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In the Wall Street Journal spotlight: intellectual property theft in China

Wall Street Journal has just published an interesting article in which Western businesses are encouraged to protect themselves against industrial espionage and intellectual property theft, especially in China – a land of opportunity but also a land of counterfeiting.

In the article “Patents are a Virtue” written by Geoff Nairn, we learn that although China is not the only source of pirated goods, it is the main source, according to the European Commission, as it accounts for 85% of the counterfeit goods seized in the European Union last year.

The problem is not limited to hot-selling electronic gadgets; counterfeiting plagues almost every industry. It costs Europe’s engineering industry about 10 billion euros per year, according to trade body Orgalime.

Although “reverse engineering” of Western products indeed has its presence in China, today more sophisticated counterfeiters go right to the source for the trade secrets instead, stealing design files and software codes directly from the manufacturers.

As noted in Nairn’s article, one of the big misconceptions about economic espionage is that it only affects big-name brands. But whether small or large, most businesses own intellectual property…which is susceptible to theft. Many companies undervalue their intellectual property and underestimate the risk of counterfeiting, making it even easier for their intellectual property to be stolen – especially if it exists in digital format. “You should always assume that your intellectual property is under threat,” said David Seall, a consultant to the UK manufacturing sector.

So how does a company protect its sensitive digital data?

For starters, by being fully aware of the company’s value and what constitutes its intellectual property. Also, by securing patents and trademarks and being diligent about the use of employee invention, trade-secret, non-disclosure, non-use, and non-circumvention agreements.

But awareness and contracts are not enough to protect a company’s confidential data – a secure environment in which the data can be safely stored and shared between collaborators must also be enabled. The Wall Street Journal article exemplifies this notion with its mention of TravelHorizon Group, a European travel operator that used ftopia’s secure virtual data rooms to maintain secrecy of the negotiations involved in the acquisition of a competitor.

ftopia’s service simplified TravelHorizon’s process of exchanging information between companies, lawyers, auditors, and investors, while also ensuring confidentiality of data through a battery of security measures: digital signing of all documents to safeguard their integrity, full traceability of all actions within each data room, network protection against intruders, etc.

> Read Travel Horizon case study

Source : The Wall Street Journal, Patents are Virtue, by Geoff Nairn.

ftopia rooms go public!

ftopia is designed to make it easy to share files across different organizations. In order to trace and secure access to information, each user has to sign in with his or her password before accessing his or her data rooms.

However, user authentication is not always a requirement. Many customers use ftopia to update files directly from Windows Explorer or the Mac Finder, but once online some of these files should be made available to a wide audience. This has been impossible so far because of the enforced authentication.

Well, there was still a way: one could generate public download links for a selection of documents and then email those links to whomever. Nice for quickly sharing a few files with a limited number of persons. But how to give them complete access to a room, with its custom look and feel and its up-to-date content?

This is now possible with our brand new public rooms! In order to grant public access to one of your rooms, click on its “Settings” tab and use the related options:

You can even let anonymous visitors upload their own files! They will be stored in special folders only visible to the room manager.

The number of public rooms you can open depends on your subscription plan. Feel free to contact us to get more information about this feature.

Saverglass selects ftopia to streamline communication with its suppliers

SAVERGLASS Group, the global leader in luxury glass packaging for the wine and spirits and the fragrance and cosmetics industries, has adopted ftopia for optimizing its document sharing processes.

Because Saverglass works internationally with many entities (the Group generates half of its revenue from exports), it shares a multitude of frequently-updated documents with external parties. The Group was in need of a solution that would overcome the inherent file size limitations of email and that would boost collaboration while ensuring security of the information being exchanged.

Enhancing the Supplier Relationship with Document Sharing

1. Circulation of Price Quotes for Maritime Transport

Saverglass’ sales department must constantly use price quotes for sea transport to hundreds of destinations when making offers to its customers and prospects. Before implementing ftopia’s service, the purchasing department solicited shipping prices from freight carriers by exchanging and building Excel spreadsheets via email and then uploaded them to a file server for internal access.

