Hasta La Gadget!

Arianespace, the company that launches satellites for the European Union, has had to concede that its latest mission hasn’t been a complete success. Friday’s launch conveyed two satellites, Dorea and Milena, into orbit to help build out Galileo, the…

Northrop Grumman has shown off what it believes the military spaceplane of the future should look like, a futuristic and reusable aircraft designed as part of a $3.9 DARPA contract. The Experimental Spaceplane XS-1 would automate a large percentage of flight, as well as kick-start hypersonic aircraft development once more, Northrop Grumman claims, though the company still has competition. Three … Continue reading

co-authored by Dr. Stephen Bryen, Founder & Chairman, Ziklag Systems

He plays bass guitar, and rather well some say. He discovered Christianity for himself and reads biblical texts. He has been a hacker since the age of 8. He is known amongst other hackers as “nerve gas,” his pseudonym. His ability and competence are unquestioned; law enforcement and top government agencies call on him for help. He is an expert, one of the best outside of the company itself, on Apple’s iOS operating system. That’s the operating system on iPhones.

His name is Jonathan Zdziarski. He has uncovered shocking information about iPhone vulnerability. Basically it is this: if you take advantage of encryption on the iPhone to back up your iPhone you may think you are protected, but you are not. Zdziarski has found undocumented services on the iPhone that would let an intruder recover everything on your phone. According to Zdziarski, these undocumented services should not be on the phone, but they were put there. Who knows why?

Meanwhile three researchers working at the University of California Riverside at the Bourns College of Engineering have found that it is possible to get sensitive personal information off the phone taking advantage of what they call “shared memory” statistics. Basically, every smartphone shares memory among applications, meaning the memory is both accessible and vulnerable. If what looks like an APP you like to run has been tampered with and includes malware, it can be running alongside of regular software you typically use. Looking into this further, the research team of Zhiyun Qian, a computer scientist and engineer, Z. Morley Mao, an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, and PhD student Qi Alfred Chen, were able to demonstrate how Gmail, H&R Block, NewEgg, WebMD, Chase Bank, Hotels.com and Amazon could be hacked and personal information stolen. They did this fairly consistently, over 80 percent for all of them, except Amazon, where they were able to hack 48% of the time. According to the team, while they carried out their demonstration hacks on the Android platform, the same thing should be true for iPhones and Windows-based smartphones. Their proposal: side memory channels need to be eliminated, but this is very unlikely because the side channels facilitate running multiple programs at the same time.

Smartphones are outselling all computers (desk top and lap top) because we have moved into the world of highly mobile computing. Smartphones, phablets and tablets offer convenience and power; because of their multiple sensors, cameras, microphones and fast processors, smartphones make everything easier. You can, for example, take a snapshot of a check you received, send it electronically to your bank and deposit it. In fact, our California research team has a neat video showing how a check sent to Chase can be perfectly hacked, meaning an intruder gets the check image and from that the bank account number, the name and address on the check, and the depositor’s signature.

The smartphone problem is a growing one. As smartphones are increasingly used for financial transactions, sharing sensitive personal and proprietary information, and for operating other devices (such as home security systems), the field for intruders grows and becomes increasingly attractive. Smartphones are intentionally built as open platforms so programmers and developers can quickly build APPS to take advantage of the phone’s potential. Under some public pressure from privacy organizations, smartphone makers have been grafting on encryption to try and protect phones; but putting encryption on a phone does not mean that it is used, and even when it is, as “Nerve Gas” proves, it is easy to get around.

But, you say, I am careful and I only use my smartphone to call the family or check the news, sometimes for a text message or email. Even if someone picks it off, it does not really matter much.
Think again. Your smartphone can be listening even when you think you have turned it off. There is a type of malware called a “spy phone.” The spy phone can actually activate your phone at your office or home and listen in to your conversations, even take photos without you knowing it. If you write on your calendar APP that you will attend an important product meeting or board meeting, the spy phone can attend too. It will hear what you hear, and send it back to the intruder.

