9 SXSW Interactive Sessions Everyone Should Vote For - Now!

The South by Southwest (SXSW) Conferences & Festivals - the giant confab of interactive, music and film in Austin, TX, in March, 2013 - is currently working on some 3,656 panel proposals. Which ones actually happen depends on how many votes they get. Here are nine panels that deserve your support.

The voting closes on August 31st at 11:59pm Central Daylight Time, not much time to review all those choices. To check out 3,656 sessions in 36 hours, you would need to cover about 101 sessions per hour, or 1.7 panels per minute (PPM). And that doesn’t leave time for eating, sleeping or anything else.

To make your job easier, we waded in and identified nine can’t-miss panels that deserve your support, based on these four criteria:

1. Is the topic technology related?

2. Is the topic approachable?

3. Is the content unique?

4. Are the speakers/panelists reputable?

Vote early and vote often, whether or not you plan to make it to Austin in March. Click on the headline to vote for the ones you like best.

What You Will Learn: This session will share how brands, producers and advertisers (both big and small) can leverage social TV to target and engage with current and potential customers. For people just interested in what’s around the corner, this session will provide plenty of insight into the future of social TV that is sure to keep the wheels in your mind turning for days.

Speakers: Sam Decker of Mass Relevance, Olivier Delfosse of FremantleMedia Enterprises, and Mike Proulx of Hill Holliday

What You Will Learn: This session will teach you how to leverage social data to improve your personal and professional life. For example, you will learn how to use data to monitor your friends so that you know exactly what to get them for their birthday. You will also learn how to figure out what the opposite sex responds to in an effort to improve your “game.”

Speakers: Adam Schoenfeld of Simply Measured and Matt Thomson of Klout

What You Will Learn: This session will share what neuroscience has uncovered about social behavior and teach you how you can apply these neurological principles into the design of your site and your online community.

Speakers: Yumio Saneyoshi of Google and Mimi Kao of University of California, San Francisco

What You Will Learn: This session will discuss the development of a photography meme titled, “Texts From Hillary” - including how it unfolded and the impact it and other memes have had on how we tell visual stories.

Speakers: Kira Pollack of TIME Magazine, photojournalist Diana Walker, Stacy Lambe of Buzzfeed

What You Will Learn: In this session, Nadia and Chrystal will share the five guiding principles they continue to use to build and maintain their online community of over 16 million members.

Speakers: Nadia Hussain and Chrystal Chan of Polyvore

What You Will Learn: From marketing and going paperless to accounting and contact management, this session will teach you how to get the most out of your Evernote account.

Speakers: Lindsey Holmes of LCH Business SM & Tech and Josh Zerkel of Custom Living Solutions

What You Will Learn: This panel will share how networking has evolved and empower you to leverage the new trends to maximize your network and reap the rewards.

Speakers: Stephanie Agresta of Weber Shandwick, Porter Gale of Porter Gale, Inc., David Hornik of August Capital and Shira Lazar of What’s Trending

What You Will Learn: This panel will take you into the future and demonstrate what 3D printing makes possible - including the impact it will have on manufacturing, design and creativity as we know it.

Speakers: Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine and Peter Weijmarshausen of Shapeways

What You Will Learn: This panel will help you cut through the common myths surrounding blogging and outline a comprehensive, actionable blueprint you can implement immediately. Have a question that wasn’t answered? Be sure to ask the panel for help. 

Speakers: Mark Schaefer of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, Gini Dietrich of Arment Dietrich, and Stanford Smith of Fluency Media

BONUS: The following three sessions are proposed by SAY: Media, ReadWriteWeb’s parent company. You may want to check them out, too:

1. Adapt or Die, Jane Pratt’s Publishing Evolution: Featuring the one and only Jane Pratt, documenting her journey into digital publishing and what she has learned along the way.

2. Addicted to Mobile, The New Cigarette: Doug Grinspan and Jeremiah Zinn of Viacom reunite to uncover what makes mobile devices so addicting.

