have been.

We have been working with one technology that should be seriously considered by the security folks who are concerned about an Internet terrorist attack; in fact, it was developed under DARPA funding. Basically this technology tags packets such that they can be identified as legitimate or forged and use this information to throttle a Distributed Denial of Service attack. Also they can block a Trojan Horsed PC from launching a flood of forged packets from that PC's network onto the Internet (sort of a Reverse Firewall). In this case we looked at ways to both identify and mitigate attacks. But as a result of the SQL Slammer attack, it has turned out to be sought by ISP's simply to identify legitimate from forged packets to determine if an increase in packet arrival rates is actually legitimate data or, in fact, a flood attack that should be blocked by other means. Had this been installed a lot of the SQL Slammer damage could have been mitigated. But the old question arises: who should pay for this? The ISP? but s/he has enough cost demands. The customer? but, of course, his/her servers would NEVER be attacked!

Enough for this morning .. just reacquainting myself with this Blogger activity and how to use it. Recently acquired Biz Stone's book on Blogging -- a great help in pulling the picture together.




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