Nashville Technology Council

The Nashville Tech Story (9/1/2009)

Your child or the one you love is running a dangerous fever and is showing signs that he/she may have contracted the ever dangerous H1N1 virus, better known as the “swine flu.”  As you rush to the physician’s office your thoughts are constantly racing, hoping that it is just a run-of-the-mill virus.  Having gone through this experience a few hours ago, the “what if” scenarios kept running through my mind as I rushed my daughter to the pediatrician.  Once all was clear, I really had a moment to think about the implications if the test had shown a positive result.

The swine flu particularly in children can be deadly, but left untreated, could be deadly for anyone of us.  The United States is one of the most technologically advanced societies in the world today, so what role does technology play to combat this potentially life threatening disease?

Being the hardest hit country in the world, a team of Australian scientists, along with the help of a federal grant from their government, has developed a new technology called the Nanopatch.  This potentially could eliminate some of the major problems associated with the vaccination of millions worldwide.  The goal of the Nanopatch project is to target long term protection, similar to that of the annual flu shot, which calls for seasonal vaccinations. 

The patch ignites immune cells found under the surface of the skin.  This, in turn, initiates a powerful immune response from the body, while using considerably less vaccine.  Producing the Nanopatch is significantly cheaper than the use of a syringe or needle.  The reduction in cost is based on the Nanopatch using less of the vaccine and the elimination of expensive syringes, needles, and the appropriate means of disposal.

While this new technology is still in the testing phase, the increase in reported H1N1 flu cases should drive the production of potential weapons to treat this virus to a new level.  As the swine flu continues to make its best attempt to steal the headlines, the common seasonal flu symptoms now take priority in early treatment and detection.  As in Australia, the use of the Nanopatch and the hope that the United States will see some relief could still be a few years away.

The Nashville Tech Story (8/31/2009)

As the economy slowly begins to stabilize and take an upward swing for a change, the world is looking to find new ways to save money.  As witnessed in our blog posting last week, the Pinnacle building in Nashville and the Willis Tower in Chicago, formerly known as the Sears Tower, have taken an aggressive approach using “green” technology to create long term savings.

While all of the improvements are being made, a lot of focus has been put on the use of large turbines to utilize wind power to save cost.  However, another type of power that has lost some attention is the use of solar energy.  At least, that used to be the case.

Industry experts are reporting that the reductions in solar power costs are expected to not only drop, but decrease significantly.  The downside of using solar power has always been the extreme expense of installing solar panels for collecting and transferring energy into the home or business.  Materials and installation expenses are one of the main reasons for the anticipated savings, with projections dipping nearly one-third less than current costs over the next several years. 

For residential buyers, a one-third reduction in cost would equal an average savings of $16,000; dropping the normal budget from nearly $24k to only $8k.  Help from state and federal governments has already been seen in the “cost cut” cause, as some residents, like those in California, are eligible for state and federal rebates.  The primary reason for the drop in price is the significant decrease in production costs for solar cells. 

Currently, the use of solar energy is most popular in places like Germany and Japan.  The hope is that the United States government will take the same approach as the Germans.  The German government placed a premium on “green electrons.”  They have developed a policy that pays solar energy producers a fixed amount of money per watt at a rate guaranteed for 20 years. 

This is great news for solar power investing homeowners, who have been given the ability to generate a healthy rate of return from their solar energy investment.

One of the main concerns on our home soil is that rolling blackouts continue to effect the Southwestern United States and a substantial investment in solar energy should alleviate the problem.

Nashville Tech Story (August 28, 2009)

Is there ever a time when someone can have too much power?   Well the developers at Power.com are working hard to provide a powerful social media tool that allows the user to track all of his/her social media accounts in one place. 

There are other applications out there that are slicker and allow you to track your social media presence, but require the opening of multiple tabs in your browser.  The marketing on this says that it will help consolidate all communications, calendars, and social networks.  It fell short of expectations, but if you are a power user on social networks, you might find some value in logging in once to access all of your sites.  It was a pleasant surprise to find Hi5 included in the social nets as well.

Interested in learning more?  Visit www.power.com

The Nashville Tech Story (8/27/2009)

Last month, the Willis Tower in Chicago, known as the center of renovation, caused shockwaves throughout the world with the announcement to “go green.”

