Wanted: a handshake across the paywall

For five years I was a loyal subscriber to the Boston Globe. When I was out of town, which was a lot, I’d read it online, because the print subscription covered that too. This academic year I’m out of town more, so I canceled the subscription, because I didn’t want to pay $3.99 per week [Read More →]

What if qualified leads were free?

In terms of economic signaling, think about which is worth more: A ready-to-sell-something message from an advertiser A ready-to-buy-something message from a customer Of course it depends. A company can use an ad to signal many people at once, and to signal far more than a readiness to sell something. And now, with advanced analytics and [Read More →]

Intentcasting

I’ve lately been posting under Dave Winer‘s threads, using an OPML editor. One of Dave’s latest posts bowls right up a big VRM alley, as he says in this tweet here. That alley is Intentcasting. From my reply: In the VRM development community, we started out calling the latter category “Personal RFPs,” but in the last [Read More →]

Time for subscribers to fix the broken subscription business

I love the New York Times. I’ve been buying and reading the paper for most of my life, and consider it the best newspaper in the world. And, now that I’m spending more time in New York, I want to subscribe to at least the digital edition. But trying to subscribe is a freaking ordeal. [Read More →]

Can we each be our own Amazon?

The most far-out chapter in The Intention Economy is one set in a future when free customers are known to be more valuable than captive ones. It’s called “The Promised Market,” and describes the imagined activities of a family traveling to a wedding in San Diego. Among the graces their lives enjoy are these (in the [Read More →]

Let’s fix the car rental business

Lately Ron Lieber (@ronlieber), the Your Money editor and columnist for the New York Times, has been posting pieces that expose a dysfunction in the car rental marketplace — one that is punishing innovators that take the sides of customers. The story is still unfolding, which gives us the opportunity to visit and think through some [Read More →]

Your actual wallet vs./+ Google’s and Apple’s

Now comes news that Apple has been granted a patent for the iWallet. Here’s one image among many at that last link: Note the use of the term “rules.” Keep that word in mind. It is a Good Word. Now look at this diagram from Phil Windley‘s Event Channels post: Another term for personal event [Read More →]

Say howdy to Insidr and Glome

One is Insidr, which is “rewriting the Rules of customer support” by giving you a way to “connect directly to real people who have worked in big companies and are willing to help when the company can’t or won’t.” You post a question, offer a bounty for an answer, and get an answer from an [Read More →]

Signs of progress

The bottom line (literally) of this report on the Consumer Energy Summt in the UK is this piece of excellent news: …energy companies have agreed to give consumers access to their data in electronic format as part of the government Midata programme. Connect.me, a VRM company, gives us a way to construct “trust frameworks” among ourselves. They [Read More →]

Posted in Demand chain, EmanciPay, Events, freedom, ListenLog. Tags: , . Comments Off »

Prototyping a new business model for everything

For IIW next week, Craig Burton and I have been working on a prototype demonstrating EmanciPay, using ListenLog on the Public Radio Player app from PRX.  The description at the EmanciPay link is minimal so far, but the model has a great deal of promise, because what it puts forward is a new business model for [Read More →]