I am excited to share that the Gartner 2012 Magic Quadrant for Web Fraud Detection was released today and Silver Tail Systems was positioned in the Leaders quadrant. Placement in this quadrant holds much significance, we believe it indicates that Silver Tail has been able to successfully execute against our vision and roadmap for innovation while scaling our company to meet the requirements of some of the most demanding customers in the world.

Given it is 2012, it might be good to commemorate the tenth anniversary of what I see as the rise of phishing.  Of course, phishing really got going around 1998, but I think a lot of people see phishing as having truly hit its stride in 2002.  That's when many of the banks, and of course eBay and PayPal, really started to be hit.

Most of you have probably seen the pop-ups and other advertisements that read "Your computer is infected.  Click  here to fix it."  After clicking on the link, the end user is shown a popup that tells them it has identified the malware on the computer and the user must pay some (usually small – maybe $20) amount of money to clean their system.

I was both thrilled and humbled to see that Fast Company named me one of the Most Creative People in Business. Throughout my career I have had the benefit of working with some of the most amazing minds, whether that was in teaching me to think like a criminal, raising venture capital, or creating a product that protects billions of people online. And to see that I am being recognized with luminaries like Ben Horowitz and the founder of Hip Hop Public Health is incredible.

At Finovate Spring this week in San Francisco, there has been considerable buzz around all sorts of technologies available for financial organizations worldwide. It's a fascinating group, from online financial advice companies to multi-party payment providers to online money movers. One thing many of them have in common: service offerings on the Web.