Being the tallest building in the United States, the skyscraper formerly known as the Sears Tower, is a national icon. With these renovations they are working to show how a few changes can save natural resources.  Estimates put the project at approximately $350 million dollars and will include the following changes:

• Installation of solar panels to heat water used in the building.
• Efficiency improvements to the building exterior and windows, reducing energy use by 50%.
• Implementation of fuel cell technologies that will generate electricity, heating, and cooling.
• Elevators will be modernized to reduce energy consumption.
• Plumbing upgrades to restrooms and recovery systems for condensations, which could save almost 24 million gallons of water per year.
• A lighting control system will be added that recognizes the amount of sunlight in a room and dims the lighting accordingly.
• Wind turbines will be placed on the 90th floor to create an efficient energy source.  
• A “green” area will be developed to include plants that can survive high-altitudes and they will be used as a test to see if they can reduce storm water runoff and help with the urban heat island effect.

The upgrades will reduce energy use by 80%, which averages out to 68,000,000 kWh per year or the comparable of 50,000 barrels of crude oil. The updates are in progress and due for completion in four short years.

Other icons that have become more economically friendly include the Empire State Building, and coming soon, Nashville’s newest skyline addition, the Pinnacle at Symphony Place.  Due to be completed by November of this year, the Pinnacle will be the first downtown building to gain the LEED Silver Certification, which is a national standard measuring a building’s environmental friendliness. 

With the Pinnacle building making a strong statement locally with its environmentally conscious design and the statistical advantages shown by the current improvements being done on the Willis Tower, the hope is that others will follow in their footsteps.  The costs of creating of more environmentally friendly buildings can be relatively high in the short term, but the long term financial savings and the reduced strain on the environment are well worth the investment.

Nashville Technology Council member companies Pinnacle Financial and Bass, Berry and Sims PLC will be two of the most highly recognized companies to take up residence in one of Nashville’s first environmentally friendly masterpieces. 

For more information on the Pinnacle at Symphony Place, click here.

The Nashville Tech Story (8/25/2009)
by Bill Gurley

Many are speculating that the year two thousand and nine represents a fundamental turning point for the venture capital industry. Some are arguing that the industry is in dire straits after years of poor performance. Others have argued that the math simply does not work for the industry’s current size. Another theory suggests that permanent challenges with the IPO market call into question the fundamental economics of the VC industry. Lastly, some credible authors have suggested that things are so bad that a federal bailout may be in order.

What is really happening in the venture capital industry? It is indeed quite likely that the venture industry is in the process of a very substantial reduction in size, perhaps the first in the history of the industry. However, the specific catalyst for this reduction is not directly related to the issues just mentioned. In order to fully understand what is happening, one must look upstream from the venture capitalists to the source of funds, for that is where the wheels of change are in motion.

Venture capital funds receive the majority of their funds from large pension funds, endowments, and foundations which represent some of the largest pools of capital in the world. This “institutional capital” is typically managed by active fund managers who invest with the objective of earning an optimal return in order to meet the needs of the specific institution and/or to grow the size of their overall fund. These fund managers have one primary tool in their search for optimal returns: deciding which investment categories (referred to as “asset classes”) should receive which percentage of the overall capital allocation. This process is known in the financial field as “asset allocation.”

Asset allocation is the strategy an investor uses to choose specifically how to divide up capital amongst asset classes such as stocks, bonds, international stocks, international bonds, real-estate funds, leveraged buys-outs (LBOs), venture capital, as well as other obscure classes such as timber funds.  Some of these asset classes, such as stocks and bonds, are known as “liquid assets,” because these instruments trade on a daily basis on exchanges around the world. For these assets, investors can be quite sure of the exact value of their holdings, as the price is set continuously in the market. Also, if they need to sell, there is a ready market to accept the trade. Illiquid assets, also known as alternative assets, include all the other investment classes that do not trade on a daily exchange. These “private” investments (as compared to “public” liquid investments) are considered higher risk due to their illiquidity, but also are expected to earn a higher return. Some hedge funds are included in alternative assets either because they themselves invest in illiquid investments or because they put strict limitations on the trading capability of the institutional investors, rendering themselves “illiquid”.

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The Nashville Tech Story (8/24/2009)

Ever think that your cell phone could get smaller?  Well, it could happen.  From the unmistakable “bag” cell phone to the present day iPhone, researchers continue to look for multiple ways to make cell phones smarter, faster and smaller.

