No Laughing Matter

Dec 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Sandra Kay Miller

One woman’s quest to protect her social networking site from hackers and bad joke-tellers

Have you heard the one about the Harvard graduate who gave up being CEO of two leading information security consulting firms to raise a family and tell jokes for a living? E. Kelly Fitzsimmons is chuckling as she has carries her entrepreneurial spirit and good sense of humor over into her latest venture with the online media production company, Area 444's ComicWonder (www.comicwonder.com), the first Internet-based competitive arena for joke-telling exclusively dedicated to audio.

“There are about a half million Web sites out there hosting text jokes, images and that send out jokes-of-the-day, but none of them focus on how well you tell a joke,” Fitzsimmons says.

Humor aficionados can listen to, vote on and promote jokes told by others or submit their own. Upon signing up to enter a joke on the site, ComicWonder automatically dials the telephone number entered by the user. None other than Fitzsimmon's voice offers the greeting and instructions when the user answers the call. After a participant delivers his or her punch line, it is entered into the system for anyone to listen to or vote on. Comedian-wannabes with the most votes at the end of the week have the chance to win cash as well as funky prizes such as books, hats, even a canned ham (can included) or a dog sweater (dog not included).

It was no laughing matter when it came to building security into the project. From the inception of ComicWonder, Fitzsimmons called in some of the top architecture and security minds in the business. “I told them I want to do this right. I don't want this thing crashing and burning on national sponsors,” she explains. “But we had to keep reminding ourselves we weren't protecting state secrets. By most Web 2.0 standards, it's complete overkill, but for us, we're comfortable.”

Fitzsimmons not only had to incorporate security into a social networking site but into the interactive telephone system too. “Building a social networking site isn't so bad, but if you want to have an integrated telephone system, it gets very complicated very fast. Also, if you want to do a national campaign, you need to support millions of page views to a Web site. If it's not well-architected and secure, you're going to have a mess on your hands,” she explains.

Both the telephone system and network were designed to not only withstand the barrage of external attacks, but to handle the onslaught of traffic when a “killer joke” came along. “We're interfacing with a rowdy bunch. Our target demographic is 18 to 34-year-old males. If we dropped it by a couple of years, we'd have the entire DEF CON crowd involved,” Fitzsimmons quips.

Interestingly, as traffic has ramped up, Fitzsimmons has encountered other unsavory characters on the Web in addition to hackers — the bad joke-teller. “They're not tampering with our systems, but there are some jokes that made us scratch our heads and wonder what is the world coming to,” she says. Nobody wants to be the “humor police,” but there are certain boundaries that Fitzsimmons feels must be respected. “We scan each joke for hate speech and inappropriate content,” she explains.

Coming from a security and privacy background, she is also acutely aware of copyrights, so Fitzsimmons included copyright flags in the system, so if anyone tries to post something that is someone else's material that can be documented, it's pulled from the site. “We take that very seriously. Most of the social networking model is ‘you post it, and we'll think about taking it down while we enjoy the traffic,’” she adds.

While this may sound like all fun and games, social networking sites have become big business. Earlier this year, Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook for a meager 1.6 percent share of the company. In 2006, Google purchased YouTube for a whopping $1.65 billion in the search engine company's stock.

What began as a fun investment opportunity while her children were young is evolving into a new avenue for advertising, especially in a declining medium — radio. “We want to become radio's best friend because right now radio is seeking opportunities to try to bridge over to the Internet and to figure out clever ways to connect with advertisers and sponsors in such a way to use the Internet for additional advertising,” Fitzsimmons says.

She's done her homework.

Over the last three years, radio's revenues have been flat and declining except for Internet-related advertising. The goal with ComicWonder is to assist in extended audio-based ad inventory. “You can put a clip in front of the joke that says, ‘this joke is brought to you by…’ and then go into the joke,” Fitzsimmons says. Other possible revenue streams include selling advertising on the joke acquisition system so when a user accesses the phone tree to submit a joke, there's an audio advertisement first. Another option is to create branded campaigns, which tie together radio and Internet advertising, allowing local radio stations to run promotions such as a search for the best joke-teller in a particular city or the best joke of the week. “They can use our contest infrastructure so they don't have to build out a social networking site themselves,” she says.

Fitzsimmons is no stranger to being on the leading edge of emerging trends in the technology industry. She ventured into the information security industry in 1996 when she started Sun Tzu Security, one of the first firms in the country to focus solely on information security.

“I had this vision about how business networks should be secured because I really saw the potential for great harm to be done,” she says. Driving Fitzsimmons' decision was her experience with the family's business, Paper Machinery Corp. (www.papermc.com), a small Milwaukee-based manufacturer of production machines and applications for the paper products industry.

In 1982, Paper Machinery hit the cover of World Trade magazine after a Korean company had reverse-engineered one of its machines. Despite complex legal battles over patents and copyrights, in the end, the Korean-made machines failed to work properly due to incorrect tolerances. Years later as the company installed an Internet connection, Fitzsimmons' realized the implications had Paper Machinery's competitors accessed the CAD files on the network or worse, walked in and stolen the hard drives. “They would have gotten the tolerances right, and it would have been game over. We didn't have a firewall at the time, and nobody was talking about security in the small to medium-sized business market,” she says.

After this eye-opening revelation, Fitzsimmons became more involved in security, going back to school to study firewalls and taking more classes in coding. “I felt there was a real need to secure systems.” So she started Sun Tzu and grew the business for several years before selling to Neohapsis, an independent information risk and security consulting firm offering forensic services and product testing. Fitzsimmons served as their CEO for the next three years until the birth of her first daughter. “I felt it was a good time to transition. The world of information security has gotten so difficult and so complex, and the problems have gotten much, much harder. I'm such an eternal optimist, I wanted to fix everything, but I realized that the majority of problems were pretty much people-oriented and unfixable,” she says.

Fitzsimmons feels comfortable with ComicWonder's network access control and security. “We're not going to crash when the world's greatest joke is told, but I've also learned from my experience that there is no such thing as an unhackable site.”

In addition to her work with ComicWonder, Fitzsimmons is an executive committee member for the Wisconsin Technology Council and the science and technology advisor to the Governor and the Legislature. She also serves on the Board of Trustees for Alverno College and on the Advisory Team for the Executive Women's Forum, a community of more than 200 executive women in information security, risk management and privacy.

Fitzsimmons has also shared her knowledge and experiences through keynote speeches for multiple technology and security organizations.

She lives in Milwaukee with her husband and two young daughters.

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© 2012 Penton Media Inc.

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