Month: March 2014

Happy Birthday Twitter: The First Tweets from Tech Journos

Today, Twitter turns eight years old. Unlike my eighth birthday, no dinosaurs were involved. Instead, Twitter is celebrating by showing us our very first tweets (see your own here.)

We’ve come a long way since March 21, 2006 when Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass and Evan Williams all tweeted “just setting up my twttr.” (Fun fact: Dorsey tweeted it first amongst the four founders.)

Twitter has changed our lives for the better. It’s a platform for social change, a medium to accelerate the speed of information and my morning news feed that helps me catch up on what I’ve missed for the past seven hours. It helps us make informed decisions and enables anybody to connect with their local politician, their favorite athlete or a local business. It’s also changed journalism- reporters use it to get sources, share their articles, and break stories before their competitors.

To celebrate Twitter’s anniversary, we thought it could be fun to look at ten of our favorite tech outlets. Who tweeted first? What did they tweet? What reporter embraced Twitter before it became the norm? Here’s what we came up with:

First Reporter

When looking at 100+ of our favorite journalists, Om Malik led the charge. On July 14, 2006, just five months after Twttr’s launch, Om tweeted:

First Outlets:

The New York Times and TechCrunch couldn’t be closer. Of the 10 outlets we looked at, the NYT edged out TechCrunch by one day, tweeting on March 5, 2007.

The race quickly picked up speed, with WIRED, GigaOM and the Wall Street Journal all sharing their first tweets in the following 26 days:

And we’d be remiss to not share the funnier tweets from some of our favorite journalists. Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal, Arik Hesseldahl from Re/Code and Russell Brandom at The Verge’s stood out:

As for some of us at Highwire?

Beyond Snowden: A New Era of Security Disruption at RSA 2014

RSA2

Say what you want about Edward Snowden, but the fact of the matter is that his recent leak of NSA secrets has brought cybersecurity to the forefront of national conversation. This year, conversations regarding privacy were constant at RSA, to no surprise. In 10 years, when we’re commuting to RSA 2024 via hoverboard, we’ll look back and remember RSA 2014 as the year cybersecurity and privacy discussions left the hacker forums and leaped to the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

Despite the controversial buzz surrounding Snowden, whose mystery is only exceeded by his power, the polarizing whistleblower and current Russian resident still played second fiddle to the central themes at RSA 2014: continuous disruption and the recent flock of investors targeting cybersecurity start-ups.

From the industry’s first bot killer to an evolved look at geopolitical nation-state cyber attacks, the innovation and research to emerge from the industry this year signaled a changing of the guard that was hard to ignore at RSA 2014. Several members of the Highwire PR security practice were on site this year to rep our growing security practice and learn more. See their highlights below:

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Nicole Plati, Senior Account Executive
At RSA 2014, we were reminded just how dynamic and rapidly accelerating the cybersecurity sector is. You could feel it in the air: this was the biggest RSA ever. One of the messages heard over and over again at RSA was clear: if the industry fails to develop disruptive new technologies and defense mechanisms, out-of-date solutions will become obsolete as soon as they are put into place due to hackers that simply work harder, better, faster (stronger?). At this year’s show, Highwire client Trustwave reminded us that we are officially in an arms race between cyber criminals and IT professionals, and without the latest and greatest technology, IT professionals will constantly be playing catch up.

Megan Grasty, Account Executive
Cybersecurity is by definition a constant war between the good and evil. This year, my favorite keynote was from HP’s SVP and General Manager, Enterprise Security Products, Art Gilliland, who taught us if we want to succeed, we need to “think like a bad guy.” Tying in a Star Wars theme (unfortunately, no lightsabers were broken out), Art reminded us that the bad guys usually had the cooler weapons, but it’s up to all of us to use the force and build our own cool weapons that focus not only on breach prevention, but on the full cycle of an attack.

Natalie Mendes, Account Associate
When I tell friends I represent enterprise security companies, most people’s eyes tend to glaze over. However, if we’ve learned anything from the cyber events of this year, it is that cyber security may just have the largest impact on consumers of any other sector. From Snowden’s NSA revelations, to Apple OS vulnerabilities, and yes, even the Mt. Gox exchange hack, cybersecurity has never been closer to the everyman. It was with this perspective that I attended RSA, realizing that the greatest vulnerabilities and threats in the cyber world are being rooted out and stopped by the companies in attendance at the conference. In fact, at RSA this year, security companies uncovered threats exposing the confidential information of consumers such as the iOS key logging flaw discovered by FireEye and Bitcoin-stealing botnet exposed by Trustwave. If there is one industry that should excite and interest every person it is security, and RSA is a conference that brought that fact to life.