On Ebay's security Key

Infoworld has an article indicating PayPal launching a mutli-factor authentication scheme using security key.

The security key is actually a small electronic device, designed to clip on to a key-chain, that calculates a new numeric password every 30 seconds. PayPal users who sign up to use the device will need to enter their regular passwords as well as the number displayed on the key whenever they log in to the online payment service.

This is welcome development and something that I have been writing about for the past two years. The cost of such a device is $5. A small cost to pay to secure the PayPal account from Phishers and hackers.

What took so long ? Where is Google, Yahoo and MSN on this ?
While this is a welcome change, I would like to see industry wide adoption of this and have a single device for "all online identities". It doesn't make sense to have five different devices for five different accounts, say yahoo, Google, MSN, Amazon etc.

Combining RSA tokens with Mobile phones
Another user friendly option is providing such a "two factor" authentication over the cell phone. This will alleviate the need to carry multiple devices and new Websites can be added as when they adopt this security mechanism. Most internet users I know generally have access to a cell phone and they carry it around when they are traveling. So it makes a lot of sense for putting the "secure key" on a cell phone rather on a separate device.

Software Secure key and works on all Cell phone models
It can be "software based key" which can be installed on various different models of cell phones. Each time a new website rolls out "secure key" authentication model, the software key can be synchronized with that website. This way multiple Application can be authenticated using just one device and that device is something most of us carry around in any case.

This is a good opportunity, which is waiting to be tapped. The difficult part is not building the software key but convincing all the different companies to go with the same authentication model.

Few things to check before moving to Custom Blogger Domain

Here are few things to check, before you would move your old "blogspot" blog to custom domain. I moved my blog http://amanthan.blogspot.com to blog.amanthan.com. The primary reason behind doing this

• Email addresses for the domain
• I can create additional pages and link them to my blog. For example, if I happen to publish some white papers , I can have them all on the same domain.
• Can publish more detailed "About" page etc.
• More control and the option to move to some other hosting service, if need be.
• Want to host photos on the same domain
• Its free !!
  

The trade-off ?

• Though all the old links direct to the new site, you will lose your google page rank.
• The blog will lose its technorati rank. Gotta start all over again.
  
• Though the old pages indexed in Google will still come to new blog, I am not sure about the ranking of new posts in Google Search. Perhaps the posts will never make it to the front page for a while !!
• None of the trac-back work any longer.
  

Consider all of these before making the move. If you think , some of these things listed here are incorrect, leave a comment and I will update them.

Update: Some of my readers reported and I have noticed that this blog is down with "page not found" error. Checked the other "blogspot" blogs and they seem to be working fine. This might be because of issues with URL redirection.

Update: Inside Google has some more on this.

Moving to a new Domain

Blogger just released a new feature, which allows "Blogger users" to host blogger powered blogs on their custom domains. Every thing else remains the same like the subscription and existing links. The new url for this http://blog.amanthan.com

Drop me a mail if anything is broken.

Update: Feeds are not working and site is down intermittently, so moving back to the old domain.

LinkedIn's new question and answers service

LinkedIn has launched a new “Q and A” feature on the LinkedIn web-site. LinkedIn is a business oriented social-networking site and it seems to work for a lot of people. Take a look at some suggestions from Guy Kawasaki for improving the value of your LinkedIn profile. Personally LinkedIn has been more of nuisance, especially the part where you cannot decline a contact request, without writing a note about why you are declining. It seems LinkedIn sends a notification to the person initiating the request indicating that his/her invite has been declined. Now coming back to the LinkedIn “Q&A”, I would hope that it generates enough momentum that serious IT Professionals start using it. Or at least people on my contact list start using it. Maintaining a Yahoo Group of contacts and getting them to use it for technical Q&A has been a failure from my past experience.
There are very few forums for “Oracle ERP/CRM” discussions and it is often difficult to get the right approach for some problems. Other niche forms like It-toolbox are doing exactly the opposite of what LinkedIn is trying. They are encouraging people to create profiles and connect to fellow forum users. They are trying to build a social network around their forum users. Getting answers for my questions from one of my contacts would definitely be of higher value, than from total strangers.