Because of the difference between the number of shipping destinations listed and those actually served, this manual and repetitive task used to consume more time, effort, and attention from the purchasing department than needed. ftopia’s collaborative service enabled the Group to restructure and improve this process with a system that allows freight carriers to instantly upload quotes into shared online workspaces.

Sales teams now have direct and immediate access to up-to-date information without requiring the purchasing department’s help or soliciting freight carriers unnecessarily. The end result is time-savings and increased responsiveness and productivity for internal teams and suppliers.

2. Requests for Proposals – Work and Investments

For every major project, Saverglass Group must provide potential suppliers with RFPs including specifications, models, and a number of other large files. Given the file attachment size limits of Saverglass’ internal mail system, CDs and USB flash drives were used for exchanging this data. This was an inconvenient solution – especially when sourcing geographically remote suppliers.

Ftopia provides all authorized parties with a single access point to data and a centralized and secure environment for each proposal. Now RFPs are simply uploaded into compartmentalized online workspaces and interested companies have direct access to download them from any location with an Internet connection.

Data is easily updated and companies are automatically notified via email whenever updates are made. Detailed user activity reports ensure complete traceability of all files and enable teams to determine whether each file has been viewed by its intended recipient(s).

Saverglass’ Expectations Surpassed

Thanks to ftopia, Saverglass has not only made file sharing with its suppliers much easier, but it has also increased productivity by simplifying the flow of communication and reducing response time.

In addition to resolving all the issues posed by Saverglass Group, ftopia’s solution has become an even more valuable tool for the Group which has since found many other uses for the service.

“ftopia, like any good information system, is a structuring tool that allowed us to simplify and optimize the organization of our work. We won time but also added relevance and value to our operations.“
Vincent Malvault – Group Buyer, Saverglass

Fabernovel Reveals the Three Secrets of Amazon

Fabernovel today released on SlideShare a brilliant presentation about Amazon, the e-commerce behemoth. The study analyzes the three digital engines that Amazon has used to propel its empire.

The first engine leverages the Internet’s specific characteristics to improve the very traditional “bricks and mortar” business model: real-time analysis of visitors’ behavior in order to continuously improve customer experience and increase conversion rates, extreme optimization of logistics, opening the platform to third-party vendors in order to reduce inventories, etc.

The second engine is the control of customer relationships, at the core of the platform integrating sellers and consumers.

The last digital engine is the development of an ecosystem similar to the Apple model. AWS (Amazon Web Services) is instrumental to this strategy, even if its current business model is closer to a B2B provider of hosting infrastructure.

The formidable logistical and transactional capabilities of amazon.com are used today by millions of sellers (businesses and individuals) to market a myriad of products. AWS could easily apply this model and become one of the dominant players of application distribution platforms, alongside the Apple App Store, Android Market and Force.com.

As of now, the second digital engine mentioned in Fabernovel’s study is still missing – even though AWS already offers a payment system as part of its services. Most SaaS vendors that use AWS keep their independence with respect to their customer transactions.

In addition, we’d like to modestly point out that one of Fabernovel’s slides showcases rising and established stars of the Web that use AWS, like Zynga, Dropbox, Netflix and …ftopia!

Source: Stéphane Distinguin, Amazon.com: the Hidden Empire, faberNovel, May 2011. Fabernovel’s original blog post can be found here.

 

 

Improved download links

We have introduced several improvements related to public download links. These links enable you to share files without having to create user accounts.

First change: the validity period has been extended. You can now have links expire after one month, or even keep them active forever.

When you have to share several files at once (using multiple-file selection), only one link will be sent out, and recipients will see all the files on one page, instead of having to click on each download link one by one…

Last but not least, the download link is now directly displayed in the bottom panel. You may copy it to the clipboard and email it by yourself with a personalized message:

We hope these changes will be useful to you!

