Happy Memorial Day

Mynt Public Relations would like to wish everyone a safe, relaxing and memorable Memorial Day weekend.  Take a moment to stop and remember all those men and women who have bravely given their lives.

The Media Universe

andressilvaa:

NextLevel Internet Expands Executive Management Team

NextLevel Internet, Inc., a leader in mission-critical Internet access and hosted voice services, today announced that the company has expanded its executive management team with two new key appointments for inside sales engineering manager and channel development manager.

NextLevel Internet increased its employee count by 26 percent last year and achieved its most profitable and successful year since the company was founded in 1999. To support this progression, NextLevel Internet has brought in two seasoned veterans to manage this expanded workforce as the company continues to grow its IT focused operation.

Al Allen has been promoted from business development executive to inside sales engineering manager. Having worked at NextLevel Internet for the previous three years, Mr. Allen brings over 20 years of telecommunications, technology management and sales experience. In his new position, Mr. Allen will focus his talents on supporting a sales engineer team determined to deliver unparalleled customer service, support and strategy for companies that rely on NextLevel Internet’s mission-critical Internet and hosted phone solutions.

“Al joined NextLevel Internet in February 2009 as an outside sales and business development executive for the Los Angeles and Orange County markets,” said Jerry Morris, founder of NextLevel Internet, Inc. “His in depth knowledge of NextLevel Internet’s services and client-focused culture made him the easy choice to come in, develop and run the sales engineer team. His previous management experience and style is a perfect complement to NextLevel Internet’s ongoing objectives.”

Mickey Chapatte is joining the NextLevel Internet team as the channel development manager. Mr. Chapatte brings with him over 25 years of proven telecommunications experience a director of channel management, direct sales and marketing. His previous experience provides a proactive, relationship-oriented approach that has generated record breaking growth by penetrating new markets and creating new strategic partnerships while at TelePacific, Nextlink, Internap and Cable & Wireless.

“Mickey brings with him a new focus and dynamic to NextLevel Internet with his stellar track record of building successful relationships, developing reseller channels and a ‘never quit’ attitude,” said Morris. “As NextLevel Internet expands, so does the need to increase our reach to new audiences and vertical markets. Mickey will be instrumental in guiding this process, while crafting strong, long term relationships to support our channel program and partners.”

For organizations that would like to request more information on NextLevel Internet’s business-to-business co-location, Internet, hosted voice, and managed data services, please visit www.nextlevelinternet.com.

 

What was First – the App or the Smartphone?

Hard to say, but KOBIL has no time to start philosophizing. After all, their business is to secure both the app and the mobile endpoint. KOBIL’s new technologies, presented for the first time at the Payments convention in Baltimore starting today, take a radically new approach – including for mobile payments.

With BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), the “mobile office” issue has become a familiar subject in virtually every company. Mobile access to e-mails or their own CRM system involve certain hazards, as well. Flexible and mobile payment options, which are booming at the moment, must be based on a solid foundation too – trust. Being well aware of the threats and opportunities associated with this new trend, KOBIL offers extensive safeguarding mechanisms for any security issues created by the new way of being mobile.

If you are going to be at the Payments Convention, stop and see KOBIL at booth #109!

EdgeWave Security Solution Supports YouTube EDU to Ensure Safe and Productive Web Content for Students

EdgeWave Inc., a leading provider of Secure Content Management (SCM) solutions, today announced that its brand new release, iPrism Web Security v7.0, includes native support for student access to YouTube EDU-only content. The seamless integration allows educational institutions to support compliance to acceptable use policies for accessing video content that has been deemed by school administrators to be safe and appropriate, while other video content is blocked.

YouTube EDU is a free service that provides educators and their students with access to hundreds of thousands of educational videos from well-known organizations such as Stanford, PBS and TED, as well as from popular up-and-coming YouTube partners like Khan Academy, Steve Spangler Science and Numberphile. YouTube for Schools was launched in December 2011 as a way to deliver YouTube EDU’s growing collection of educational content to as many schools as possible. The service offers school-friendly features such as the ability for teachers to customize their own content by creating playlists to add to their curricula. YouTube EDU helps teachers create these lists by organizing content by subject and grade for quick access. The addition of iPrism Web Security support gives schools added assurance that students will have access to only the YouTube for Schools content they have chosen, while other video content will be blocked.

