But, as CIOs dealing with the pains of IT consolidation know, there’s plenty more work for the federal government to do in its quest to make its federal data centers and other IT assets more efficient and cost-effective. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) said the federal government should do so almost three years ago.

Despite the reported potential for cost savings, recent reports from the U.S. Government Accountability Office highlight duplicative investments and issues with the accuracy of the data in OMB’s IT Dashboard.

The GAO report released Tuesday points out that just one of 24 federal agencies submitted a complete inventory of existing data centers, which the federal government wants to consolidate, and not one handed in a complete plan.

More generally, Rep. Darrell Issa of California said during the hearing, “estimates suggest that as much as $20 billion in taxpayer money is wasted each year.”

Rep. John Mica of Florida highlighted findings from a 2012 GAO report showing that in fiscal year 2011 the federal government “funded 622 separate human-resources systems, 580 financial-management systems and 777 supply-chain-management systems.

“So what we’ve ended up with,” Mica said, “is various federal agencies as well as offices within the different agencies making separate and very costly investments in back-office systems that often perform the same function.”

Issa has drafted legislation to set a deadline for the giving Congress a plan to implement the 2010 OMB initiative to consolidate data centers. The bill would require the federal CIO to give Congress specifics on “how agencies will use reductions in floor space, energy use, infrastructure, equipment, applications, personnel (and) increases in multiorganizational use,” as well as “appropriate consideration of shifting Federally owned data centers to commercially owned data centers.”

Clearly, the bill could benefit colocation and maybe even cloud providers. But that might not happen anytime soon.

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In the blog post sharing the report’s findings, Jeremy Kessel, Twitter’s legal policy manager, wrote that Twitter has received more government requests in the first half of this year than during the entirety of 2011. With 679 requests targeting 948 accounts — apparently more than the rest of the world combined — the U.S. government led the charge in terms of volume. U.S. officials also top the list with a 75 percent success rate followed by runner-up the Netherlands at 50 percent while many countries are at zero percent.

It’s easy to point the finger at Twitter for turning over so much data to law enforcement but, by and large, it’s just doing what’s required under U.S. laws that were written decades before the web as we know it came into existence. Google also has seen a surge in user-data requests from the U.S. government, totaling 6,321 requests on 12,243 accounts (with a 93 percent hit rate) from July 2011 through December 2011. Google’s statistics for the first half of 2012 should be available soon.

Twitter claims it notifies users of all requests to access their information, and does occasionally deny requests that are too broad or when users challenge the requests in court.

Takedown requests under the DMCA are also much less of an issue for Twitter than for Google. Whereas Twitter received 3,378 requests during the first half of 2012, Google’s real-time trackers counts more than 2 million in the past month.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock user SoulCurry.

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Yes, it’s something of a “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me” situation given the recent history with the federal government and IP laws, but Espinel’s plan looks good on the surface. At the least, it’s open — Espinel says all suggestions made via Regulations.gov by July 25 will be made publicly available. If the executive branch decides to go crazy prosecuting relatively minor infringements (like, I don’t know, Richard O’ Dwyer) or supporting draconian bills, it can’t say it hasn’t heard the opposing viewpoints.

Espinel is also requiring anyone citing the economic losses from piracy to back up their claims with real proof. This is a fair requirement. Content-industry lobbyists, especially, are notorious for claiming huge losses as a result of online piracy, but have also been accused of significant exaggeration. For example, one common question is whether individuals who illegally download content ever would have paid for it in the first place. From the call for suggestions:

Submissions directed at the economic costs resulting from violations of intellectual property rights must clearly identify: (1)The type of intellectual property protection at issue, e.g., trademark, copyright, patent, trade secret or other (2) the methodology used in calculating the estimated costs and any critical assumptions relied upon, (3) identify the source of the data on which the cost estimates are based, and (4) provide a copy of, or a citation to, each such source of information.

Of course, while this all sounds good on paper, it’s of limited utility. The executive branch does get to decide whether or not it actually enforces the laws (it decided last year, for example, not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act) and can veto bad legislation, but it’s Congress’s job to actually draft new laws for dealing with IP. And if President Obama loses in November, Espinel could be gone by January along with whatever strategy the current administration decides upon.

