Dogtown Media, 228 Main Street, Suite 4, Los Angeles, CA (2026)

07/15/2026

"Convenience is the enemy of security."

Our CEO Marc Fischer shared that warning in Forbes Technology Council this week, in a panel on the tech issues remote employees should escalate to IT rather than fix themselves.

His focus: personal phones and tablets paired with work accounts. They feel harmless. They also carry company data with no managed security, no encryption standards, and no remote wipe if they go missing.

The theme across the full panel is consistent. Well-intentioned workarounds, from unapproved apps to personal AI logins, create the security gaps that hurt organizations most.

Our takeaway for any hybrid team: convenience wins whenever the secure path is slow. Make the approved path the fast one, and if a device touches company data, make sure IT knows about it.

Not every problem is safe to troubleshoot without involving IT; some simple DIY "fixes" could introduce security risks or complicate the diagnosis of underlying issues.

07/02/2026

Most e-waste doesn't begin at the landfill. It begins in a drawer nobody's opened in two years.

Our CEO, Marc Fischer, was in Forbes this week for a piece on how companies can cut e-waste, and his take is refreshingly unglamorous. Before buying anything new, audit what you've already got.

Walk through most offices and you'll see the same thing. Drawers packed with cables and adapters. Spare monitors stacked in a closet. Laptops that still run fine, forgotten after someone left. Nobody has a clear picture of it, so teams order new equipment while working hardware collects dust a few feet away.

That isn't really a sustainability problem. It's a visibility problem.

The fix doesn't need a big green initiative or a new vendor contract. It needs knowing what you have. A simple internal inventory tells you what you own, where it is, and whether you can reuse it, repair it, or reassign it. Do that, and a lot of "we need to buy this" turns into "we've already got three of these."

Cuts spend. Keeps working equipment out of the waste stream. Costs almost nothing to start.

The greenest device is the one you already bought. The trick is knowing you have it.

Companies can often reduce e-waste—and reap business benefits—through smarter operational decisions and more intentional technology management.

06/29/2026

Our CEO Marc Fischer is featured in a new Forbes Technology Council piece on what large engineering teams can take from small ones.

His point is one we think about a lot here: small teams don't move fast because they skip process. They move fast because the people building things stay close to the people affected by them.

"Small teams talk to each other instead of updating tickets," Marc says in the piece. "The feedback loop between building something and learning whether it works is almost instantaneous."

That loop is easy to lose as companies grow. Every new approval step, every reporting layer, every handoff adds distance between the engineer and the outcome. Not because anyone made a bad decision, but because each addition felt reasonable at the time.

The question worth asking isn't whether your organization has too much process. It's whether your process is serving the work or just making the work visible to people who aren't doing it.

Worth a read. Link below.

For bigger engineering teams, the challenge isn’t to copy small-team practices wholesale but to adapt the underlying habits that make them so effective.

06/24/2026

Most apps don't ask for your trust. They assume it.

You download something new, open it for the first time, and you're staring at a wall of toggles that are already switched on. Notifications, enabled. Tracking, allowed. Data sharing, active. All before you've tapped a single button or seen a shred of value.

That isn't onboarding. It's a land grab disguised as a setup.

Trustworthy products work the opposite way. They start quiet. They let people turn things on as they understand what each permission actually does for them. Consent gets earned through usefulness, not assumed at the front door.

The pattern shows up everywhere once you start looking. An app that assumes consent before earning it tells you exactly how it sees the people using it. So does a flashlight tool that wants your contacts, or a privacy policy that runs five pages without ever saying whether your data gets sold.

For anyone building software right now, the takeaway is simple. The defaults you ship are a statement of values. Switch everything on by default and you're optimizing for extraction. Start quiet and you're optimizing for trust.

One of those compounds. The other gets you uninstalled the moment someone notices.

Build like people are paying attention. Increasingly, they are.

A polished interface, strong rating or confident privacy claim can make an app look trustworthy, but those signals don’t always tell the full story.

06/23/2026

Infinite scroll was built to remove friction. No page breaks, no stopping, just content flowing forever. It worked. People stayed longer.

But it quietly took something away: a sense of place.

When a feed has no bottom, users lose track of where they are and how much they've taken in. There's no natural moment to pause and ask the question that actually matters: keep going, or stop here?

Pagination felt clunky by comparison. But it did one thing well. It gave people a decision point. A conscious beat to stay or leave on their own terms.

This is the tension every product team faces now. We optimize for engagement and call it good design. But engagement without awareness isn't good design. It's a trap, and users are getting better at recognizing it.

The teams earning long-term trust are the ones building stopping points back in. Progress markers. "You're all caught up" states. Small moments that respect a user's time instead of mining their attention.

Friction isn't always a flaw. For the right moments, a deliberate pause is what restores a person's sense of control.

The lesson for anyone building digital products: design for agency, not just time on screen. Speed matters, but orientation matters more. The products people trust are the ones that always let them know where they stand.

Features that minimize effort can also hide how decisions are made, what actions are happening behind the scenes, and how much control users actually have.

06/02/2026

Our CEO Marc Fischer is featured in a Forbes Technology Council roundup on pairing agentic AI with IoT for real-world use cases.

Marc's focus: home emergency response. Sensors already detect smoke, wind shifts and ember strikes. The technology exists. But most systems stop at the alert and wait for a human to decide what happens next.

When you add an agentic AI layer, the system stops notifying and starts acting. Presoaking roofs. Closing vents. Shutting gas lines. Handing responders a structured brief before they pull up to the scene.

The insight applies well beyond emergency response. Across every industry represented in this piece, the pattern is the same. Organizations sit on enormous volumes of real-time sensor data. The bottleneck is never detection. It's the gap between knowing something is wrong and doing something about it.

