Thomson Reuters announced last Friday that it is acquiring the London-based mobile platform developer Apsmart for an undisclosed amount. Apsmart founder Rahul Powar was the creator of the first Shazam iPhone app that is recognized by many as one of the top innovative mobile apps created for the mobile industry. So, what does this mean for Thomson Reuters? It means more innovation for WestlawNext and the ProView eReader platform for starters, and it would appear that the company is very serious about investing in the “small screen” world of mobile technology.

In the press release, Powar sounds as if he is being given some “artistic license” to bring in some new ideas to what Thomson Reuters can do in the mobile environment:

The team at Apsmart is excited about the opportunity to apply our diverse mix of skills to the large Thomson Reuters customer base. We look forward to helping drive the strategy and creation of significant new experiences in mobile across the organization.

Let’s hope that Thomson Reuters lets Powar and his team run with limited oversight and introduce products that are creative and allow for the freedom users expect with mobile devices. My concern whenever ingenuity meets established business models is that the culture of the business trumps the fresh ideas of the developers. We’ll have to see how this all works out. I’d be really interested to see if Powar stays on for any length of time, or if the culture of the giant Thomson Reuters world runs him back to the more flexible world of mobile app start ups.

In light of the recent LinkedIn password debacle, I thought I would share a password secret I’ve been using for a while now, client side password hashing. 

Password hashing takes a simple password, runs it through an algorithm and spits out a more complex password.  Stanford University researchers developed an algorithm for passwords that uses the domain of the site you’re logging into and your simple password to create a unique and more complex password for every site you log into, even if you use the same password for each site.

You can find out more about the Stanford project here.

On the right side of the pwdhash.com page, you’ll see a box (like the one above) with fields for Site Address, Site Password, and Hashed Password.  Enter the domain of the site you’re logging into in the Site Address field (geeklawblog.com), enter the same silly password you use for every single site you log into in the Site Password field (for me, it’s greglambert. Shhh!), press the Generate button and voila!, out pops your hashed password.  Ts7ZoXk8Nqj6d is my official password for 3 Geeks.

When I go to log into Facebook, I enter facebook.com, greglambert as my password, and my official password for Facebook becomes bmQHlmV4bWUEu.

This way I can continue to use 2 or 3 relatively simple passwords and still have complex and unique passwords for every site.

I know what you’re thinking.  “I don’t want to have to go to pwdhash.com every time I need to get my password!”  You don’t have to.  Cynix.org has created bookmarklets that you can save to your browser favorites.  When you go to a site that needs a password, click on the bookmarklet, a java window pops up asking for your Master/simple password, it takes the current domain from the page you’re on and runs the Stanford algorithm spitting out your unique password for that domain.  On some browsers it even enters the new password in the password field when you place your cursor there.  (Warning: I haven’t had a lot of luck with the bookmarklets in versions of IE. Stick with Chrome, Firefox, or Safari.)

But what about on my iPhone or iPad?  The bookmarket works in mobile safari.

But what about signing into Apps on my iPhone or iPad?  There’s an app for that too.  KeyGrinder uses the same algorithm to return the same password every time.  You enter the domain and password and then tap on the Create button, the hashed password is automatically saved to your clipboard.  Just go to the App, enter your username, tap in the password field and select paste.

The benefits of hashed passwords are many.

  • I can remember only my simple master passwords and still have unique complex passwords for every site.
  • If a website (like LinkedIn) is compromised, the attackers only have my password for that one site, not for every other site I go to.  
  • Since I’m never actually typing the hashed password in anywhere, keyloggers don’t capture my passwords.
  • Since the typed master passwords and hashed passwords are hidden (******) in the bookmarklet, someone standing over my shoulder or viewing my screen still wouldn’t get my password.
  • Since I’m only remembering my master passwords, I couldn’t reveal my actual passwords even if I was being tortured.  

On second thought, that last one might be a bad thing.

**************

UPDATE:  Added the words Client Side to the title to differentiate from the standard server side password hashing that LinkedIn is accused of doing poorly in the Computer World article linked at the top.

UPDATE 2: You can check here to see if your old LinkedIn password was confirmed as cracked.  Please change your password first!  Another benefit to client side password hashing, the server side hash is much harder to crack because it bears no relation to a dictionary word.  In case you’re wondering, my original password is not currently on the list of cracked passwords.  Glad I changed it anyway.

I can admit it now: I was a pretty weird kid.