Still, federal regulations are still made via notice and comment through the Federal Register and federal laws are still written in Congress, not on a Google doc started by Reddit. There’s no guarantee of any particular result, but if you want to ensure the government at least hears your opinion on IP without having to employ a lobbyist, this is as good an opportunity as any to do it.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock user Wilm Ihlenfeld.

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There certainly are numerous avenues for the government to take advantage of big data, so hopefully the TechAmerica commission will be able to offer some meaningful advice when it develops its first report over the next several months. The obvious benefits from government big data adoption range from standardized data practices to improved decision-making to more-accurate intelligence, but how the government regulates broader issues such as privacy also will have a major impact on the data-driven economy as a whole.

I’m generally skeptical of anyone from the IT industry trying to influence government action on technology topics because the government spends so much money on IT, and thus, the temptation to pimp one’s own tools has to be immense. However, when I spoke with Citrix’s Kurt Roemer last year after TechAmerica’s cloud computing commission kicked off its work, he assured me the presence of so many competing interests on such commissions helps prevent against any one vendor grandstanding or trying to push its own agenda. Indeed, Roemer’s cloud-focused commission, which was co-chaired by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, released a rather insightful report on how the Congress should address cloud computing as a tool to both increase the government’s efficiency, and drive U.S. economic competitiveness.

The TechAmerica big data commission is co-chaired by IBM’s Steve Mills and SAP’s Steve Lucas, with vice chairs from Amazon and WYLE. Among its almost two dozen commissioners are Cloudera CEO Mike Olson, Dell cloud and big data head John Igoe, Microsoft Information Services CTO Raghu Ramakrishnan and Lockheed Martin CTO Richard Johnson.

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It’s hard to be a web user these days, especially since the government has gotten so interested in what we’re doing online. Bills and proposed regulations that target web activity and user data are popping up all the time, and it’s hard to keep track of what any of this actually means. It gets even worse when we can’t figure out who — if anyone — is actually on our side, and when compromise has to take the place of all-out war.

Occasionally, things are easy, like SOPA. It was a ridiculous bill for the myriad reasons cited between its rise to prominence in October 2011 and its eventual shelving in January 2012. It would have led to absurd lawsuits and would have proved to be an incredible burden for many web service providers. But that bill clearly targeted web users’ favorite web sites and the users themselves — if you were in one of those two camps, it was easy to pick a side.

Some things are trickier

I admit I have been somewhat taken aback, however, by the outrage over the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA — namely, the allegations that it’s little more than SOPA 2.0. As I explained in a post yesterday, although the bill does mention intellectual property, it doesn’t aim to target illegal downloading. It targets actual breaches of corporate networks in an attempt to steal files, and that’s a good thing.

I get why web users are gun-shy about copyright infringement, but things like legislative intent do matter. It’s probably not worth burning cycles chasing red herrings.

A law is only effective if it can withstand judicial scrutiny. Otherwise, something happens, someone files a lawsuit, and a court either declares a law unconstitutional or narrowly construes its meaning. The latter happened earlier in the week when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act doesn’t apply to cases where people merely exceed the permissions to which they’ve agreed. It’s a very good example of the importance of legislative intent, as both the majority and dissenting opinions agree on the cases the law did not intend to target (i.e., employees using Facebook at work or dating-site users lying about their physical attributes).

However, the CISPA does present a tricky question for web users to answer: When it comes to privacy, do we trust the government more, or do we trust Facebook? Jim Dempsey, vice president for public policy at the Center for Democracy and Technology, made some good points about CISPA’s privacy shortcomings in a U.S. News & World Report article on Thursday. We already knew the bill’s language about information sharing and protective measures was vague, but Dempsey suggests government pressure might make sites like Facebook willing to share more-personal information on users than they’d normally do.

The bill actually purports to put the power in companies’ hands, stating that ”Cyber threat information … shall only be shared in accordance with any restrictions placed on the sharing of such information by the protected entity or self-protected entity authorizing such sharing, including, if requested, appropriate anonymization or minimization of such information.” But even if companies would like to just provide the anonymous bits and bytes related to suspected attacks, says Dempsey, “The government can say ‘You want our secret sauce, give us all your data; if you play ball with us, we’ll play ball with you.’”

Who’s on our side, and what can we live with?

But Facebook wouldn’t do that, right? Or Google or Twitter or any of the large web companies web users sided with to help defeat SOPA? Well, maybe. After all, they’re the villains in the debate over web privacy, right? And it’s possible they’re more concerned with their own self interests in preventing attacks than they are with any specific sets of user data, right?

