Category: Links (Page 2 of 7)

Closing a bunch of open tabs. Here goes:

VRooMy news

•  HACKMIT – Oct 4-5 (a weekend of hacking)
• Geraldine McBride (of MyWave) on corporate governance (and the importance of customer-centricity)
•  Modernizing the real estate transaction process (which sorely needs ReVRM)
•  The Marketing/Cybercrime symbiosis (T.Rob on why it’s even worse than you thought)
•  (599/2) How does Facebook track the websites I visit when not logged in? – Quora (Don Marti answers the question)
•  What Would Happen If You Let Donors Come to You? – What’s the Big Idea? – The Chronicle of Philanthropy- Connecting the nonprofit world with news, jobs, and ideas (Yours truly holds forth in a podcast)
•  Data | CGAP (interesting stuff)
•  US tech companies heading for a customer service disaster? | MyCustomer (The answer: Yes.)
•  Irving Wladawsky-Berger: On the Complex Evolution toward Mobile Digital Payments (What’s important: evolution is inevitable. And happening faster.)
•  Freelancers Union :: A Federation of the Unaffiliated (Biggest single employer is the single employer: self.)
• The Cloud Name System – Addressing Architecture for the Internet of Things | SOA World Magazine (Identity stuff. Fodder for IIW.)
• Why I hunkered down with NAB’s Cameron Clyne in an Israeli bomb shelter: entrepreneur Catriona Wallace (Australian VRooMer under the dome. I was there too, btw.)
• Deluded buyers stoke the online advertising money machine – diginomica(more on what’s not working)
• Digital Initiative – Faculty & Research – Harvard Business School (Cool new biz thing we need to get involved with)
• Philip Sheldrake | ZiL Lane 2.0 – the new killer app for the interwebs (VRooMer doing a cool thing)
• Privacy Tools for Sharing Research Data (“a Harvard-based, collaborative effort between the Center for Research on Computation and Society, the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and the Data Privacy Lab.”)
• Forrester Research (New index page headline: “Power has shifted to the customer.”)
• Lavaboom | Secure email for everyone (Secure messaging is the new black. Or the new invisible.)
•  Big Data is our generation’s civil rights issue, and we don’t know it – Solve for Interesting (Or like Big Tobacco.)
• Open Notice(Great legal hack in the works.)
• the Biggest Lie on the web: I have read and agree… (to terms and conditionsl)
• Home – The hi:project (A worthy cause, toward effects.)

Startups

• Fetch (intentcasting)
• Sandstorm.io – Personal Cloud Platform | Indiegogo
•  Shoptility (shopping)

Cozy Cloud, an open source personal cloud (and therefore VRM) company based in France, just raised a million bucks. Nice work!

MyWave, a New Zealand-based VRM/CMR (Customer Managed Relationship) company, says this in one of its recent posts:

MyWave’s vision is for an online world where individuals have control and ownership of their data and have the power to choose and create ‘segment of one’ personal relationships based on Mutual Value.

That means giving people the power to gather, control and use their data in one place; to see where they have been, what they have been doing and plan for what they want to do. It means giving individuals new ways to engage – not only with companies and people, but with the things they own or aspire to, or are interested in. Conversely, it means giving individuals the power to filter out the products and services and other personal and business clutter that wastes their time and energy.

The data an individual generates describes who they are and what they do – up to a point. Typically, that data is held in enterprise company databases. It ages, is incomplete and is stored and used in ways designed to push products and services. But if individual customer data could be accurate, up to date, and – most important – be used with the individual’s personal ownership and permission, then that data can become alive and help individuals and enterprises build a highly personalised mutual value relationship.

brand eins‘  Ausgabe 05/2014 – Schwerpunkt Im Interesse des Kunden Was der Kunde wirklich will translates as  Issue 05/2014 – Focus In the interest of the customer — What the customer really wants. It sources The Cluetrain Manifesto and more recent utterings by David Weinberger and myself.

Don Marti‘s latest unpackings of what’s going wrong in online advertising-ville:

• Leaving money on the table
• Conventional wisdom on privacy
• A non-creepy ad niche
• Turn that crap down

Dan Blum‘s Dark Lords of the Internet moves the ball downfield from his earlier piece, Covert OAuth Redirects and Perverse Incentives. The pull-quote in both: “A weak protocol meets risk aggregation and perverse incentives. There may be an even bigger story here. Unfortunately, it seems the big service providers may be equally loose on fraud, when it comes to their advertising bottom lines.”