Government spying on smartphones is now well known. But spying by corporations and private eyes gets less attention than it deserves. Private companies spy on each other and get away with it, because they are rarely caught. In Britain a major scandal broke out more than a year ago involving 140 top firms in the UK, including law firms, who were all spying on competitors or adversaries. The scandal was picked up by a Parliamentary committee who started to ask questions. The police claimed they would interfere with ongoing investigations and asked them to stop inquiring. The scandal was covered up, mostly because some of the firms were spying on their overseas competitors (mostly in the US one would guess), and thus the spying was helping the British economy.

If you work in a competitive company, in a law firm, in an advocacy organization, in the health care service industry, or in banking and finance (just to name a few highly targeted organizations), then you and your smartphone are on someone’s hit list. Beware.

So what can you do? To start, minimize putting personal information of any kind on your smartphone. If you put it there it is exposed to hackers. Next, try and avoid using social APPS on your smartphone. They are easy pickings for even amateur hackers. Don’t use web based email, even if it is supposedly free. The best email system is one that is run by your company and works over a dedicated client on your smartphone. Almost all public web based email systems scan your email and sell the information from the scans to advertisers or others willing to pay for the information. In fact, free email providers don’t necessarily know who they sell to because they work through data brokers. At last count data brokers were holding some 700 billion data “elements” and adding 3 billion new “elements” (pieces or saleable information) per month. Sad to say, there are no rules about who gets all this information or what they do with it.

And, of course, don’t put APPS on your phone that you don’t really need and which ask for a bunch of permissions you may not want to give. For example, if a photo APP says it wants to know your location, don’t download it.

Above all, think before you use an APP, type out a password, grant a permission, use social media, snap a photo or take your phone into a sensitive meeting.

I am eight, and I am afraid of everything. The list of things that keep me up at night includes but is not limited to: appendicitis, typhoid, leprosy, unclean meat, foods I haven’t seen emerge from their packaging, foods my mother hasn’t tasted first so that if we die we die together, homeless people, headaches, rape, kidnapping, milk, the subway, sleep.

An assistant teacher comes to school with a cold sore. I am convinced he’s infected with MRSA, a skin-eating staph infection. I wait for my own flesh to erode. I stop touching my shoelaces (too filthy) or hugging adults outside my family. In school, we are learning about Hiroshima, so I read “Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes,” and I know instantly that I have leukemia. A symptom of leukemia is dizziness, and I have that, when I sit up too fast or spin around in circles. So I quietly prepare to die in the next year or so, depending on how fast the disease progresses.

Are you aware of the steps it takes for a client to hire you? What’s involved on their end, and on your end?

You might be spending a lot of time doing and explaining the same things, over and over again, for each prospective client.

I know I was. And I’ve been working with clients for a long time. So I decided to change things up a few months back, and automated more than half of my process to get clients from interested to signed on with me for web design work.

Call me an experimenter. I’m never satisfied with how anything works, and am always trying to change things up to see if something else works better. Since I started freelancing, though, I hadn’t done anything with how I onboard clients.

Here’s what it typically looked like:

1. Client finds my name and link to my site on the bottom of a site they visit.

2. They click DESIGN on my site and see my portfolio.

3. If they’re impressed, they get in touch — sometimes with quick and vague emails, sometimes with 10-page essays that detail everything from how and why they started their business, to notes about their pets.

4. I email them back when I have time, and ask them to fill in a project planner (a Google Doc that I make just for them).

5. Once they fill it in, they email me back to let me know it’s filled in.

6. Then I email them back to suggest a Skype call and a date/time.

7. We go back and forth a few times to sync up when we can both get on Skype.

8. We talk about the project on Skype for 30-40 minutes.

9. I write up a statement of work that details three things: cost, deliverables, and timing.

10. They sign it and send me a down payment to hold the start date.

11. I send them a checklist of tasks they need to complete before we start.

12. We start the project.

That’s 12 steps, and quite a bit of work for each step. When I wrote it out, it became obvious that I could automate the first seven steps. This would save me a ton of time and also get potential clients the information they needed quickly, to see if I would be a good fit for their project.

