HowAbout has both a consumer and a professional version. Both communicate with each other but from a completely different perspective. Plenty of advantages of the consumer version have already been highlighted in previous articles. Now it is time to give you a heads up on the professional version.

First of all you don’t need the average consumer to be using HowAbout to make good use of the app. It is a great tool to use intra-company since it will reduce your IT staff and release pressure on your mail server. That means HowAbout is going to save you money. There is no argument against that. So without taking use of any of the marketing potential that HowAbout offers, companies already reduce their costs for IT and communication. Not a bad start.

The most powerful element in HowAbout is how we use groups. Groups are an active tool. You drag them around, create new ones almost every day and delete the ones you no longer need. They are a dynamic ingredient in HowAbout. People who work in your company can be listed in groups according to their functions, the projects they are working on or any other way you like. People can be in several groups at the time so you can also group them in function of a certain type of messages. People at other locations can also be in any group as well as people on mobile. There are no restrictions and you can even work with several company setups at the time using the group-in-group function. Just don’t make it too complicated so you don’t lose the overview. 

But it is the UI that makes it so easy to handle all these groups and communication between everybody. Very simple and user-friendly without ever losing your overview of your communications. Smart details make group communication seamless avoiding public beside the point comments from co-readers. 

All messages to a person are saved in a block which means you will have a communication block per person. Easy to look up any previous messages. All intra-company communication happens in a private circle. Only the central operator can add external HowAbout accounts to the circle. That means your communications are quite safe. That doesn’t mean you can not use howAbout to communicate with the rest of the world. You just can not mix your professional messaging with private. HowAbout also has chat and you can send files or photo’s of course.

HowAbout also offers event based messaging and photo-sharing. When you set up an event for a group of people you will be able to send messages to the group with one click. Invitees answer directly to you only. If replies are worth sharing the organiser can share it with the group. This to avoid other invitees from being bothered by often irrelevant remarks from other participants in an event.

“This feature can be life-saving and time saving”

Once an event is set up participants can activate event-based photo-sharing. Photo’s taken in this mode are shared immediately with all participants. This feature can be life-saving and time saving. And fun as well of course. Events are found in event-history which is linked to your Howabout calendar.

Talking about calendars, HowAbout also has a feature for meeting set-up. You virtually compare calendars with multiple people and pick out the moment best suitable for all to have a meeting. After all selections are in, the organiser picks and confirms the best option upon which all participants get the final invitation. After confirming the event is created in their calendars. 

Filters can be created to make it easy for you to go through your calendar. They are really easy to create or switch on or off. The calendar warns when you try to plan an event where something else was planned already.

So far very briefly the communication part of HowAbout. It’s marketing functions are a subject for a later article.

Blog advisors say one has to post at least one article a day to keep peoples attention. I’m going to add my two cents to this statement.

I have subscribed to quite a few blogs, and frankly, I only read them very selectively. For example when I see titles starting with ‘Five ways to…’ I get discouraged to read them more and more. The reason is that most of these articles sum up the obvious, and look more like an excuse to post something than a valuable addition to a subject. Anyone can come up with this kind of articles and not say anything that a person with common sense doesn’t already know. You’ll lose less time doing one indepth search on your subject than read such blogs I would think, and you’ll get much more valuable information overall.

Some companies offer a weekly wrap-up of their articles. Then I wonder what is the difference between one poor article a day or a stack of them once a week. A jewel hidden among them could get lost that way. To my opinion, if you have nothing interesting to say, don’t say anything at all. Better send a joke instead, then at least some people are amused. Obviously that implies you’ll eventually have to let go of ‘political correctness’ to avoid getting cheesy in the long run, and many would consider that a risk.

Some famous people with blogs post very long articles with lots of personal story that I believe more resembles fanmail, or go way too deep into their subject to keep the attention of the reader. Not all readers are fan, and no matter how rich your are, that still doesn’t make you an interesting writer.

My point is that I don’t believe the customer is more happy with getting frequent crappy reads than with getting less frequent ‘readable’ articles that bear some depth and analysis. When adding the appropriate references, an article also does not need to be long. It can be a thesis based on different reads. Adding an executive summary is a way to get around the fact that sometimes there simply is a lot to say about a subject, and keep the impatient reader coming back without reading your entire article.

I guess a solution would be to select your readers in different groups, offer some kind of subscriptions. I believe the blogger’s contact with the reader would be a lot better, and you would get happier readers.

An interesting article from Privacy News Online at privateinternetaccess.com, written by Rick Falkvinge.

Imagine you had a really strong and complex password. It was so hard for anyone to remember, that you had printed thousands of business cards with the complex password on them, and left such a card at every single object you just happened to touch. Would that be a good password?

This week, there was a story about an FBI house search where the people in the house were compelled to give up their fingerprints in order to unlock phones, which were locked just with fingerprints.

Most people seemed to be appalled at the FBI being able to coerce somebody into unlocking their phone, while pretty much nobody would have blinked at phones being seized as part of a lawful search.

How many stopped to reflect over the fact that the house was probably filled to capacity, on every object and every surface, with those fingerprints required to unlock the phones in question? That it would have been absolutely trivial to recover them from the first glass fetched from the kitchen?

Fingerprints aren’t authentication.

Fingerprints are identity. They are usernames.

Fingerprints are something public, which is why it should really bother nobody with a sense of security that the FBI used them to unlock seized phones. You’re literally leaving your fingerprints on every object you touch. That makes for an abysmally awful authentication token.

It’s true that phones can be unlocked with fingerprints, but that doesn’t turn the fingerprint into a secure authentication token. Rather, it turns the phone lock into a phone bolt, without a key requirement – an electronic bolt which one particular person can open trivially (because they carry the fingerprints on their hands) and everybody else can open with a small amount of effort (because those fingerprints are trivially retrievable and copyable). But in no way should it be considered secure, or even a lock: it’s merely something that takes less effort to open for one particular person.

Yes, of course it’s better to have a bolt on something than no bolt (fingerprint security is better than nothing). But a bolt that requires a sliding action should not be mistaken for a lock that requires a key. A false sense of security can be worse than no security in some cases.

Biometrics were never authentication tokens. They were identity tokens. Authentication tokens are secret and replaceable, and your fingerprints (your retina, your iris, and so on) are neither.

When you authenticate something even slightly sensitive with biometrics, you’re doing it wrong.

The right way to do it is to identify with biometrics, and then authenticate with a proper security token, which is secret.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.