Antony Declercq at GovLab Blog and Ideas Lunch: Doc Searls – Maintaining Independence and Privacy in a World of Security and Surveillance. Very thorough rundown of a talk I gave at The Gov Lab in New York.

In Fellow Travelers: Thali and Telehash, Jon Udell gives props to Jeremie Miller’s tele hash (“A secure wire protocol powering a decentralized overlay network for apps and devices”), along with Jon’s own work on Thali (“Building the Peer to Peer Web”).  Both are open source and have crews working away on them. Both guys also point me (and now us) toward alternative-internet.

Vendor Relationship Management: Why Nonprofits Should Care at TechSoup has a nice rundown on what VRM can do for nonprofits and where VRM stands in general right now. One pull-quote: “The movement has huge potential for nonprofits and public libraries, but it still has some ways to go in the overall technology sector.” That’s why nearly every movement starts with verticals. Uber is a perfect example. Not only is it now a navigation fixture on Google maps, but (says the company) it’s creating 20,000 jobs per month.

Geddup, a Melbourne-based VRM startup, is listed by Anthill Online as one of the 2014 Smart 100. Readers get to vote on their favourites.

In Building a Universal Silo (which he argues against), Phil Windley explains, “the Internet is the one big silo we’re after. It’s not perfect. In particular, we need to weed out some of the centralization that has crept in (e.g. DNS, Root Certificate Authorities). But it’s the one big silo we all can be a part of without everyone subjecting themselves to a single administrative authority.” He also points to Ben Werdmüller’s How we’re on the verge of an amazing new open web  #indieweb. Great work going on there, all up the #VRM alley.

Russell Brandom in The Verge: iOS 8 Strikes an unexpected blow against location tracking.

Will Bourne in Inc.: The Revolution Will Not Be Monetized. Nice profile of Wickr (“an all-but-unhackable mobile messaging app”), and founder Nico Sell. Pull-quotage:

Wickr, which was founded in 2011, has much bigger ambitions than helping people avoid the NSA: Sell wants to obliterate the business model on which the world’s most powerful tech companies depend.

Sell is part of an idealistic but ambitious movement in Silicon Valley looking to flip the switch on how we live and share and do business online. These entrepreneurs see the status quo–in which users have signed away the rights to their data and online existence to Facebook, Google, Apple, Twitter, and a few other supremely powerful companies–as not just a violation of privacy but also as fatal to innovation. “We all assumed our data was private, and now we’re realizing that it’s not, and we’re doing something about it–as a culture, as a society,” says Brian Blau, Gartner Group’s research director covering social networks. “I’m seeing this all over the place. The pendulum is swinging,” he says, adding that he is in the middle of a project tentatively called “Power to the People.” “If people demand better privacy controls, then the natural outcome is that they’re going to want more control of their data, and eventually they’ll realize their data has value. I think there’s a big business there.”

This sector is only just emerging, but Sell certainly sees the potential. “I want [Wickr] to replace Facebook and Skype–simultaneously,” she says. And she isn’t kidding. “We’re hoping to create an entire marketplace and have thousands of apps running off Wickr software.”

In fact, a cluster of young companies is forming around the premise that users will demand more control of their online data and that the Googles and Facebooks of the world will give in 
to that demand–or be replaced. As Johannes Ernst, CEO of the company that makes Indie Box, a personal server that debuted in May, asks: “Why can’t we have all the same chatting and things we like to do online without Mark Zuckerberg in the loop? Why do we need him?”

Naturally, many eyes will roll at the thought of a guerrilla force of furry little “open Web” usurpers setting their sights on Zuck. But Apple laughed at Android, too, once upon a time. Sell believes we can rebuild our online lives around a new model and open up a vast commercial terrain in the process. “They are stealing,” she insists. “I think that Google and Facebook, in another 30 years when we look back, will be the robber barons of our time.”

Also featured are Ansa (“Communicate off the record, so no trace of your conversation is left behind”) and Omlet (“Unlimited free messaging with control over your data.”)

