Just a guy in Vermont trying to connect all the dots...
Dan York
Author's posts
Aug 04
Voxeo’s Hiring a VP of Marketing – Come Be My Boss!
Yes, I'm part of that team - I'm looking for my new boss!
Opportunities like this don't come along all that often... are you up for seizing the chance?
A word of caution... if your idea of a "VP of Marketing" job is someone who sits down in week-long strategy sessions, has long alcohol-fueled lunches, spends half the time at fancy conferences "networking"... and takes a few weeks to create fancy PowerPoint slides before handing the work off to staff or agencies to create glossy direct mail pieces before heading out to the golf course... well... please don't waste our time by applying!
Voxeo is a %#$&@$ rocketship that is taking on the traditional players in the industry and winning pretty much every major deal out there. You have to be able to grasp on to that rocket and if you can't... you're going to be burned to a crisp. (And, oh, by the way, you're supposed to be helping steer that rocket!)
It's an incredible place to work with an amazing team of people and an incredibly open culture. Coming up on 4 years here at Voxeo, I can say definitively that this company is going places... and this is an incredible opportunity to join the company and help shape that growth.
It will probably be one of the most rewarding jobs you'll ever do - and one of the most fun - and, well, a heck of a lot of work!
As the job description says:
The Vice President of Marketing will run Voxeo’s Marketing organization from Voxeo’s Orlando, FL Headquarters. Executives at Voxeo are expected to create strategy and high-level goals, and then jump in with their team and help get the job done. We are all “doers” at Voxeo. We work hard. We play hard. We’re in this to win it. Pure thinkers who don’t like to get their hands dirty won’t work well here.
Voxeo has the best products in the industry, a rapidly growing customer and partner base, an insanely high 62% Net Promoter Score, and recognized by analysts at Gartner and Ovum as one of the top vendors in our industry.
What we need now is a phenomenal Vice President of Marketing who will strategize, implement, analyze and improve marketing with a focus on lead generation.
We have an existing team of top-notch experts in SEO/SEM, social media, event marketing, and analyst relations. We need to improve our messaging, press relations, and again… lead generation.
And here's a key point:
At best 1 in 20 buyers in our market know who we are. When they know who we are we win almost every time. You need to get us into the minds of the other 19 buyers.
Ready for the challenge?
The job description has more of the responsibilities and requirements of the position. This position is based in our Orlando office as many of the marketing team members are remote and you need to be interacting with the other executives and staff. And if all you know of "Orlando" is Disney... forget what you know... downtown Orlando is a completely different world from the empire of the Mouse.
To learn more about what we do, visit our website ... but then look at our many blogs, our presence on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and the many (20+) other web sites and services that make up Voxeo's offerings.
I'd give you the links... but if you can't find them you don't deserve a chance at an interview, let alone the job! :-)
Come join us... it's going to be fun!
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Aug 03
MarsEdit Offline Blog Editor For Mac OS X Has a New (Minor) Version Out
Yesterday Daniel Jalkut released a minor update to MarsEdit, my favorite offline blogging tool, and while the 3.3.2 release itself was really just about bug fixes, I thought I'd mention the tool again here on this blog for those who may have recently moved to Mac OS X and are looking for an offline blog editor. I've written about MarsEdit a number of times before and continue to find it probably the program I use the most on my Mac outside of email and web browsers.
Granted, I write across a lot of blogs... but that's the point! MarsEdit gives me a consistent editing interface across all the blogs, no matter what platform they are running on. I also never have to login to any sites because I'm doing all the editing on my local Mac. For the same reason, it's very fast to get in and start editing... and I can easily drop in graphics... and everything else I want to do to write posts.
If you are on a Mac and write blogs posts, do check out MarsEdit. Yes, it's NOT free software... but I've found it well worth the price.
P.S. I have no financial relationship with Red Sweater Software other than being a happy customer, i.e. I am not getting any compensation or anything else if you buy the software.
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Aug 02
Facebook Acquires eBook Maker Push Pop Press – See The TED Video To Understand
Now we're taking our publishing technology and everything we've learned and are setting off to help design the world's largest book, Facebook.Although Facebook isn't planning to start publishing digital books, the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook, giving people even richer ways to share their stories. With millions of people publishing to Facebook each day, we think it's going to be a great home for Push Pop Press.