By the time I was twelve, I had already read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, along with George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. My mom thought that I would like them—she had read them while studying at Kent State University just a few years after the National Guard had killed four students.

And My dad had taken me and my two sisters to see The Planet of the Apes series and Soylent Green movies. Not exactly Disney.

So I knew about Ray Bradbury. I had seen The Illustrated Man–and, no, I don’t mean the book. I mean the movie. Starring Rod Steiger.

When I heard that he died today, it took me back to a rainy Sunday, stretched across the family room shag carpet in front of the TV. Hearing, again, Rod Steiger’s meandering, lisping tone as he weaved an eery tale from each of the lurid tattoos penned into his skin.

Bradbury’s binding of the technological, fantastical and psychological cast a spell that lured me into a world that I have visited again through the mirrors of Orson Scott Card and Stephen King’s writings.

Thank you, Raymond Bradbury, for introducing me to your new worlds. May we meet again in the future.

Legal Project Management (LPM) can now officially be crowned the buzz-phrase of 2012. Although not many firms have fully integrated LPM in to their practices, the need for embracing it is a foregone conclusion. Being faced with this challenge has caused me to put many brain cells on the how and why of LPM and what will drive productivity growth in law firms. Ron’s post on productivity helped bring my thinking in to the clarity of this blog post. From what I am seeing, the market is setting lower prices and now firms are trying to reduce the cost of their services, which translates in to productivity growth.

To Ron’s points on growth in productivity, law firms need to become ‘better, faster, cheaper’ (BFC). Obviously LPM plays a role in this. However, I believe LPM is necessary but not sufficient for BFC. Because in most respects (and I’m sure other bloggers may chime in here) LPM is about doing something the same way only with more discipline. It’s about defining how we do things and then institutionalizing that effort in a standardize way.

I have touched on this point before, however the BFC angle refined my thinking and I drove me to the following BFC definitions:

Better: Doing it (a task, matter, etc.) with the same or more resources but driving an improved outcome (a.k.a. higher value).
Faster: Doing it with the same resources and with the same outcome, but in a shorter period of time.
Cheaper: Doing it with fewer or cheaper resources and driving the same level of outcome.

Translated in to ‘legal’ these become:

Better: Doing it with the same or more hours, but getting a better result.
Faster: Doing it with the same hours, but in a shorter time-frame (probably with more people).
Cheaper: Doing it with fewer hours or by using people with lower rates or with technology.

There is an old engineering adage that says “Faster, better, cheaper — pick two.” This idea basically argues any system can optimize at most two factors, to the detriment of the third. Using LPM, at best you can restructure the project plan to improve one or maybe two of the factors, but only by sacrificing a reduction in the third one. Clients seem to be pushing on ‘cheaper’ with minimal attention to the other 2 factors. This begs the question of where should the focus be?

Real productivity growth comes when you change the system, which leads us to process improvement. This is where most businesses gain a competitive edge. They employ long-term process improvement techniques, along the lines of Six Sigma.

Which brings me back to my point: LPM is necessary but not sufficient to drive improvements in law firm productivity. Project management brings discipline to a process, but is not about improving a process over time. I believe growth in productivity is what clients really want, whether they see this explicitly or not. Discussions about ‘efficiency’ are too often vague with no real discussion about what that means (e.g. no first year associates on the bill). Instead the presumption is that ‘cheaper’ equals efficient.

So I’ll start my campaign now for BFC to become the heir-apparent buzz phrase for 2013. Instead of being a technique like LPM, it’s actually the desired goal.

Remember my 2011 rant on fax machines? Well, it looks like someone finally figured out an electronic solution: HelloFax.

Super-easy to set up, I was able to get an account up and running in about five minutes. The hardest part was importing a photograph of my signature. For that, I signed a piece of white paper, snapped a photo of it with my Droid, emailed it to myself, downloaded the image to my desktop then import the image to HelloFax.

Easy-peasy.

HelloFax choice 5 account tiers:

  1. Free: 5 free faxes, then $.99/fax, and 5 signature requests
  2. $4.99/Month: 50 faxes, 30-day free trial, and 10 signature requests
  3. $9.99/Month: 500 fax pages, 
    30-day free trial, fax multiple recipients, and unlimited signature requests
  4. $69.99/Month: 
    2000 fax pages,  30-day free trial, fax multiple recipients, and unlimited signature requests  

They’ve got some really nice features: a super-easy cover sheet; integration with DropBox, GoogleDrive and Box; and a way to integrate the system with your already existing fax number. HelloFax also sends a link with a  code to access a full-color, high resolution copy of the fax.

