Future of Media 2013 Speaker Bio: Josh Sternberg

Josh Sternberg is a Media/Publishing reporter for Digiday, covering the industry’s transition from an analog to a digital world.

He’s been published in The Atlantic, The Awl, The Huffington Post, Mashable & Mediaite., among other publications.

He first started his professional life as a professor at two New Jersey universities teaching communications and media courses.

After stepping out of the Ivory Tower, Josh went on into the public relations field, helping clients navigate through the messaging waters.

Following a almost a decade in PR, Josh made the transition to the journalism world to follow his love of words and the never-ending intriguing world of media.

Follow him on Twitter at @joshsternberg

Future of Media 2013 Speaker Bio: Steve Ladurantaye

Steve Ladurantaye is the Globe and Mail’s media reporter. In this role, he spends most of his time talking to the top media minds in the country – broadcast executives, newspaper publishers, start-up entrepreneurs, digital innovators.

His work appears across all of the national newspaper’s sections, and he also stars in a weekly web video produced by the paper that explores Canadian media issues and regularly appears on conventional television programs such as CTV’s Economix Panel and Canada AM.

He also spends a great deal of time tweeting the bits of news that don’t fit into his stories, and is convinced that we are all just one tweet away from being fired (@sladurantaye).

He’s been nominated for two National Newspaper Awards, the highest honour in Canadian journalism. He won once, in the explanatory journalism category for a story he wrote that detailed the costs, personal and financial, associated with a nasty crash on Canada’s busiest highway.

Prior to the Globe he was a city editor at Peterborough Examiner and Kingston Whig-Standard, editor of the Ottawa Business Journal and a cop reporter at the Ottawa Sun. He also used his Commodore 64 to make his own clip-art heavy newspapers, but sadly this was before anyone had thought to invent paywalls. Or the Internet.

Follow him on Twitter at @sladurantaye

Future of Media 2013 Speaker Bio: Jonathan Perelman

Jonathan Perelman is Vice President of Agency Strategy and Development, BuzzFeed.

At BuzzFeed Perelman works closely on all aspects of the business, with a particular focus on educating advertising agencies on the BuzzFeed platform and ad products.

Prior to BuzzFeed, Perelman spent six years at Google, most recently as the Global Lead for Industry Relations. He was responsible for brand identity initiatives and relationship management within the advertising and media industries. This also includes aligning Google’s business and public policy priorities. Google’s Operating Committee awarded the prestigious OC Award to Perelman for his work on mergers and acquisitions.

Prior to Google, Perelman worked at Financial Services firm, Unifund, and also was the Deputy Finance Director on Cory Booker’s 2002 Mayoral run in Newark, NJ. The campaign was captured in an Academy Award nominated film, Street Fight, released in 2005 Perelman is a Sr. Fellow at the Center for the Digital Future, at the USC Annenberg School. In addition, he serves on the board of Advertising Week, Ad:Tech, the International Association of Internet Professionals, along with other industry groups. He’s also an advisor to several start-ups.

Perelman is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in political science. He lives in New York City with his wife, Alexandra, and two sons.

Follow him on Twitter at @JPerelman

Future of Media 2013 Speaker Bio: Sabaa Quao

Sabaa Quao is the Chief Marketing Officer of Digital Journal Inc. and co-founder of /newsrooms.

Quao is a creative director, business strategist, and career entrepreneur who has a passion for emerging platforms in the digital media and marketing space. From cloud-inspired business models, to bending (and sometimes breaking) Facebook, to building social media-driven transactions, Quao has managed teams dedicated to the future of marketing and advertising.

Quao founded and ran XCORPORATION for 10 years, an intense and accomplished communication and design firm in Canada. He eventually moved to London UK and tightened XCORPORATION’s focus around new brand and enterprise development

In addition, FILMINUTE is the International One-Minute Film Festival Quao founded with John Ketchum in 2005, based in London, Bucharest, and Toronto.

In London, Quao ran Capacity Networks, a media and entertainment IP commercialisation company formed from a merger between Helsinki and Oxford-based technology and software development companies.

With degrees in Communication and Design (OCAD), a B.Comm in Marketing (Concordia), and an Executive MBA (Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto), Quao brings a valuable left brain-right brain balance and approach to business problem solving. Creative and strategic discipline, combined with entrepreneurial instinct and activation leads to provocative business and marketing solutions.

