Read my guest blog post on Forbes as to Why Entrepreneurs are the New Asset Class.

Business Forward  is an organization that is taking on this noble cause.  They are bringing together key policymakers and innovative business leaders to openly discuss the important challenges and opportunities our country faces.  The organization is focusing its efforts on several broad principles relating to job creation, health care, education, energy, the environment, innovation and have recently expanded their outreach to include trade and immigration.

I have attended three Business Forward events this year:  a CEO Roundtable with U.S. Energy Secretary Dr. Steven Chu ;  in early April, Ron Bloom, Senior Counselor to the U.S. President on Manufacturing Policy, met with 20 leading Silicon Valley CEO & entrepreneurs in manufacturing; and a Clean Energy Investments Roundtable with Executive Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Programs, Jonathan Silver.

 I observed some very refreshing differences between Business Forward’s events and similar events I have attended in the past:

• Steven Chu, Ron Bloom and Jonathan Silver all traveled to Silicon Valley to meet with us.  They  escaped the confines of the Beltway and were getting some real world experience with business leaders.
• These three gentlemen also showed up ready to listen and it actually seemed as if they had left their egos at the door.
• The groups were small, only 25-30 people in the room maximum, so it was a face-to-face, very intimate gathering.
• There was no censorship in these discussions.  Everything was on the table.  And I didn’t get the feeling that these guys were reading from a list of talking points.
• The policymakers actually got to hear firsthand what effects their policies are having on the business world.
• No lobbyists.

We need to continue these extremely valuable discussions.  The business community and government need to collaborate more around what scientific breakthroughs are worth funding and let’s put our dollars there.  Our government needs Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to work with D.C. policymakers to help revitalize the manufacturing sector.  We need each other.  With Business Forward, we are moving in the right direction.

What happened in Las Vegas in late July does not appear to be staying in Las Vegas. 

Sohail Ahmad, senior wireless security researcher at CMEA portfolio company AirTight Networks , recently discovered a large black hole in wireless security protocol that makes any wireless network susceptible to hacking.  Ahmad demonstrated this vulnerability at Black Hat Arsenal  and DEF CON 18  in late July.  

The vulnerability has been dubbed “Hole196” and is named for the page of the IEEE 802.11 Standard (Revision, 2007) where Ahmad found the original reference.   Hole196 involves a man-in-the-middle style attack, whereby a hacker inserts himself between a WiFi user and the network to capture all traffic to and from the user in order to compromise private data.  After reading a six word sentence on page 196 of the 1200-plus page of the industry’s wireless security protocol specifications, Ahmad realized the common group key used in wireless networks was not immune to spoofing.  He was able to send a broadcast packet using the group key over the air to all the wireless devices in his vicinity and redirect their traffic through his own computer.  Because the network is being used against itself, there is little detectable evidence.  And because the other WiFi client devices (laptops, POS systems, VOIP phones, etc.) assume the hacker’s computer is now the network gateway, the devices redirect all of their secure traffic to that computer and the network access points re-encrypt the traffic with the hacker’s own private key allowing the hacker to read the once private data without cracking the encryption.

There have been claims that the “brouhaha” surrounding the discovery of Hole196 is a publicity stunt.  AirTight is after all a wireless security company and certainly benefits when new vulnerabilities are discovered.  But a publicity stunt doesn’t explain why the Blackhat & DEFCON conference organizers asked Ahmad to demo at their events or why approximately 1500 people showed up for the demo.  And a stunt doesn’t really explain why almost 200 people participated in the public webinar   AirTight held on August 4^th or why 86% of those polled during the webinar said they were concerned with insider threats such as Hole196.  And their concerns are legitimate.  According to the 2010 CyberSecurity Watch Survey by CERT, CSO and Deloitte, more than half of all security breaches are perpetuated by insiders and are a big source of loss for businesses.

We need to move beyond the publicity stunt debate to uncover what I believe is the real story here:   the valuable service independent WLAN security vendors provide to wireless security.  Small start ups such as AirTight are still uncovering significant security problems.  The company continues to innovate and make a real difference with its growing and extensive customer base (Financial Services, Inc.,  Hudson Advisors , International Speedway Corporation, Maine Medical Center, MTA New York City Transit , USAID, U.S. Oil .  AirTight  is now the last remaining independent in a once crowded field of wireless security vendors, proving that venture-backed start ups still have their place in this world and that what happens in Vegas doesn’t always necessarily stay in Vegas.

Did I mention that the Mint just won the International Design Excellence Award or the Popular Mechanics’ Editor’s Choice Award at CES 2010?  I know it’s just July, but the holidays will be here before we know it.  Click here to reserve your Mint.

Well,  today I can finally give them an answer.

And here it is, in video form (thanks Mike Arrington):
Here’s what Blekko’s founders Rich Skrenta and Mike Markson had to say about it:

You can also see what Rich and Mike had to say about Blekko on their respective blogs, here and here.

Finally, here is the original TechCrunch post on Blekko (I’ve included snippets and screenshots below):

“What Makes Blekko Different?

Blekko is a full web search engine, with regular crawls of billions of web pages. But they know that they can’t beat Google at size of index, relevancy and speed right out of the gate. So they’re differentiating themselves in  another way – by giving users tools to do new types of searches that they can’t do elsewhere. And by providing an unprecedented level of access to the algorithms and data that Blekko uses to determine relevancy.

That doesn’t mean Blekko’s relevancy isn’t great. The company says they’re on par with Google and Bing for most queries. But the differentiating feature are the query refinement tools they call Slashtags. These tools, like /news or /date or /amazon or /blogs, or any combination, make it very simple to quickly filter results to what you are looking for.

Users can create their own slashtags based on a group of URLs. I’ve created one that lists all TechCrunch sites to do easy site search. Others have created slashtags for conservative or liberal blogs, top tech sites, etc. If they make those slashtags public, others can use them, too.

The company also lets users search via a variety of APIs. Add /amazon to search on Amazon. Or /twitter to search via the Twitter API. Or just type /whatever.com to search just that domain.”

“Blekko Is Instantly Likeable

Anyone who’s used to advanced search tools on Google will instantly like Blekko. It’s much quicker than using things like “site:” modifiers on Google, and some of the searches you can do on Blekko you just can’t do on Google at all.

Will less advanced users like Blekko, too? The founders think they will. And since Blekko works just like the search engines they’re used to as well, they think people will quickly get comfortable creating and using slashtags.

Transparency

Blekko is also showing just about all the behind the scenes data that they have to determine rank and relevancy. You can see inbound links, duplicated content and associated metadata for any domain in their index.”

I think it’s about time someone started pushing the envelope again in search. And I’m betting that Rich, Mike, and the Blekko team are the guys to do it.

I’ll have a lot more to say about it in the coming weeks, but that’s my answer for right now. Stay tuned.