MADISON - "Wisconsin's open for business," is more than a slogan, Governor-Elect Scott Walker told attendees at the Wisconsin Technology Council's Early Stage Symposium in Madison. It will be how we view the future of state government and beyond government, and startups and small business will be at the forefront of that.

Walker's proposal to help create 250,000 jobs and 10,000 new businesses by 2015 has met with some skepticism, but he said the number was based on the record of Tommy Thompson's first term

via wistechnology.com

By Mike Klein & Brian Canin 

Offensive material posted on dead teen's Facebook page, Madison Startup has solution

Today is Veteran's Day and we remember Justin Ellsworth, a soldier killed in Iraq in 2004. His family sought access to over more than 10,000 pages of e-mail messages and photographs from Yahoo, who denied their request. An Oakland County judge ordered Yahoo to turn over Ellsworth's digital assets. What happens to your online presence when you're gone? Does Facebook Twitter, Second Life, or Google own your personal data, photos, and videos or is there a succession plan for your heirs? What if you don't want your heirs to have access to your Facebook account? Just

Last Sunday, Cameron Lowe, 17, was attacked by youths in Australia. He fell and hit his head and later died in hospital. Police are working to have offensive material removed from a memorial Facebook page website set up by friends of Cameron.

It is embarrassing for your mom, family and friends to see your Facebook information when the unthinkable happens and you check out before your data does. Facebook users still exist in their system after their corporal existence has been snuffed out. Google, a company taking heat for making it difficult to recover your identity should it be hacked and who has only heuristics and no human interaction in the account recovery processes, will actually on request and after your demise package up your digital identity by physically burning multiple DVD's and shipping it out to your heirs via the US post office - a non-virtual and time consuming event for a very virtual company or delete your account.

There have been recent incidents among Facebook users who have died, where their accounts have been hacked and spam and porno sent to the users friends list. This is painful and embarrassing for the deceased family and friends. Twitter has death policy as of August, 2010.

According to the Jesse Davis and Nate Lustig at Entrustet a cutting edge startup dealing with the protection of digital property & assets, three Facebook users die each minute, and what happens to their digital assets are right now a hot bed for litigation and controversy. Entrustet provides an online service in what some call, but they aren't fond of, the “Digital Death Industry”, a new concept for many of us in and out of the technology world and one which is becoming more and more significant as our virtual presence becomes larger and more entwined in an ever increasingly digital world. The first Digital Death Day Conference was held October 9th in Mountain View, California.

According to Lustig, Faceboook offers a moralization of your profile, which removes your profile, and wall from Google's search results and only lets existing friends comment after you're gone.

“The problem is that most people do not know they offer it,” Lustig said. “There is no way no way to curate what goes on your wall after you die. So if someone posts an disparaging comment about you to your wall no one can edit it and/or delete it.”

Entrustet's model is very interesting. They partner with the various social media and web communities where people interact, post photos and videos as well as `manage' their online presence and digital assets.

The company's vision came from Thomas' book,"The World is Flat", who wrote about Ellsworth's family experience with Yahoo anf access to deceased people's digital assets. Friedman asked, who will sort this out?

Entrustet offers packaged services to attorneys and estate planners who are increasingly having to deal with end of life digital media asset issues on behalf of their clients. Entrustet offers clients and consumers a web based service at which the user make decisions about how their virtual property will be dealt with should they expire before their accounts do.

WTN News caught up with Nate and Jesse at their Madison, Wisconsin office just as they getting ready to embark on an international adventure.

These two entrepreneurs are moving their executive office to Santiago, Chile for a 6 month adventure in South America. Why Chile? The Chilean government has created Startup Chile, an initiative of the Chilean Government to attract world-class early stage entrepreneurs to start their businesses in Chile. They selected 25 high potential startup companies and entrepreneurs who have an innovative business plan with the potential of reaching multiple international markets. Start-Up Chile covers up to 90% of the project's budget, which includes operational expenses, investments, and human resources

“We are excited about getting to meet 25 high-impact entrepreneurial companies and collaborate and experience what it will be like to startup and run a bushiness in a another country as well as learn what Chileans think about the digital death industry,” Lustig said. "We have experienced a lukewarm reaction to our concept by some investors because it's human nature that people don't want to think about death and the U.S. military was interested, but we are not on the official procurement lists.”

Entrustet is currently a live website accepting members, the company is generating revenue and will be cash-flow positive in the near future,” Lustig said.

Members create a list of online accounts, and profiles including passwords and user names of accounts they have and how they want their digital assets handled.

The company has one major east coast investor as well as Madison, friends, family and angel financing. They are not seeking another funding round or venture capital financing for another 6-9 months as they seek partnerships with corporate web site partnerships with companies such American Express, Northwestern Mutual, domain registrars such as Go Daddy, social networking sites and photo and video sharing sites.

The company is redesigning their website, fine tuning the business model, and further prove the execution of their business plan. Entrustit currently has more than 4000 members, is utilized by 16 law firms representing 10,000 clients and has a partnership with independent music web site Broadjam, who has 120,000 members. The company has three major deals in their pipeline.