Also of note, back in April when GoogleDrive launched, HelloFax was its most installed app. I’m a little late to the launch party but that doesn’t dilute my enthusiasm!


The Consumerization of IT.  Bring Your Own Device. Personal Cloud Storage.  These buzzwords have sent IT departments the world over into a tizzy.  In fact, 37% of all IT related articles written in the last 2 years have been about one of these three concepts.  (I totally made that stat up.) We, as IT people, are obsessed with the consequences of allowing consumer devices and personal software behind the corporate firewall and well we should be.  The idea raises many questions:

  •  How can we support all of these various devices? 
  •  How will we keep our networks secure? 
  •  If they’re using their own software and hardware, do they really need us at all? 

These questions, and their many variations, are important and must be answered.  However, in the midst of our flesh rending and teeth gnashing, I think we have completely missed the biggest problem introduced by Consumer Technology in the Enterprise, it has given rise to the RETEs.

Recently Empowered Technology Enthusiasts are proto-geeks who have come to believe that they have a savant-like way with technology, because in recent years the technology they used to struggle so hard to use, now just comes to them naturally.  Most RETEs are harmless, sweet even.  Your mother became a RETE the first time she texted you from her new iPhone.  But there is a certain brand of RETE who is very dangerous, specifically for IT Departments dealing with Consumer Technology issues, the RETE in charge.
 
This person used to fight with their Blackberry daily.  They would get stuck in the menu tree and call IT to help them find their way out.  They bought a netbook because it was tiny and shiny and cool-looking, but they threw it out a window because it was too slow and would drop the wireless network every 5 minutes.  Then they discovered the iPhone, the iPad, and the App store.  The heavens opened and Steve Jobs in the guise of Prometheus bent toward them with the flame of all technical knowledge, passing it slowly in front of their face.  The scales of ignorance fell from their eyes and suddenly everything made sense.  Technology was easy!  Apps could do everything!  And that’s the moment when the question that strikes fear in the heart of every IT Guy first occurs to the RETE.  “Why is it still so difficult to do all of this technology stuff at work?”

It’s a perfectly valid question, but there are many obstacles to making technology at work as easy to use as commercially available consumer technology.  We have long term contracts and agreements with enterprise software makers.  We have security and support issues that consumer app makers don’t even consider, and we have industry and company specific requirements that they aren’t interested in addressing.  The RETE in charge doesn’t care, “Why is it still so difficult to do all of this technology stuff at work?”
Consumer software makers have spent the last few years building apps that aren’t just solving a particular problem for the user, but also doing it in a way that is intuitive and simple, that conforms to the user’s workflow instead of requiring the user to conform to the software.  The software learns the user instead of the other way around.  Intelligence is built into the back end of these apps so that users don’t even see it, let alone have to use their own.  “So… why is it still so difficult to do all of this technology stuff at work?”
Many enterprise software makers are just now hiring their first User Experience Engineer. They’re half a decade or more behind the consumer software developers.  The big guys, the one’s we’ve all been paying exorbitant licensing fees for the last 20 years, they’re going to struggle and many of them will fail in the coming years.  They’ll be replaced by little guys who have been building consumer apps and have been focused on the user experience all along.  These little guys will eventually nail the security and support issues too, and their focus on user experience and their lower overhead costs (read: lower licensing fees), will lead to enterprise level, intuitive, user-centric software in the not-too-distant future.
In the meantime, the question is still hanging in the air, waiting for a simple answer. “Why is it still so difficult to do all of this technology stuff at work?” 
If you come up with a good answer, drop me a line.  
Please…

One of my absolute favorite websites for learning about new products, or how to enhance my use of existing products is MakeUseOf. Unfortunately, they post dozens of updates each day and it can be a bit overwhelming to find updates that fall specifically into my wheelhouse. Yesterday, however, I did find a nice juicy nugget of information on LinkedIn that I wanted to point out to everyone. In the post 10 Little Known LinkedIn Features That Make It More Fun To Professionally Network, author Saikat Basu taught me a few new things about LinkedIn that I didn’t know. 

