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Location: bwtech@UMBC, 5520 Research Park Drive, Baltimore
Leadership: Zuly Gonzalez, co-founder and chief operating officer; Beau Adkins, co-founder and CEO
Year founded: 2010
Total employees: 2
Total funding: $15,000
Beau Adkins and Zuly Gonzalez know a thing or two about how to protect sensitive information — both worked in national security before launching Light Point Security. Gonzalez is a former information assurance engineer and security vulnerability analyst for the federal government. Adkins used to work as an information security specialist for the defense department. The two quit their day jobs to focus on their company last year.
Light Point offers ...
Continue reading http://www.bizjournals.com/baltimore/print-edition/2013/08/02/cyber-standouts-light-point-security.html
Sarah Gantz
Reporter - Baltimore Business Journal
Maryland may have sold its shares of Sourcefire Inc. years ago, but the state still stands to win big from the Columbia cyber security firm's $2.7 billion sale.
Industry analysts say software giant Cisco’s willingness to pay more than ten times Sourcefire’s revenue is a sign of the potential for cyber companies growing up in Maryland. Industry leaders consider the sale validation of their efforts to promote cyber here.
Read more at http://www.bizjournals.com/baltimore/news/2013/08/01/finding-marylands-next-cyber-security.html
For the average user there’s little difference between products offered by Yahoo! and by market leader Google. Yahoo!’s position is largely dictated by brand; or rather by Google’s superior brand.
There has long been debate over Yahoo!’s identity. Long before Marissa Mayer moved into the big office, questions were asked about the longevity of Yahoo!’s branding.
Amongst Mayer’s considerable achievements with Google, it’s probably her oversight of the legendarily minimal layout of the Google homepage that convinced Yahoo! to recruit her. It seems that the Yahoo! board has been eyeing a redesign for some time.
Shortly after Mayer’s installation as CEO, Yahoo! tried out a rebrand. In retrospect it appears that Mayer was engaged in some kind of power struggle over whether or not to redesign the company logo because a year later, following a successful redesign of their homepage, Yahoo! have announced that a new visual identity will be launched on the 4th September.
[We] want to preserve the character that is unique to Yahoo! — fun, vibrant, and welcoming — so we’ll be keeping the color purple, our iconic exclamation point and of course the famous yodel. After all some things never go out of style. — Kathy Savitt, Yahoo! CMO.
To celebrate Yahoo! are running with a different logo every day, for 30 days. Their new “Yahoo! 30 days of change” video hints at some of what’s to come.
Kathy Savitt, Yahoo!’s Chief Marketing Officer, has said that the 30 logos are “our way of having some fun while honoring the legacy of our present logo”. And one can’t help but wonder if these 30 logos are rejected designs from the rebrand process — a couple look similar to the beta-redesign from 2012; in which case it’s a fascinating look at how a corporate behemoth perceives itself.
Yahoo!’s homepage featuring the first of 30 logo redesigns.
Reportedly a “modern redesign that’s more reflective of [Yahoo!'s] reimagined design and new experiences” the new logo will be revealed on September 4th. In the meantime you can view all of the temporary logos, a new release every day, on the Yahoo! Tumblr site; or simply head over to yahoo.com for the latest iteration.
Do you think Yahoo! needs to rebrand? What approach do you think the new logo will take? Let us know in the comments.
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UMBC is pleased to announce the call for proposals for the Hrabowski Fund for Innovation Award 2013-14 competition.
For Academic Year 2013-2014, a total of approximately $100,000 will be available through this competition to support initiatives to enhance teaching and learning at UMBC, with specific emphasis on innovative approaches to increase the success of our undergraduate and graduate students. Such approaches may include, but are not limited to, redesign of courses or other learning experiences, innovative course and/or curriculum development, and other projects designed to improve or understand student-learning outcomes at UMBC. In this round of the competition we have expanded the submission eligibility requirements to include full-time staff as well as faculty.
The competition is open to all tenured and tenure-track faculty, clinical instructional faculty, lecturers and instructors, and staff with full-time appointments. Proposals for funding may be made by individuals or by collaborative groups. The Faculty Development Center is available to work with faculty or staff as they develop their ideas for projects.
For the AY13-14 competition, proposal deadlines are October 11, 2013 and February 14, 2014.