We wish them success!

Reproduction permitted for personal use only. For reprints and reprint permission, contact reprints@wistechnology.com.

Will Apple's software license be overturned by the courts? Apple needs a wake up call as my personal  experience is that there quality, reliability are slipping and they are losing the edge of product superiority. In the last 3 months, I have replaced two IPhone that failed. My two-year old MacBook has had three repairs in three weeks , 2 logic boards and failed RAM. My IPod crashed right after the extended warranty ended. My Macbook Pro has had performance issues that Apple does not seem to be able to fix. So what's going with the competition? 

One year ago, an otherwise sleepy April in the Apple universe was turned upside down by a tiny company from Southern Florida, kicking off a real-world Clone War between Apple and Psystar.

It's been a year since Psystar began selling Mac clones in defiance of Apple.

(Credit: Psystar)

Today, the essential question regarding Psystar is unchanged: does the company have the right to sell computers with Apple'sMac OS X Leopard preinstalled, as it has been doing since April 14, 2008? Psystar set off shock waves through the Apple world that week, as an army of journalists, bloggers, fanboys, and detractors set off on a manic search for anything and everything related to the company and its desktops.

Psystar emerged a year ago as a small independent system builder, the likes of which can be found in any medium-size town in the U.S. What provoked the interest and ire of the Maccommunity was Psystar's decision to ship so-called "white box" systems with Mac OS preinstalled alongside systems withWindows Vista and Linux, in defiance of Apple's licensing policies for that operating system.

Psystar recently updated its flagship product, the Open Computer, and CEO Rudy Pedraza promises that more products are yet to come.

In an interview, Pedraza acknowledged that the past year has been quite a challenge, but he's glad that at least so far, Psystar has been able to provide an alternative to Apple. "(Our customers) are people who would otherwise be unable to afford an Apple computer, and they are just happy about it."

READ MORE:

Blog update: 04/02/01 7:02/PM EDT.

Blogger's Note: This is exclusive “real- time coverage of Berg's  presentation and follow up Q/A discussion that followed the announcements  and release earlier in the day of Skype - iPhone  application. Written by Mike Klein, editorial director, WTN News. See updated news reporting at WTN News, www.WTNNews.com. 

MADISON: Dan Berg, a self-proclaimed geek since childhood, is chief technology officer of Skype, an Internet phone service owned by eBay Inc. Berg returned to his home town area last night as he was raised and schooled in Oregon, Wisconsin. He took the opportunity to talk tonight at an Accelerate Madison monthly gathering.

Daniel Berg's primary responsibility is to drive innovation and ensure Skype continues to develop great software. His mandate covers Skype's full range of products, He is developing and maintaining a global team of more than 300 staff. Dan joined Skype after 15 years at Sun Microsystems, most recently as CTO for their Global Sales and Services Division and Vice President of Systems Engineering for Sun's Emerging Markets Region. He joined Skpe in January 2009. His presentation was on the value of the network.

He began his talk with a classic 20-year-old presentation that started with the mainframe and then talked about the change to client server computing. He discussed open standards and protocols and how open standards are playing a significant role in driving innovation. He also discussed that the cloud might contain some degree of hype. He did cite Salesforce.com as an exception. 

"With the cloud there will be more than goes into it such as SaaS, PaaS, and infrastructure as a service." Berg said. “Salesforce.com going good things in SaaS and PaaS.

Berg showed a corporate video that stressed how is Skype enabling the world's conversations.

Eventually, he discussed the just-released Skype application on iPhone and Android as well as competition from traditional Telco's. Berg addressed the hometown crowd on the same day Skype confirmed rumors that it would roll out its anticipated iPhone app at the CITA Wireless show in Las Vegas. This enables users of the iPhone and iPod Touch to download Skype  to make free calls to other Skype users over Wi-Fi rather than a cell network.

So what's the bid deal about Skype?  He said with Skype we have no servers and as users are added peer-to-peer technology expands the network. For chief information officers this can be a problem because they loose control, said Berg.

The first week of January they had 14 million concurrent users and this week now have 17 million concurrent users without adding servers.

So what's the downside Berg asked? It's hard to control outages and tech glitches." There are good and bad uses on peer-to-peer computing," said Berg.

Skype's biggest issue is security," said Berg. "Our security has not been broken with all the hackers doing bad things on the network. A good portion of R&D is how we work with firewalls.”

A few weeks back Skype introduced "Silk" an audio codec technology developed to increase audio quality. "One of the biggest complaints we get at Skype is `your quality sucks!' “Berg added.

"Video has allowed us to get to the next step. The biggest problem we have is that it's user device quality. We are now working on HD audio and video. In the next month or so Skype will introduce with another manufacturer a $15 headphone,” he said.

“Skype has 440 million registered users. We are adding 350,000 users a day. So since yesterday we have added almost a million users. We run about 20 billion calls a month and now passed ATT as biggest provider of international voice communications,” continued Berg.