“There’s enormous appetite from teachers to use educational YouTube videos in the classroom. We’ve been working on technology solutions to make it easier for schools to access just the videos from within YouTube EDU,” said Angela Lin, Head of Education at YouTube. “Smart technology like EdgeWave’s will make it easier for busy school IT administrators to enable access to YouTube EDU, giving teachers an engaging new resource to educate and inspire their students and bring learning to life.”

“Enabling schools and educational customers to create safe and productive internet access is critical to supporting an effective learning environment for our education customers,” said Steve Kelley, SVP of Corporate Development and Product Strategy at EdgeWave. “Working together with YouTube EDU to ensure that only approved content is delivered to students offers a great benefit to our mutual customers.”

EdgeWave’s iPrism Web Security solution was originally developed to serve the education market and has a strong track record with K-12 schools. EdgeWave has long supported school Web safety and CIPA requirements and the latest release of iPrism v7.0, which was announced today, continues that commitment. Many iPrism features are aimed at mitigating the threats schools face such as Web 2.0 applications, circumvention attempts and remote and roaming users who access the school network. Added support for YouTube EDU furthers EdgeWave’s commitment to the education market.

For more information regarding the integration of iPrism v7.0 and YouTube EDU, please visit:
http://www.edgewave.com/products/web_security/technology_youtubeSchools.asp.

To attend a joint webinar discussing this announcement and corresponding integrated solution, please sign up at: http://www.edgewave.com/resources/Youtube_webinar.asp.

About YouTube for Schools
YouTube for Schools is a network setting that lets schools access free educational YouTube videos while restricting access to other YouTube content. Students can learn from more than 500,000 videos, from well-known organizations like Stanford, PBS and TED, and from up-and-coming YouTube partners with millions of views, like Khan Academy, Steve Spangler Science and Numberphile. Schools can also customize their YouTube for Schools experience by granting access to additional YouTube videos for viewing only within their school network.

Pravin Kothari, Founder and CEO of CipherCloud, comments on the recent Global Payments breach

“While MasterCard and Visa continue to investigate the massive security breach of Global Payments, what’s most shocking is that breaches happen so often that it’s actually not shocking anymore. This time, over 50,000 Visa and MasterCard cardholders may have had their personal data stolen. Although the breach details are not yet disclosed, people familiar with the investigation estimated that it could be hundreds of thousands.

“The breach is an example of why PCI DSS compliance is inadequate. In spite of growing profits and huge revenues in billions of dollars, companies such as Global Payments are focusing more on doing minimal to somehow obtaining compliance certification than on really protecting their customer data.  If companies don’t implement enough controls to protect sensitive data, it’s only a question of when, not if, a breach will happen as cybercriminals are becoming highly advanced and organized. A small missing technical control can become executives’ nightmare and business disaster on such breaches as they suffer significant impact on reputation, revenues and stock prices.

“It’s time for organizations to take greater responsibility for the protection of their customers’ sensitive data, regardless of where it resides—behind their firewall, with a business partner, or in the cloud. Demanding that businesses encrypt sensitive customer data is a step in the right direction.” 

How long do online empires last?

As more and more social media sites are born and incorporated into our Public Relations strategies, CenturyLinkQuote.com just posted a very interesting infographic on the average length of online sites such as Digg, Altavista, Myspace and Facebook. The average came out to 11 years, with Facebook launching 8 years ago.  

With Facebook’s heavy integration into both our daily personal and business lives, I can see the social networking site easily surpassing this average.

Almost last call for RSA media/vendor briefings - have any open slots?

Attention media attending RSA! We’re getting down to the wire but it’s not too late to book time with clients at RSA 2012.  Below is a summary for the show.  Please shoot me an email at rmanning@myntpr.com if you would like to schedule a quick chat with any of these companies.

Lieberman Software (www.liebsoft.com) Privileged access — new product previews

Viewfinity (www.viewfinity) Privileged management – major new product announcement in March

Yubico (www.yubico.com) Authentication, HSMs, secure remote access; Yubico is announcing a new NFC enabled solution for mobile authentication

TeleSign (www.telesign.com) Cell-phone based authentication solution has a patent on mobile fraud technology to discuss

TextPower (SMS-based authentication) patented SMS based authentication method

KOBIL (www.kobil.com) Mobile application security, cloud security and authentication — German company expanding in US; mobile app security new product annc

OATH (www.openauthentication.org) Initiative for Open Authentication (royalty-free standards, OTPs); updates on new standards and organization elections

DeviceLock (www.devicelock.com) Endpoint security and data leak protection; new version of flagship software coming out

NagraID Security (www.NIDsecurity.com) Smart cards for secure payment, secure banking, new smart card products rolled out and new details on amount of credit card fraud in US and technology Nagra offers to reduce it

SPYRUS (www.spyrus.com) Secure pocket drives/industry technology partnerships, new secure storage products, strategic partnerships

DataLocker (www.lockerdrive.com) Encrypted hard drives, secure CD-Rs and DVD-Rs.  Fed government is a major customer; releasing new encrypted external hard drive

Hope to see you at the show!!

