Inbound Thinking

The windows near my desk look down on Kendall Square in Cambridge. I think it’s worth sharing. You can also see the reflection of my desk in the corner, I love giant post-it notes.

My employer, inbound marketing software maker HubSpot, is putting together the Inbound Marketing Summit this September.  The event is focused on sharing the latest strategies and best practices to leverage inbound marketing to attract more qualified prospects to your business website and generate more leads and sales online.

The summit is September 8, 2008 and is held at the Boston Cambridge Marriott.  There are going to be great speakers including keynotes from David Meerman Scott and Seth Godin.

As a reader of my blog you can get a special discount of $200 off the admission price – just use the discount code 8EHR2 when you register.

I’ll be attending at least part of the summit so if anyone is interested in meeting up in person, drop me a line at dabdinoor [at] hubspot [dot] com.

Also let me assure that the summit is not a sales pitch for HubSpot. We have built a successful company using the Inbound Marketing methodology and that is what the summit will be about, not our product.

Saturday night I went to see U23D with Craig, Heather, Thanh and Jonas. It was my second time watching this show, and it was just as good, if not better, than the first time. The reason this show is so great is because of the incredible access the camera crews had. The cameras get so close that you can even see inside Bono’s mouth (not that you would ever want to, but I bet you now get the idea of how close the camera was).

One of the greatest things about the 3D IMAX format is the editing. Having that extra dimension of depth for the visuals is simply amazing. Throughout the show you’ll see different shots overlayed on each other: Like Edge playing guitar in the foreground while Bono sings in the background. The stage show also features a gigantic LED-type wall, and those graphics are used in the film itself to really make the 3rd dimension pop. I can’t explain it accurately, but trust me, it is very cool.

I’ve always liked U2’s music, but I am by no means a super-fan. That being said, I thought the show was awesome so I feel it is fair to say everyone can enjoy this movie. Most of the songs were popular at one pont, not all the greatest-hits, but close enough. I think the overall message of the show is more important than each of the songs, the value of the concert is greater than the sum of its parts. I can’t think of any other band that can do a huge rock show and leave you with a message of peace and unity, it is impressive.

If you’re a Boston or New England native, you can catch the show at the Aquarium IMAX theater, and I definitely reccomend it.

Knowing that Jay Prouty was on opening duties for this night was all the motivation that I needed to be there. Jay is a good friend of mine, so it was great to see and hear him again. It had been a long time since we last hung out and I really dig Jay’s music so I was really looking forward to hearing it at Estate. I got there a bit after 10 and it was completely dead. That just happens to be the way Estate works on Friday, nobody shows up until midnight, at least that has been my experience there.

Jay paced himself and played some bass-heavy, groovy stuff to settle people in. The music progressed really nicely and by 11 the more upbeat tracks came out and the dancefloor was filling in. We got word from management that Dan + Donald’s plane was running late so Jay was going to have to play a bit longer than expected, no problem there. Jay cruised right through to midnight when there was finally a crowd and plenty of dancers when the headliners arrived.

After Dan and Donald got their gear set up, it was on with the show. I definitely chose the word show deliberately here. Dan was playing the tracks, working on his own trio of CDJs and using the DJM-800 to tweak out all the builds, giving that extra push to rile up the crowd. Glaude was spending most of his time playing a drum machine and scratching over the tracks. Donald also played with some a-capellas over the music, and inevitably ended up scratching those too.

It was entertaining, and the crowd was definitely into it. But I just couldn’t help but think that it was too much of a rehearsed act, a touring show that was going to be the same night after night. Of course I have huge respect for each of these guys as DJs and producers, so don’t get me wrong, I still had a great time. My only real problem with the night was that the audio was at total ear-bleed level. Just way too loud to be enjoyable. I understand when you have so much bass that your internal organs shake (that’s basically how Avalon used to operate) but when you have the mids and highs cranked it’s just totally uncomfortable.

Overall it was a very good time. Jay did a great job with his time and played some grooves that the Estate crowd normally wouldn’t be tasting. DJ Dan and Donald Glaude put on a great performance and got everyone into it, so what more can you ask for. I’m glad I went to this show, it was a necessary change of pace.

This night was a blast, good music and a great group of friends. I got to Underbar early to help set up although Greg and Joe weren’t there yet. Anyone who knows these two can tell you they are perpetually running late, despite Greg being able to drive between 2 points ridiculously fast. I spent some time chatting with Dana, the light girl for the night. If you meet her ask to see her sketchbook, the stuff she draws with a regular ballpoint pen is amazing.

Greg kicked things off around 11 with his normal Miguel Migs type of deep house. Good sounds for filling the room a bit, but Greg was restless and told me that he wasn’t going to hold back for long. So, soon after, Greg was rocking into bigger tracks. The crowd seemed to be receptive but Underbar is a strange place, they never like the same music twice. They got all worked up for the Funkagenda remix of Man With The Red Face, a track you normally wouldn’t consider to be a hit there. But no complaints from me, or Greg; the people were dancing, what more can you ask for.