Thanks to Johannes for bringing this piece to my attention. Also thanks to the Personal Clouds list for pointing out “patents pending” on every Wickr page, and its apparent absence of source code to inspect. Alec Muffett also wrote about this two years ago. When another contributor to the list took issue with criticizing Wickr for its patents and (apparently) hidden source code, I wrote this back to the list:

These are fraught issues.

That Wickr would require NDAs is not unusual. Nor (imho) should that make it a non-starter, at least at this stage of the company’s game.  But it does give me some of the same pause it does (another contributor to the list).

I have my own problems with patents:

• An open letter on patents 12 years later
• An O’Reilly interview on patents
• A Linux Journal article I wrote on patents

Still, I know many companies that say they cannot get funding or operate in markets such as finance and government without standing on patents they hold.

I know others that patent everything they can, just to protect themselves and their work from “submarine” patents and patent trolls.

Large companies — ones that can afford to patent everything they want — often deploy patents like nuclear weapons: something they never use, but which give them bargaining power with other big companies. Sometimes that bargaining power opens rather than closes markets.

And I know others (including big companies such as the kind just mentioned) who patent their work for the purpose of opening it up to everybody. Digital, Intel and Xerox together did this with their patents for Ethernet. They held (and presumably still hold) those patents while also letting the whole world use Ethernet at no cost. This led them to beat Token Ring in the marketplace. Ethernet was free and open (but owned) while Token Ring was costly and closed (and owned). The whole world uses Ethernet today.

Source code is another issue. There are the kinds of code that use licenses approved by the Free Software Foundation or the Open Source Initiative (including most things called “open source”). There are kinds that are open and frozen in place and left stable for the world to use (e.g. RSS 2.0), but don’t bother with getting FSF or OSI approval. I am sure there are other variants as well. Still, it would be nice if Wickr could expose at least some of their code for the world to see and trust.

Anyway, it’s complicated.

Steve Lohr in The New York Times: New Curbs Sought on the Personal Data Industry. It begins,

The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday called on Congress to protect consumers against the unchecked collection and sharing of their digital data — from websites visited to their marital status — by providing people with tools to view, suppress and fix their information.

The agency also said the little-known companies, called data brokers, that analyze and sell huge amounts of the consumer information for marketing purposes, needed to be reined in and more transparent to the public.

Companies that trade in consumer data, the agency said in a 110-page report about the industry, suffered from “a fundamental lack of transparency.”

RT News: German ‘NSA-proof’ private server raises $1mn crowdfunding in 89 minutes. The server is for small companies, but it’s a harbinger for personal servers as well.

Recent VRM tweets:

Bill  ‏@RealEstateCafe .@hackyourcity Just glossary or LIVE notes at event, then collaborate / act post event? #IIW #VRM model http://InternetIdentityWorkshop.org  #HackHousing from Boston, MA

NZN ‏@NZN  United Individuals of America http://www.moxytongue.com/2014/06/united-individuals-of-america.html … #SovereignSourceAuthority #indieTech #vrm #econID #PDF2014 #MITTRSummit #govlab #IDESG 

my wave ‏@mywaveme A simple and informative look at the new marketing economy. http://slidesha.re/1oF4HM9  #cmr #vrm

NZN ‏@NZN  What is #SovereignSourceAuthority you ask http://www.moxytongue.com/2012/02/what-is-sovereign-source-authority.html … #econID #indieIDP #indieTech Individual Human Power,Pre-Administration #vrm

EPIC ‏@epicress  Jun 6 Come to the #VRM training course for Building Quality Business Relationships Join us here > http://goo.gl/rH1Hzh  #atx #realestate #VRMU

Luc Dancause ‏@eldancos  Jun 5 Ds universitaires, mais aussi ds représentants de ministères, d’associations et d’OBNL participent aux discussions sur #densification #VRM

James Bryce Clark ‏@JamieXML  Jun 5 Want to be cheered up, after that? Here: http://werd.io/2014/how-were-on-the-verge-of-an-amazing-new-open … #IndieWeb #VRM @benwerd @aral #open #FOSS

NZN ‏@NZN  Jun 5 Root Data Structure of Society http://www.moxytongue.com/2014/06/root-data-structure-of-society-internet.html … #PDF14 #vrm Our Integrity is a Structural Concern.