Which was similarly confirmed in a statement from Facebook that was published on All Things D (and other sites):
Facebook isn’t planning to get into the digital book business, but some of the ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with Facebook
I'd not seen their book myself prior to this news, but to understand how cool Push Pop Press' "publishing technology" is, check out the video of co-founder Mike Matas' demoing the technology at TED:
It will be fascinating to see how Facebook adds Push Pop Press' technology into the Facebook user experience... could be fun!
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Aug 02
New Android Malware/Trojan Records Your Phone Calls
News out of the CA Security Advisor Blog today is that there is a new piece of Android malware that records phone calls that you make on an Android phone. The post author, Dinesh Venkatesan, goes into some detail about what they found – and how they found it – in testing this malware.
While this is not a “VoIP” issue, per se, as the trojan seems to record calls over the “regular” phone connection it is a general communications security issue and something we all have to watch out for. Over on the ReadWriteWeb, Dan Rowinski published a good piece putting this malware in context with other recent Android malware.
The net of both posts is that ultimately you need to be extremely careful about the source of applications you are installing on your Android phone – and what permissions you are granting them.
Meanwhile, I expect that we’ll continue to more creativity coming out of the attacker community..
Image credit: CA Security Advisor Blog
Aug 02
Dulwich – a native python way to access Git repositories
Ever wanted to manipulate Git repositories directly in python? Well, okay… I haven’t really myself, but in writing about Google Code’s support for git yesterday, I noticed that they are using Dulwich, a native python implementation of git. Rather than wrapping command-line git with python scripts, Dulwich is a python module giving you direct access to a git repository. As shown in the Dulwich tutorial, creating a new repo is simply this:
>>> from dulwich.repo import Repo
>>> from os import mkdir
>>> mkdir("myrepo")
>>> repo = Repo.init("myrepo")
>>> repo
<Repo at 'myrepo'>
Once a repo is created (or you connect to an existing repo), you can do what you would do with git at the command line: adding files to the repo, committing files, and changing files.
While I don’t know that I personally will use this… it’s very cool that Dulwich is out there for python programmers who want to interact with git repos. Very cool to see!
Aug 01
European Union Security Agency Releases Report Analyzing HTML5 Security
While not directly related to Unified Communications, the reality is that many UC web interfaces, particularly for mobile devices, may turn to HTML5 as a way to create a web interface that provides an excellent user interface and works across all mobile devices.
Perhaps more importantly, the work of the RTCWEB/WebRTC working groups within the IETF and W3C, which I've written about over on Voxeo's blogs, is aimed at bringing the "real-time communications" functionality directly into the web browser. In other words, you wouldn't need a browser plugin or additional program on your computer to make voice, video or chat connections… it could happen entirely within the browser.
At that point every browser potentially can become a UC endpoint… and therefore a concern for communications security.
It's a lengthy document from ENISA, but worth a read as it dives into both analysis and recommendations for greater HTML5 security.
Aug 01
Google Code Now Supports Git for Hosted Projects
Being a big fan of Git for version control, I was very pleased to see the announcement last week that projects hosted at Google Code can now use git in addition to subversion and mercurial (see also Google Code’s GitFAQ). I had looked at hosting projects on Google Code in the past, but chose not to specifically because git was not an option. While I personally am quite happy using Github for project hosting, it’s always good to see other services supporting git:
Way to go, Google Code!
Aug 01
XKCD’s Brilliant – And Sad – Comic About Cancer…
Someone recently pointed this XKCD comic out to me and it is both brilliantly done ... and hits home at the tragedy of where we are at as a society with cancer:
The scary part is exactly what the strip shows... you don't know if or when it may ever return. :-(
And yeah... F___ Cancer!
Aug 01
Walled Garden Deja Vu: Facebook Provides "facebook.com" Email Addresses
Over the weekend, I had a severe case of deja vu... and found myself humming that song from Styx that includes the line "Haven't we been here before...".
Why?
Because Facebook followed through on its earlier statement around letting people receive email to a "facebook.com" email address:
So yes, indeed, because clearly I need more email addresses, you can now send me email to:
dyork@facebook.com
[On a side note, I will be very curious to see what kind of anti-spam measures Facebook puts in place as these addresses get out there. Consider this my little test... putting that email address out here on a public blog site where it can be easily scraped.]
