WMBD/WYZZ TV –
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Program to Keep Safe from Sexual Predators
From: http://centralillinoisproud.com/content/fulltext/?cid=6091
WMBD/WYZZ TV –PEORIA
WMBD/WYZZ TV –
Internet security co. found by college student
From: http://www.hoinews.com/news/news_story.aspx?id=96661
By Nishi Gupta
Posted: Friday, February 15, 2008 at 5:25 p.m.
Ricky Doyle says portcard.net does basic background checks for people who log onto social networking sites like myspace and facebook.
He says his site verifies the user by asking questions only they know the answers to.
Then it tags the user's account on the social networking sites showing they've been approved by his company.
He says it helps increase safety on the internet- especially for teens.
"Predators, individuals trying to prey on these children because there's total anonymity on these sites. There's new stories everyday. It's depressing and sad but we're trying to solve that," said Doyle, currently a junior at the University of Southern California.
Doyle says the information remains private unless police need it for an investigation.
It costs an individual $10 to get authorized on portcard.net.
It costs a family $14.95
USC juniors create site to increase web safety
From: http://media.www.dailytrojan.com/media/storage/paper679/news/2008/02/25/News/Usc-Juniors.Create.Site.To.Increase.Web.Safety-3230821.shtml
Business administration majors Ricky Doyle and Paul Loeb teamed up to turn what began as a class project into a successful, national business that could potentially change the way people use the Internet, allaying parents' fears about whom their children are talking to on social networking sites.
The site, portcard.net, began as a marketing assignment and verifies that users of social networking sites are who they say they are. It encourages people to only network with individuals who have registered with the site.
"I have 14 cousins all under the age of 16, and they were using sites like Myspace, but their parents had no idea," Doyle said. "I was concerned about who they might be talking with."
Doyle asked Loeb to get involved with the project.
"Since freshman year … he was the tech guy, the technical know-how for everything. We both share the same entrepreneurial spirit," Doyle said.
The two put portcard.net on the Web.
Portcard.net allows people age 21 and older to authenticate themselves and their children's online usernames. The user fills in basic information and his or her Social Security number.
The site then pulls background information about the user from public databases and credit records, and the user must answer a series of randomly selected personal questions in less than a minute each. Examples include mother's month of birth, previous addresses and other questions that could not be answered with the contents of a wallet.
The time limit deters imposters from registering. The premise is that only the real person would be able to answer correctly in the allotted time frame, according to an instructional video on the site.
If the user passes the background test, he or she becomes authenticated. When the person logs on to various networking sites, other users will see a message that says that person's identity is validated. To ensure maximum online safety, people are encouraged to only engage in conversation with other authenticated users.
If an authenticated user engages in predatory activity, portcard.net can quickly pull up their identification information for local authorities.
Annual membership costs $14.95 per families of up to four children or $9.95 per individual.
After creating his business plan, Doyle shared the idea with his father, who pitched it to close friend Lee Graves, the CEO and founder of ELM Group of Companies in Peoria, Ill. Graves provided some of the start-up capital, and writing letters to family and friends generated an additional $450,000.
Establishing credibility as serious businessmen has been an uphill battle for the young entrepreneurs, they said, but they have managed to attract a board of advisers that includes professors from the University of San Francisco School of Law and UC Berkeley.
"We have the technological background and they have the business experience," Doyle said.
The Boys & Girls Clubs of America has become portcard.net's first national partner. Each Boys & Girls member is authenticated for free, and the Boys & Girls Club receives 10 percent of the revenue generated by portcard.net's registration fee. In exchange, the Boys & Girls Club has endorsed the site and given it legitimacy.
Doyle and Loeb have also made contact with several prominent attorney generals who are actively involved in advocating for Internet safety legislation. One is Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal, who in May 2007, forced Myspace to turn over a list of 5,000 sex offenders using the site. The pair aims to eventually contact all 50 attorney generals.
