Email and Forum Questions Profiles in IT: Daniel Mark Lewin Earnst and Young Strategic Growth Forum Twitter Still Hopes to Make Profit Unlocking My Verizon Blackberry Storm Red Hat to get new CEO from Delta Air Lines
Email from Andrew: Dear Tech Talk, How can I keep my passwords from being intercepted at the airport or any wi-fi service? Andrew
Tech Talk Answers: You need to set up a VPN to encrypt your data stream and keep anyone from intercepting your user name and password. You can configure a VPN between your computer and the firewall for business email retrieval. If you don’t have that option, you can use a public proxy service. A list of available proxy can be foundat www.proxy.org. The most popular proxy listed on that site is www.proxify.com.
Email from Mike: Hi Dr. Shurtz & Mr. Russ. Still enjoying your show and am really amazed at Dr. Shurtz’s accomplishments. I’ve been trying to teach myself web programming for a site I’d like to launch – while I tend to be good at finding things on the web – this one answer has eluded me. I’m building a web site which I want to be browser aware so that I can send tailored web pages to desktops & handhelds while also considering all of the various browsers and versions out there for proper rendering. Thanks in advance – Mike (Still in Leesburg)
Tech Talk Answers: You can detect the browser type by using a simple JavaScript program detect the string: navigator.userAgent. Once you have this information you can delivery the different web pages to selected browsers. You can create a CSS that is standards compliant. Then load an additional CSS style sheet for any browser specific workarounds using simple <if>….<endif> commands. As the browsers become compliant you can simply drop the second style sheet.
Email from Dennis: Hi Guys, I am looking to get a 1TB external hard drive. What brand would you recommend to get?, Thanks, Dennis
Tech Talk Answers: There are some great drives. Make certain to get high speed USB 2.0 and 7,200 rpm. I like the WD MyBook and Iomega eGo drives for around $100.
Profiles in IT: Daniel Mark Lewin
Daniel Mark Lewin was a mathematician and entrepreneur who co-founded Akamai Technologies, a distributed Internet content delivery company.
Daniel Mark Lewin was born May 14, 1970 in Denver, Colorado and raised in Jerusalem. He was known as Danny.
He served for four years in the Israel Defence Forces as an officer in Sayeret Matkal, an elite and secretive unit.
Danny Lewin attended the Technion University in Haifa, Israel while simultaneously working at IBM’s research laboratory in Haifa.
He received a BA and BS, summa cum laude, from Technion in 1995
He enrolled in the PhD program at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1996.
While there, he and MIT Applied Mathematics professor Tom Leighton, came up with innovative algorithms for optimizing Internet traffic.
His master’s thesis, which won the 1998 Best Masterworks Thesis Presentation Award at MIT, included some of the fundamental algorithms that make up the core of Akamai’s services.
This problem has been suggested by Tim Berners-Lee who office was down the hall.
The Internet is made up of over 15,000 separate networks which are connected at peering points.
Because the different networks are not always paid to carry traffic from other networks, these peering points frequently are congested.
Many carriers simply provide bogus information to Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), the core routing protocol of the Internet, to divert traffic;
The challenge is to delivery content reliably in this environment.
He and his roommate Preetish Nijhawan decided to enter an MIT $50K business plan contest. Preetish was business major and had urged him to enter.
The business plan ranked in the top six entrants and made it to round two (winning around $100). Unfortunately, they were trounced in the finals and did not even place in the top three (out of six).
But their entry did get attention from the tech community and over thirty joined their development team to actually write code to test the theory.
He revised the business model and founded Akamai in 1998 with Professor Tom Leighton and MIT Sloan School students Jonathan Seelig and Preetish Nijhawan. Akamai is a Hawaiian word meaning smart or intelligent.
They needed a customer.
In January 1999, Victoria’s Secret aired its first-ever Super Bowl commercial. The ad generated millions of hits within minutes slowing the site dramatically. They turned to Akamai, in partnership with IBM, to solve the problem.