Just in case my word isn’t good enough to make you link over to the post, here are the 10 items that Basu highlights:

  1. Network with Cloak of Security (force LinkedIn to use https connections… good for public WiFi or shared computers.)
  2. Your Own LinkedIn News Daily (a very eloquent display of top LinkedIn headlines found under that “news” tab that I’ve never clicked on before.
  3. Go Text To Speech With LinkedIn News (not my cup of tea, but the SpeechIn might be something others would use.)
  4. Make Contact Without Making a Connection (initially connect with someone that may not be willing to click the old accept button from your request.)
  5. Browse In Stealth Mode (when you don’t want people to see you on their Who’s Viewed Your Profile screen.)
  6. Set Up A LinkedIn Search (Email) Alert (have your search results emailed to you periodically)
  7. Find The Right Group To Join (by using a Group Statistics feature, you could narrow down your choices of groups significantly.)
  8. Map Your LinkedIn Professional Network (very cool function from the LinkedInLabs apps.)
  9. Export Your Connections (nothing is better than an Excel spreadsheet full of contacts.)
  10. Waste Time With Tetris (AKA DropIn) (between this, Cubeduel and Snake & Ladders, you’ll waste a lot of your professional time.)
There a lots more interesting things coming out of the LinkedInLabs site, so you’ll want to go check it out right after you read the MakeUseOf post.

If you have a service that gets 20 million unique users a month, and you have personal information on those users, what could you do with it? For the staffers at music streaming site, Grooveshark, the answer was to build a free tool that shows the demographics, culture and lifestyles, habits, and product preferences of those users that listen to particular artist. This morning, Grooveshark launched a data analytics resource called Beluga. This resource allows you to type in the name of a musical artist and find out information about the fans that listen to their music. The press release that Grooveshark wrote this morning says that the information is designed to help artist better position themselves to their fanbase (it could also be related to the fact that all four major record labels are suing Grooveshark… but, we’ll stick to what Beluga does for this post.)

Grooveshark’s co-founder, Josh Greenberg believes that by exposing these analytics, artists can “learn about their fans, route their tours, sell merchandise, work on building a following, and take their careers to the next level.” He thinks there is also value from the sales and marketing aspects of the record label as well since they can position themselves “to partner with artists who connect with their target audience, presenting endless opportunities.”

If you’ve used Grooveshark in the past, you know that from time to time they ask you to fill out a quick survey. It seems that we are seeing the first of the results of those surveys, and it makes for some interesting information when looking at musical groups. Here’s a sample of results I got when I searched on Eric Clapton:

  • 55+year old females are moderately over-represented (and yes, they look Wonderful Tonight)…
  • Fans of Clapton seemed to have retired in the past year (remembering Days of Old)…
  • Israelis seem to love themselves some slow-hand…
  • Clapton users seem to show some Old Love and rent their movies from Blockbuster online…
  • Poor people don’t really like to listen to Clapton (no Hard Times for Clapton fans)…
  • Clapton listeners tend to bank at Citibank (cause, Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out)…
  • Apparently, Clapton sounds best when you’re driving and Traveling Alone.
What is the accuracy of these survey results?? I’m not sure. I guess the case could be made for not giving too much faith in the results you get from a voluntary web survey. However, I did look at the survey results for some smaller named bands that I like, and the surveys seemed to fall about where I’d expect for these bands, although the geography preferences tended to trend outside the US (maybe because Americans are less likely to fill out the survey??)
Regardless of whether or not you trust the results, if you love to see examples of what can be done with large amounts of data, then you’ll find yourself having some fun looking at Beluga.

When Dewey & LeBouef filed for Chapter 11 protection, the firm listed the unsecured creditors, and three of the biggest losers on the list were Thomson Reuters (owed $2.3 million), LexisNexis (owed $1.4 million.), and CCH (owed $650K.)

Although the total amount of legal research to debt is something like 1.7% of the total, it still shows the amount of money that firms pay year in and year out for legal research products. I hadn’t thought about the fact that Westlaw/Lexis/CCH, etc. contracts are unsecured debts before, but I guess there’s not really a lot that Wexis can get from the firms they serve to secure the services they provide.

Does the exposure of this information give us any “insider” information on Dewey’s existing contracts with their legal vendors? Could we make some broad assumptions and say that if we calculate out the remaining amount owed by the number of months left in the year, does this come out to mean that Dewey was paying $3.45 million a year for Westlaw (or roughly $260 per month per lawyer… assuming 1100 lawyers)?? Let’s keep on making these “very assumptive” mathematical calculations:

Lexis — $2.1 million annual – $175 per month per lawyer
CCH — $975,000 – $74 per month per lawyer

In an industry where we are always trying to figure out where we are on our contracts versus our peers, there could be some interesting information coming out in the Dewey bankruptcy. Perhaps those Competitive Intelligence experts could find some even more interesting tidbits.