3. SocialX : UX :: Users : Users: SAY: Media social mastermind Ted Rheingold on how to design for the social experience.

Have other sessions you like? Share them in the comments below!

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by William Griggs, a startup strategist who helps startups with their product, marketing and fundraising strategies. You can find more about him at TheStartupSlingshot.com or follow him on Twitter @TSSUpdates.

Austin image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Why You Should Be Terrified Of A Free Trade Agreement You've Never Heard Of [Infographic]

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is the most influential piece of recent legal work you’ve probably never heard of. Can a Free Trade Agreement really threaten Internet freedom, redefine copyright and alter the course of global healthcare? You bet.

According to the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) and other participating or negotiating members, the TPP is just another Free Trade Agreement (FTA). Like most FTAs, the TPP regulates tariffs and duties and sets standards for trade among member countries. Unlike most FTAs, though, the TPP imposes additional standards on Intellectual Property (IP) law, including some that are more extensive and severe than any currently on its member countries' books.

In its TPP FAQ, the feds justify the deviations from FTA norm by claiming the modern world has changed the game:

The Administration recognizes that the concerns that workers, businesses, farmers, and ranchers have today are different than those they had a generation ago. We intend to negotiate a high standard, regional agreement that addresses new and emerging issues, incorporates new elements reflecting our values and priorities, and responds to the 21st century challenges our citizens face.

If successful, the TPP could help the United States and its neighbors compete more effectively in ever-important Asian markets. In addition to securing a stronghold against economic bullying from China, the U.S. could use the TPP to gain access to lucrative agriculture markets in Japan and New Zealand, and reduce or eliminate oppressive import duties that have depressed exports. Other participants have similar goals. New Zealand, for example, is eyeing U.S. dairy markets.

So what’s the problem? For starters, the whole negotiating process looks a little shady. In May, more than 30 legal scholars wrote a letter of protest to Trade Ambassador Ron Kirk over a lack of transparency. His response, essentially, was that it could be a lot worse. A few days later he asserted that the USTR had carried out “the most engaged and transparent process we possibly could,” though stories of discrimination against public criticism (like this bungle in Hollywood) didn’t help his case.

The bulk of the criticism centers around TPP’s Intellectual Property protections. On one hand, these protections impose copyright standards on member countries that are more extensive and punitive than current standards in any of the member states At the same time, it pressures Internet Service Providers in participating countries to filter their own Internet traffic for infringing material and enforce violations by blocking access to offending websites. In theory, a video mashup, a song cover or even some Harry Potter fan fiction could shut down an entire site. Taken to the extreme, it’s SOPA on a global scale, without a vote, minus the public scrutiny.

Concerns about excessive Intellectual Property protections extend beyond the digital world. Kensaku Fukui, a professor at Nihon University in Japan, is concerned that the TPP would give copyright holders complete and arbitrary control over “parallel goods” – licensed merchandise from multiple sources – which could disrupt established import/export markets. Want that rare import album? You might be out of luck.

Other impacts could be life-threatening. Twelve members of congress sent a letter to the USTR expressing concern that “long-term goals of public health and other programs in TPP countries would be challenged” due to increased costs for medications caused by an increased monopoly period in developing countries.

For more TPP criticisms, check out the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s topic page, or just check out the infographic:

Lead photo by Gobierno de Chile.

Container ship image courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Should Your Company Just Say "No" To Dropbox?

As the business world increasingly turns to mobile devices and cloud-based file-sharing services to store or collaborate on important documents, the amount of information that’s falling into the wrong hands keeps climbing.

The numbers tell the tale: 90% of organizations had a leak of sensitive or confidential information over the past year. That’s one of the take-aways from a new study from security analysts at the Ponemon Insitute.

Services like Dropbox, Bitcasa YouSendIt and others are useful and efficient ways to get documents and files from one worker to another, especially in this age of mobile devices and distributed workforces. Plus, they’re cheap (or free) and easy for individual workers or small departments to set up.

