Two Blasts From The Past In One Day: Monetate and IMCD

I got two exciting calls today from friends and former colleagues, David Brussin and Michael Miora. two of the guys with whom I co-founded InfoSec Labs and ePrivacy Group.

Mr. Miora is a seriously qualified information security and disaster recovery expert (as in Michael Miora, CISSP, ISSMP, FBCI). He has been working on a product that helps businesses recovery from disasters. It is called IMCD, from Incident Management CD, because one of its many clever tricks is to store, one on CD (or USB thumb drive or SD card) everything your company needs to know in an emergency: who to call, contact details, systems and software applications and data, by department, priority, location, and so on and, Wow, there really is a lot of stuff you need to get your hands on fast when the nasty stuff meets the whirling blades.

One reason I'm familiar with this product is that my brother (Mike Cobb, CISSP, ISSAP, MCDBA) was heavily involved, coding the interface and algorithms and such. The exciting news today was the availability of the new version, boxed and priced to sell, on places like Amazon, for $99.00. At this price it's a very cheap insurance policy and potential life-saver for owners of small-to-medium businesses as well as in charge of regional offices of larger companies. The next step in the marketing plan is to move into brick and mortar retail stores like Staples and OfficeMax. I look forward to seeing it on the shelves soon.

The news from Mr. Brussin was also very exciting--his new company's new product is ready to rock and they've just activated the first client. David is one of those people obsessed with making things work better through the appropriate application of technology. He was running his own networking company before he turned 20 and has been coming up with bright ideas ever since, like the anti-spam router, still the single most effective anti-spam tool you can buy. This latest company/idea is a means of making online retail sites work better (a by-product of spending too much time Internet shopping?). It sounds like David has put together an ace tech team to build this thing and I look forward to learning more about it.