But doesn’t that make the government two-faced? After all, it’s the hero in the debate over web privacy, becayuse it’s the one that wants to regulate what web sites can do with the data users are all but forced to hand over in order to use any web service. Right? Well, maybe the Federal Trade Commission has users’ best interests in mind, but the Justice Department, which for years has been leveraging antiquated laws to demand user data without search warrants — and which is the agency at play in CISPA — doesn’t seem to think that data should be so private.

I guess what I’m saying is that the law isn’t always black and white, and reacting to the words intellectual property within a bill with crazy arm-waving and chants of SOPA 2.0 probably aren’t too effective. We actually need to consider what proposed laws say, how they relate to existing legal doctrine and what are the interests of the parties involved, and then react accordingly.

Often times, as with CISPA, that requires not throwing the baby out with the bathwater, or even throwing out the bathwater at all — because when Congress and industry are aligned, something is going to pass. Rather, we’ll have to determine what’s actually wrong with the bathwater and then figure out a way to make it tolerable. And those debates are a lot harder, a lot more nuanced and a lot less fun than sticking it to SOPA supporters.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user aesop.

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According to Decide.com Vice President of Product and Marketing Michael Paulson, members of the company were invited to attend the White House’s big data summit, and one of the big takeaways was that Congress might be willing to admit that it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know with regard to big data. While discussions about privacy get a lot of attention, lawmakers don’t always know how data is being used to improve the user experience. There are a lot of bills about to be written governing data use, Paulson said, and part of the summit was an effort to make sure those writing the bills don’t hinder benign innovation with short-sighted laws.

Paulson also noted that several agency members approached Decide Co-Founder and CTO Oren Etzioni a Decide software engineer and suggested they could provide datasets that might actually improve Decide’s buy-or-wait engine for electronics purchases. Decide works by analyzing large datasets on pricing and product-release information in order to give consumers an idea whether now is the best time to buy a particular product or whether they should wait because the price is about to drop, or a new model is about to come out. It also aggregates reviews, news and other info about a product so consumers can make informed decisions beyond Decide’s algorithmically generated predictions. According to Paulson, federal agencies have data on factors from energy efficiency to manufacturing location that they might be willing to share.

If you’re wondering what makes Decide such an innovative use case that it was invited to attend and speak at the summit, here are some highlights of how the service works:

• The founders and many engineers came from airfare-prediction service Farecast, which Microsoft bought in 2008. Co-Founder and CTO Oren Etzioni founded Farecast, as well as Clearforest, which Thomson Reuters acquired in 2007.
• Decide gives consumers a simple “buy” or “wait” decision on their planned purchases, as well as greater detail into how much the price might rise or fall in what timeframe, or when a new version is likely to be released.
• Paulson said Decide is 77 percent accurate on predictions and saves users an average of $54 per purchase. About 20 percent of the time, he said, there’s a good reason to wait.
• It has a 100TB-and-growing pricing database and more than 8 billion price observations to drive pricing models.
• It built the world’s large first “lineage database,” a massive store of information on what products and versions are related to each other. This — along with news and rumors — helps predict the likelihood of new models.
• Decide relies on Amazon Web Services for its operations, including Elastic MapReduce for Hadoop jobs. Other big data tools include Apache Solr/Lucene and Weka, an open source “collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining tasks.”

And we are only at the beginning when it comes to startups using data to build apps that will improve the consumer experience. Even for teams that aren’t stocked with Ph.Ds., analytic techniques such as natural-language processing and machine learning are slowly making their way into the mainstream. Just this morning, I had a call with the founders of Stazoo, a site that’s using sentiment analysis to help users determine what music and movies are hot among their friends and the greater world of Twitter users.

I have been adamant about the need for lawmakers to get a better grasp on where technology is headed so they don’t write laws that inadvertently stifle innovation down the line, and data is a particularly tricky area in that regard. If Congress and the administration are actually serious about getting educated on big data so they can ensure it flourishes, I say kudos to them.

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It’s a noble goal, but also a necessary one. Big data does have the potential to change our lives, but to get there it’s going to take more than startups created to feed us better advertisements.