Even with a plethora of support and new members signing up every day, portcard.net cannot fully ensure that members are protected from online predators.
Predators can still authenticate themselves as long as they are not stealing someone else's identity, or someone might hack into an authenticated user's screenname or site.
"The last thing we want to do is give people a false sense of security. The goal is to create an Internet safety zone," Loeb said.
Facebook, once primarily used by college students, has recently opened up to users 13 and older and therefore now also faces child safety issues. Doyle and Loeb were invited to Facebook's platform developing convention in San Francisco, and are now working with the company to help protect its users.
"To tell kids not to go onto these sites - that just doesn't work. Our goal is to encourage it and make it safe," Loeb said.
But that is not to say that college students are not touched by the proliferation of Internet manipulation.
For Rachel Wagner, an undeclared freshman, identity theft hits close to home.
"Last year, my friend from Minnesota discovered that someone had made a Myspace pretending to be her. The impostor posted pictures of my friend and left comments on other people's pages," she said.
Wagner's friend contacted Myspace and the account was eventually removed, but the removal process was long and tedious.
Jessica Starr, a freshman majoring in business administration, also sees the usefulness of portcard.net for college students.
"Facebook isn't just for talking to friends. We are establishing business contacts and getting job offers, and we don't always necessarily know who we are talking to," Starr said.
Loeb and Doyle said new users are joining their site every day, but they would not say how many users had registered.
They said they might eventually sell the company, but for now they plan to keep advertising it on a national level.
"We love the company. It's our baby. We want to change the Internet - we want to make it a safer place," Loeb said.
USC juniors create site to increase web safety
Portcard.net verifies users and collects information that authorities can use.
By: Taylor Friedman
Posted: 2/25/08
Two USC juniors might save hundreds of lives before their college graduation.Business administration majors Ricky Doyle and Paul Loeb teamed up to turn what began as a class project into a successful, national business that could potentially change the way people use the Internet, allaying parents' fears about whom their children are talking to on social networking sites.
The site, portcard.net, began as a marketing assignment and verifies that users of social networking sites are who they say they are. It encourages people to only network with individuals who have registered with the site.
"I have 14 cousins all under the age of 16, and they were using sites like Myspace, but their parents had no idea," Doyle said. "I was concerned about who they might be talking with."
Doyle asked Loeb to get involved with the project.
"Since freshman year … he was the tech guy, the technical know-how for everything. We both share the same entrepreneurial spirit," Doyle said.
The two put portcard.net on the Web.
Portcard.net allows people age 21 and older to authenticate themselves and their children's online usernames. The user fills in basic information and his or her Social Security number.
The site then pulls background information about the user from public databases and credit records, and the user must answer a series of randomly selected personal questions in less than a minute each. Examples include mother's month of birth, previous addresses and other questions that could not be answered with the contents of a wallet.
The time limit deters imposters from registering. The premise is that only the real person would be able to answer correctly in the allotted time frame, according to an instructional video on the site.
If the user passes the background test, he or she becomes authenticated. When the person logs on to various networking sites, other users will see a message that says that person's identity is validated. To ensure maximum online safety, people are encouraged to only engage in conversation with other authenticated users.
If an authenticated user engages in predatory activity, portcard.net can quickly pull up their identification information for local authorities.
Annual membership costs $14.95 per families of up to four children or $9.95 per individual.
After creating his business plan, Doyle shared the idea with his father, who pitched it to close friend Lee Graves, the CEO and founder of ELM Group of Companies in Peoria, Ill. Graves provided some of the start-up capital, and writing letters to family and friends generated an additional $450,000.
Establishing credibility as serious businessmen has been an uphill battle for the young entrepreneurs, they said, but they have managed to attract a board of advisers that includes professors from the University of San Francisco School of Law and UC Berkeley.
"We have the technological background and they have the business experience," Doyle said.