kidOYO ‏@kid_OYO  Jun 4 @RappaportSteve Society has root data model problem caused by flawed #administrativeprecedence http://www.moxytongue.com/2013/01/administrative-precedence.html … #indieIDP #vrm

vdA Zuid-Holland ‏@PvdAZH  Jun 4 PvdA vraagt om meer aandacht voor ondergrondse infrastructuur voor bv datatransport, glasvezel, CO2 leidingen, warmtemeter #VRM @siebekeulen

PvdA Zuid-Holland ‏@PvdAZH  Jun 4 Behandeling Visie Ruimte en Mobiliteit door @siebekeulen over onzekerheid bestaande initiatieven, leefbaarheid kleine kernen en rol PS #VRM

Maarten den Braber ‏@mdbraber  Jun 3 @dsearls unfortunately with the acquisitions it also becomes exponentially harder to get in touch and ask questions #vrm 🙁 @movesapp

Doc Searls ‏@dsearls  Jun 3 @movesapp Post- the new privacy policy, I will gladly pay you to have full control over who and what I share my data with. #VRM

Geraldine McBride ‏@geraldineglobal  Jun 3 This research paper ably demonstrates the advantages of turning CRM into CMR. MyWave enables this. http://bit.ly/Q7SKl2  #cmr #vrm

Erik Cecil ‏@erikcecil  Jun 3 #facialrecognition workshop today at NTIA #privacy #bigdata #GRM #VRM http://www.ntia.doc.gov/other-publication/2014/06032014-facial-recognition-technology-multistakeholder-process-webcast …

Dion Hinchcliffe ‏@dhinchcliffe  Jun 3 RT @windley: Building a Universal Silo http://www.windley.com/archives/2014/06/building_a_universal_silo.shtml … #vrm /cc @dsearls < “The Internet is the one big silo we’re after.” +1

Graham Hill ‏@GrahamHill  May 20 Acting in the interests of customers is the best way to comply with data laws http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/disciplines/direct-marketing/opinion/acting-in-the-interests-of-customers-is-the-best-way-to-comply-with-data-laws/4010537.article?cmpid=directfocus_292038 … #privacy #vrm

Joe Pine ‏@joepine  May 15 RT @mywaveme: Our technology expert James Ladd on how the personal touch builds a loyal audience http://bit.ly/1mZIlm0  #vrm

Josh Weinberger ‏@kitson  May 13 Opp.Research2.0 #crm #vrm RT @TechCrunch SocialRank Raises $1M To Help Brands ID Competitors’ Most Valuable Followers http://tcrn.ch/1gzHKn3

James Ladd ‏@jamesladd  May 12 Is a personal cloud/ VRM in your future? http://mywave.me/news_blog#blog  #vrm @dsearls #personalcloud

Toon Vanagt ‏@Toon  May 12 “Not paying for a product? You’re the product” becomes “Your data is someone else’s property even when paying”: http://readwrite.com/2014/05/12/personal-data-privacy … #VRM

Bill Wendel ‏@RealEstateCafe  May 11 Want an amendment to Constitution that says U own Ur data? http://nyti.ms/1kW1SCr  Don’t wait to get started http://RespectNetwork.com  #VRM #IIW

The marketplace

• Tim Harford: Casinos’ worrying knack for consumer manipulation
• Doug Weaver: Dead Internet Ideas: The ‘Right’ to Target.

VRM and Personal Clouds

• Fatemeh Khatibloo at Forrester is tweeting for #VRM and related updates.
• Ctrl-Shift interviews MyWave‘s Geraldine McBride about what her new company is up to. Note that MyWave finds it best to market VRM as CMR — Customer Managed Relationships. That’s cool. Whatever works.
• All the stuff at Customer Commons.
• Dan Blum, Security Architect: Semantic Data as an Architectural Element of Personal Clouds and Big Privacy. Subhead: Semantic data is the third architectural element in the Big Privacy framework for infusing privacy into Big Data and other online processes.
• Mashable on Blackphone, which “aims to put privacy in your hands, protecting you from anyone wanting to snoop into your private data — even the NSA.”