Joe hit the decks sometime before 1am. It seemed like time was flying and I remember Joe dropping some harder stuff and the lights going crazy. Way too much strobe light, I swear that is the only light they know how to work at Underbar, but I digress. Other jams included Eric Prydz’s Pjanoo and a very banging remix of Livin’ on a Prayer, if you were there you might remember Joe, Greg, John Issac and myself doing a bit of karaoke to that track from the DJ booth. There are some priceless pictures of us singing by Mikey McNulty.

It was great to see lots of music industry folks in the house: Craig Mitchell, Etiquette, D-Lav, John Isaac, and more. My highlight of the night was walking away from the bar with a martini only to have it splashed all over me by a rogue elbow. Thankfully the owner of that elbow got me a replacement, it wasn’t even my martini to spill!

In summary, it was a great time. Greg and Joe always put out quality music and if for some reason you have never heard either of them play you should probably change that, there will be lots of gigs with them this summer to check out, fun times guaranteed and maybe even a karaoke session.

In Michael Arrington’s recent Techcrunch post about the iPhone 3G, he mentions that Apple is not competing with the current cellphone technologies as much as Google’s upcoming Android platform.

This made me wonder if the current shift in openness (see Facebook, MySpace, Google, etc.) could apply to Apple’s mobile ambitions. Apple started out in the consumer electronic devices area with the iPod, a stack that included hardware, software and marketplace. This vertical integration (some argue vertical monopoly) allowed Apple to control the minutiae of the product and ultimately it worked. Apple controls something like 70% of the portable audio player market now.

Now, Apple has proven themselves to be a player in the mobile space. They moved 6mm iPhone’s in the first year and will likely sell another 4mm in the second half of 2008. However, there are billions of handsets in the world, and it’s projected that the number of mobile handsets will eventually be roughly equal to the population of the earth.  So Apple’s cut, while a great first-effort, is not entirely game changing. Maybe the new iPhone price will accelerate their market share, but that remains to be seen. In the US the iPhone is bound to the AT&T network (unlocking aside) and that is a non-starter for many people, myself included. AT&T might be great in Albuquerque or Laredo, but it sucks in Boston.

So, the smart play for Apple might be for it to open up it’s current vertical stack of mobile offerings. Namely, they could allow the AppStore to distribute applications for all mobile devices. If Google’s Android platform could take advantage of the AppStore to sell applications and download them, it could be a windfall for both companies. Apple could also open iTunes to Android devices, and allow those customers to buy music, movies and games and sync them to their phones with the desktop software and via the over-the-air store. Google products are often missing the consumer-facing shine that Apple has perfected, and Apple is lacking the massive adoption of computer services that Google has achieved; working together could solve both issues.

Although this might be an unlikely scenario, it’s definitely not impossible. There are already tight ties between Google and Apple, with Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt sitting on the board of directors at Apple. I think both companies develop revolutionary technology, Google just tends to leverage open source and standards more than Apple. Seeing Apple standardize and open up its marketplace would be a major departure, but it could prove to be a smart decision.

Hosting is a commodity and the differences between companies are often negligible. I happen to use HostGator because I bought it years ago and the price is ridiculously cheap. They give me plenty of storage for my sites and I’m able to adjust everything myself using cPanel. Usually HostGator is great, but recently they sent me a message about a mandatory password reset (full-text below). This is a great example in how not to address your customers about a possible security issue. I completely believe in transparency, and at HubSpot when we screw something up we come clean about it. That being said, you don’t want to alert all of your customers to all of your staffing and security issues in such a bombastic way. This message alone mentions:

• A former employee they’re suing
• Someone who took another job and decided to cause some damage before leaving
• A trustworthy employee with VPN access, using a trojaned computer
• Their early billing system stored plaintext passwords and may have been compromised at one point

I like their reasoning for not using the same password again, but they probably could have handled the packaging better.

The email you have received from hostgator with information regarding the forced password update is in fact real. You can confirm this by hovering over the url and seeing that it links to us at https://secure.hostgator.com/password_reset/
I have included more information in this post about why we did this and why YOU SHOULD NOT change your password back to what we had on file.We have over 150 employees currently and have had dozens and dozens more come and go over the years.

We had one employee that is no longer with us from a few years ago that we are in the process of suing. He will be served in the next few days. He was operations manager of hostgator for a brief time period and could have very easily taken a username / pw list home from the billing system. We don’t have any evidence that he did this but at the same time we can’t say 100% that he didn’t. I don’t believe it’s worth the risk any longer especially knowing he’s most likely going to be pretty upset about being served.