Agentic AI closes that gap. Not by removing humans from the equation, but by shifting their role. Instead of watching dashboards and reacting, people set the guardrails and govern the outcomes. The system handles the speed.

That shift from "monitor and respond" to "detect and act" is where the real operational gains live. And it's where we see the most exciting work happening right now at the intersection of AI and connected devices.

Pairing agentic AI with IoT can provide faster, more adaptive ways to respond to changing conditions while still keeping human oversight in place where it matters most.

05/28/2026

Our CEO Marc Fischer was featured in Forbes Technology Council this week, and his contribution hit on something we think about a lot at Dogtown Media.

Most conversations about AI focus on efficiency. Faster workflows. Fewer clicks. Lower costs.

But some of the most meaningful applications aren't about speed at all, they're about preparation.

As Marc put it: "A prepared parent asks different questions than one holding a folder."

He was talking about parents of children with disabilities walking into IEP meetings outnumbered by specialists who know the system better than they do. AI can help close that gap, reviewing evaluations, flagging what's missing, translating complex language into plain English before the meeting even starts.

That's one example. But the principle applies everywhere.

When someone navigates a healthcare decision, a benefits enrollment, a legal process, or a financial crossroads, the outcome often depends less on the options available and more on whether that person understood them well enough to advocate for themselves.

Read the full Forbes Technology Council article to see how 20 tech leaders are thinking about AI as a decision-support tool, not a decision-maker.

AI’s next wave of value may come from helping people make sense of complex decisions and processes when guidance is hard to find, too expensive or stretched thin.

05/15/2026

Most companies track which AI tools their employees use.

That tells you almost nothing.

What matters is what employees paste into those tools. Client contracts summarized in ChatGPT. Financial models formatted in Gemini. Proprietary code uploaded for a quick refactor. That content leaves the organization and nobody logs it.

DLP solutions catch email attachments. CASBs flag unauthorized file shares. But prompt content flows out through the browser completely unmonitored.

Our CEO Marc Fischer shared his perspective on this in a new Forbes Technology Council roundup on reducing data leak risks from browser-based AI tools. His take: organizations need to treat prompt content with the same rigor as outbound email. Capture it. Log it. Make it auditable.

Not to police every query. Heavy-handed monitoring kills adoption and pushes usage to personal devices where visibility drops to zero. But when something goes wrong, someone needs to know what left the building.

The full piece features 20 technology leaders weighing in on the problem, and several points stand out:

→ Give employees sanctioned AI tools before banning the unsanctioned ones. Blocklists just move usage to personal phones and laptops.

→ Classify your data before building guardrails. No browser extension or proxy helps if the organization doesn't know what counts as sensitive.

→ Train people on the actual risks. Every technical control loses to a well-meaning employee who doesn't understand the exposure.

The gap at most organizations sits between "we have an AI policy" and "we know what's actually happening." Closing that gap starts with visibility into the prompts themselves.

Browser-based AI tools can streamline workflows, but without clear safeguards, sensitive company information can be exposed through prompts, file uploads or integrations.

05/11/2026

Sustainability reporting has a timing problem.

Most organizations treat it as an annual exercise. A team scrambles to reconstruct twelve months of energy use, supplier activity and material flows from whatever records survived the year. The output gets polished, published and filed away until the next cycle begins.

The gap between what happened and what gets reported is where trust quietly erodes.
Blockchain offers a different model. Instead of attestation after the fact, every action is logged as it occurs. Suppliers, auditors and internal teams all reference the same tamper-resistant record. The question stops being "do we trust this number" and becomes "do we trust this system."

For organizations exploring this shift, a few principles tend to separate the serious efforts from the performative ones:

Start with the data layer, not the disclosure. A clean report built on shaky inputs is still a shaky report.

Focus on claim integrity in multiparty supply chains. Scope 3 emissions and recycled material provenance are where verification matters most, and where self-reporting tends to break down.

Pair the ledger with smart contracts that tie incentives to outcomes. Recording what happened is useful. Automatically rewarding or penalizing based on real impact is what moves behavior.

Sustainability does not fail from a lack of claims. It fails from a lack of proof. The technology to close that gap already exists. The question is which organizations will actually use it.

What's holding your industry back from making the shift?

Blockchain can create shared, tamper-resistant records multiple parties can review and trust, which could help close persistent gaps in transparency and accountability.

04/27/2026

Your brand's biggest security threat might already have its own domain name.

Domain squatting has evolved far beyond someone registering a misspelled version of your URL and hoping for accidental traffic. Today's attackers create pixel-perfect clones of legitimate websites, spin up convincing email domains, and launch credential-harvesting campaigns within hours of registration.

Most organizations discover the problem after a customer reports a phishing email. That timeline needs to shrink dramatically.

Our CEO Marc Fischer shared his perspective on this in a recent Forbes Technology Council piece, and the core message is simple: proactive monitoring beats reactive cleanup every time.

What that looks like in practice:

Crawl newly registered domains daily and compare them against your brand assets. When a match appears, cross-reference it with phishing databases and certificate transparency logs to assess how serious the threat actually is. Then act. Coordinate takedowns with registrars. Push alerts to your customers. Update email filters to block fraudulent domains before messages reach a single inbox.

The article features insights from nearly 20 security leaders, and the consensus is clear. Detection speed matters, but response speed matters more. The gap between a squatted domain going live and your team doing something about it is where the real damage happens.

Read the full Forbes piece for the complete breakdown of detection and response strategies companies should have in place right now.

Companies need ways to identify suspicious sites quickly beyond occasionally checking for lookalike domains or waiting for someone to report a problem.

Dogtown Media

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