Customer Login
Tech vs. Tech: Businesses find ways to bottle the dark side of innovation
Technology
Tech vs. Tech: Businesses find ways to bottle the dark side of innovation
Kansas City Business Journal - by David Twiddy, Staff Writer
Date: Friday, March 4, 2011, 5:00am CST
Technology revolutionizes the business world every day.
Wireless phones and laptops free workers from their desks and improve productivity. Faster computer networks have given rise to faster payment processing and employee remote access. Social media let executives cheaply push their brand and message directly to consumers.
At the same time, technology has a dark side.
Workers cause traffic accidents while texting or leave their laptops full of business secrets in the coffee shop. Hackers unleash a miasma of viruses and malware to infect and raid corporate databases. Competitors or clumsy employees use Twitter, Facebook or Yelp to harm a company’s reputation.
Technology is starting to fight back, however, giving businesses new tools to rebalance the scales and get their modern tools back to generating revenue instead of headaches.
Distracted driving
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said that in 2009 995 people were killed and 24,000 were injured in crashes that were at least partly blamed on the use of cell phones by the driver.
Texting while driving has come under special scrutiny because typing typically requires the driver to use both hands and to take his or her eyes off the road for longer periods.
Overland Park-based wireless carrier Sprint Nextel Corp. has a portion of its website dedicated to distracted driving, including a list of smart phone applications for dealing with the problem.
One of those is MyAutoReply, produced by Kansas City-based software developer Moblico Solutions LLC.
The program sends an automatic reply to incoming messages that the receiver can’t answer texts at that moment. It also can track when the user has the application on to show compliance with state laws banning texting while driving — or that they were paying attention during meetings.
While the texting function is blocked, the app still allows the phone user to listen to music or get turn-by-turn directions.
“The application is essentially our first effort in this area of distracted driving,” CEO Pierre Barbeau said. “We feel strongly about it, being purveyors of mobile technology. We think it’s important that, that technology be used responsibly.”
Although MyAutoReply currently is available only for Android devices, Barbeau said subsequent updates may be available for BlackBerry and Apple iOS phones as well.
Remote control
Kansas City IT firm MDL Technology LLC uses mobile laptops and other devices for its workers to communicate from job sites around the region.
To keep those devices updated with the latest software downloads or to tweak applications or device settings, the company uses Microsoft Corp.’s System Center Configuration Manager to make the changes wirelessly.
MDL also uses the program to update and strengthen security settings on the devices, such as creating passwords and locking the devices if they haven’t been used for a certain amount of time.
“This is a program we use to monitor and maintain networks,” Operations Manager T.J. Bloom said. “We have lost a laptop before and used this to begin locking things down or remote wiping or copying the data.”
Firewall shunning
Most businesses with computer networks have set up some form of firewall and instituted anti-viral programs to defend against intruders.
But as the online troublemakers have graduated from isolated hackers to well-organized criminal gangs, their ever more sophisticated threats have IT directors searching for new weapons.
Overland Park-based RiskAnalytics LLC has started selling a new defense system called AutoShun.
The device, which CEO David Frankland describes as an “in-line packet filter” deployed in front of a standard firewall, checks the Internet addresses of everything flowing into a company’s network. Using a constantly updated list of addresses linked to criminal activity, AutoShun blocks questionable traffic from reaching subscribers’ systems. Also, if a virus reaches a client’s computer network — possibly via an infected laptop — the system blocks those viral programs from communicating with criminal addresses.
“The problem with anti-virus and most modern firewalls is an issue of capacity and speed,” Frankland said. “The bad guys are morphing their viruses and malware at such a great rate that the anti-
virus companies can’t keep up. So each day your computer is supposed to download its virus permissions, in milliseconds, someone can download the contents of your computer way before a new anti-virus can prevent that from happening.”
Social media reputation
It used to be that a disgruntled customer or nefarious rival would set up a website to attack a company’s reputation — painful, but of limited reach.
With the advent of social network platforms, however, the scope of bad business mojo can spread quickly and be almost impossible to stop.
Shelly Kramer, CEO of Kansas City-based V3 Integrated Marketing, said the best defense for a company is to deploy as many online listening posts as possible, such as Google Alerts, which sends every mention of your company or your competitors and is free.
She said business owners also should monitor sites with customer reviews because those may be hidden from regular Internet searches.
For more intensive searches, she recommended employing social media monitoring services, such as those offered by local companies Infegy and Spiral 16, which comb through millions of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other postings for mentions.
“It depends on what level of sophistication you’re looking for,” she said. “I think it’s also important to know that you can’t fix those things that people say about you that are negative. You can’t erase them. ... But you should use customer service to counter any negative reviews.”