Switching to Solr

This week we have migrated our search engine from Sphinx to Solr. The main reasons for doing this are:

• Too strong of an interdependency between Delayed Job and Thinking Sphinx
• Full-text searching of documents stored in ftopia

Both Sphinx and Solr are full-text search engines. Sphinx has been designed for performance, relevance, and ease of integration. It is written in C++ and runs on most systems. Solr is based on the Lucene engine; its main strengths are its relevance and its extensibility.

Sphinx and Thinking Sphinx

The ruby gem that we have been using with Sphinx is Thinking Sphinx. Thinking Sphinx has many upsides:

• Easy integration of indexing with models
• Many search options and good pagination management
• Can be coupled with Delayed Job in order to index new data
• Fast searching and low memory footprint

However some of these arguments turn out to be not so cool when the data volume or load increases:

• The engine is too tightly linked to Delayed Job; when using this update mechanism instead of an asynchronous update, all the Delayed Job workers have to run on the same server where Sphinx sits. This is a major obstacle to horizontal scalability and high availability.
• Sphinx stores strings as integers – this is a problem when indexing data that doesn’t change much, such as the name of a class for an STI model, for instance (http://freelancing-god.github.com/ts/en/common_issues.html#string_filters).

Solr and Sunspot

Solr relies on the Lucene Apache engine and is written in Java. This might not sound that cool to a number of coders, but Solr includes scripts and tutorials that make it a breeze to install the server. In a dev env, a simple script is enough to boot the server.

The ruby implementation of Solr is Sunspot. Very similar to the Sphinx and Thinking Sphinx pair, but without Sphinx’s main drawbacks:

• Indexing new data is done by sending content to the Solr server, whereas Thinking Sphinx stores them in a database before a Delayed Job worker can process them. Performances are similar as long as the Solr server response time is equivalent to the database’s. Indexing this way through the Solr server avoids unnecessary coupling with Delayed Job.
• Stored data are not converted to integers and Solr can index recurrent textual data much more easily.

Sunspot also has a nice upside for the developer: since classes are reloaded upon each request, the code that describes the index is executed upon each request too. In our app with Thinking Sphinx, this code takes more than 1000ms to run in a dev env – it’s much faster with Sunspot, about 40ms with the same indexes! In production, classes are cached upon the first execution, therefore there’s almost no difference between the two search engines.

It’s also worth mentioning that Sunspot is slightly different regarding the way the search is coded: instead of using a traditional call to a method with search params, Sunspot uses a ruby block describing an elegant DSL. Much better for code readability:

Post.search do
 fulltext 'best pizza'
 with :blog_id, 1
 with(:published_at).less_than Time.now
 order_by :published_at, :desc
 paginate :page => 2, :per_page => 15
 facet :category_ids, :author_id
end

Performance and next steps

Compared to Sphinx, Solr’s main drawback is search speed. But Solr’s performances can be greatly improved by clustering Solr servers.

We are much more confident about the scalability of our architecture now that the search engine runs independently of our asynchronous queue management system.

The next step is to exploit more of Solr capabilities and apply full-text indexing to all the textual content stored on ftopia.

ftopia joins EuroCloud

ftopia, a provider of secure online file-sharing workspaces in SaaS (Software as a Service) format for professionals, announces that it has joined EuroCloud, the only pan-European business network revolving around SaaS and cloud computing.

EuroCloud, created in 2009 by Pierre-José Billote, Founder & Chairman of the French ASP forum, aims at promoting, supporting, and encouraging SaaS organizations and cloud ecosystems in their market development.

More information: www.eurocloud.org

ftopia secured by Panda

Panda Security, the leading provider of cloud-based protection against malware and viruses, and ftopia, a global provider of cloud-based file-centric collaboration, today announced that they have joined forces in order to make online file collaboration safer.

Panda’s cloud-based antimalware technology is now used to scan files upon uploading them to ftopia data rooms. Suspicious files are automatically quarantined and the account administrators are notified about potential security risks.