The Boys & Girls Clubs of America has become portcard.net's first national partner. Each Boys & Girls member is authenticated for free, and the Boys & Girls Club receives 10 percent of the revenue generated by portcard.net's registration fee. In exchange, the Boys & Girls Club has endorsed the site and given it legitimacy.
Doyle and Loeb have also made contact with several prominent attorney generals who are actively involved in advocating for Internet safety legislation. One is Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal, who in May 2007, forced Myspace to turn over a list of 5,000 sex offenders using the site. The pair aims to eventually contact all 50 attorney generals.
Even with a plethora of support and new members signing up every day, portcard.net cannot fully ensure that members are protected from online predators.
Predators can still authenticate themselves as long as they are not stealing someone else's identity, or someone might hack into an authenticated user's screenname or site.
"The last thing we want to do is give people a false sense of security. The goal is to create an Internet safety zone," Loeb said.
Facebook, once primarily used by college students, has recently opened up to users 13 and older and therefore now also faces child safety issues. Doyle and Loeb were invited to Facebook's platform developing convention in San Francisco, and are now working with the company to help protect its users.
"To tell kids not to go onto these sites - that just doesn't work. Our goal is to encourage it and make it safe," Loeb said.
But that is not to say that college students are not touched by the proliferation of Internet manipulation.
For Rachel Wagner, an undeclared freshman, identity theft hits close to home.
"Last year, my friend from Minnesota discovered that someone had made a Myspace pretending to be her. The impostor posted pictures of my friend and left comments on other people's pages," she said.
Wagner's friend contacted Myspace and the account was eventually removed, but the removal process was long and tedious.
Jessica Starr, a freshman majoring in business administration, also sees the usefulness of portcard.net for college students.
"Facebook isn't just for talking to friends. We are establishing business contacts and getting job offers, and we don't always necessarily know who we are talking to," Starr said.
Loeb and Doyle said new users are joining their site every day, but they would not say how many users had registered.
They said they might eventually sell the company, but for now they plan to keep advertising it on a national level.
"We love the company. It's our baby. We want to change the Internet - we want to make it a safer place," Loeb said.
Portcard.net aims to warn kids of potential predators in online chats
From: http://www.pjstar.com/stories/021908/BUS_BFQTSNHO.027.php
Keeping predators out
Portcard.net aims to warn kids of potential predators in online chats
Ricky Doyle believes the company he founded back when he was 19 years old will soon be a $10 million company.Doyle then would know Portcard.net is a success, both from a financial standpoint and from the way he believes would be the best measure of success - membership exposure.
"The more members we get, the more people - kids, mostly - that we are potentially protecting from Internet predators. And that is what this is all about," Doyle said last Friday while in Peoria from his native southern California.
With a national roll-out of Portcard.net soon to start, Doyle hopes a year from now to have 1 million members at the $9.95 annual fee (for personal membership, or $14.95 a year for a family).
Doyle, by the way, is now 20 years old.
Portcard has kind of a dual base of operations. Doyle and co-founder Paul Loeb, also 20, are students at the University of Southern California, better known as USC or Southern Cal. They give a mailing address in Walnut Creek, Calif.
Company CEO Lee Graves, who is founder and chairman of Peoria-based ELM Enterprises and who financed Portcard's start-up, maintains his office on State Street in Peoria.
Also, the company's national partnership with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America is getting its biggest push from - indeed, it started with - the Peoria club, which is helping drive membership.
What's more important than the company ZIP code, Doyle and Graves agreed, is to protect children from predators who troll the Internet for victims.
To that end, Portcard is about to embark on a national pilot program that will begin with Peoria District 150 schools, as well as Dunlap and Peoria Catholic schools. Materials will be given to students and their parents to explain Portcard.net and the benefits of enrolling in the program.
Doyle believes the time is right to boost membership now that Portcard is gaining affiliations with national social networks, including Facebook and MySpace.
"We want children and their parents to understand what Portcard.net is about, which is keeping the children safe while chatting on the Internet," Doyle said. "With Portcard.net, they can authenticate that the people they are chatting with are safe, even though their identities remain anonymous.
