What is an ISRC? It’s the International Standard Recording Code that’s used to identify music. If this information is entered incorrectly, it could potentially funnel revenue away from a rightful owner. Metadata is the backbone of digital music commerce.

Metadata Panel SXSW 2011

There are four kinds of identity theft:

• Financial – someone using your credit card to buy products; someone using your personal info to open new credit accounts

• Medical – someone getting medical services and providing your info instead of theirs so that your insurance will pay for it

• Criminal – someone getting arrested and giving your info — this will result in you having a criminal record. An example of how this will hurt you: a woman went to apply for a job and when her potential employer pulled her criminal record, there was a prostitution charge on it. Yikes!

• Identity Cloning – living under someone else’s identity. Thieves often use children’s social security numbers since those credit records are hardly checked.

Some ideas to combat identity theft are:

• Make sure and shred unwanted mail with personal info on it.

• Try not to use the same password for every account you have.

• Lock wi-fi routers at home with a secure password.

• Try not to use the security questions feature the way it was intended. For example: when Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account was hacked, the perpetrators simply clicked on the “forgot password” feature and answered the security questions such as “Where were you born?” All of the info was easily available online. Try coming up with an answer that will make sense to you, but someone else will have a hard time guessing.

• Use password generators if possible.

I attended a couple of panels that spoke about marketing for Latinos with technology, so I’ve decided to blog about both of them at once. The first speaker was Ana Grace, Global Team Site Manager for Best Buy. I initially cringed when I found this out because I remember the long nights we spent working on the failed pitch a few years ago. But after listening to her for a few minutes, I got over it. She spoke about the Spanish website they developed after numerous requests from their border-area stores. This immediately piqued my interest since I recently worked on the Spanish Legacy EX site. Interestingly, they found that many of their Spanish-speaking customers are big consumers and welcomed the site with open arms. Some of the customers’ requests included mirroring the Spanish site to the English one (no soccer-themed homepage or pictures of piñatas), offering the exact same deals (which BB obviously intended to do all along), and the ability for in-store pickup. She also spoke about the lack of trust that many consumers in this market have toward big businesses and the immense benefits if those trust issues can be overcome. (more…)

I have to admit that I didn’t know a lot about iPhone game development before I attended this panel. I don’t own an iPhone and don’t consider myself a gamer, but I was quickly enthralled by the conversation between the panelists because they spoke a lot about their entrepreneurial skills. The panelists represented a mix of truly independent developers as well as corporate sponsors. It was interesting to hear them talking about how they started with nothing and were able to develop and sell successful apps. With the growth of game development came a flooding of the marketplace. Panelists spoke of not only developing great games, but also how to market them. Personally I believe that independent developers can survive, but finding a niche is critical.

I recently heard a reporter refer to the uprising in the Middle East as the “Facebook Revolution” and wondered what he meant exactly. I was hoping to get some answers at the above-mentioned SXSW panel. The panelists included a reporter, a couple of tech gurus and an activist.

Habib Haddad, the founder YallaStartup, started off by talking about the misconception that people in the Middle East are not tech savvy. I have to admit that I was surprised to learn that protesters were using multiple internet avenues such as Facebook and YouTube to mobilize.

What I found interesting was that while technology was helping the protesters, it was also being used as a tool for the government. Government officials were sent to infiltrate these social networks and pose as protesters. Every time protesters tried to plan a rally, the plants relayed the info to the military.

Ironically, the decision to cut off internet access to the masses was the government’s demise. Many of the protesters later claimed that by being denied internet access, they became restless and decided to actually take the fight to the streets when, otherwise, they would have stayed at home.