Lucky Birds takes off on iPhone!

Articul Media LLC today announced the release of Lucky Birds, a new arcade, action and puzzle game to the Apple App Store.  Lucky Birds is currently compatible with the iPhone3, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S with iOS 4.3 or later.

Lucky Birds for iOS features three characters; Sneaky Sparrow, Dull Pigeon and Big Crow, whose goal is to safety get home before night falls.  Lucky Birds love to land on telephone wires but must be very careful not to fall to the ground or be caught out after dusk.

Gameplay consists of flying the Lucky Birds to their homes by launching the birds off of the telephone wires.  Uses must change the bird’s trajectory to correctly aim and reach the home targets for the feathered characters.  Along the way, the birds can collect bonuses, keys, teleport, open doors and much more.

The three types of Lucky Birds differ in weight and personalities, a grumpy bird may refuse to sit next to its friends and birds in a hurry may be set to a timer.  As the levels rise in difficulty, there are three different types of wires that the Lucky Birds can land on - regular, worn-out, and hot.  Regular wires can be used any number of times, however, the worn-out wires can only be landed on three times or it will break and one should never land on a hot wire or you will get burned.

Lucky Birds is currently available for iPhone in the App Store for $.99 at http://bit.ly/LuckyBirdsAppStore.  

Technical Details
Release Date – February 5, 2012
Platform – iPhone
Genre - Action, Arcade, Puzzle
Developer - Articul Play Dev Studio
Publisher - Articul Media LLC
ESRB – E? or E 9+
Levels – Three with 30 levels each - levels four, five, and six coming soon.
Languages – English, Russian, Spanish, French, German - second release: Italian, Chinese

For screen shots, video demos, and more information on Lucky Birds, please visit www.luckybirds.com or www.facebook.com/luckybirdsgame. 

Data Privacy Day and Thoughts from a Security CEO

January 28^th is the annual Data Privacy Day.  Data Privacy Day is an international celebration designed to promote awareness about privacy and education about best privacy practices.

Stina Ehrensvard, CEO for Yubico shares her thoughts on the importance of this day.

“The Internet was designed for sharing, not security. As we have moved our business, e-governments and social lives online, and as these digital services become more and more sophisticated, so do fraudsters. Online identity theft is today the fastest going crime, with trillions of dollars in yearly losses.

However, just as the safety belt for cars was not adopted in larger scale until it was a simple one second procedure, users will not adopt online identity protection if it is too complicated to use. And just as your driver license verifies your identity across multiple services, a secure and simple identity and authentication method that can be re-used across the range of Internet services will be needed for mass implementation. White House Initiative National Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC) could make a difference here, driving mass implementation of online identity protection for US citizens and services, based on open identity standards and new authentication technologies.”

Mynt in Print @PRDaily - 23 Smartphone Apps Perfect for PR Pros

Honored to be published in PR Daily today for 23 smartphone apps perfect for PR pros… to view the article in its entirety, please visit http://bit.ly/ztTih7 

——————

There are more than 1 million applications available for smartphones and tablets. Among the first applications that everyone probably downloaded was Facebook, Angry Birds, or Pandora. 

With more business-oriented applications become available, I was curious to know which apps my fellow PR professionals use on a daily basis and can’t live without. So, I reached to colleagues and sent a query through Help A Reporter Out (HARO). 

The most common answers were apps that many of you are probably already using—Facebook, Twitter, TweetDeck, HootSuite, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Mashable, Google, and Yelp—so I wanted to focus on the applications that fell outside of this group, some of which were new to me and I have since begun to use. Most of these applications are multi-platform with Android and iPhone, I have listed which are iPad only. 

Click here to view the list!!

San Diego’s NextLevel Internet Delivers 2011 Year in Review

NextLevel Internet, Inc., a leader in mission-critical Internet access and hosted voice services, is pleased to deliver a 2011 year in review and 2012 technology forecast.