But increasing use of these tools in the workplace, even for legitimate business reasons such as collaboration, puts a lot of private information at risk. And companies are starting to notice.

How bad is the situation? According to the Ponemon study, 60% of organizations have employees who frequently or very frequently put confidential files on services like Dropbox without permission. And just about that same percentage (59%) reported that what controls they do have in place were inefffective at managing who has access to sensitive files.

It’s not that these consumer cloud services are inherently insecure. But as Wired’s Mat Honan learned a few weeks ago, nearly any service can be socially hacked (though proper precautions can help.

The problem is that mobile and remote workers want to have access to their files where and when they need them. But the idea of just having critical company information out in a public cloud makes a lot of companies nervous. Risks of data loss and falling out of compliance are too high to ignore.

“Consumer file-sharing services are effective, for consumers, but they lack the security, reliability and granular permission settings that business requires,” said Andrew Dixon, Sr., Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Igloo Software, a cloud-based business collaboration company. “And that means they can quickly become just another way for information to fall into silos or slip into the wrong hands.”

Some companies are already reacting with strong policies regulating use of such file-sharing services. IBM, for instance, has banned employee access to services like Dropbox and iCloud. Even the iPhone’s Siri is turned off for fear that sensitive information could be discovered from search query data stored at Apple.

This might be going too far for many companies. Especially if they don’t provide some sort of alternative. IBM has its own custom-built solution for file sharing, but many smaller operations can’t afford such measures.

Not surprisingly, new ventures are stepping to try and fill the void. The solution is use a collaborative platform with secure file sharing capabilities, according to Yorgen Edholm, CEO of Accellion, which markest just such a product.

“Organizations need to give their employees a secure way of sharing files or every mobile device will continue to be a potential sieve for confidential data,” Edholm wrote in a recent article on Forbes, “Before deploying a file-sharing solution, organizations should educate themselves about the risks of various file-sharing technologies and the requirements for enterprise-class mobile security.”

In other words, if you can’t beat ‘em, join 'em. By implementing a broader solution for collaboration that has easy-to-use and secure file sharing features, IT managers can reduce workers’ temptation to venture out on a consumer service.

Make a collaborative platform safe, make it easy and your sensitive documents might just stay where they belong.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Should Your Company Just Say "No" To Dropbox?

As the business world increasingly turns to mobile devices and cloud-based file-sharing services to store or collaborate on important documents, the amount of information that’s falling into the wrong hands keeps climbing.

The numbers tell the tale: 90% of organizations had a leak of sensitive or confidential information over the past year. That’s one of the take-aways from a new study from security analysts at the Ponemon Insitute.

Services like Dropbox, Bitcasa YouSendIt and others are useful and efficient ways to get documents and files from one worker to another, especially in this age of mobile devices and distributed workforces. Plus, they’re cheap (or free) and easy for individual workers or small departments to set up.

But increasing use of these tools in the workplace, even for legitimate business reasons such as collaboration, puts a lot of private information at risk. And companies are starting to notice.

How bad is the situation? According to the Ponemon study, 60% of organizations have employees who frequently or very frequently put confidential files on services like Dropbox without permission. And just about that same percentage (59%) reported that what controls they do have in place were inefffective at managing who has access to sensitive files.

It’s not that these consumer cloud services are inherently insecure. But as Wired’s Mat Honan learned a few weeks ago, nearly any service can be socially hacked (though proper precautions can help.

The problem is that mobile and remote workers want to have access to their files where and when they need them. But the idea of just having critical company information out in a public cloud makes a lot of companies nervous. Risks of data loss and falling out of compliance are too high to ignore.

“Consumer file-sharing services are effective, for consumers, but they lack the security, reliability and granular permission settings that business requires,” said Andrew Dixon, Sr., Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Igloo Software, a cloud-based business collaboration company. “And that means they can quickly become just another way for information to fall into silos or slip into the wrong hands.”