Working with the Provost’s Office, Dr. Linda Hodges, Director of the Faculty Development Center, coordinates the competition. The detailed request for proposals, instructions for submission, and required forms for the application can be found here.
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UMBC is fortunate to have so many talented and dedicated Exempt and Non-Exempt staff working in support of our mission. We encourage administrators, faculty, and staff who are familiar with the contributions of our outstanding staff to nominate them for one of these prestigious awards:
Descriptions of the three different kinds of awards and the eligibility requirements for each, along with a nomination form, can be found on the UMBC Staff Awards website. The Staff Awards Committee (SAC) requires submission of only one nomination letter and completion of a brief nomination form, along with the nominee’s resume or job history form. Nominations should be forwarded to the attention of the SAC, in the Office of the Provost, by Sept. 16, 2013.
If you have questions about staff awards, please address them to Beth Wells, Assistant Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, at bwells@umbc.edu or 410-455-8907.
]]>Whether you are working alone or with a team of people, launching a new business will take lots of time and effort. Internet-based companies are somewhat easier because there are no requirements to handle physical products. Granted, physical products come into play if you are managing an e-commerce store. However creating digital products on the Internet provides a more lucrative method of launching and scaling quickly.
But what type of tools would be useful when just getting started? I have put together a collection of webapps and resources that you can use for any new project launch. There are often so many details to remember and it is easy to get lost in the myriad of choices. But you should make the time for testing these different tools and see which ones provide the most benefit to your workday.
The biggest problem I always run into is keeping everything organized. What needs to be done and what order should these to-dos be completed? The best way to keep yourself organized is by using a task management system. But there are countless solutions out there, so it’s tough deciding which is best. It all comes down to what you are personally looking for and how much functionality is required for yourself or a team.
The task management tool Asana works great for any type of company. Even if you are working alone by yourself, their interface is really simple for managing project tasks. Plus you can invite people into specific tasks as needed. I think it is a great place to start with a free account and see how you like the features.
Another free solution Teambox also puts a lot on the table. I am enticed by their backend interface features which allow for multiple project workspaces. This means you can organize tasks between different online products or even completely different companies. Also Teambox has a conversation feature where you can message other members on your team. It is definitely worth some consideration if you are looking for a free tool that’s also easy to learn.
To mention just one more resource Trello is a great webapp that comes attached with a free price tag. You can signup and invite team members to your projects forever on this free account. It does not offer as many features as you will find in other project management tools. The interface is a bit simpler and much more focused on tasks/projects rather than team collaboration. But if you like the interface then it is a wonderful solution for any new business.
Online cloud hosting platforms are often much more agile for sharing files between computers. It’s a different story when you consider web hosting and CDNs. But consider sharing a .zip of your latest website HTML with two co-workers located at different places around the world. It would be easiest to upload the zip archive onto a hosting client and then share your link with both people.
Dropbox is a powerful solution for keeping your files organized and sharing entire folders with other people. It also offers a free plan which does limit the amount of files you can host. But this storage space limitation can be upgraded by inviting new people onto the service. I really like their web interface because you can drag-and-drop files to upload into your account. Also you can download entire folders of content as .zip containers right from the website! It has a great system for collaborating with other teammates and I highly recommend that everyone should have a Dropbox account.
People often forget about Google Drive, which comes out-of-the-box offering 15GB of free storage space with every Google account. Drive is generally meant for handling online documents including spreadsheets and presentations. But you can also upload other types of media for sharing with your team members. For a free service run by Google it does provide a nice allotment of features. But just the document viewing & sharing functionality puts Drive well above many other competitors. Box.net is another similar webapp you might consider.
If you have a great product then you will likely want to create an online presence. Consider registering a new account on networks like Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, and and others. It will boost your website’s visibility and help people find you quicker. But what kinds of tools are useful for managing all of these profiles?
This newer product GrabInbox has not been online for too long. It is a service which allows you to manage a set network of accounts from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. You can schedule messages to post at certain times while also checking user responses. Signup is free but for now it’s difficult to tell how the company will progress. If you like demoing these tools as an early adopter then I say go for it!
Now HootSuite is a much more professional solution which has been tried & tested by many other companies. Their free service is phenomenal when you don’t have money to pay for a pro or enterprise account. You can easily manage social profiles from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and other common networks. I would recommend trying HootSuite and sticking to them if you like the service. It is simple to use and you’ll never be forced to upgrade from a free account.
