Security and the Red Herring 100

So, the Red Herring 100 for North America were announced at a party on June 24. I know this mostly because Avigilon sent me a press release about them getting named to the list.

And good for them, but it's not like I was eagerly awaiting the list. As Red Herring will tell you, “Red Herring editors were among the first to recognize that companies such as Facebook, Hotmail, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, Skype, Salesforce.com, YouTube, and eBay would change the way we live and work.”

But, well, when you tab 100 companies every year, you're bound to strike gold every once in a while. What about all the crap companies that never amounted to anything or went out of business or what have you? And does anyone use Hotmail anymore?

Still, it's interesting to see what physical security companies are on the list. There is the aforementioned Avigilon, which does pretty cool things with high-res IP video.

We've also got, well, hold on a sec … I guess iJet counts. But they're basically just a data-aggregator. Not sure they count as part of the physical security community, but security end users certainly use their services, so I'll put them in there.

Lumigent does error and fraud monitoring, which involves risk, so they're kind of in the same biz.

But that's about it. And I clicked through to most of those web sites (gah! Do they all have to use the same stock-art provider? Does anyone think they look like real people? No one in any office actually looks like that.) to make sure I'd hadn't just never heard of the company or something.

So, are no security companies applying for this glorious honor or is the security industry just completely invisible to rest of the world, like usual? Probably the former, but at least a little bit the latter. The security industry has some cool technology - it just does a bad job of letting everyone know about it.