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Passwords are only as strong as your application makes them – not your users.
As creators of web software which usually has user management, we have to consider password rules carefully. Without using 2-step verification which is overkill for most online accounts we have to ensure that we are not leaving the door open to hacking or phishing. This means finding a balance between security and keeping a good user experience at sign-up and login.
So thats that? As far as your application is concerned, yes – but for organisations they need to think about educating their users to behave more carefully in their password creation. They may be able to meet your list of requirements, but could still be making terrible choices which put your system at increased risk.
Arguably the education of the users is far more impactful than simply ensuring your system has perfect password rules. It will also be the case that not all systems can meet your requirements and so user education is your only line of defence.
Urbano networking breakfast examining IOT (Internet of Things) and M2M (Machine To Machine), featuring William Webb, CEO of Weightless CIG and President of the IET.
Mark @ Urbano kindly asked us to put together a short presentation of some practical IOT technology. Google Glass, Raspberry Pi all tied together with Xpin showed how an imaginary manufacturing plant might look with additional sensors and heads up feedback.
The Internet of things was a strong theme running through this years CES in Las Vegas. The idea that you can connect and therefore monitor and control your toaster or heating system has been the realm of hobbyists and enthusiasts for a few years now. Indeed, we worked on a project over five years ago to let you monitor your electricity usage and compare it online.
Now with the likes of Hive from British Gas and Apple’s HomeKit, the promise of programmable stuff is becoming ever more common and it’s not just in your home, the internet of things is becoming increasingly mainstream. Retail is starting to roll out iBeacons to blend the real world with the digital, alerting you to offers and information about products as you walk past them. The ability to tie real things to information systems this way, has great potential not just for retail but for manufacturing as well.
Bluetooth low energy aka Bluetooth LE, BLE, marketed as Bluetooth Smart is not a new technology but the recent adoption in smart phones (iOS 7 in 2013 was first) has lit the fuse for developers of software and hardware. Unlike the earlier versions of Bluetooth which were power hungry the new low energy requirements means the transmitters or ‘beacons’ can be miniaturised with battery life of many years.
The Intel Button – shown at the CES 2015, contains motion sensors and is bluetooth LE compatible.
Over the last year there has been an explosion in beacons in various form factors from key fobs to stickers with different manufacturers aiming at specialist use cases. Part of the differentiation comes not only in the physical form factor but also in the management software and the organisational structures they apply.
Beacons are tiny transmitters, dumbly transmitting their unique reference. When a receiver such as your Bluetooth LE capable smart phone comes into range, the message is received and actioned where appropriate. In practise developers make bespoke smart phone apps that only react to their beacons – otherwise your phone would be alerting you to every beacon it came across.
Retail: Many examples – including those from manufacturer Estimote, show a retail environment where you can view content as you pass through the store and come into close proximity with beacons. For instance you may be able to watch a video on your phone of someone modeling the coat you are trying on or see technical details for the car you are looking at.
Museum or gallery: This is a great example of the technology working in an environment where people are interested in localised additional information. We are used to audio tours and even using QR codes to launch web content for commentary on a painting or exhibit but the introduction of beacons allows this new layer of content to be delivered seamlessly to your smartphone..
Asset Tracking: Trackr and SticknFind have created beacons and a platform to track your lost property. Their beacons incorporate an audible alert which can be triggered from your smart phone. While this sounds like a good idea, tracking and location awareness with Bluetooth LE brings its own challenges and limitations. We will also be keenly investigating the Kontakt.io cloud beacon due out later in January- which acts as a bridge between bluetooth and the cloud via wifi.
Wayfinding: Where you have 3 or more beacons in known locations you can trilaterate the receivers position. Careful configuration can result in robust, scalable wayfinding solutions like indoo.rs which has rolled out airport way finding projects for visually impaired passengers.
Bluetooth is based on radio waves which are hard to work with. They bounce off objects, are absorbed by walls and can only provide signal strength – no direction. So when you are tracking an object you are only *maybe* able to tell you are x number of meters away – not which direction it is in – so you end up needing to walk around getting ‘warmer’. By having beacons in known places you can improve your chances of positioning the receiver using triangulation but it still requires some guess work.
