Bloomberg Says London, Not Silicon Valley, Is New York City's Top Tech Competitor

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg says he spends more time eyeing London than he does Silicon Valley in the battle to be the champion city for the tech industry.
"Our competition is only going to be in other cities that have similar kinds of characteristics. And the city that comes to mind is London," Bloomberg said at a seminar held at the law firm Proskauer's New York City office on Friday.
Bloomberg, whose term ends in 81 days, said U.S. immigration laws are "mashugana" – a Yiddish word for "crazy" – and are driving tech talent to international cities. London has the advantage of being a family-friendly city that speaks "the business language of the world," he said.
Bloomberg has been outspoken about his support of immigration reform. Last year, he joined several other prominent business leaders in pushing for reform in an online March on Washington. While the Obama administration has outlined broad plans for reform, including a provision to offer startup visas, the legislation is languishing in Congress. In the meantime, entrepreneurs and top tech talent are being forced to leave the U.S. because of issues with their visas.
As for cities within U.S. borders, Bloomberg argues San Francisco and the surrounding area is too much of a "vacuum" to be competitive.
"If you play golf, it's ok. If you ride a bicycle, it's great. If you live in front of a mirror, I guess that's where you do it," he said. "If you are going to build product, and you are going to sell stuff around the world... you don't want those kinds of people. And you don't want people who don't have other interests. You want well-rounded people."
Meanwhile, Silicon Valley proponents have argued that California is a better location to start up because the Big Apple offers entrepreneurs too many distractions.
Bloomberg also rejected the notion that Boston is the technology center of the world. "I pointed out to them that New York City has more students in college than Boston has people, so that ended that."
It comes as no surprise that the fearless leader of the Big Apple would be its strongest advocate. Bloomberg also took a round-about opportunity to compliment his own work. "This city has an enormously strong hand to play," he said. "This city, if it doesn't screw it up, has enormous potential to keep going."

How to Ensure Your Technology is Secure, Stable and Scalable

Your business operates in the digital economy where success is predicated on your ability to compete in a high-velocity environment. Selecting, deploying and maintaining the right technology platforms will determine whether your business will thrive.
There are four primary areas you should focus on to maintain the efficacy of your technology foundation:
1. Security
Data is at the core of every business and your inability to protect it will be the end of your business. Outside of more regulated industries like finance and healthcare, security is unfortunately not one of the top priorities. For a company that operates on tight margins, investing in security is seen as non-revenue generating, serving merely as a risk-mitigating insurance policy.
Would you be able to convince your CEO to invest $100,000 to prevent the 10 percent likelihood of a cyberattack resulting in $1 million in damages? Or, is it easier to make the argument for a $100,000 investment which has a 75 percent chance of generating $150,000 in revenue? Flipped around, the former has a 90 percent chance of throwing $100,000 down the tubes, and the latter has a 25 percent chance.
The problem with applying an expected value analysis to security is that there are too many qualitative variables required in the assessment. What you should acknowledge on is that a security incident is a low-probability, but high-cost event. And it’s possible for that cost to be catastrophically high. Can you really quantify the cost of exposing all of your customer data?
2. Stability
If your technology doesn’t work when you need it most, what good is it? When a new customer tries to buy something from your website and it doesn’t work, it’s very likely that you’ve lost him forever. The most timely and unfortunate example is HealthCare.gov.
The digital centerpiece of the Affordable Care Act is supposed to permit Americans to sign up for health insurance online. The problem with the website is that, since it launched, it has intermittently not worked for users, displaying a multitude of cryptic errors or transferring invalid information to healthcare providers.
The lesson here is that the consumer has very little patience for a lousy online experience. In our digital economy, we have come to expect websites to work with the certainty of flipping a light switch or starting a car. When Gmail goes down for several minutes, there is a collective aneurysm on Twitter. A population that reacts like this is not going to tolerate substandard technology, so you better make sure your digital infrastructure works all the time.