Quao’s marketing and consulting portfolio includes the launch of the Toronto Raptors and Playdium Entertainment, the rebranding of the CN Tower and the Directors Guild of Canada, and special projects for Toronto International Film Festival Group, Nortel Networks, Roots, RBC Royal Bank, Levi’s, Bell Mobility, Rogers Communications, The Beer Store, GlaxoSmithKline, McCain Foods, Corona, Coca-Cola, and Jack Daniel’s.

Quao has a passion for building new brands and enterprise business units from scratch and he has done precisely that for a wide range of companies and continue to collaborate on projects of this nature internationally.

Follow him on Twitter at @xsabaa

Are passwords on the way out? EyeVerify uses ‘eyeprint’ security

by Leigh Goessl (Digital Journalist/Guest contributor)

Today people rely on passwords to protect digital information. For years, these strings of code have been the “keys” to access digital property. As 2013 arrives, will passwords be enough to protect valuable personal information?

As technology moves forward, an increased number of personal and business activities are conducted online. Many people are accessing their accounts using their mobile devices. As both mobile and use of online services grows, so does the risk of identity theft.

A technology company called EyeVerify says it has a new solution in biometrics. Biometrics are steadily moving forward as an alternate way to authenticate and access information that is widely viewed to be more secure than using passwords. EyeVerify has developed an authentication method using eye vein biometrics.

The company was launched in Jan. 2012. According to the company’s website, EyeVerify’s technology “enables mobile users to authorize transactions and access information in a manner that is secure, scalable, and convenient.”

EyeVerify aligns with the philosophy that passwords are outdated and no longer able to provide the security needed in the modern world and that biometrics will be the future method to protect valuable digital information.

The “brittleness of passwords have become painfully apparent”, CEO Toby Rush said in an email to Digital Journal, noting “Voice and facial images [are] too susceptible to being reproduced. At EyeVerify, we are using a more private biometric, and ensuring we have strong spoof detection enabled in our system.”

Digital Journal asked Mr. Rush a few other questions about the company and what it does

.Digital Journal: What inspired you to start EyeVerify?

Toby Rush: It wasn’t hard to see trends like mobile and the consumerization of IT are influencing this new era of BYOD [Bring Your Own Device]. Personally speaking, I do more web access on my smartphone than my traditional laptop.Gartner predicts BYOD will become the top technology trend for 2013, with mobile devices surpassing PCs as the most common Web access tool. I agree. That said, I have almost 20 years of experience in mobile development, and many security protocols, especially in mobile, are horribly inefficient, exposing users to identity theft and fraud (e.g. mobile banking).

For instance, passwords, no matter how complex, are too easy to hack, not to mention that most people can’t remember them. Voice recognition can be easily compromised by external elements such as background noise, or a bad cold. And there have been increasing privacy concerns relating to the popular usage of face recognition technologies. While Iris scanning is secure and reliable, it requires extra hardware installation, which makes its implementation extremely cost prohibitive for mobile users or businesses looking for BYOD security solutions.

I discovered the core concept of ‘eyeprinting’ at the University of Missouri Kansas City (UMKC) working with Dr. Reza Derakhshani and Dr. Arun Ross, both are leaders in biometric research. It was an interesting research project, and I quickly saw the potential for the mobile market and thus, EyeVerify was born.

Digital Journal: How does EyeVerify work?

Toby Rush: Similar to how fingerprints historically were the standard in identifying individuals, EyeVerify has created the first and only mobile authentication solution that leverages the uniqueness of eye vein patterns to obtain a person’s ‘eye print’.It’s as easy as a mobile user glancing left and right using a regular smartphone camera to image and then pattern match the blood vessels in the whites of the eye. Since your eyeprint has four unique points of reference in each eye, this mobile authentication becomes a stable and convenient alternative to proving you are who you say you are. And, because the authentication also requires a ‘liveness’ detection, no one can steal your eyeprint

.Goals and launch date

Currently, EyeVerify has nine employees and is growing, according to Rush. At this time, the company’s focus is on using this type of biometric authentication in conjunction with mobile devices, but “we are not restricted to that”, he added

.At this time, EyeVerify is in beta and is planning to launch commercially during the first half of 2013.

Visit this link to see a demo video on how it works.

Many forecasts have been made regarding biometrics, along with several other types of biometric initiatives. According to Government ID News, the biometrics market is expected to reach $10.02 billion by 2014.

According to Reuters, nearly 12 million Americans fell victim to identity theft in 2011. Javelin Strategy & Research conducted the study which also noted identity thieves frequently target users of smartphones and social media.

Will 2013 be the year biometrics replace passwords? What do you think?

This article originally appeared on Digital Journal [Link]