Raspberry PI and Spark.io
Code Vanilla are working on a number of exploratory projects around asset tracking and location-based information to enhance our TAG & Xpin platforms. We use Raspberry Pi and Spark.io ‘build-your-own-devices’ to examine and analyse interactions that get built out into meaningful experiences in our applications.
These low cost – low barrier hardware solutions open up the door for fun, one off installations as well as large enterprise roll-outs – both of which we hope to have news to share soon.
Code Vanilla is pleased to announce details of a new service called ‘Integrity’ soon to be available for TAG. Integrity provides live monitoring of published TAG content with email alerts where unexpected file or database changes are detected.
The challenge:
Integrity bridges this gap by checking for changes on a daily basis meaning the organisation is made aware far earlier and can take affirmative action.
The 2-day event gave us the opportunity to really understand the landscape of cloud-based platforms and SAAS delivery in regulated industries. Learnings from the event will be fed back into our SAAS Training & Guidance (TAG) platform.
Google glass has been around for about two years now and although it occasionally makes it into the main stream media it remains on the margins of public use and acceptance. Clearly Google are taking a MVP approach of releasing it into the wild and seeing what users and developers do with it. It seems from the reaction of the two Google glass owners and evangelists at The Society of Glass Enthusiasts meet up, the answers is – not much at the moment.
Our meeting spent a fair amount of time talking about privacy issues as well as exploring Glass’s capabilities but struggled to find the ‘killer use case’ for everyday situations. What struck me was that Glass has a far better chance of immediate commercial success in the Business sector than it does in the consumer space and in particular, in high value manufacturing.
We provide information solutions to companies that have complex manufacturing processes, where mistakes are extremely costly or dangerous. Operators in these environments typically have two information systems to help them in their work. The first is the standard operating procedure (SOP) which tells them step by step what they need to do to complete a task. The second is a Learning Management System (LMS) which trains them on how to do each step. These two informations systems are supposed to give the operator enough knowledge to complete all the tasks they need to undertake safely, ‘Right first Time’, every time. The problem for operators is that training on an LMS is ‘out of process’ and can take place weeks and months before the operator needs to draw upon that knowledge.
Operators know what to do – it is written on the SOP – but they can sometimes be unsure how to do a task. TAG presents them with contextual knowledge that shows them how to do a task using rich media created and delivered by ‘local experts’.
The key to the success of TAG is that it delivers knowledge, when and at the point that it is needed. Google Glass as form factor is a compelling extension of that principle. Voice control, head and eye gestures, allow an operator the use of both hands, keep eyes on the task and access supporting material simultaneously.
Further more, an onboard camera allows operators to record critical tasks for audit at a later date. It can provide remote eyes on in a critical and dynamic situation by using a live feed and it can enable the operator to check off the items on an SOP as they are completed.
Google by no means have a monopoly in this area. Other manufacturers are already in the market, some like Vuzix and Epson are actually available to buy and are actively targeting manufacturing. Kickstarter projects such as ORA are looking to get in on the act at a lower price point.
We are in the midst of a manufacturing revolution, where more and more customisation is required on the production line. Without sophisticated information systems that genuinely support the people working in these dynamic environments, quality and productivity will suffer. Sure there are challenges in using products that are in themselves essentially in ‘beta’ and as ever the challenge of introducing new technology into risk averse businesses remains. But without taking those risks we would all be standing around in animal skins comparing flint tools.
Code Vanilla are now proud members of the DIA. The Drug Information Association (DIA) is the leading member-driven professional association involved in the discovery, development, and life cycle management of medical products. http://www.diahome.org
Ongoing discussions we are involved with center around:
Code Vanilla will be attending and exhibiting at this event at the Hilton Brighton Metropole on Thursday, 13 November 2014.
De Wolfe are the largest independent music library in the world and they have been producing and publishing music for over 100 years, so there is an enormous catalogue of music. After nearly ten years of faithful service the De Wolfe site was looking tired and in need of some serious love. Ten years ago if you wanted library music you turned to a shelf of CDs or a desktop program to help you find what you were looking for (over the years we did quite a few of those!). Now the web site has become the main distribution channel for all of De Wolfe’s Music worldwide.