Cloud-based antimalware with Cloud-based collaboration

Panda Security has pioneered in cloud-based security by developing its exclusive real-time Collective Intelligence technology, a security platform with database servers hosted in the Cloud. These servers receive and store information from the user community regarding virus detections and new threats. All of Panda’s security products benefit from Collective Intelligente knowledge, resulting in much greater threat detection and efficiency rates than the market average and an overall higher level of security than provided by traditional technologies.

“As more files are stored and shared in the cloud, so must be security,” said Josu Franco, Director of Corporate Development at Panda Security. “We are excited to join our expertise with ftopia so that cloud-based protection goes hand-in-hand with cloud-based storage.”

As a Software as a Service (SaaS) provider of online file sharing services, ftopia delivers an environment that is both secure and very simple to use for business professionals. With unparalleled protection and preservation of all data room contents as top priority, ftopia employs the most powerful combination of security measures on the Web. SSL encryption, SAS 70 type II-certified infrastructure, file timestamping, and digital signing ensure the utmost safety and integrity of data while it resides in the Cloud and transmits across the Internet between collaborators.

“Online file collaboration services have transformed the way organizations operate. They have also increased the speed and the volume of exchanged data,” said Philippe Honigman, Founder and CEO of ftopia. “Our partnership with Panda Security will enable companies to reap the benefits of cross-organization collaboration while providing an additional layer of malware protection.”

Panda Security’s antimalware protection is available immediately as an option to ftopia account holders.

The first provably secure cloud collaboration service

ftopia, a global provider of cloud-based data collaboration and storage services, and GuardTime, creator of the patented Keyless Signature™ technology used to validate the world’s data, today announced a partnership that enables businesses to securely share their files without relying on trust as a means to validate the integrity of their data.

With GuardTime’s Keyless Signatures technology integrated within ftopia’s secure rooms, businesses will be able to:

• Securely store their data online with undeniable proof of integrity, eliminating the need to rely on trust
• Safely share and synchronize their content with other people, providing evidence that the content has not been changed since it was last shared
• Convert their data stored in the cloud into safe, tamper-evident data archives

GuardTime’s Keyless Signature technology provides proof of signing authority, time of the signature, and lifelong integrity for data stored in the cloud or in transit between business collaborators. The signature never expires and its verification is based solely on mathematics, eliminating the need for secrets or keys and the unwieldy management associated with traditional PKI technologies that fail in the cloud.

Business teams can securely store and share files with proof that their data remains intact

“The integration of our unique Keyless Signature technology within the ftopia collaboration and storage service answers the most pressing question facing the cloud computing industry — how can businesses trust their data in the cloud?” said Mike Gault, CEO of GuardTime. “The answer is they don’t have to, as cloud service providers such as ftopia can now provide proof of data integrity for the content stored within any GuardTime-enabled secure storage location. Furthermore, with the GuardTime Keyless Signature by its side, the proof of integrity follows the data wherever it goes, even when shared outside an ftopia secure room.”

“Organizations are often leery of storing their data in the cloud or sharing their data with other people. However, with the GuardTime-enabled ftopia secure rooms, we eliminate the need for businesses to blindly trust the integrity of their content by delivering proof that no content changes have been made since the files were uploaded,” said Philippe Honigman, Founder and CEO of ftopia. “Integrating GuardTime’s Keyless Signature technology into the ftopia service fulfills the otherwise unanswered need of provable security for businesses interested in using cloud-based services for storage and collaboration.“

The GuardTime-enabled secure storage and collaboration service is available immediately as a subscription add-on to any of the paid Standard or Enterprise plans offered by ftopia.

New auditing and reporting capabilities

We have just released new audit and monitoring tools for all our customers, including our free plan subscribers. Our comprehensive reports enable you to obtain detailed information on all file and account activity so that you’ll always know where your projects stand.

Dashboard

At any time you have instant access to key indicators that enable efficient management of your data rooms and the flow of information. Graphical charts and room reports provide a quick view of how your account is used over time, from user activity, to content upload and download volume, to document-exchanging details, to file quantity, and much more. Continue reading ↪

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