Currently in the works, physicists are developing real-life invisibility cloaks, which would in turn shrink the antennas of cell phones, making them even smaller.  Materials called “Metamaterials,” possess non-existent properties, enabling the manipulation of light and electromagnetic waves with such dexterity that they can steer rays around objects as if they weren’t there at all.

Researchers have successfully created these metamaterials that can be tuned to a range of different frequencies as needed. A cell phone antenna fashioned from the new material, could be tuned to work very efficiently across a small frequency range, but re-tuned to a different band for roaming.

Broadband metamaterials that operate over a wide frequency range already exist, but for various reasons can’t be applied to most designs.

The new design of metamaterial can be tuned to different frequencies and could someday be used as an alternative to X-rays in medical imaging.  However, modifying it to work with the gigahertz frequencies used by cell phones should be fairly simple.

The Nashville Tech Story (8/21/09)

This week, we held our latest Bumpy Road Series.  The topic was Cloud Computing.  Cloud computing is a new consumption and delivery model inspired by consumer internet services.

Cloud computing exhibits the following 5 key characteristics:

• On-demand self-service
• Ubiquitous network access
• Location independent resource pooling
• Rapid elasticity
• Flexible pricing models

Raymond Trakimas, Vice President IBM Enterprise Initiatives reported “from a business perspective, the cloud enables:

• Economies-of-scale
• Self-service for end users
• Sourcing options for consumers of cloud services.”

He went on to discuss the technical perspective by saying “the cloud  leverages virtualization which enables:

• Abstraction of resources
• Dynamic right sizing
• Rapid provisioning.”

Four major platforms are beginning to emerge:

1.    Business Process as a Service
2.    Application as a Service
3.    Platform as a Service
4.    Infrastructure as a Service

Cost savings can be from 30%-75% depending on the services you move to the cloud.  If you think the Cloud sounds like it would work in your business, it is time to create a transformational plan to help guide you through the analysis and implementation.

Visit our website event calendar to join next month’s webinar.

The Nashville Tech Story (8/19/2009)
by Jeremy Kirk, IDG News Service

Web sites such as Twitter are becoming increasingly favored by hackers as places to plant malicious software in order to infect computers, according to a new study covering Web application security vulnerabilities.

Social-networking sites were the most commonly targeted vertical market according to a study of hacking episodes in the first half of the year. The study is part of the latest Web Hacking Incidents Database (WHID) report, released on Monday. In 2008, government and law enforcement sites were the most-hit vertical markets.

Social networks are “a target-rich environment if you count the number of users there,” said Ryan Barnett, director of application security research for Breach Security, one of the report’s sponsors, which also includes the Web Application Security Consortium.

Twitter has been attacked by several worms, and other social-networking platforms such as MySpace and Facebook have also been used to distribute malware. That’s often done when an infected computer begins posting links on social-networking sites to other Web sites rigged with malicious software. Users click on the links since they trust their friends who posted the links, not knowing their friend has been hacked.

The WHID sample set is small, encompassing 44 hacking incidents. The report only looks at attacks that are publicly reported and those with which have a measurable impact on an organization. The WHID’s data set is “statistically insignificant” compared to the actually number of hacking incidents, but shows overall attacker trends, Barnett said.

Other data showed how Web sites were attacked. The most common attack was SQL injection, where hackers try to input code into Web-based forms or URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) in order to get back-end systems such as databases to execute it. If the input is not properly validated — and malicious code ignored — it can result in a data breach.

Other methods used include cross-site scripting attacks, where malicious code gets push to on a client machine, and cross-site request forgery, in which a malicious command is executed while the victim is logged into a Web site.

The WHID found that defacing Web sites is still the most common motivation for hackers. However, the WHID includes the planting of malware on a Web site as defacement, which also points to a financial motivation. Hacked computers can be used to send spam, conduct distributed denial-of-service attacks and for stealing data.

“Ultimately they [the hackers] want to make money,” Barnett said.

The Nashville Technology Council will be hosting the 8th annual InfoSec Security conference on September 17th.  The event will feature Ryan Burnett and his team from Breach Security.  For more conference details or registration information, click here

The Nashville Tech Story (8/18/2009)
by Jake Hird, Research Analyst for Econsultancy

The social media statistics I posted a few weeks ago seemed to strike a chord amongst the digital community, especially in highlighting just how big an issue this particular area of online currently is. So I’m happy to say that I’ve trawled around the internet to bring you some more snippets of useful data and awesome figures.

