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Author: Bonnie

Don’t Look Now, But the Tech Surveillance State Just Upped the Ante

Don’t Look Now, But the Tech Surveillance State Just Upped the Ante

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We know that the lockdowns with the Covid flu went far in enriching the coffers of the tech cartel at an (even more) accelerated rate than usual (World’s Richest People Smashed Wealth Records This Week). At some point, it’s no longer about money: it’s about what that largesse can bring and in case you missed it, NSA Chief Who Oversaw Sweeping Domestic Phone Surveillance Joins Amazon Board As Director. “This is the very NSA chief (Keith B. Alexander) who was the face of the agency’s mass sweeping up of Americans’ communications exposed by Edward Snowden’s leaks. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit earlier this month ruled the invasive NSA program was “illegal” and that US officials lied about it… For those keeping score, not only does Amazon own the The Washington Post and oversees the CIA’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise, it now has on its powerful board of directors the most visible figure from the NSA who illegally spied on Americans for the better part of a decade.” ZeroHedge reported, and it’s a must-read, and note to self: “Crucially his tenure as Director of the National Security Agency went for nearly a decade, from August 2005 to March 2014. From there he founded a cybersecurity technology company in 2014, of which he’s still leads as Co-CEO and president, called IronNet Cybersecurity, Inc.”

The hire came “Just days after Amazon published a scathing letter (in the Washington Post, which, like Amazon, is also owned by Jeff Bezos) slamming President Trump for not allowing the American multinational tech company to get the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, which instead was awarded to Microsoft.”

Never mind that Amazon Web Services is now authorized to host the US Department of Defense’s most sensitive data, including top secret Pentagon and NSA information (as of 2017) and also has “a monopoly on many services on the internet,” as Esha (@eshaLegal) noted, and “Even without an ex-spy chief with a less-than-stellar reputation in terms of privacy protection on its board, Amazon has faced growing pushback over its intrusive high-tech devices. Its virtual assistant Alexa was caught red-handed passively recording intimate conversations of unsuspecting family members, while its new fitness tracker ‘Halo’ promises to scan users’ bodies and track emotions in their voice,” RT reported, Read More...

Is It Time to Shoot the Messenger?

Is It Time to Shoot the Messenger?

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Image by Jan Alexander from Pixabay

Calm down, we’re talking about delivering your message via online video. It seems that everyone is doing a videocast these days and given that one has one’s choice of either Facebook Live, LinkedInLive, YouTube, Periscope, DLive, Twitch, et al and out in beta, mmhmm, there is certainly no shortage of platforms. Or people who feel that they need to say something, whether or not they necessarily have something to say.

Careers have been launched via these platforms: look at PewDie Pie, the gamer/comedian who started out by playing videos of games, threw in some comedy and became one of the most viewed channels on YouTube. Or Harry Stebbings, who was a mere 20 years old when he launched his Twenty Minute VC, featuring, yes 20-minute interviews with investors, keeping them short, snappy and getting right to the point. Twenty minutes. That’s all it took. In fact, the now 24-year-old Stebbings recently launched his own micro VC fund (20VC).

“Podcasts are becoming big business — in part because of how well they can attract and keep audiences at a time when so many other media formats are finding it hard to pin down that elusive metric of engagement,” says Techcrunch. Read More...

Inside Investor Baseball: Here’s the Pitch

Inside Investor Baseball: Here’s the Pitch

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Image by Сергей Ремизов from Pixabay

Ok, so you’ve done your pitch deck – revised it ad infinitum, based on the feedback you’ve gotten from everyone you know and his or her fourth cousin twice removed. Now you’ve secured a few investor meetings, via Zoom. Where’s that investor pitch meeting template when you need one?

Brian Cohen spoke at our virtual investor breakfast recently and imparted some pearls of advice to help you with that one, some of which we’ll share with you today, with a few additions of our own, along with points other investor friends and previous Investor breakfast speakers of ours have made in the pas.

First, meetings these days are done via Zoom. Show your face. At least at the outset of the meeting. Not a photo, nyour initials, not your LinkedIn photo, which is no doubt a selfie and doesn’t look all that great anyway – the real you – and the other team members who may also be on the call. Why? Investor(s) want to get to know you and yours, and much is conveyed via your visage and facial expressions. Do you smile? At least occasionally? Investors – and Brian referred primarily to angels – after all, he was Chairman of the New York Angels for a decade before co-founding New York Venture Partner – and has invested in literally hundreds of companies over the years – have to like you. This is a partnership and a potentially a long one, so they want to see you – if only on a video call. For now, at least. Read More...

The Investment Landscape in the New For-Now

The Investment Landscape in the New For-Now

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Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

It’s an odd time in the industry, to put it mildly. World economies have certainly been challenged (again, to put it mildly). Still, Crunchbase reported that “Despite the turmoil of an ongoing pandemic, global venture funding for the second quarter of 2020 was not as dire as we expected, but it was down from previous years.” Specifically, it was down 7% from the first half of 2019.

According to CNBC the First half of 2020 sees 30% drop in startup deals; seed funding falls 40%. The big winners in overall funding: fintech, health tech and long-time also-ran edtech.

We live in strange times, again to put it very mildly. After all, Meditation app Meditopia raised $15m funding round. “Mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower reckons that the top 10 meditation apps generated $195m of user spending in 2019 – and that was before a global pandemic created a new spike in their popularity.” Read More...