Pay Per Visit advertising: Advertisers dream come true?

Pay per click advertising is a great way for advertisers to drive targeted audience to their website. Extending this further, can a "pay per visit" advertising model be devised for the real world? In this model advertisers will shell out ad dollars only if the target audience happens to visit the particular business or avail a certain service. Rapid advances in location based services in Mobile phones and connected GPS devices, can perhaps turn this fantasy into a reality. A 3G or Wifi enabled GPS device can be a great way to push location based advertisement to customers, assuming that the GPS Devices has access to user’s preferences.
Contextual advertisement based on

• Location of the consumer
• Time of the day
• Date (thanksgiving, Christmas etc)
• Buying history ( Say from Amazon or ebay )
• Personal preferences created or subscribed by the consumer
  

The advertisements are relayed via the location sensitive cell phones or GPS devices, during weekends or holidays. The advertisements kick in when the consumer is on the road and heading in a particular direction. The advertisers don't pay unless the consumer happens to visit the advertised business, which is determined by

• The location of the GPS or Mobile device.
• Or the ads provide “discount coupon code”, which is used the track the conversion rates.

Intrusive,spooky, looney? The geek in me found this thought fascinating nevertheless.

Dash and Yahoo Local, great way to push local Ads

It was in November on a 2500 Miles road trip, we fully realized the utility of a GPS device and how it could b a great medium to push local advertisement. Once we started using GPS devices, we stopped visiting Yahoo Maps or Google maps and they were totally irrelevant to our pre-trip planning. No more printouts and worries about missed exits. With GPS devices touching sub-$500 prices, I had imagined GPS companies will team up with the likes of Yahoo or Google to provide navigational aid on the road. This could be a great medium to provide location specific local ads.

Some of the problems with current generation GPS devices are

1. They are basically stand alone devices, with no connectivity to the internet.
   
2. Since they rely on local storage, there is limited amount of information on these devices.
   
3. There is no simple way to update the data on a daily basis and we have to wait for companies like Navteq ( Who supply the mapping data ) to update their database
4. It would be great if the GPS could get some real time data like weather of the destination, traffic accidents, repair work etc, so drivers could avoid certain roads and reach quicker.
   

Yahoo and Dash announced a partnership, whereby Dash users can use Yahoo Local to search for location specific queries, like pizza or atm in the vicinity. While this appears to be a very exciting development, there is no mention of "Internet Connectivity" details for Dash Navigation system. Looks like the system connects over WIFI, but then its totally useless since these advanced features can only be used in places where there is WIFI connection. There is no word on local advertisements either in the press release.

Create dynamic website using Zoho and Google pages

While "Google Apps for your domain" provides a lot of functionality like 200 email accounts, calendar, google pages etc and hope fully in the future it would integrate with "google docs" , lack of support for any kind of database is a serious setback for people hoping to host their small business website using Google. Combining Google Page creator with "Zoho Creator" gives a great way to create dynamic website with forms/reports and search database.
The advantages of using "Zoho Creator" is, it can be done by people having little or no technical knowledge and zero coding. Zoho creator provides tools to embed forms, reports etc using either iframe or javascript in any HTML page. Here is how you can add dynamic content or forms to any HTML page.

1. Register with Zoho and create tables using "zoho creator". Create a form using the simple interface and embed it to your HTML page using javascript or Iframe. In this sample form, candidates can register for open positions using a simple form.
   
2. Create a view for the tables that you created and embed them as IFrame or javascript. In this sample view, I list out the list of candidates who have applied for the openings.
   
3. Host the HTML pages using free hosting sites like Google page creator.

Zoho creator is the quickest way to add dynamic functionality to HTML pages without worrying about SQL or PHP.