The deja vu part is that ... we've been here before. Remember AOL? CompuServer? Prodigy? Delphi? MCI Mail? GENIE?
Remember all those "walled gardens" of the original "computer information services"?
And remember those glorious days when you could FINALLY get an email address so that you could send and receive to people outside the walls of whatever service you used? (Even if those addresses were sometimes hard to write or remember? ex. CompuServe's numerical addresses.)
While I realize that some % of readers of this post in 2011 were probably not born in the heydey of those services, for those of us who were around those were big days when we finally got those email addresses.
Soon everyone had an open Internet email address... the walls came down... and communication happened across all services.
Over time, though, the walls started coming back up. I wrote about this four years ago in a May 2007 post, "Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and the Return of the Walled Gardens of E-Mail" and drew my view of the evolution of email:
[Another side note: Notice how things change in 4 years and some of the services I mentioned on the right that are no longer around or relevant...]
And so now we Facebook giving us a way to receive email messages. We've had the ability to send email messages out of Facebook for some time now, but it was sent from cryptic, ugly addresses that changed. Now we have a "regular" email address... and indeed an outbound message from Facebook to my "dyork@voxeo.com" address looks fine in my regular email client:
Note, of course, that since Facebook does not let you set a "Subject" line on an outbound message you create, the subject is simply "Conversation with Dan York".
When a message is initially received from the outside, the subject line of that email is preserved, as you can see here:
The "Hidden Text" in this case was my normal Voxeo email signature.
All in all it works quite well. I'm not naive enough to think that this is some great idea by Facebook to open up to the outside world... the simple fact is that they want to keep you inside of Facebook where you interact with people on Facebook... and, oh, yes, view all the advertising.
If Facebook can convince you to use the site as your email portal, instead of, oh, GMail, then Facebook and their advertisers win against Google and its advertisers.
Of course, Facebook still has its incredibly onerous Terms of Service that basically says all your email - and any other content - belong to Facebook... so I don't see me personally using my "dyork@facebook.com" email account all that often outside of the regular FB messaging I'll be doing there.
Still, all cynicism and deja vu aside, as an advocate for the open Internet I am pleased to see this move by Facebook. Some people have made Facebook their portal of choice... and this now lets people choose other sites as their portals of choice, yet still communicate with Facebook users.
In the end, this openness - and ability for us to control our choice of communication - is exactly what we need.
Have you "claimed" your Facebook email address yet? Will you use it?
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Jul 28
One Simple Reason O’Reilly ROCKS as an Ebook Publisher
Like many technical folks, I've long been a fan of O'Reilly books, having purchased my first "animal" book sometime back in the late 1980's, but as we collectively make the transition to the world of ebooks, I've discovered one simple reason O'Reilly truly rocks as a publisher:
http://oreilly.com/e/
That's it! Enter that one little URL into the browser on your tablet, mobile phone or e-reader and after you login... ta da... there are all the O'Reilly ebooks you have purchased! No need to sync to a program on your laptop or desktop ... just straight downloads to your device to open in whatever program you use - iBooks, Kindle, Stanza, whatever...
Here's how it looks on my iPad:
As you can see, books are available in whatever formats they were produced in... so you can grab ePub for iBooks or Stanza, Mobi for Kindle, or just a straight-up PDF for use in other apps. You aren't limited to one format, either, as you can download all of the formats if you want. O'Reilly has also taken the step to deliver their downloads DRM-free, so you can use them on any device.
The image on the right shows the same screen on my iPhone. The URL will naturally work on a laptop or desktop, too, but the beauty of it is that the URL is so trivial to enter into a mobile device. About as small a URL as you can get.
The great thing about ebooks is, of course, that you always get the latest version of whatever the author has uploaded. And O'Reilly routinely alerts you via email whenever there are new updates for you to download.
That one simple URL makes it so easy to obtain whatever books you purchase and whatever updates there are.
In full disclosure, I now am an "O'Reilly author" with my latest book, "Migrating Applications to IPv6", but that is just recent (last month) and I started purchasing O'Reilly ebooks quite some time ago for my iPad.
The whole world of ebooks is undergoing an amazing amount of innovation right now... and it's great to see publishers like O'Reilly trying out new ideas to see what works. And in my mind, having an easy-to-access portal to all your ebooks at a super-simple URL is a great idea!
Thanks, O'Reilly, for making it so simple to get to your ebooks!
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