So what is changing? “We are not tied to a dedicated hardware device. We are software,” explained Berg. Where do we see things going?” Communications is like water and should move around with you. The conversation should flow to where you are on any device."

"From office to car, to home, to big screen TV, Skype adds value as a user has rich experience from chat to talk to video," he said, noting that the technology does not limit the business model.”

"We do not expect existing Telco's to re-invent communications. Over time they have become a walled garden, instead of being open. It is hard for them to open up. Skype is now going beyond ATT in terms of International calls. We are changing the worked in the process,” Berg said.

So what is the winning service? “It needs to be device and network agnostic,” added Berg."

"Finding ways to monetize Skype has been difficult," said Berg. 

"One of the biggest problems we have is fraud. That's why it took us so long to get the iPhone application out," said Berg.

"We would like to have everyone to have access and with that we will change the world."

When asked by the audience about how Skype compares to technology from Microsoft, Vonage and other competitors he responded with confidence, "Were better!" 

"We are really working on video and trying to increase the experience for the user"

"We need to be friends with providers, who are also our foes" said Berg

Berg said Skype is very concerned about net neutrality, a threat for users and peer-to-peer technology.

Some counties like China are angry with Skype as they have hard time monitoring communications. We want to do the right thing to protect the user until laws change," said Berg. 

We are working on new version of Skype "To Go" application to improve quality, said Berg. 

He closed talking about net neutrality and how that is not a good thing for users and Skype as an organization. This means that Skype strongly supports net neutrality and the attempts by ISPs' to limit bandwidth and give priority to some content providers over others is beneficial for users. 

I am delighted to announce today that WTN Media has launched WTN TV, an internet - based news and commentary broadcast service. The premier episodes are produced by WTN Media in conjunction with theDelphi Group and DelphiTV.com. The first recordings were produced at the Fusion CEO - CIO Symposium that took placed March 4-5 in Madison, Wisconsin. The first installment features guest host, Tom Koulopoulos, author of the soon to be released booked called "The Innovation Zone." Koulopoulos interviewed Dr. Ajei Gopal of of CA on the topic of practical innovation. Click here to watch the video. 

Our next installment will feature Ed Meachen, the CIO of the University of Wisconsin System. Meachen shares his thoughts on K-12 and higher education in regards to technology adoption. The third episode features an interview with Peter Coffee, former technology editor of PC Week and E-Week. Coffee is currently Director of Platform Research for Salesforce.com. Coffee and Koulopoulos discuss the current and future state of cloud computing and software as a service. This week on WTN News we feature a column contributed by Peter Coffee titled, "Geekonomics, when people Aren't Buying Technology."

Also through a partnership with Sonic Foundry, WTN Media has video of its' conference presentations on MediaSite live. The recent Fusion CEO-CIO Symposium and well as the Digital Healthcare Conference and previous years events can be accessed atwww.fusion2009.com and www.dhc2009.com.

WTN Media has been publishing on the web for over 6 years and now attracts a significant regional readership, as well as coastal readership by major investment bankers, venture capitalists, angel and institutional investors including, Hummer Winblad, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, Frazier Technology Ventures, and more. WTN News has significant readership by technology leaders and investors in emerging markets including India, Brazil, Russia, China as well as Germany, Vietnam, and Great Britain.

We have performed extensive market research and WTN Media through the launch of WTN TV and other interactive social networking features will provide our audience with more ways to network and interact on a global basis to meet our mission statement to connect the people, technology and ideas performed by entrepreneurs, researchers, and existing enterprises that are driving the advancement of information technology, biotechnology, and other life sciences such as stem cell research, health care technology, nanotechnology, genetic-based personalized medicine, and an emphasis on alternative energy.

While other media companies are struggling, and closing newspapers and conferences, WTN Media sold out the Fusion CEO - CIO Symposium 2009 as it has done for the previous five years and is on track to sell out the Digital Healthcare Conference, now in its' 6th year. I was recently honored by the U.S. Small Business Administration as "Journalist of the Year" for the state of Wisconsin and the entire upper midwest including, Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. We are still waiting for the announcement of national winners. I am grateful to all our of readers and writers and staff that have been with us during this journey. During the last six years we have published almost 6,000 stories and columns on business technology news. 

These webcasts are just one of the enhanced features WTN Media will use as it transitions to a new format and global network. Be sure to check out our new groups on LinkedIn: Wisconsin Technology Network and Fusion CIO. Please join in the discussions.

This week will launch a new blog, called Mike Klein's Global Fusion, in which I will offer a global perspective on the latest in business and technology trends. In the coming weeks we will launch Fusionheathcare.com as a new online community for the rapidly evolving field of healthcare technology and information networks. We will as also launch the Global Technology Network and reviews. Standby for big announcements in the field of Stem Cell Research from WTN Media.

Thanks for listening and your support. Please join the discussion!

Mike Klein