(…)there are no magic solutions. Our belief in magic solutions that may happen some day in the future keeps us from doing what we really need to do right here and right now.

via A Minty Fresh Mind | Tricycle.

Yes, it sounds pretty crazy. But it’s true. In the seed and series A, you are selling promise and some execution. In growth rounds, you are selling something that already “works”. You are selling a marketing machine, and the ability to “put in 1 dollar and get out 2″. In between, you are selling a hybrid of both, and that isn’t easy.

via Why The Series B is the “Sucker Round” – ROBGO.ORG.

Experience is often over-rated. Some of the most successful startup teams consisted of people that lacked relevant experience at the time they joined. But, what they lacked in experience, they more than made up for in sheer talent and hunger. In the early days, hire athletes. People with raw talent and a propensity to get things done. Don’t be resistent to recruiting people that are early in their careers. You’re looking for arbitrage opportunities. You’re looking for the future stars — because you likely can’t afford or convince the current stars.

via Startup Lessons From 17 Hard-Hitting Quotes In “Moneyball”.

The willingness to reach out to someone you don’t know is crucial to the art of connecting, and especially important in uncertain economic times. Those who are in mid-career and may have worked for one company for years should learn connecting skills before they need them.For instance, most people’s natural inclination is to seek out friends at meetings and mealtimes. Banikarim says not to do that. “It’s easy to sit with someone you know,” she says. “It’s hard, but more interesting, to sit with someone you don’t know. This is not like high school. It’s not just the losers who don’t have somewhere to sit.”

via Forget Networking. How to Be a Connector | Entrepreneur.com.

Wrapp Mogul: Why LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman Is Investing In The Social Gifting Site
FAST COMPANY | JANUARY 18, 2012
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/fastcompany/headlines/~3/vAXJBl45k4Y/linkedins-reid-hoffman-invests-in-social-gifting-site-wrapp

Hoffman’s previously tossed cash at Facebook, Groupon, and Zynga. Now the Greylock partner sees potential in the data you can … read more

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http://pulse.me

A New Faster Fourier Transform Can Speed One of IT’s Fundamental Algorithms
POPULAR SCIENCE – NEW TECHNOLOGY, SCIENCE NEWS, THE FUTURE NOW | JANUARY 18, 2012
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-01/new-faster-fourier-transform-can-speed-one-its-fundamental-algorithms

The Fast Fourier Transform From many irregular signals, one. Christine Daniloff via MIT NewsEven faster than the fast Fourier … read more

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http://pulse.me

VMTurbo deserves recognition for Cloud Operations Manager’s innovation, ease of implementation and excellent value. Their product deploys as a virtual appliance and offers completely real-time data, which assists in capacity planning and dynamic workload orchestration. It also supports multiple hypervisors and multiple tenets, and it even has its own application programming interface.

via Products of the Year 2011: Virtualization management.

If you have someone on your team who is consistently overdelivering, requires little supervision, and makes the team around them markedly better, promote them immediately and give them more responsibility along with that promotion.

A promotion is a great way for a CEO or manager to recognize ‘A’ players, to position them as role models within the team or company, and to regain valuable management bandwidth.

If you’re thinking seriously about promoting someone, especially at a startup, then it probably means you should do it.  I have managed people who fit into the ‘Promote Fast’ bucket before, and the only regret in my time working with them was that I did not promote them sooner.

One way to slash the number of successful phishing attempts would be for B2C sites to start adding mobile-based authentication as part of their login process on top of the usual username/password combo.

Yes, this would negatively affect the user experience, as the user would need to provide more info than username and password at login, but it would reduce the attack surface of a typical internet user dramatically.

With this type of authentication scheme, when you login with your username/password pair, your phone is called if the username/password combo is accurate.  At that point, your cell phone will ring, and you’ll need to pick up and press a button to show that you are indeed the person who just entered that username/password info.  This is a powerful concept because if the phisher doesn’t have your phone, and he/she can’t do any damage.

For added security, a site could also use the phone authentication to protect certain critical operations post-login (e.g. a mass delete, a message to a large number of contacts, a purchase above a certain pre-set threshold).

No consumer site has tried to “sell” me this kind of two-factor authentication lately as part of their user experience.  However, if that site is buying or selling anything on my behalf, I’m open to a slightly more clunky user experience in order to add another layer of protection.

There are companies who provide two-factor authentication as a service, but clearly it is not terribly popular in the consumer web or B2C world (or, maybe just with the sites I use — as I never bump into it).

Is the user experience so poor that it’s not worth implementing these solutions?  Basic two-factor auth is not that hard to build, so I can’t imagine that it would be a technology issue (or a cost issue if working with a 3rd party web service that provided this functionality).  Or do the consumer sites themselves and their customers not really see this (phishing) as an existential threat?

Seems intuitively that mobile and / or multi-factor (e.g. phone + username/password + something else) authentication is a big area of opportunity given the current trends in phishing and security, but maybe I am missing something.

What am I missing? :)

Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), a global venture capital firm, today announced the promotions of Abhijeet Muzumdar and Sarah Tavel to vice president.

via Bessemer Venture Partners Announces Vice President Promotions | Business Wire.