Consumer data is easy to get, and profitable

It’s not fair to call the current state of big data problematic, but it is largely focused on profit-centric technologies and techniques. That’s because as companies — especially those in the web world — realized the value they could derive from advanced data analytics, they began investing huge amounts of money in developing cutting-edge techniques for doing so. For the first time in a long time, industry is now leading the academic and scientific research communities when it comes to technological advances.

As Brenda Dietrich, IBM Fellow and vice president for business analytics for IBM Software (and former VP of IBM’s mathematical sciences division), explained to me, universities are still doing good research, but students are leaving to work at companies like Google and Facebook as soon as their graduate or Ph.D. studies are complete, often times beforehand. Research begun in universities is continued in commercial settings, generally with commercial interests guiding its direction.

And this commercial focus isn’t ideal for everyone. For example, Sultan Meghji, vice president of product strategy at Appistry, told me that many of his company’s government- and intelligence-sector customers aren’t getting what they expected out of Hadoop, and they’re looking for alternative platforms. Hadoop might well be the platform of choice for large web and commercial applications — indeed, it’s where most of those companies’ big data investments are going — but it has its limitations.

Enter federal dollars for big data

However, as John Holdren, assistant to the president and director of White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, noted during a White House press conference on Thursday afternoon, the Obama administration realized several months ago that it was seriously under-investing in big data as a strategic differentiator for the United States. He was followed by leaders from six government agencies explaining how they intend to invest their considerable resources to remedy this under-investment. That means everything from the Department of Defense, DARPA and the Department of Energy developing new techniques for storage and management, to the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Science Foundation using big data to change the way we research everything from climate science to educational techniques.

How’s it going to do all this, apart from agencies simply ramping up their own efforts? Doling out money to researchers. As Zach Lemnios, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research & Engineering for the Department of Defense, put it, “We need your ideas.”

IBM’s Deitrich thinks increased availability of government grants can play a major role in keeping researchers in academic and scientific settings rather than bolting for big companies and big paychecks. Grants can help steer research away from targeted advertising and toward areas that will “be good … for mankind at large,” she said.

The 1,000 Genomes Project data is now freely available to researchers on Amazon's cloud.

Additionally, she said, academic researchers have been somewhat limited in what they can do because they haven’t always had easy access to meaningful data sets. With the government now pushing to open its own data sets, and as well as for collaborative research among different scientific disciplines, she thinks there’s a real opportunity for researchers to do conduct better experiments.

During the press conference, Department of Energy Office of Science Director William Brinkman expressed his agency’s need for better personnel to program its fleet of supercomputers. “Our challenge is not high-performance computing,” he said, “it’s high-performance people.” As my colleague Stacey Higginbotham has noted in the past, the ranks of Silicon Valley companies are deep with people who might be able to bring their parallel-programming prowess to supercomputing centers if the right incentives were in place.

Self-learning systems, a storage revolution and a cure for cancer?

As anyone who follows the history of technology knows, government agencies have been responsible for a large percentage of innovation over the past half century, taking credit for no less than the Internet itself. “You can track every interesting technology in the last 25 years to government spending over the past 50 years,” Appistry’s Meghji said.

Now, the government wants to turn its brainpower and money to big data. As part of its new, roughly $100-million XDATA program, DARPA Deputy Director Kaigham “Ken” Gabriel said his agency “seek[s] the equivalent of radar and overhead imagery for big data” so it can locate a single byte among an ocean of data. The DOE’s Brinkman talked about the importance of being able to store and visualize the staggering amounts of data generated daily by supercomputers, or by the second from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

IBM’s Dietrich also has an idea for how DARPA and the DOE might spend their big data allocations. “When one is doing certain types of analytics,” she explained, “you’re not looking at single threads of data, you tend to be pulling in multiple threads.” This makes previous storage technologies designed to make the most-accessed data the easiest to access somewhat obsolete. Instead, she said, researchers should be looking into how to store data in a manner that takes into account the other data sets typically accessed and analyzed along with any given set. “To my knowledge,” she said, “no one is looking seriously at that.”

Not surprisingly given his company’s large focus on genetic analysis, Appistry’s Meghji is particularly excited about the government promising more money and resources in that field. For one, he said, the Chinese government’s Beijing Genomics Institute probably accounts for anywhere between 25 and 50 percent of the genetics innovation right now,  and “to see the U.S. compete directly with the Chinese government is very gratifying.”