"It will still be a question of choice for the children because we don't regulate who they are chatting with. But with our program, we determine, through registration, who we will authenticate as somebody who is not a known predator. That's an important step," he said.
"If we protect a single individual, we will have succeeded," Doyle said.
Portcard.net started as a marketing class assignment. Doyle had to develop a business plan for a fictional company. He chose the subject of protecting children from Internet predators because of his own knowledge that children and teens often have no idea with whom they are chatting online.
The more he got into the class project, the more he realized it could be a viable business with the right planning. With enough financing, too, of course.
First he brought in Loeb, a fraternity brother and classmate he describes as a "technology wiz," then he took his business plan to his father's college roommate, Lee Graves.
"I've known Ricky all his life. This is a young man I trust. I think the world of him. I also believe in what he's trying to do with this," Graves said.
"I don't know technology, but I do know how to start companies. So I agreed to fund this because I want to help feed the entrepreneurial spirit of a great young man. It was, really, a very easy 'yes' on my part."
Next up was getting the Peoria Boys and Girls Club involved - Graves is on the club's board of directors - and getting its endorsement. That led to the national Boys and Girls Club organization becoming a Portcard partner.
Under the partnership, Boys and Girls Club members get their Portcard.net membership free of charge, and the club will share revenues with Portcard, Graves said.
"There are more than 4,000 Boys and Girls Clubs, so we will try and prioritize which ones we'll go to with revenue sharing, those with the most need," he said.
Such partnerships are available for other organizations as well, he said.
Doyle said another key will be law enforcement involvement. To that end, Portcard.net plans to team with police - including in Peoria - to coordinate a program of speaking to school assemblies.
"We want to reach as many as we can, but we also must be careful to make sure the kids don't consider this to be mandatory. If they think that, they won't be interested in it. We won't use Portcard to monitor who they chat with or it won't work," Doyle said.
Graves said he expects the company to grow quickly. "Already, they are maturing in dog years," he said.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Treadwell & Rollo, Inc. To Offer Identity Verification Service Portcard.net As Benefit To All Employees
From: http://news.yahoo.com/s/prweb/20080129/bs_prweb/prweb660114
Bay Area-based environmental and geotechnical consulting firm Treadwell & Rollo has begun offering all employees a free one-year membership to social networking registry Portcard.net. Portcard.net is a registry that authenticates the identity of the person behind a username on social networking services like Facebook. Portcard.net protects children, teenagers and adults against Internet predators who try to take advantage of them by exploiting the total anonymity of the Internet.
Walnut Creek, CA (PRWEB) January 29, 2008 -- Bay Area-based environmental and geotechnical consulting firm Treadwell & Rollo has begun offering all employees a free one-year membership to social networking registry Portcard.net. Portcard.net is a registry that authenticates the identity of the person behind a username on social networking services like Facebook. Portcard.net protects children, teenagers and adults against Internet predators who try to take advantage of them by exploiting the total anonymity of the Internet.
Treadwell & Rollo began paying one-year registration fees on Portcard.net for all employees and family members that registered during the month of December. President and CEO Phil Tringale decided to offer Portcard.net to Treadwell & Rollo employee families after watching news stories about the sexual predator problem for both children and adults who are meeting people on the Internet.
"Treadwell & Rollo is committed to our employees' and our families' health and safety and we're offering Portcard.net as a way to keep us all safer on the Internet," said Tringale. "This service should dramatically reduce the risk to our children and give comfort to adults in knowing that children have the ability and obligation to authenticate identities of the people they are communicating with on social networks."
"We are delighted that Treadwell & Rollo is adding Portcard.net to their employee benefits," said Portcard.net Founder Ricky Doyle. "Treadwell & Rollo's support of Portcard.net demonstrates that Portcard.net can be a valuable benefit to employers and helps ensure that their employees and their families can have safer social networking experiences."
