Wysdom 2.0

My earlier post "Wyse Up At Home" celebrated the benefits of installing thin clients in my home rather than additional PCs. Having tested out the brand new S10 Blazer from Wyse, I am now even happier about my decision.

Like the 1200LE and 1125LE units I had been using before, the S10 uses the Blazer operating system, a super thin OS that boots up very quickly. It has front loading USB ports and a VESA adapter that attaches the unit to the back of your monitor. It now supports audio through RDP, so that you can connect your microphone and speakers to the unit--a must have for VOIP users. (Video streams and games remain the only applications unsuitable for thin clients.) The S10 also supports automatic FTP downloads of configuration files, so you can store a script on your PC that all your clients run on startup. My script includes a background JPEG image, along with JPEG icons to represent all my available connections so my family can easily click on their photos to login. And an icon pointing to my SONOS application software enables quick access to home audio control.

There are more functional clients around from Wyse, Sun (just announced yesterday) and others that run beefier operating systems or connect to Linux, but I must say I like 'em fast and thin.

At Last: Shop Around for Hospitals

Healthia (which I blogged about here) has followed up on its doctor reviews by launching a cool feature (in Beta) to enable price comparisons of any hospital procedure within 100 miles of your home. It's a sign of things to come as the medical industry yields to transparent pricing and consumer driven healthcare.

McAfee Buys SiteAdvisor

Congratulations to Chris Dixon and the whole team on an outstanding outcome for them and their appreciative investors.

Chris started SiteAdvisor while still a member of our investment team in New York. In 2004 Rob Stavis (of Skype fame) sponsored and incubated Chris' idea within Bessemer, despite doubts some of us had that such an ambitious product could be built. But the latest release and dozens of positive reviews prove otherwise. Don't leave your home page without it!

Stinksys

Here's some of the creative thinking that evidently went on in the halls of Cisco's consumer products unit to generate "follow-on revenue" to sales of the Linksys Media Center Extender...

"I know! Instead of simply publishing the setup utility on our Cisco-powered web site, right alongside the sales brochure, we'll publish it only on disk. Whenever the system crashes (and oh boy does it crash a lot), we'll require the user to enter a 25 character code for the setup utility that's presented only on the disk sleeve itself. When the users lose their disks or even just the sleeves, we'll charge them $10 for replacements!"

I should have bought HP.

Cat and Mouse

Anonymous (a frequent commenter on my blog) asked a good question regarding my blog post on patching a critical secruity flaw in Microsoft IE. I thought I'd answer it in a new post...

This game of cat and mouse in security can't go on forever. (Or can it?) What do you see as the future of software security? Do you see a point where a single elegant solution will address most, if not all, exploits?

No, the game won't go on forever--at some point the Sun will explode.

To think that the current state of insecurity is anomolous, and that the prior period of relative quiet was more normal, is backward. During the initial 6 years of internet growth the criminals hadn't yet organized, studied, and employed state of the art technology for developing and sharing exploits. That honeymoon is over. Exposure to cyber fraud, looting and mayhem is the normal state of affairs for a world in which the internet plays such a pervasive role.

Things that could could happen before the sun explodes to curb innovative and dangerous computer attacks:

(i) single world government that effectively tracks and prosecutes computer crimes everywhere

(ii) technical stagnation, in which new technologies are NOT regularly deployed

(iii) destruction or obsolescence of the internet.

I'm not holding by breath.

Sure, we will eventually tame any given vector of attack (e.g. email virus, spam, port scan, SQL injection, etc.) at least down to a nuisance level through a combination of technology, legislation/prosecution, profiling (which barely exists today), education and behavioral change.

(For a nice analogy to this phenomenon, read Earth Abides, in which humanity mostly dies off, and the earth offers up a fresh playground in which species compete for dominance. One by one new species explode to the point of over-population, and just as quickly die off in the face of predators and competitors.)

But criminals, embued with human ingenuity, will always plot new vectors, as I demonstrated to my wife here. You can wish it will stop, but you might as well also wish for world peace, an afterlife, or 18 consecutive birdies.

Bessemer Startups To The Rescue

Websense has now detected over 200 web sites exploiting the CreateTextRange vulnerability in IE 5.01 and 6.0 in order to deliver payloads of malware to desktops. One of the commonly pushed payloads logs keystrokes, which is the first step to identity theft.

Unfortunately, Microsoft is still weeks away from issuing a patch. According to Security Focus and the Washington Post, two Bessemer companies, eEye and Determina, have issued free software patches to close the vulnerability for IE users.

No worries for me--I use Flock.

Wikia, Jimmy Wales' Startup

We're announcing today Bessemer's investment in Wikia, formerly known as Wikicities. Wikia, started by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and Wikimedia Foundation director Angela Beesley, is an ad-supported, open source platform for community-based wikis, with (freely licensed) content that falls outside the scope of an encyclopedia. With over 1,000 Wikia already created in 35 languages, content and registered user growth are tracking right along the same growth curve as Wikia's cousin Wikipedia. Here is the full story.

In related news, we also led a $15 million investment round in Zopa, a P2P lending site with much better economics than the banks and credit cards for both lenders and borrowers. In just its first year, Zopa has registered 55,000 members in its network.