But he’s also excited about the possibility of seeing big data turned to areas in genetics other than cancer research — which is presently a very popular pastime — and generally toward advances in real-time data processing. He said the DoD and intelligence agencies are typically two to four years ahead of the rest of the world in terms of big data, and increased spending across government and science will help everyone else catch up. “It’s all about not just reacting to things you see,” he said, “but being proactive.”

Indeed, the DoD has some seriously ambitious plans in place. Assistant Secretary Lemnios explained during the press conference how previous defense research has led to technologies such as IBM’s Watson system and Apple’s Siri that are becoming part of our everyday lives. Its latest quest: utilize big data techniques to create autonomous systems that can adapt to and act on new data inputs in real time, but that know enough to know when they need to invite human input on decision-making. Scary, but cool.

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Here’s where its efforts are headed, in a nutshell:

Grants: About $73 million has been specifically laid out for research grants, with the National Science Foundation chipping in about $13 million across three projects, and the Department of Defense ponying up $60 million. The U.S. Geological Survey will also be announcing a list of grantees working on big data projects, although no specific monetary amounts are listed.

Spending: If there’s one thing the DoD knows how to do, it’s spend, and it will be doing a lot of it on big data — $250 million a year. DARPA alone will be investing $25 million annually for four years to develop XDATA, a program that aims “to develop computational techniques and software tools for analyzing large volumes of data, both semi-structured (e.g., tabular, relational, categorical, meta-data) and unstructured (e.g., text documents, message traffic).” The Department of Energy is getting in on the big data frenzy, too, investing $25 million to develop Scalable Data Management, Analysis and Visualization Institute, which aims to develop techniques for visualizing the incredible amounts of data generated by the department’s team of supercomputers.

Open data: The White House has also teamed with Amazon Web Services to make the 1,000 Genomes Project data freely available to genetic researchers. The data set weighs in at a whopping 200TB, and is a valuable source of data for researching gene-level causes and cures of certain diseases. Hosting it in the cloud is critical because without access to a super-high-speed network, you wouldn’t want to move 200TB of data across today’s broadband networks. While the data itself is free, though, researchers will have to pay for computing resources needed to analyze it.

Here’s how the White House summed up the rationale behind its efforts in the press release announcing the new programs:

“In the same way that past Federal investments in information-technology R&D led to dramatic advances in supercomputing and the creation of the Internet, the initiative we are launching today promises to transform our ability to use Big Data for scientific discovery, environmental and biomedical research, education, and national security,” said Dr. John P. Holdren, Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

It’s worth noting, however, that the White House’s approaches to capitalizing on the big data opportunity aren’t entirely novel. Open source projects such as Hadoop — the linchpin of many big data efforts — and the projects surrounding have already revolutionized the way we think about storing and analyzing unstructured data. And researchers have already had cloud-based access to genetic databases and tools — DNAnexus is hosting the 400TB Short/Sequence Read Archive as part of its cloud-based genome-analysis service, and Microsoft is hosting the NCBI BLAST DNA-analysis tool on its Windows Azure cloud.

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The entertainment industry — profit-hungry and change-averse — is already its own worst enemy. Meanwhile, the Internet economy that bills such as SOPA and PIPA threaten to derail is a potential job creator the likes of which Hollywood could ever be.

The movie industry is dooming itself

It’s true that movie studios, often cited as the driving force behind the two controversial bills, are losing money to online pirates, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. As my colleague Ryan Lawler explained in a Thursday post, the movie industry’s determination to maintain its existing distribution methods are driving consumers to seek out pirated content. We live in an increasingly Internet-centric (read “on-demand”) world, but not an anarchical one. Many consumers would gladly pay for the movies they want to see, but forcing them to watch those movies either in the theater or on DVD forces their hands.

When consumers choose to watch pirated content or to not watch at all, studios lose money; when they lose money, they cut production and cut jobs. But this downward revenue trend seems entirely reversible if movie studios get creative and figure out a way to leverage consumers’ appetites for video on-demand. Just look at the shift in Internet traffic volume from BitTorrent to Netflix once the latter started streaming movies. If Hollywood really wants to save jobs, it needs to step into the 21st century.