Some companies are already reacting with strong policies regulating use of such file-sharing services. IBM, for instance, has banned employee access to services like Dropbox and iCloud. Even the iPhone’s Siri is turned off for fear that sensitive information could be discovered from search query data stored at Apple.

This might be going too far for many companies. Especially if they don’t provide some sort of alternative. IBM has its own custom-built solution for file sharing, but many smaller operations can’t afford such measures.

Not surprisingly, new ventures are stepping to try and fill the void. The solution is use a collaborative platform with secure file sharing capabilities, according to Yorgen Edholm, CEO of Accellion, which markest just such a product.

“Organizations need to give their employees a secure way of sharing files or every mobile device will continue to be a potential sieve for confidential data,” Edholm wrote in a recent article on Forbes, “Before deploying a file-sharing solution, organizations should educate themselves about the risks of various file-sharing technologies and the requirements for enterprise-class mobile security.”

In other words, if you can’t beat ‘em, join 'em. By implementing a broader solution for collaboration that has easy-to-use and secure file sharing features, IT managers can reduce workers’ temptation to venture out on a consumer service.

Make a collaborative platform safe, make it easy and your sensitive documents might just stay where they belong.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

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Should Your Company Just Say "No" To Dropbox?

As the business world increasingly turns to mobile devices and cloud-based file-sharing services to store or collaborate on important documents, the amount of information that’s falling into the wrong hands keeps climbing.

The numbers tell the tale: 90% of organizations had a leak of sensitive or confidential information over the past year. That’s one of the take-aways from a new study from security analysts at the Ponemon Insitute.

Services like Dropbox, Bitcasa YouSendIt and others are useful and efficient ways to get documents and files from one worker to another, especially in this age of mobile devices and distributed workforces. Plus, they’re cheap (or free) and easy for individual workers or small departments to set up.

But increasing use of these tools in the workplace, even for legitimate business reasons such as collaboration, puts a lot of private information at risk. And companies are starting to notice.

How bad is the situation? According to the Ponemon study, 60% of organizations have employees who frequently or very frequently put confidential files on services like Dropbox without permission. And just about that same percentage (59%) reported that what controls they do have in place were inefffective at managing who has access to sensitive files.

It’s not that these consumer cloud services are inherently insecure. But as Wired’s Mat Honan learned a few weeks ago, nearly any service can be socially hacked (though proper precautions can help.

The problem is that mobile and remote workers want to have access to their files where and when they need them. But the idea of just having critical company information out in a public cloud makes a lot of companies nervous. Risks of data loss and falling out of compliance are too high to ignore.

“Consumer file-sharing services are effective, for consumers, but they lack the security, reliability and granular permission settings that business requires,” said Andrew Dixon, Sr., Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Igloo Software, a cloud-based business collaboration company. “And that means they can quickly become just another way for information to fall into silos or slip into the wrong hands.”

Some companies are already reacting with strong policies regulating use of such file-sharing services. IBM, for instance, has banned employee access to services like Dropbox and iCloud. Even the iPhone’s Siri is turned off for fear that sensitive information could be discovered from search query data stored at Apple.

This might be going too far for many companies. Especially if they don’t provide some sort of alternative. IBM has its own custom-built solution for file sharing, but many smaller operations can’t afford such measures.

Not surprisingly, new ventures are stepping to try and fill the void. The solution is use a collaborative platform with secure file sharing capabilities, according to Yorgen Edholm, CEO of Accellion, which markest just such a product.

“Organizations need to give their employees a secure way of sharing files or every mobile device will continue to be a potential sieve for confidential data,” Edholm wrote in a recent article on Forbes, “Before deploying a file-sharing solution, organizations should educate themselves about the risks of various file-sharing technologies and the requirements for enterprise-class mobile security.”

In other words, if you can’t beat ‘em, join 'em. By implementing a broader solution for collaboration that has easy-to-use and secure file sharing features, IT managers can reduce workers’ temptation to venture out on a consumer service.

Make a collaborative platform safe, make it easy and your sensitive documents might just stay where they belong.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Read more »