“2011 was our most profitable and successful year to date. Not only did we see double digit growth in revenue and client base, but we also increased our number of employees by 26 percent,” said Jerry Morris, founder of NextLevel Internet, Inc. “We are continuously adapting and evolving our service offerings to make sure we are providing our B2B clients with the best privately managed voice, Internet, and cloud based data services available in the market. As we look forward into 2012, we see this trend to continue as we will be offering new services to remain ahead of the ever changing needs of our clients.”

Customer Satisfaction — In 2011, NextLevel Internet received the highest recognition for the company’s customer service and support. The company scored a Customer Excellence rating of 98 percent in a survey to the company’s existing client base. Conducted by Strategic Business Communications, Inc. (SBC) during a three month period from February through April 2011, the outside blind survey asked respondents to rate interactions, transactions and satisfaction levels between themselves and NextLevel Internet.

California Power Outage — Further expanding on NextLevel Internet’s mission-critical offerings; during the massive power outage on September 8, 2011, the company’s NextLevel Voice(TM) and Co-location services provided uninterrupted service to emergency organizations and first responders. The power outage, which was the largest recorded in the region’s history, lasting more than 10 hours left roughly eight million people and thousands of organizations in parts of Southern California, Arizona and New Mexico without power, Internet, and phone access. This disruption of power and the associated loss of connectivity could have resulted in the loss of life, money, or reputation for many of those affected.

NextLevel Voice Adoption Rate — Introduced as a new service in 2008, NextLevel Internet’s flexible hosted voice service, NextLevel Voice saw an increase in revenues of 65 percent during 2011. Clients have installed and retained NextLevel’s voice solutions because of the quality, reliability, affordability and disaster recovery (DR) attributes.

NextLevel Voice provides organizations with 10 to 500+ employees the advanced features and security of a sophisticated Private Branch Exchange (PBX) system for a fraction of the cost, with unsurpassed ease of use and zero system maintenance fees.

Data Center Expansion — In 2011, the company increased access to its new, secure, 88,000 square foot, SAS 70 Type II compliant data center in Rancho Bernardo, CA. The expansion to the new World Trade Drive Data Center followed the relocation of NextLevel Internet’s headquarters to North County San Diego in September 2010. SAS 70 Type II compliance certifies that NextLevel Internet’s data center has adequate controls and safeguards in place when hosting and processing data for the company’s clients.

Managed Internet Infrastructure — NextLevel Internet’s privately managed Clear Channel connectivity options allow businesses with 10 to 500+ employees the ability to control the quality of service (QoS) and class of service (CoS) to include its hosted voice service offerings. NextLevel’s mission critical Internet access and 24/7 NOC services are designed to give businesses everything they need to maximize company uptime and headquarter all remote sites.

For organizations that would like to request more information on NextLevel Internet’s business-to-business co-location, Internet, hosted voice, and managed data services, please visit www.nextlevelinternet.com .

Statement from Yubico CEO on Zappos.com Security Breach

“A security breach of the magnitude experienced by Zappos.com is a serious concern for any business that relies exclusively on Internet orders for sales,” said Stina Ehrensvard, CEO, Yubico, Palo Alto, California and Stockholm, Sweden, commenting on how hackers exposed 24 million client records in a security breach over the weekend.  “While it appears Zappos’ securely protected the database that housed credit card information, hardware security modules (HSMs) could have prevented the exposure of Zappos’ customer password data that were compromised from the organization’s servers in Kentucky.  The exposure of email addresses and password hashes of weak and duplicated passwords leaves customers exposed across potentially many sites.  The perception is HSM and related services are very expensive, but the cost and complexity for this needed technology has fallen dramatically to a few hundred dollars and the cost of not deploying it is very high as Zappos has shown.”

“Additionally, Zappos has reset and expired their customers passwords and is helping them choose new passwords.  We believe a better solution is the new breed of consumer-friendly one time passcode tokens that users can keep on their key chains to replace weak and duplicated passwords,” Ehrensvard continued.

2012 PR New Year’s Resolutions

Taming the inbox

“This year, my New Year’s resolution will be to keep my email inbox tame and highly organized throughout the entire year. Right now it’s like an angry pit bull, but I would rather have it be a happy puppy.” - Ronnie Manning, principal, Mynt Public Relations, @RManning_Mynt