Marisa's Poetry High-Tech Startup Blog

Roxanne Gibert, CEO & Founder of Sprya Mobile Gaming Company with David Robinson, Head of Product Development

As Sun Tzu said in his seminal military strategy book, The Art of War,  written over 2,400 years ago: “Discipline means organization, chain of command, and logistics.” One panelist at the Summer Solstice Event on June 21, 2012 asked: “Does the male male midcore market need another social strategy mobile gaming company?”  Really? The answer is the same as: “Do women need more shoes?” Both questions are answered with a resounding “Yes!”

Mobile gaming is new Eldorado.

Summer Solstice as well as JumpStartDays are events created by the Keiretsu Forum, the largest angel network in the world. Roxanne Gibert, CEO and Founder of Spyra Games mobile gaming company, pitched at both of those events. I know, I was there. Spyra is a mobile gaming studio that creates social strategy games for mobile devices; iPhone, iPad, and Android.

It’s the Jockey not the Horse. The adult male mid-core mobile gaming market is bottomless, like the adult female mid-core shoe market. Adult midcore males are glued to their ubiquitous mobile devices seemingly 24/7 and I hate to be the one to tell you, they are usually not doing work. Roxanne Gibert is the mobile game monetization jockey.

Her Previous Mounts.  Zynga, Playdom, Playfirst and Outspark. Roxanne specializes in figuring out new monetization models and how to make the games viral. She has worked on Mafia Wars iPhone, Sorority Life, Mobsters 2, and Diner Dash for Facebook.

Stable Hands? They are five (5)– all avid, hardcore gamers: a prodigy software engineer, a film maker/tv producer, a marketing/PR person and David, Head of Product Development.

Hobbies? In her spare time she consults  with Bay Area companies on analytics, monetization, and gamification features. Some of the  larger clients have included Zynga, Outspark, and Glu mobile.

What the Plan? The plan is to role out new 6-8 titles a year. Their first game is Global Attack. For you mobile gamers in the audience, Global Attack is similar to Risk.

Cost per Game? $80k

Current Users? 40k

Takeaway: Following Sun Tzu advice, Roxanne knows the meaning of discipline: organization, chain of command and logistics. She has identified an underserved market and has devised a plan (6-8 social mobile strategy games per year) to ride this market profitably.

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W

Kevin Dodson, Co-Founder & CEO in.vu

As the brilliant military strategist, Sun Tzu said 2,400 years ago in his seminal “Art of War“: “Those who use the military skillfully do not raise troops twice and do not provide food three times.”

On June 12, 2012, as the guest of Viglink,  I attended ForumCon in San Francisco and I met Kevin Dodson, Co-Founder & CEO of In.Vu. His co-Founder is Jacques Nadeau, who is also the CTO. Kevin and Jacques are tackling machine generated big data overload with their prelaunch startup: In.Vu. Obviously this product is for the mid to large enterprise information technology (IT) departments.

What Does In.Vu Do? “Raising the troops” in modern times for an enterprise is mastering big data they generate.  With enterprises producing machine data from websites, applications, servers, networks and mobile devices, with the frequency of synapses firing in the brain, there is simply too much data to be analyzed by humans. If you can “not raise troops twice and not provide food three times” you save lots of money. In.Vu searches and analyzes machine data using Hadoop.

What is Hadoop? According to Wiki: “Apache Hadoop is a software framework that supports data-intensive distributed applications under a free license. It enables applications to work with thousands of computational independent computers and petabytes of data.” Most importantly is that Hadoop works really well and it is free.

Product for the Enterprise. In.Vu is the machine data search and analysis tool for enterprise information technology operations. It works by sitting on top of Hadoop.

In.Vu, the Next Gen? In.Vu is easier to scale, because everything is on top of Hadoop, so massive archival storage and redundancy are built in. Plus, with In.Vu no SAN is required and we all know how expensives SANs are. In.Vu is more cost effective because of the ease of scaling. In.Vu has a non-propriety database because all of your data is in Hadoop, thus allowing access via the usual Hadoop tools of MapReduce, Hive or any of the new BI solutions built on Hadoop (Datameer, Karmasphere). Like war, in business, faster, cheaper and greater scale wins the battle.

Specific Example? If for example, Etsy were a beta client,  In.Vu would do IT troubleshooting, security and compliance. The most important function would be the troubleshooting. If part of the Etsy site went down, in order to figure out the cause of the outage, the company would need to analyze each server logs for a hardware failure, network failure or application failure. Rather than searching each one of their servers individually, with In.Vu they could just search their monitored servers (a much smaller number of servers) with each monitored server available at a modest cost.

Takeaway: In the big machine data overload wars, raise your troops once and feed them once, use In.Vu to search and analyze your machine data.

CTO's Dogs: Edward, the black one, and Henri, the white one.

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ancient cyber-defense method

As the famous military strategist Sun Tzu said in his Art of War written 2,400 years ago: “In ancient times those known as good warriors prevailed when it was easy to prevail.” Fifteen years ago it was easy for a good programmer to build a good firewall. It is no longer easy to prevail in the malware wars. Malware has become a profitable business.

On Monday, June 4, 2012, as a guest of Bank Leumi USA, I attended the Cyber Defense Symposium in Santa Clara. Having just finished cleaning up two (2) separate malware attacks on my website and blog, I was very interested in the current state of cyber defense.

The most innovative and engaging presentation was by Nir Zuk, the Founder and CTO of Palo Alto Network. His talk was on Modern Malware: The Evolving Threat Landscape.

Nir Zuk Background? Previously, Nir was CTO at NetScreen Technologies (acquired by Juniper Networks), Co-Founder & CTO at OneSecure, and principal engineer at Check Point Software Technologies.

His Radical Concept.The traditional firewall is obsolete.  Its sole purpose is to keep a network secure by analyzing the data packets in the incoming and outgoing network traffic and determining whether the packets should be allowed through or not based on a predetermined set of rules. The old firewalls (most of the ones in use currently) identify the traffic by the port # or the IP address, but popular ports, #80 and #443, for example, are no longer traffic specific. You are going to need new hardware and new software. Nir’s new firewall needs identifies the user, identifies the application and figures out what the user is doing with the application based on the application content because every document coming into an organization can be an attack. Nir’s firewall scans every document coming into an organization based on content (specifically looks for credit card numbers, social security numbers or other financial data) and automatically generates multiple signatures which can be delivered within an hour.

Anatomy of a Modern Attack according to Nir. The attacker attacks by taking over the end-user’s machine by following five (5) steps:

1. bait an end user using a PDF file which may arrive by Skype or some other trusted source (note the malware does not arrive in an email)
2. exploit a vulnerability (put the attack in a PDF document of interest to the end user and send it from a trusted source)
3. download a backdoor (the enemy code is very small and it’s sole purpose is to create a backdoor)
4. establish a back channel
5. the enemy can now enter at will and explore and steal

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