As before, all this information is likely to be out of date in six months or so, but until then, they’re reasonably recent facts and I feel they demonstrate the meteoric rise and importance of this rapidly evolving area of online.

In no particular order:

• Social networks and blogs are the 4th most popular online activities online, including beating personal email. 67% of global users visit member communities and 10% of all time spent on the internet is on social media sites. 
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth most populated place in the world. This means it easily beats the likes of Brazil, Russia and Japan in terms of size.
• 80% of companies use, or are planning to use, LinkedIn as their primary tool to find employees during the course of this year. The site has just celebrated reaching their 45-millionth membership. 
• Around 64% of marketers are using social media for 5 hours or more each week during campaigns, with 39% using it for 10 or more hours per week. 
• It took radio 38 years to reach 50 million listeners. Terrestrial TV took 13 years to reach 50 million users. The internet took four years to reach 50 million people.  In less than nine months, Facebook added 100 million users.  
• Wikipedia currently has more than 13 million articles in more than 260 different languages. The site attracts over 60 million unique users a month and it’s often debated that the information it contains is more reliable than any printed Encyclopedia. 
• The most recent figure of blogs being indexed by Technorati currently stands at 133 million. The same report into the Blogosphere also revealed that on average, 900,000 blog posts are created within a single 24-hour period. 
• It’s been suggested that YouTube is likely to serve over 75 billion video streams to around 375 million unique visitors during this year. 
• The top three people on Twitter (Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres and Britney Spears) have more combined followers than the entire population of Austria.
• According to Socialnomics, if you were paid $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia, you would earn $156.23 per hour. 
• The online bookmarking service, Delicious, has more than five million users and over 150 million unique bookmarked URLs.  
• Since April this year, Twitter has been receiving around 20 million unique visitors to the site each month, according to some analytical sources.  
• Formed in 2004, Flickr now hosts more than 3.6 billion user images.  
• Universal McCann reported that 77% of all active internet users regularly read blogs.

Some Nashville related statistics, according to NashMash.com:

• There are currently 19,991 Twitter users in the Nashville area.
• One of the most influential Twitter users in the Nashville area is Dave Delaney of Griffin Technology.
• This month alone, more than 46,000 tweets have been posted on Twitter. 

For more information and other interesting articles revolving around this topic, visit www.econsultancy.com

The Nashville Tech Story (8/17/2009)

An information security innovation and services company called MainNerve, recently announced that it was opening an office here in Nashville.  Nashville based security maven, Mark Burnette, has been appointed President of the Central Region.  Among other responsibilities, Mark will be overseeing the opening of the office and leading the company’s business development efforts.  The Council recently caught up with Burnette regarding MainNerve.

Based in San Antonio, Texas, MainNerve has been delivering security solutions across the US since 2001.  The company specializes in security consulting services such as vulnerability assessments, penetration testing, directory management and integration, as well as, PCI, FERPA and HIPAA compliance.  While other firms offer similar services, MainNerve has a major differentiator – the company provides at least one of its world-class technology solutions to service customers free for one year. 

“For security leaders who are trying to manage risks with a minimal budget, our offering provides the best of all worlds,”  said Burnette.  “The client gets top-notch security consulting services at aggressive rates and is able to add that security technology solution that keeps getting cut in budget meetings without having to find the money to pay for it.”

MainNerve also offers security technology solutions that merit a look by Nashville businesses.  The company’s NetForce Defender tool is the Swiss army knife of network security, bundling 15 different network-based security capabilities such as intrusion prevention, spam, spyware and content filtering, network quality of service, VPN access and a firewall into one device that MainNerve will manage at no additional cost.  NetForce Defender gives companies the option to replace several other tools that have costly annual maintenance fees with the all-in-one Defender device.

Perhaps MainNerve’s most impressive technology solution is the company’s innovative patent-pending Adaptive Darknet.  When plugged into the network, this tool immediately identifies any infected computers on the network and “grabs” the traffic off the network, preventing a “bad guy” from controlling the machines and providing a report of machines, so that they can be quickly cleaned. 

“Nashville is a very fertile market for our services and technology,” explained Burnette.  Then again, if you can save a company money AND improve its security, I imagine any market would be open to that.”

MainNerve will be a Gold level sponsor at our upcoming InfoSec Nashville conference on September 17th.  For more information on MainNerve, stop by their exhibit at the conference or visit www.mainnerve.com.  Mark Burnette can be reached at mark.burnette@mainnerve.com.