3. Scalability
Your business objective should be growth and the digital infrastructure supporting your operations must be able to scale and accommodate the resulting increase in demand. If you have an infrastructure that is based on physical servers, you’ll need to be extremely accurate with your load estimates. In this situation, it’s better to overestimate the potential impact of increased business, than to underestimate. In the digital world, when you find yourself faced with the latter, you have no recourse in the midst of a traffic surge.
Imagine a three-lane highway that has three cars driving down it. Once you add a fourth vehicle to the mix, you start seeing congestion. At the end of a football game, ten thousand cars get added to the highway, and the result is a major traffic jam. Physical servers are fixed assets like highway lanes, which function perfectly under normal conditions, but are unable to expand and meet high demand.
4. Sustainability
Your ability to ensure security, stability and scalability at a single point in time is critical, but it’s more important to be able to sustain this over the long-term. The apropos and often overused analogy here would be that it’s a marathon, not a sprint, because you need to serve your customers today, tomorrow and in the future.
The digital business environment is fluid and dynamic, with regular traffic peaks and valleys. The nature of viral content is that it is unpredictable. Like a tsunami, it’s difficult to spot until it’s too late to respond -- when it’s about to break on your shores. Handling the scale of a massive traffic spike and sustaining that over a period of time is how you can take your company to the next level. That surge is likely exposing your brand to a massive new consumer base.
Digital infrastructure is the foundation on top of which many of you will build successful businesses. The potential for, and magnitude of your success is contingent upon the quality of this foundation. It has to be secure to protect your critical assets and data. It has to be stable and provide expected functionality for your customers. It has to be scalable to respond to the increasing demands of your success. And, it must sustain these traits over extended periods of time.
As an entrepreneur, your business should succeed or fail based on the merits of your ideas, not the technology used to support your operations. Your digital infrastructure should be secure, stable, scalable and sustainable, allowing you to focus on your core business.

Tech Trend for 2014: The Risk in BYOD Offices

Tech,

It's enough to make a company lose its app-etite. From January to July of this year, 718,000 malicious and high-risk apps were distributed on the Android mobile platform alone, according to JD Sherry, vice president of technology and solutions at computing security firm Trend Micro in Irving, Texas. That's more than double the number of Android-based malware apps discovered in all of 2012.
This is the new open-door reality that gives nightmares to IT chiefs--and it's only getting worse. Already, more than half of the U.S. adult population connects to the internet through a smartphone or tablet, and 60 percent of businesses allow employees to access company networks via their personal devices under a strategy known as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD). Why? The efficiencies offered by a mobile work force are too great to pass up, and moving the cost of access to the employees is too juicy a cost savings to ignore.
Android apps accounted for 79 percent of all smartphone malware last year, according to security firm F-Secure. But Apple's iOS isn't entirely in the clear. While Apple doesn't release malware figures, Sherry points to 2012 reports that a handful of products that had made it through the App Store approval process turned out to be carrying nefarious software.
The potential for damage this brings to a business with a BYOD policy is something Rizwan Hussain knows all too well. As vice president of sales at AllRounds, a Bay Area startup that provides private capital analytics and automation, Hussain managed a team of reps who were constantly on the go. In order for his employees to hit their sales targets, they needed constant access to the AllRounds IT infrastructure, which allowed them to do everything from e-mailing prospects to issuing contracts.
"The problem I have with BYOD is security," Hussain says. "Most personal devices have a range of user-installed apps. How am I supposed to know if any of them are malicious and can hurt my network? Then there's the whole storage issue. Where exactly is our company's data being stored when some-one uses their own device, and what about the security risks if someone loses their phone or it's stolen?"
Forward-looking IT pros are in the process of mapping out a new set of rules for BYOD. This can start with implementing a companywide policy that addresses acceptable and unacceptable device use and provides details of excluded apps, data ownership and scheduled IT access to the device for updates. Those same pros are also pushing for encryption of all files stored on or accessed by a personal device, either through the phone's encryption program or through a third-party app such as TextSecure or RedPhone. Another option is to mandate that employees use a tool like Divide, which creates a fully functioning workspace within the device that provides government-grade security and protection for the business.
Defensive maneuvers aside, Sherry warns that the big question with BYOD is not if your employees' phones will be infected but when.