We had another employee that got another job and decided before telling us that he was going to do some damage. He logged into our ticket system and closed all the tickets in que. While we don’t have any reason to believe he ever created a list of usernames / pw we can’t rule out this possibility. I just got word that this ex employee is in the process of being prosecuted by the DA for this malicious attack. Again it’s just not worth taking the risk knowing that there’s a small chance he could have a pw list.

We recently had to let a very trustworthy / hard working remote employee go. She worked for us back in Florida for years and wasn’t able to relocate with us to texas. We kept her on as remote employee since she was unable to relocate. Just recently we discovered that the computer she was using to login with had a trojan on it. We don’t believe her hacked machine ever gave out any customer usernames / pws, but again we can’t positively say it didn’t. Due to this security breach of her machine we gave her the choice of either moving to houston to work in house or let go.

Not to long ago we allowed many employees to login to the ticket system / billing system from home using a vpn. It’s very possible one of their computers could have been trojaned and someone was building a username / pw list. We have no evidence this ever happened but it’s very possible as slim as it is.

I could go on and on about different incidents that could have resulted in an intrusion that we never became aware of. It’s that unknown that keeps me up at night! The billing system we currently use just isn’t safe with passwords displayed.

I repeat DO NOT change it back to what it was!!!!! If you do and you get hacked don’t blame the gator!

The new billing system we are about to deploy will never display a customers full password to employees. This will help protect you from a hostgator computer ever getting hacked as well as any ex employees looking to get “even” with us.

Our systems have been locked down with only office ips being allowed access. We use to allow employees access from home back when we were smaller.

Modernbill had a major exploit years ago that would have allowed a hacker to view all usernames and passwords. We patched this the same day it came out so there’s no need to worry about this particular incident, but what if there was another 0 day exploit that hasn’t been discovered? It’s just not secure having passwords in plain text without encryption as modernbill does now.

I’m sorry for the lack of notice on this update but if someone out there did happen to have a list the last thing you would want to do is give them a warning. I also apologize about some of the confusion that resulted from customers on the first few servers being updated.

Thanks for reading all!

As my first post in my return to blogging I wanted to highlight some things I’m looking forward to, and why.

Windows 7 (Sometime in 2009)

I hate Windows Vista. Barely a day goes by that it doesn’t make my technologogy-saturated life more difficult. So I’m really looking forward to the next major version of Windows. I hope that they took time to address all the issues from Vista. Of course this is Microsoft, so that’s probably hoping for too much.

iPhone version 2.0 (June, 2008)

Although I don’t own an iPhone, I absolutely adore them. I would have bought one the day it was released (June 29th, 2007) if the AT&T network weren’t part of the deal. So I am very excited to see what happens with version 2. Will it have 3G, a new design, come in black and white? Probably all of those will happen, but as with most Apple product announcements I love being blindsided by some great features that nobody has dumped on a mac rumor site.

Facebook profile redesign (June, 2008)

I’m excited to see such a major social application unwind the clutter and put good design ahead of customization. I hate MySpace more than anyone, mostly because of the unruly profile pages. Facebook is making a preemptive strike against clutter and moving all the disruptive junk into separate pages or tabs. The timeframe on this one is a little speculative, but the screenshots have been available for some time and release is imminent.

24 season 7 (January, 2009)

I’ve been on the 24 bandwagon since the first episode, and I miss how entertaining the first seasons were. I think the show was a victim of it’s own success for a few seasons but I’m expecting a return to form with season 7. The writers strike, combined with a major re-working of the plot caused the 2008 season to be scrapped. With all the extra time the writers have had, I think season 7 could be one of the best yet.

I haven’t been blogging lately, mostly because I couldn’t think of anything worth writing a lengthy post about. So I’ve decided to break my own perceptions of blogging and just write short thoughts as best I can, without worrying about a message or lesson. Hopefully my thoughts will be of some interest to readers.

As is often the case with Windows Vista, my laptop crashed today while I was working on some code for a .NET 2.0 website. Unfortunately this happened while the site was building from a previous change. In case you’re not familiar with how .NET does this, here is a quick overview:

1. .NET realizes that you’ve rebuilt a dll, and as a result the whole application needs to be recompiled
2. .NET shadow copies the dll’s from your website’s bin folder into a seperate .NET framework directory
3. .NET completes compilation and serves the website via IIS

Unforutunately, if your computer dies or crashes during this shadow-copy stage you’re in trouble. The specific error is “Exception from HRESULT: 0×80070057 (E_INVALIDARG)”.

To fix it, you need to get rid of the files that were corrupted during the interrupted file copy:

• Find the .NET framework complilation folder (in my case it was: “C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\Temporary ASP.NET Files”)
• Delete all folders other than “root”
• Open up the “root” folder and delete all subfolders
• Pull your website up in the browser
• It should compile successfully and load the website.

Special thanks to my co-worker Patrick for figuring this out.