Throughout the early phase of launching your product there will always tweaks worth making to the user interface. Nothing is perfect during its first inception, but how do you know exactly what needs to be retouched? There are plenty of tools online for testing various analytics and UX ideas. I want to share just a couple that may prove useful to a majority of Internet projects.
BrowserStack is not a free service but it does provide great support for browser testing. You can quickly generate screenshots from any web browser over the various Operating Systems. It will save time when squashing bugs if your site isn’t rendering properly for a certain browser version. Plus you can run tests on more complicated features like JavaScript or responsive CSS within legacy browsers.
One tool I can really get excited about is Visual Website Optimizer. This allows you to run A/B split testing on your website and track user analytics to learn from the results. I have been very impressed with the many case studies involving big-named corporations. When first getting started you may not have a need for A/B testing – or even understand why it’s helpful. But optimizing the user experience is crucial for obtaining the best results and delivering the best product out to your visitors.
If you are working with customers then it is best to have some type of support management application. Even if you are building a startup or webapp for people to use freely, it helps to garner feedback. Your audience knows what they like and what they don’t like. So with enough testing and great feedback you can fine-tune any project to be working as efficiently as possible.
Intercom is an online service for handling user support problems. This includes a typical web-based helpdesk along with customer relationship management tools. Intercom is a beautiful system for overseeing a project with clients or customers. Even a free social networking site may find Intercom useful for managing support questions. Their free plan is a great way to play around with the features and determine if Intercom can really benefit your project.
The web application UserVoice is perfect for handling more direct feedback. You can setup a tiny widget on your site where visitors may directly send messages to your account. It also works as a support system with organized backend tickets. This is a great all-around solution for handling feedback and support problems within a project. Their plans can range up to $100/month but you may also keep the free plan indefinitely for one account.
Lastly the startup TrackDuck is not known all too well, but it is a very powerful tool. You can setup a tiny box in the corner of your site where visitors can send feedback about the interface, potential bugs, and really anything they want. It can integrate with other applications like Basecamp for easily tracking user feedback. Plus there is even a free edition which provides all the basic services for one account! I would definitely recommend TrackDuck if you are just getting started with user feedback tools and want to test the waters.
There may be other categories of webapps and tools that can really help entrepreneurs manage their projects. I put together this collection of specific tools which really helped me, and I hope some of these tools will help others as well. But if you know about similar resources that I may have skipped please share with us in the comments discussion area.
The post Helpful Tools and Resources for Managing a New Internet Business appeared first on Treehouse Blog.
]]>The following is a guest post by Andrey Sitnik, the creator of the Autoprefixer tool, a "postprocessor" for handling vendor prefixes in CSS. Why use this instead of your preprocessor or another tool? Many reasons. Andrey will explain.
Autoprefixer parses CSS files and adds vendor prefixes to CSS rules using the Can I Use database to determine which prefixes are needed.
All you have to do is add it to your asset building tool (Grunt, for instance) and you can totally forget about CSS vendor prefixes. Just write regular CSS according to the latest W3C specifications without any prefixes. Like this:
a {
transition: transform 1s
}Autoprefixer uses a database with current browser popularity and properties support to apply prefixes for you:
a {
-webkit-transition: -webkit-transform 1s;
transition: -ms-transform 1s;
transition: transform 1s
}
Autoprefixer logo by Anton Lovchikov
We can, of course, write vendor CSS prefixes by hand, but it can be tedious and error-prone.
We can use services like Prefixr and text editor plugins, but it is still exhausting to work with big blocks of repeating code.
We can use mixin libraries with preproccesors like Compass for Sass or nib for Stylus. They solve a lot of problems, but create other problems instead. They force us to use a new syntax. They iterate much slower than modern browsers do, so a stable release can have a lot of unnecessary prefixes, and sometimes we need to create our own mixins.
And Compass does not really hide prefixes from you since you still need to decide on a lot of questions, for example: Do I need to write a mixin for border-radius? Do I need to split arguments for +transition by comma?
Lea Verou’s -prefix-free came closest to solving this problem, but using client side libraries is not such a good idea when you take end-user perfomance into account. To avoid doing the same job again and again, it is better to build CSS once: during asset building or project deployment.
