Unified Messaging Meeting Held in Los Angeles

I had the opportunity to be part of a very interesting meeting recently in Los Angeles. Held at the offices, of Myspace (part of the News Corp's Fox Interactive Media Group), a group of 25+ companies gathered to discuss the need for unified messaging for cyber security education.

The companies in attendance included Myspace, Facebook, Microsoft, Google, RSA, Costco, Wal-Mart, Intuit, Symantec, McAfee, Trend Micro, AVG and my company ESET. Background and educational lectures where provided by experts from Carnegie Mellon and Palo Alto Research Center.

The mission of this group was to develop an action to develop unified messaging as part of a a national umbrella awareness campaign similar to the 1970s "Give a hoot, don't pollute" http://preview.tinyurl.com/dlt9ku anti-pollution campaign and the Smokey the Bear "Only you!" http://www.smokeybear.com/ a campaign which is now 65 years old.

On May 29th, 2009, President Obama's in his "Remarks by the President on Securing our Nation's Infrastructure" http://preview.tinyurl.com/n9jobu called for a public/private partnership to develop a national campaign. I think our group is working to rise to the occassion.

The next step's for our working group is meet in August in Washington D.C. to meet with government leaders from the Department of Homeland Security and a number of other stakeholders such as the US Chamber of Commerce to enroll their support for the initiative.