Category: Tech

First comes the story we all asked each other when we met…”How did you hear about LessConf?” Most answers were, oh I was here before or my friend told me about it.  Mine is just a bit different and it happened on February 17, 2013 when I stumbled upon a blog post called “Top North American Conferences for Entrepreneurs” on the Clarity.fm blog    http://blog.clarity.fm/top-north-american-conferences-for-entrepreneurs/ If you visit the site you will see that there is a long list there but while scrolling through the list I got to the section titled “Have Your Mind Blown (Inspiration)”  and what I saw next was love at first sight with LessConf. LessConf  (April 11-13, 2013; Panama City Beach, Florida) Pack a diaper because you are going to pee yourself many times. LessConf is the place to go to laugh, listen to amazing speakers and leave smiling. More importantly, it’s the place to be if you want to challenge conventional thinking. The LessConf  website only confirmed the love with its most awesome descriptions and weird design of floating bubbles. What is LessConf? LessConf is not like other events you’ve heard about. Sure there’s speakers, after parties, people with laptops, it has been called “Summer camp for startups”, “the best time of my life,” and even “the world’s worst conference”. Fast Forward to April 11, 2013 when I landed at the Panama City airport all alone, nervous and excited at the same time. Thoughts were going through my head…”what if they don’t like me?”, “what if this isn’t for me since I’m not a programmer or coder?”, “what if…” and then I snapped out of it while sending an email to the group as I didn’t see anyone with a LessConf sign like we were instructed.  That’s when I met my first SuperFriends of the weekend, Nathan & Kim @FirstNate whose cool product PromoFLy already has me hooked now, you too should have a look www.getpromofly.com. Other soon to be SuperFriends were slowly gathering around us until we got to about 20 people that then squeezed into vans sponsored by GitHub and headed to our destination at the Bay Point Wyndham Resort where we signed our life away in about four separate waivers and received LessConf T-shirts and  other items from our gracious sponsors.   What followed next during dinner that night had some people running as live animals from ZooWorld came out of their cages. There was a crocodile, a parrot, a snake, a lemur, a hedgehog and even a baby kangaroo that became a twitter celebrity that night. Of course the Charfigy.com bull tried stealing the kangaroo’s fame at the afterparty when it started dancing to AndyD’s music. More entertainment that night was provided by the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus  (thanks Steph & Keith) who were ever so patient and supportive in teaching others how to juggle. Personal accomplishment was when I went from not being able to juggle one to juggling with three. After a long first night and low on sleep we were ready for the un-named speakers scheduled to inspire us on April 12. 2013, and inspire they did!  The Martin Theatre in downtown Panama City was the venue of choice (and a great one at that). The first speaker to take the stage was Jack Welde – CEO of Smartling.com He a technology early-adopter, serial entrepreneur, and combat-decorated Air Force pilot. Some of Jack’s quotes & advice: “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow” “Get 80% solution and start executing” Have a Back Up Plan OODA Loop – “Observe -> Orient -> Decide ->Act” Commander’s Intent: key element to help a plan maintain relevancy and applicability in a chaotic, dynamic, environment.”Small changes can have a big impact” Broad View (Don’t micromanage) High Level Goals Mid Level Objectives “Communication is negotiation””Aviate, navigate, communicate” OverCommunicate “Sound cool on the radio” keep calm like Captain ‘Sully’ Sullenberger who landed in the Hudson river… see video Sound cool to the rest of the world even if business is in trouble “If they are shooting at you, you’re doing something right” “Invest in training” “Learn how to learn” “Take care of your people”   Our next speaker was AJ Leon of PursuitOfEverything.com AJ used to be an unremarkably average financial executive in Manhattan until he decided to stop living the life he was supposed to live, and start living the life he was destined to live. Now, he spends most of his time changing the world. He is a writer, designer, entrepreneur, humanitarian and world traveler. Some of AJ’s quotes and advice “Musings from a Life Reinvented”: “Your life is always just one brief moment of audacity away from remarkable” Starting from scratch -you don’t have to choose, you can create “Define your moments or they will define you” “This is not your practice life, this is all there is” “Most people are waiting for a glitch” I was trapped “The more money you make, the harder it is to walk away” A lottery or inheritance to go on that trip they’ve been dreaming of a big bonus to use and start their own business or… a cup of Starbucks coffee to burn the sh*t out of them so they can sue for money “I was making an extraordinary amount of money but I hated my life, I despised my work” “I hated myself for trading my life for more money” “You can, and should rebel against a system that tries to tell you what your life should be like” “We all dream of escaping the office, but we don’t change what we do after getting out.” “Everything from tomorrow on is unwritten, be the protagonist and write your own novel” ” We got rid of almost everything we owned except what fit into a backpack” “Taught ourselves how to travel the world on the cheap, bartered by creating websites or services etc” “You can choose options that are given to you or you can reject all options and set out to create from scratch” Up to bat came Ryan Ohara  who works over at Dyn Inc. in Business Development He is

Is your memorable password secure? Could a hacker quickly crack it? If your passwords consist of: numbers only or lowercase letters only or are shorter than seven characters you are at the highest risk for a cyber hacking. The most secure passwords include eight characters, numbers, upper case, lower case letters and punctuation. Top 5 most common passwords used by people include: password, 123456, qwerty, abc123, monkey These  passwords are very commonly used. It would be cracked almost instantly.  If you want to know how fast your password can be cracked go to www.howsecureismypassword.net and enter it. Let’s put it to the test with a weak and a strong password. johnsmith    (It would take About 6 hours to crack your password ) all lower case johnsmith1  (It would take About 169 days to crack your password ) adding a number johnsmith1$  (It would take About 769 years to crack your password )  adding a symbol Johnsmith1$  (It would take About 71 thousand years to crack your password )  adding an UPPERCASE —– As if this wasn’t bad enough that we use insecure passwords, many websites as of late have been hit with data breaches. According to New York Times: A group of hackers, posted online the user names and passwords for what appeared to be 453,492 accounts belonging to Yahoo, and also Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, Comcast, MSN, SBC Global, Verizon, BellSouth and Live.com. The breach comes just one month after millions of user passwords for LinkedIn, the online social network for professionals, were exposed by hackers who breached its systems. The breaches highlight the ease with which hackers are able to infiltrate systems, even at some of the most widely used and sophisticated technology companies. The lesson we can learn from this is to not use the same password for every website because if one is compromised, the hackers use common sense to try the password on other popular services including Facebook, twitter, yahoo etc. In the recent months around 20% of our Brilliant Geeks customers have had their email accounts compromised to the point where their friends have received links to spammy websites advertising weight loss or work from home etc. Our recommendation is that you ACT NOW! Change your email password and any other password you might be worried about being compromised. The inconvenience of changing it now will save you a ton of headache of explaining to your friends or business partners as to why you sent them random links to click on.    To make sure your password is secure enough  go to www.howsecureismypassword.net and enter it. It is best that it takes your password at least 100 years to crack according to the calculation.   If you have further questions you can always contact us at support@brilliantgeeks.com.