Instead of being a preprocessor – such as Sass and Stylus – Autoprefixer is a postprocessor. It doesn’t use any specific syntax and works with common CSS. Autoprefixer can be easily integrated with Sass and Stylus, since it runs after CSS is already compiled.
Autoprefixer is based on Rework, a framework for writing your own CSS postproccesors. Rework parses CSS to useful JavaScript structure and exports it back to CSS after your manipulations.
Each version of Autoprefixer contains a copy of latest Can I Use data:
By default, Autoprefixer will support 2 latest versions of major browsers, much like Google does. But you can choose, what browsers are supported in your project, by name (like "ff 21") or by pattern:
Then Autoprefixer calculates which prefixes are required and which are outdated.
When Autoprefixer adds prefixes to your CSS, it doesn’t forget about fixing syntax differences. This way, CSS is produced according to the latest W3C specs:
a {
background: linear-gradient(to top, black, white);
display: flex
}
::placeholder {
color: #ccc
}compiles to:
a {
background: -webkit-linear-gradient(bottom, black, white);
background: linear-gradient(to top, black, white);
display: -webkit-box;
display: -webkit-flex;
display: -moz-box;
display: -ms-flexbox;
display: flex
}
:-ms-input-placeholder {
color: #ccc
}
::-moz-placeholder {
color: #ccc
}
::-webkit-input-placeholder {
color: #ccc
}
::placeholder {
color: #ccc
}Autoprefixer cleans outdated prefixes as well (from legacy code or CSS libraries like Bootstrap), so the following code:
a {
-webkit-border-radius: 5px;
border-radius: 5px
}compiles to:
a {
border-radius: 5px
}So after Autoprefixer, CSS will contain only actual vendor prefixes. After Fotorama switched from Compass to Autoprefixer, the CSS file size decreased by almost 20%.
If you still don’t use any kind of tool to automate the building of your assets, be sure to check out Grunt. I highly recommend to start using build tools. This can open you a whole new world of “sugar” syntaxes, time-saving mixin libraries and useful image processing tools. All of developers’ productivity methods to save a lot of nerves and time (the freedom to choose languages, code re-use, the ability to use third-party libraries) are available now for front-end programmers.
Let’s create a project directory and write simple CSS in style.css:
a { }For this example, we will use Grunt. First, we will need to install grunt-autoprefixer using npm:
npm install grunt-cli grunt-contrib-watch grunt-autoprefixerThen we should create Gruntfile.js and enable Autoprefixer:
module.exports = function (grunt) {
grunt.initConfig({
autoprefixer: {
dist: {
files: {
'build/style.css': 'style.css'
}
}
},
watch: {
styles: {
files: ['style.css'],
tasks: ['autoprefixer']
}
}
});
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-autoprefixer');
grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-watch');
};This config enables the compilation of style.css to build/style.css using Autoprefixer. Also we will use grunt-contrib-watch to recompile build/style.css every time style.css changes.
Let’s start Grunt’s Watch:
./node_modules/.bin/grunt watchNow, we’ll add a CSS3 expression to style.css and save the file:
a {
width: calc(50% - 2em)
}The magic has just happened and now we have a build/style.css file. Grunt detected the change in style.css and launched the Autoprefixer task. Autoprefixer did find the calc() value unit, that needs a vendor prefix for Safari 6.
a {
width: -webkit-calc(50% - 2em);
width: calc(50% - 2em)
}Now we’ll add a little bit more complicated CSS3 to style.css and save the file:
a {
width: calc(50% - 2em);
transition: transform 1s
}Autoprefixer already knows that Chrome, Safari 6 and Opera 15 need prefixes for transition and transform. But IE 9 also needs a prefix for transform, which we used as value in transition.
a {
width: -webkit-calc(1% + 1em);
width: calc(1% + 1em);
-webkit-transition: -webkit-transform 1s;
transition: -ms-transform 1s;
transition: transform 1s
}Autoprefixer is designed to perform all the dirty work for you. It will check the Can I Use database, write all the prefixes needed and it does understand the difference between specifications as well. Welcome to the future of CSS3 — no more vendor prefixes!
Autoprefixer: A Postprocessor for Dealing with Vendor Prefixes in the Best Possible Way is a post from CSS-Tricks
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