Observations and More Lessons Learned from the New Normal

Observations and More Lessons Learned from the New Normal

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It’s odd how companies have always had rules to which they had strictly adhered, but the lockdowns and behavioral changes brought several other necessary changes and issues to light, and always important for founders to observe and find that white space in the landscape that need that needs to be filled.  In terms of the current work landscape, for example, employees are not only working from home, but presently, sometimes from a home that might be thousands of miles away from the office. Suddenly, we can not only work remotely: it has been more or less mandatory for months and considering that 500K+ residents have already permanently left NYC, that trend may well continue.  No worries: we’ve proven that we can work for a NYC-based company, even if we’re in, say, Ohio. Zoom is the new normal and the stock price, yes, zoomed.

Not surprisingly, tracking devices on employees’ computers are also becoming the new normal.  Just because you’re working from home doesn’t mean your boss isn’t watching you, Vox reported. In fact, “Software that monitors remote employees is seeing a sales boom.” Speaking of Zoom, “The videoconferencing software, for example, used to allow hosts on its paid service to turn on something called “attention tracking.” This feature let them see if meeting attendees navigated away from the app for longer than 30 seconds during a meeting, which served as a good indication that they were looking at something else. It couldn’t see what they were looking at instead, and it could only be activated when the host was in screen-sharing mode… the company disabled the feature after widespread outcry, which demonstrates how much people dislike features like these and why employers should exercise discretion if and when they use them.” Read More...

Ripping the Mask Off Online Networking

Ripping the Mask Off Online Networking

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Image by Ryan McGuire from Pixabay

‘The New Normal,’ ‘Zoom me,’ ‘let’s do a screen share.’ There’s no doubt that the patois – and much of our behavior – has changed in the last several months, but some things don’t, such as the importance of ‘getting out there’ and networking and staying connected.

There’s no excuse not to. You may be sitting at home, but let’s be honest: you have the world at your fingertips, so instead of wasting even more time on TikTok (and head’s up: Apple Caught China-Owned TikTok Spying on Millions of iPhone Users) or posting yet again to the gram or checking out what everyone else is doing, one of the most invigorating activities in which you can engage is meeting new people. Here are a few suggestions for doing that:

  1. Events these days are taking place virtually. Find the ones that appeal to you and participate. Ok, so you’re having a bad hair day. Most of the world has been having a bad hair three months, so don a cap, post your photo instead, and even post simply your name or initial, if you must. But remember: the web – and video conferencing – is visual. Fine to retreat behind a little black box, but at some point – especially during introductions – remember that the importance of networking is to literally show your face.
  2. Find online networking groups in your areas of interest. While in some events, you can participate in the chat only and are more or less a fly on the wall, there are those in which the attendees are actively engaged with each other and the host, en masse, or in breakout rooms. Good way to meet new people, and since people from all over the country and all over the world have the ability to participate, these are opportunities you might not have ordinarily gotten. Ever.
  3. Behave yourself. Play nice with the other kids/attendees. Participate, but refrain from using this as an opportunity to get up on a soap box or your high horse. People are participating because they want to reach out, not be shut out or shouted down.
  4. If you’re participating because you have a particular need – looking for work, employees, investors, whatever  – don’t start with that or use your agenda to monopolize the conversation. Find out who everyone is first. Participants usually also post their emails or LinkedIn information in the chat – which you can save. Establish a relationship first, and continue the conversations later – or via email or phone call or LinkedIn chat or a separate video chat. Just because it’s a video conference doesn’t mean you need to get in everyone’s faces.
  5. Participate in online activities, too. Trust us, there’s something for everyone out there – chess, yoga, cooking, karaoke, even cocktail hours. You name it, you can find it. Good time to develop an interest or pursue one that you’ve been putting off – and you never know who you meet that way. As for the cocktail hours: you may be holed up in your apartment, but no reason why you should have to imbibe alone.
  6. Good ice breaker rather than the usual, ‘who are you and what do you do?’ Try, ‘so where in the world are you at the moment?’ Many people are away from their usual home base. Always interesting to know where they’ve gone off to and how that has altered their lives. It’s a much more interesting way to connect in this age of the New Normal.
  7. LinkedIn. You may have a ton of connections, some of whom you know and some of whom you decided to connect with out of the blue for whatever reason and for whatever reason, they accepted. Good time to check in with some of those connections. Say hello. See how they’re doing and what they’re doing. Not everyone updates their profile all the time, so you never know what might have changed. Drop them a note. Or look for people/former coworkers with whom you might have lost touch. You might even want to look at some of your connections’ second degrees and perhaps introduce yourself to them. You at least know someone in common: that second degree may also have common interests or be able to help you push the envelope forward a bit – or vice versa.

We are admittedly a compulsive networker, as we enjoy meeting new people and you just never know whom you might encounter just by showing up, even if it means moving just a bit out of your comfort zone. It can be energizing. It can be thought-provoking. It may help you to look at something you’ve been thinking about/stressing over with a new perspective. If you’re working on something/need something in particular, it might even help you to move the needle forward. Read More...

About Those Cell Phones: Is It Really Your Call?

About Those Cell Phones: Is It Really Your Call?

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We reported a month or two back that Apple and Google were building a coronavirus contact tracking system into iOS and Android. “, which is laid out in a series of documents and white papers, would use short-range Bluetooth communications to establish a voluntary contact-tracing network, keeping extensive data on phones that have been in close proximity with each other,” The Verge reported.

Not that these two esteemed members of the tech cartel are known for serving the public good uber alles, and note to self: “At least eight global companies identified as benefitting from China’s enslavement of Muslim minorities published statements celebrating Juneteenth, an American holiday marking the end of slavery in the country.” Of course the list includes Apple and Google – as well as Abercrombie & Fitch, Amazon, FILA, General Motors, Nike, and Ralph Lauren. Read More...