Author: Raanan Bar-Cohen

Raanan Bar-Cohenhttps://raanan.com/
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VaultPress

Very excited about our announcement of VaultPress which is currently in private beta:
http://vaultpress.com

“The vision of VaultPress is to ensure that blogs and sites under its care are always completely secure, regardless of what happens. Today, this means every bit of content will be safe, from plugins and themes to the smallest comment or post revision, with WordPress-aware, real-time, multi-cloud backups. This is some of the most advanced technology I’ve seen interact with WordPress.

In the future, if your site is tampered with in any way, we’ll know within minutes and can take appropriate steps. The VaultPress core engine will be able to protect you against zero-day security vulnerabilities by updating your blog with hot-fixes, even while you sleep.”

More info on VaultPress.com .

Can We Kill the Fax Yet ?

Can’t believe how many people, companies, and organizations still require you to fax something. In fact, the more important, expensive, or “official” a transaction is – the higher the likelihood that a fax will be involved. You can use eFax or send scanned PDFs, but the reality is that you may find yourself faxing in a document for a big contract, or a real estate transaction.

It’s been 9+ years plus since Bill Clinton “used a smart card … to sign the digital signatures bill into law … ushering in a revolution of the digital kind.”

What do you guys think ? And what exactly is keeping this fax thing around ? Is it legal reasons, old habits, or a lack of trust for digital documents ? Quick poll below:

Interviewed in March 2010 InStyle Magazine

This article hasn’t popped-up online yet, but I was one of a handful of people interviewed for the “E-Manners” article in the March 2010 issue of InStyle magazine.  A bit different than my previous couple of interviews 🙂 The topic was around a set of questions I seem to get often today, about what’s appropriate to blog, tweet, facebook, etc.

A friend just took a pic and sent this to me after seeing it in the airport 😉 It’s on page 420:

From March 2010 InStyle Magazine page 420

Interviewed in Folio Magazine

Was interviewed for an article in Folio Magazine this month — Can Publishers Attract (And Retain) The Best Digital Talent?:

Companies should encourage their engineers, designers and digital executives to blog, speak at events and generally reach out and participate with various development communities, especially open source ones, such as WordPress. “It’s a great way for traditional companies to connect with top talent, and ultimately is a benefit when they are trying to attract the good ones,” says Bar-Cohen.

[ Read the whole article on foliomag.com ]

Ideas on how Fedex/Kinkos Can Go Digital

I should preface this by saying there is nothing wrong really with Fedex/Kinkos today.

It’s more that it dawned on me that 10 years ago I used to frequent a Kinkos about once a week back when I ran my own web agency in NY, and that today I can’t recall the last time I actually visited a location except for an emergency fax ( which needs to be a whole separate post soon ).

So back in the day I would head over to Kinkos to print out high quality presentations for a big pitch, and then walk down the street and messenger or FedEx it over to the perspective client. Today, nearly nothing like that is printed out anymore, and if you do need to print for some reason, those capabilities are largely available as cheap laser printers for home office use.

So what could Kinkos/Fedex do to get me back as a customer ?

Pretty simple, it should focus on services that are out of reach and require expensive hardware or infrastructure, just as it did 10 years ago. Three ideas:

  • All locations should be equipped with ultra fast broadband. I’m talking 100 gig/sec Japan style connectivity. This could be used for sending massive video files, doing an initial huge backup of a HD to Amazon / Jungle Disk / Mozy / DropBox. I’m sure lots of people would come in with their laptops to do some high bandwidth activities.
  • Just as people used to come into Kinkos to get their first set of business cards printed, Kinkos today could offer a digital equivalent. Call it the Biz starter package. It would include a WordPress.com site with a couple of upgrades (domain plus Video perhaps ), some Google Ad Word buys, and maybe a handful of analytics reports from Quantcast and others showing you what your online competitive space looks like
  • High quality digitization and scanning. There are tons of businesses popping up around scanning your old photos, and converting old VHS home movies to DVDs. Kinkos has the real estate advantage of being everywhere. And while they offer some of this today with photos, I think they could expand this into something greater.