[NOTE: My friend Don Cruse reminded me that “rest of the year” payments would be avoided in bankruptcy, so my calculations are most likely inaccurate. If Dewey just owes, say the five months of this year, then the totals for subscription costs would jump up about 38% higher than these numbers. Of course, I haven’t seen anything specific, so this is just me applying assumptions to come up with these amounts!! – GL (added @11:47 AM]

New Orleans’ based newspaper, The Times-Picayune, announced that it is shifting its print publications to a three day a week schedule instead of its traditional seven days a week model. The focus of the paper will shift to its free online content and will attempt to look at ways of making online advertising more profitable. In addition to the Times-Picayune, the Birmingham News the Press-Register in Mobile, Alabama, and The Huntsville (Alabama) Times will also shift to a 3 day print schedule.
[note: see Ted Jackson’s gut-wrenching photo of the T-P staff hearing the announcement.]

Print newspaper subscriptions have suffered significantly in the age of the Internet. Although no one is saying that reporting is becoming obsolete, many of us are thinking that “print” reporting is becoming obsolete and the shift is to online or mobile app platforms. In fact, in today’s Houston Chronicle (print edition) an ad was run right next to this story saying that “Sunday Circulation” was up 2.8% for the Chronicle. Notice how the ad shows the iPhone, iPad, online, and print editions?? We librarians have felt the pains of a shift in how our consumers use our services, but I’d be the first to admit that I would much rather deal with the change in library industry than be a reporter today.

The whole issue of “Print vs. Online” has been raging for years now, with print being a consistent loser. The one element in this battle, however, has been the idea that advertising revenues are what will keep these news resources going (be they in print, online, app, whatever….) However, I just got off the phone with Toby Brown and asked how the heck can advertising dollars be spread over such a large number of resources in a way that can keep them afloat?? I just don’t see how current advertising structures will be sustainable over the next few years. In fact, Fox and NBC-Universal just sued DirecTV because they’ve developed an “ad hopper” which allows DirecTV customers to automatically skip over advertising.

It is a bizarre time in the news and media world these days. As we shift more and more away from traditional sources of news and entertainment, and we go online, streaming or app our way into the future of information access, the economics of the industry will constantly shift in order to try to support the industry. I thought that Vince Gill hit something on the head when he tossed out the fact that music singles today cost 99¢. A single in 1960 cost… 99¢. The prima facie economics of the news and media industry just don’t add up to profits. Consumers don’t want to pay more, pay walls don’t seem to be the answer, and advertisers are being more selective on where they place their ads. I, for one, would hate to be an advertising director in a major corporation right now.

Where will it all lead?? Here’s some of my (random) thoughts on the subject:

  • More “app-based” access. Apps would give the media provider more control over making sure ads aren’t skipped, and that ads are targeted at appropriate users (no Cadillac ads sent to 12 year old girls.) App platforms will include iOS devices, Android (mostly Kindle Fire), and gaming devices like XBox360.
  • More online access. Similar to the app-based, media providers will push their wears to where the eyes are. I’m sure that more attempts will be made to push ads to the right people, and prevent them from skipping over the ads… however, the success rate will be much lower than the app-based platforms.
  • More “subscribe to play” access. Many providers will shift to collaborative efforts and prevent their products from entering into homes that don’t have access to their product in another way. Initially this will mean you need a Cable TV subscription in order to use their online service. I think, just like the pay wall, this will fail. It is already being floated out there to keep Hulu-Plus subscribers from having access to certain shows, if they do not have a cable tv subscription.
  • More “crowd-funded” access. You’ll see more efforts like KickStarter on media projects. I could imagine a newspaper having a KickStarter project that funds their business for a three-month period of time, and in return gives something back to their supporters. People are eager to fund projects that they feel strongly about. Imagine that instead of a subscription, a newspaper says that for $50.00 you support our paper, and in return we dedicate a section of the paper to you or to a cause you support?? For $100 you get your name printed at the top of the first page for one day, etc. May sound silly, but one musician raised $450,000 from her fans. Media outlets do have fans, perhaps there is an opportunity here for them as well??

Everything is going to change. How will it end up?? No one knows. The only thing that seems to be understood at this point in the game is that it will take some clever thinking to come to that answer.