In TV, reality is king but benefits aren’t

It’s difficult to take any complaints about job losses in the television industry too seriously, either. Sure, networks have been better about embracing the Internet than have movie studios, but many also cling to archaic notions such as primetime programming and ever-more-expensive delivery models such as cable and satellite providers.

And when television networks spotted an opportunity to cut costs with reality television, they pounced on it. According to Media Life, reality television went from practically zero percent of the big five networks’ primetime programming in 1996 to 20 percent entering the fall 2011 season (although it peaked in 2006-07).

The result of the reality overload wasn’t necessarily a lack of jobs, but a lower class of jobs. Interchangeable reality television participants make far less than do cast members on scripted programs, and despite its decade of saturating the airwaves, reality television writers are still fighting to unionize like their Writers Guild of America brethren. As is, many are without standard benefits such as overtime pay and health care.

Given all that, it’s not hard to make the argument that it’s profits, not jobs, driving Hollywood and a handful of congresspeople to support bills such as SOPA and PIPA.

The Internet: Big, growing and hiring

On the contrary, the Internet is spawning scores of startups to go along with behemoths such as Google and Yahoo. And, by and large, they’re hiring. What’s more, the Internet economy is growing like mad and spurs economic activity from servers to data centers to iPads.

According to research from McKinsey & Company, “The Internet accounted for 21 percent of the GDP growth in mature economies over the past 5 years. … If Internet were a sector, it would have a greater weight in GDP than agriculture or utilities.” The report’s authors cite a McKinsey survey finding the Internet creates 2.6 jobs for every job it destroys, as well as “a detailed analysis of the French economy” finding the Internet added 2.4 jobs for every job it made obsolete.

Legislation such as SOPA and PIPA not only threatens content-based companies such as Google, Reddit, Dropbox or Wikipedia, but, theoretically, anyone who deals with copyrighted content in any form. The recent cases such of Veoh (which was innocent) and MegaUpload (which looks guilty) illustrate what’s capable in terms of shuttering companies under existing law. Do we really want to give rights-holders even more power to chill innovation across the web under the threat of even swifter, but still potentially ungrounded, retaliation?

Not even all copyright holders are on board with SOPA and PIPA. During a panel discussion at CES, Casey Rae-Hunter of the Future of Music Coalition made a great point about how many musicians and independent artists rely on file-sharing sites to access files when they need them or to share works with possible collaborators or partners. That’s why, he said Fractured Atlas, the Writers Guild of America West, and other organizations representing the opera and theatre industries also opposed the bills.

Protecting intellectual property and saving jobs are laudable goals, and if Congress is serious about achieving them, SOPA and PIPA will look far different when they eventually re-emerge. That’s because padding the entertainment industry’s bottom line at the expense of the growing Internet industry is not the way to achieve either.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Charleston’s TheDigitel.

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I’m glad Guardly CEO and founder Josh Sookman took my idea; when I wrote about the service in April, I closed with the following paragraph:

I’m reminded of the emergency call buttons posted at lampposts around campus at colleges and universities when I think of Guardly, only the app model works better because it’s available everywhere and seldom leaves your person.

Obviously, Sookman and company also noticed the similarities. The new service, called Safe Campus, will turn students’ smartphones — including iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 7 handsets — into emergency call buttons that are always with them and provide a direct line to campus security when on school grounds. You can even exchange text messages with campus security should you find yourself in a situation where discretion is required. When off-campus, which Guardly determines using your phone’s location data, the app switches instead to Guardly’s original model, which delivers notifications to up to 15 specified contacts and can also connect directly to local 911 services.

The service will be provided totally free for students, faculty and school staff, but users must have a valid university-issued email in order to use the app. You can check if your school is among the 67 supported by following this link. Guardly is also looking to expand the program, so if your institution isn’t listed, you can suggest it for later addition.

One challenge for Guardly will be making sure students and faculty are aware of the app. That’s why they came up with the Campus Hero campaign, which encourages students to spread the word about the free Guardly services via Facebook, or directly with each other. Increased awareness about the app could also serve as a preventative measure, Guardly hopes, since knowledge that a tool like this could be in the pocket of any potential victim might help deter would-be attackers.

Guardly original received seed funding from Toronto’s Extreme Venture Partners and Bryker Capital, as well as several Angel investors. Then, in Sept. 2011, it received $237,500 in interest-free stimulus funding from the federal government, which the company invested in developing an API to turn Guardly into a platform.

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