Lewin served as the company’s Chief Technical Officer (CTO) and a board member, and during the height of the internet boom achieved great wealth.
Lewin was killed aboard American Airlines Flight 11 during the September 11, 2001 attacks, apparently toward the beginning of the hijacking.
After his death, the intersection of Main and Vassar Streets in Cambridge was renamed "Danny Lewin Square" in his honor.
Akamai currently has over 56,000 servers in over 1,000 networks in 70 countries, delivering 20% of the global web content
Current market cap is $4.1B and Leighton is now CTO.
Earnst and Young Strategic Growth Forum
November 11-15, 2009, Palm Spring, CA
Two conference tracks
Managing Transactions, Cash and Talent
Embracing Value, Innovation and Change
Entrepreneur of the Year National Awards
There were over 240 regional winners in ten categories.
Ten National Category Winners and One Overall National Winner
Paul Sagan, Akamai CEO, was the winner in the Technology category.
Tom Adams, Rosetta Stone, was overall National Winner
Keynotes Speakers
H. Lee Scott, former CEO, Walmart
Howard Shultz, CEO, Starbucks Coffee
Erwin “Magic” Johnson,
Insights from other panelists
Biz Stone, CEO, Twitter
Tony Hsieh, Zappos.com
Matthew Szulik, CEO, Red Hat Linux
Other insights from conference
Stay close with your customers, get to know them and take their suggestions seriously.
Smart companies have used the downturn to hire available talent, while taking valuable market share.
Consider a dual-leadership structure: team-up driven entrepreneurial leaders with respected industry executives but make sure they can work together.
Create a culture that values equity.
Ensure that new employees’ values match with the company’s values, and make attainment of those values a central part of performance reviews.
Embrace a culture of openness by sharing information with employees.
Twitter Still Hopes to Make Profit
The social networking site’s co- founder Biz Stone tells Jonathan Fildes that Twitter will offer commercial services this year.
A memo leaked from the company earlier this year suggested that the firm wanted to reach a billion users by 2013.
Despite this growth, critics of the firm have questioned its ability to make money.
Earlier this year it secured $100m, which would value the firm at $1bn. However, it is still to make a profit.
Unlocking My Verizon Blackberry Storm
Airtel GSM telcom in India provides nationwide coverage.
Blackberry storm as both CDMA and GSM capability
Verizon unlocked the Sim Card.
We simply called Verizon and tech support read the unlock code which I entered into the phone and it was unlocked.
I did not even have to hack the phone. Kudos to Verizon.
Red Hat to get new CEO from Delta Air Lines
Matthew Szulik will be replaced by James Whitehurst, Delta Air Lines’ former chief operating officer on January 1.
Szulik, who took over as CEO from Bob Young in 1999 just a few months after its initial public offering, said he’s stepping down because of family health issues.
Szulik, who remains chairman of the board, praised Whitehurst in a statement, saying he’s a "hands-on guy who will be a strong cultural fit at Red Hat."
On a conference call, Szulik said Whitehurst stood "head and shoulders" above other candidates interviewed in a recruiting process.
He was a programmer earlier in his career and runs four versions of Linux at home.
Szulik said he wasn’t satisfied with more traditional tech executives who were interviewed.
Whitehurst will be paid $700,000 per year with a possible bonus of the same amount.
He also will be paid up to $150,000 for relocation from Atlanta, and will be granted options to purchase 500,000 shares of common stock and 175,000 shares of restricted stock.
Whitehurst worked at Delta from 2002 to August 2007; before that, he was at the Boston Consulting Group.
In his years at Red Hat, Szulik presided over a major change in business strategy.
Until 2003, its single product, Red Hat Linux, was freely available as a download, and the company sold technical support.
The business depended on converting people who got the free versions into paying customers.
In the quarter ended May 31, 1999, the last before Red Hat’s IPO, the company had revenue of $2.7 million. In the most recent, revenue was $135.4 million.