As their digital partner of 15 years, we understood the challenges in taking on this project. The site would have to balance aesthetics and function with a blend of new features and a new visual identity. It had to be easy for users to search, audition, create playlists and ultimately download music but it also had to respect the visual heritage. De Wolfe have created some really wonderful album covers and we were all keen to make sure they were part of the searching experience.
What you see as a user is only the tip of the iceberg and behind the scenes we created a vast catalogue administration area that allows De Wolfe to prepare content and manage tens of thousands of tracks. This includes the manual and creative task of building and assigning keywords. We have helped librarians by creating topics that help them moderate their keyword assignments where tracks will have an optimal number of keywords for instrumentation, emotional content, usage, genre etc.
Other technical challenges existed around protecting the high-quality downloads and syncronising complex data with multiple external systems. You can read more about that journey in Dominic’s Tech Blog here.
June 2014 we exhibited at only the second NEPIC Meet the Members Conference and Exhibition. This was a long day for Code Vanilla but worthwhile to meet some old colleagues and make some new connections. The keynote speaker at the event was no other than Steve Bagshaw, CEO of our client Fujifilm.
Following on from last years inaugural conference, Code Vanilla attended the IchemE High Value Product Technology Transfer Conference. We exhibited in the Tech Hub, demonstrating TAG and Xpin plus an example of our Xpin integration with BioSolve, made by our friends at BioPharm Services.
Our client FujiFilm Diosynth Biotechnologies recently delivered a seminar entitled “Knowledge Management throughout the Product Lifecycle – To Shorten Development and Tech Transfer” at ISPE Europe Biotechnology Conference 2013 held in Strasbourg, France.
The presentation covered their use of the TAG (Training & Guidance) system developed by Code Vanilla.
This was raised in almost every talk we attended at Marketing Week Live conference this week. This is a hot topic due to recent changes made by Google, that all content creators big and small should be aware of.
In a nutshell… Google has created a method of claiming authorship of pages or articles on the web – via your Google+ account. Once correctly claimed your photo or company logo will appear next to the article in Google search results. This is a good thing because Google say it is and while it doesn’t currently affect your page rank – according to research it will improve click-through rates. It also adds credibility to the content and enables all of your claimed writings across many sites to be collated via your Google+ account.
More about how you go about claiming authorship can be read here. It will require minor changes to your web site, so contact your web developer to discuss what’s involved.
Content management is a core component of most web sites and pretty much an expected feature. With complex sites the challenges of content management are greater as some elements of a page are dynamically generated and others fixed. We wanted simple, in-place versionable editing which the end users could walk up and use. Rollo allows us to open up discreet parts of any page to content editors who can make changes, upload pictures and then preview – all within the live site, but without affecting the live content.
Our client FujiFilm Diosynth Biotechnologies recently delivered a seminar entitled “Technology Transfer from R&D to Manufacturing” at ISPE Europe – World-Class Supply: End-to-End Conference 2013 held in Prague, Czech Republic.
The presentation covered their use of the TAG (Training & Guidance) system developed by Code Vanilla.
Yesterday Code Vanilla attended the first IchemE High Value Product Technology Transfer Conference. We exhibited in the Tech Hub along with other technology companies and had a great day demonstrating TAG and Xpin.
NEPIC’s – (Northeast of England Process Industry Cluster) Annual Awards were dominated this year by our client Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies. Among the crop of awards was the Sustainability Award – whose submission was based on our home grown TAG (Training & Guidance) solution. We are thrilled with their success and the ongoing benefits the TAG system brings to them.
When Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies, an industry leading GMP biologics CMO, looked to meet the challenge of maintaining flexible yet dependable manufacturing campaigns, they built on Code Vanilla’s software platform to underpin compliance and right-first-time manufacturing.
The case study covers the client requirements, system capabilities and outcomes.
Our home grown TAG (Training & Guidance) solution, developed for Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies has been shortlisted for two IChemE awards.
The IChemE 2012 Awards will be presented at the 2012 Awards Dinner on 1st November at the Mercure Piccadilly Hotel in Manchester, UK.
Our client FujiFilm Diosynth Biotechnologies recently delivered a Spotlight Presentation entitled “Achieving best practice operations through improved training and guidance” at Bio Production Europe 2012.
The presentation covered their use of the TAG (Training & Guidance) system developed by Code Vanilla.