Onboarding, a brief definition

Onboarding is term from human resources for new hires, later taken by growth hackers and application developers to refer to taking on and orienting a new customer. The process is often broken into three parts: accommodation, assimilation, and acceleration.

Accommodation is giving new people the tools to use what they just signed up for. So when you sign up for Instagram and see their first few screens teaching you how to use their app — that’s their onboarding process. Samuel Hulick documented it here in 71 slides.

Assimilation is helping the new person feel like they belong–like they’re that person’s, that company’s, that app’s rat people. Zappos does this by taking their new hires through a course on company values, so they get not just what the company does, but what the company feels is important. They’re also given the choice at the end of the course to take $2,000 in cash to quit the company. Apparently only 1 percent of people take them up on it.

Acceleration is making the new person quickly enter the existing community. I do this on my mailing list by sending a PDF of the most popular articles that they’ve missed, so they can catch up and be in the same place as everyone else. I’ve spent a lot of time on the process and wording that happens when someone signs up for my list, and it pays off in spades with engagement and retention of subscribers.

All of these things above seem kind of scientific or even a bit disingenuous, but at their core, they’re about making someone new feel welcome, giving them the tools they need to catch up, and making sure they’re in the right place.

If it’s done right, automating an onboarding process can save a bunch of time, but also strengthen the connection and commitment from the user side.

My new onboarding process for web design clients

Here’s how I planned my own onboarding process, to make it as automated and helpful as possible:

1. Client finds my name and link to my site on the bottom of a site they visit.

2. They click DESIGN on my site and see my portfolio.

3. If they’re impressed, they fill in their name and email address, and receive a “Getting Started” PDF. Their details get added to a MailChimp (free) mailing list. This list doesn’t send out regular emails, but it automatically sends the PDF and tracks if they click it or not.

4. The “Getting Started” PDF details my pricing, process, and types of projects I do (as well as types of projects I don’t do). It answers all the common questions I usually get asked on email or on the phone. It also includes lots of client testimonials.

5. At the end of the PDF, there’s a link to fill in a project planner.

6. The project planner is a form hosted on typeform.com (free) that doesn’t need to be generated for each new person. It stores their answers and emails me when they finish.

7. Once they fill in the form, the final screen includes a link to schedule a call.

8. The Skype call booking form lives in a system called youcanbook.me (free) and syncs with my Google Calendar (so it only shows free time on specific days). Once they pick a time that is open for me, we are both sent an email with the confirmation and reminder.

Everything is the same as the previous process. I do the call, if there’s a fit, I write up a statement of work, get a downpayment, and get started.

What I’ve found in the first few months of doing things this way, is that my initial fear that maybe people would be put off by not actually hearing from me at first, wasn’t valid.

Every person I asked –“Did you enjoy the process? Were you okay that I didn’t personally get involved until the call?”– were all completely happy that it was so quick, answered their questions, and felt really smooth.

Out of six people who went through the new process lately, five booked projects with me. The sixth didn’t read the part about me being booked four months out and couldn’t wait that long.

For those six people who went through the process, I saved a lot of time by not having to answer questions I’ve answered hundreds of times before or doing the “when are you free” dance.

Accommodating people with automation lets them get to know my business on their own time. I assimilate them by answering all the common questions I’ve heard through my handy (and well designed, if I do say so myself) “Getting Started” PDF. I accelerate the process by using free tools that let them go from curious to a confirmed sales call within a few minutes (that doesn’t require manual work on my end).

If this article tickled your fancy (and I hope it did), it’s a taste of a course I’m building to help creative freelancers launch or grow their business in a way that works for them. It’s called The Creative Class, and it’s coming soon.