Tringale hopes Treadwell & Rollo will become a 100% Portcard-authenticated firm and be known as a role model for other firms in the Bay Area and elsewhere.
Portcard.net seamlessly allows social networking users the option of "carding" or authenticating people who send them friend requests through Portcard.net's proprietary system. Children get into the safety habit of "carding" friends on the internet, much as they would use a seat belt in a car. In a matter of minutes, users can check to see if these new friends have an authenticated identity stored at Portcard.net.
Portcard.net stores a user's identity information in case there is a need to identify a particular registered user to law enforcement. Portcard.net does not share personal information with any other entities. Portcard.net's service is agnostic and can be fully integrated with the various social networking sites.
Portcard.net (http://www.portcard.net/) was founded by Richard Proctor Doyle III (Ricky) and Paul Eric Loeb -- business students at the University of Southern California (USC) -- to fulfill their vision of creating a safer internet. Portcard.net's team includes a strong advisory board that includes internet security specialists and current and former law enforcement officials.
About Treadwell & Rollo, Inc. (http://www.treadwellrollo.com/)
Treadwell & Rollo, founded in 1988, has become a nationally recognized environmental and geotechnical consulting firm serving private and public clients throughout California and beyond. The dedicated professionals of Treadwell & Rollo are committed to finding economical and effective solutions to the challenges that confront their clients. Clients include Fortune 100 basic industries, electronic and software manufacturers, urban property owners and developers, law firms, and municipalities and governments. The company's most visible projects include AT&T Park, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, corporate campuses for Oracle and Sun Microsystems, and the underground expansion of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. Treadwell & Rollo is currently, and has been, the primary consultants on some of the most notable environmental investigation and remediation projects in the country.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Portcard.net Registration Process
This video will show you how easy it is to become an authenticated, registered member of Portcard.net.
If you are unable to view the video above, click on this YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjNnylOpDIM
If you are unable to view the video above, click on this YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjNnylOpDIM
Sunday, October 21, 2007
New Tools To Help Catch Online Predators
From: http://abclocal.go.com/kfsn/story?section=nation_world&id=5713359
Congress Gets Involved
By Alan Wang
Oct. 17, 2007 (KGO) - There's a new effort underway to keep Internet predators from preying on children. It's an issue Congress began dealing with today and one that a Bay Area company is trying to address with some of the most popular networking sites on the Web.
Alicia Kozakiewicz, now a college sophomore, went to Washington today with her mom to tell her story to Congress.
"We just talked about everything, not just about sex," said Alicia Kozakiewicz.
When she was 13 years old, she found out 38-year-old Scott Tyree was not who he said he was. He abducted, raped and tortured her for four days in a basement dungeon.
Now a bipartisan coalition is trying to make the Internet a safer place.
Also today, Facebook reached an agreement with New York's attorney general to protect minors from sexual predators and inappropriate content. Facebook promised to speed up its process for addressing complaints.
"We hope that we are one of the solutions that they are talking about in that, because we are a solution that would help that," said Richard Doyle, founder of Portcard.net.
Richard Doyle is the 20-year-old founder of a social networking registry, called Portcard.net, which verifies users. Users must answer a series of questions based on leading industry databases.
"Nothing is fool-proof, but this is the best solution today," said Doyle.
The New York attorney general suggested MySpace and Facebook were not doing enough.
"When we went with MySpace they seemed very interested. We haven't heard back from them, so I can't necessarily comment on MySpace. Facebook was very, very interested in it. They made it clear to us that they do everything in their power to make their site as safe as possible," said Doyle.
Portcard.net is now integrated with Facebook. It recruited the support of former U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan who is trying to convince legislators and state attorneys general that this is the safety device parents need.
"We do not want the state attorney generals and/or the U.S. Congress to legislate this. We need as stakeholders to fix these ourselves," said Ryan.
However, many legislators want to act now. As many as one in five teenagers are solicited for sex, and one in 33 are asked to meet or speak on the phone.
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