Surveillance vs. Privacy

• Don Marti: Adtech, privacy, fraud control: pick two?
• Mike Gurstein: So What Do We Do Now? Living in a Post-Snowden World
• Mashable Report: Benefit of NSA Spying is ‘Overblown’ It begins, The National Security Agency’s controversial PRISM and phone metadata programs had a “minimal” contribution in the investigation of 225 terrorism cases, a new study finds.
• John H. Clippinger in ID3: The Spy-Phone vs. My-Phone: Moto X and Google Now. Pull-quote: The Google Now Panopticon is nothing if not omniscient and omnipresent. But what makes it so insidious is its invisibility to users and regulators alike. Google controls the collection, analysis, sharing and sale of your most personal data. The same insidious tactics are also used by Facebook, Apple, LinkedIn, and a slew of others. The standard M.O. is to “nudge” users to relinquish their data rights in order for them to have access to what have become essential public services…The tangible threat to individual freedoms by posed the surveillance powers and business models of Moto X and Google Now might be such a catalyst. It might trigger a revolution of social innovations for not only more open mobile technologies, but for new forms of social organization, participation, governance and privacy regulation. Now that would be really unexpected and radical.
• Slashdot: Actually, It’s Google That’s Eating the World. Pivots off this.
• Australian Government ASRC (Australian Law Reform Commission): 45. Overview: Office of the Privacy Commissioner: Enforcing the Privacy Act. Pull-quote: …the Commissioner will ‘be the means by which there will be accountability to the public on the use by government of their personal information’.This expectation applies equally to the use of personal information by organisations. Bonus link.
• Academics Against Mass Surveillance.
• Juan Cole: NSA Surveillance is about Control & Leverage, not Security. Pull-quote: For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA’s latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line — like, in fact, the steal of the century.

Research

• Data & Society issues a Call for Fellows. Particulars: The fellowship program is intended to bring together an eclectic network of researchers, entrepreneurs, activists, policy creators, journalists, geeks, and public intellectuals who are interested in engaging one another on the key issues introduced by the increasing availability of data in society. We are looking for a diverse group of people who can see both the opportunities and challenges presented by access to data and who have a vision for a project that can inform the public or shape the future of society.

VRM developments

• List of developers and related projects and people on the ProjectVRM wiki. Please make or send your updates.
• Phil Windley: Intention Generation: Fuse and VRM. Pull-quotage:Fuse, our connected-car product is an intention generator. Here’s a few examples:
  • When Fuse sees your gas tank is nearly empty it can generate an intention to buy gas.
  • When Fuse indicates it’s time for an oil change or tire rotation, it can generate an intention to have the car serviced.
  • When the vehicle raises a diagnostic code, Fuse can generate an intention to get the car fixed.
  • When insurance is up for renewal, Fuse can generate an intention to solicit quotes for a new policy.
  • Geofences could be linked to intentions.
  • Even a crash, sensed by Fuse’s accelerometers, is an intention to seek emergency services.

  As an intention generator Fuse could be seen as a brand-new way for companies to spy on drivers. But we don’t think it has to be that way. If Fuse is going to generate intentions that can be acted on while preserving owner choice and privacy, it must also provide owners with two things:

  1. A way to see, select, and interact with vendors—both those who the owner has an existing relationship with and those who might be good candidates for future purchases.
  2. A way to use intentions and the make the choices that only the owner can make. For example, when my insurance is due, Fuse needs to ask me if I’m happy with my current insurance before going out to solicit bids.

  Both of these features are about providing owner choice and putting the owner in control. In the terminology of VRM, the thing providing these features is typically called the “4th party” and refers to the system that is acting on the customer’s behalf.

• Customer Commons Web Pal.
• Joshua Kopstein in The New Yorker: The mission to decentralize the Internet. Has this line: … average users can create personal clouds to store data that they can access anywhere, without relying on a distant data center owned by Dropbox or Amazon.

Privacy

• Simon Davies in The Privacy Surgeon: EU Data Protection reforms go into meltdown as legal advice triggers a fundamental conflict.
• Dan Roberts and Jemima Kiss in The Guardian: Twitter, Facebook and more demand sweeping changes to US surveillance. Subhead: Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, Apple and LinkedIn to call for reforms to restore the public’s trust in the internet
• inrialpes.fr/planete/people/lukasz: Selling off Privacy at Auction in Less than 100 ms, for less than $0.0005

Business

• Jamie Smith: Thinking about Moments and Thinking about Context.
• Karl Bode in Broadband Reports: AT&T Offers $70 1 Gbps in Austin — With a Big Catch. Pull-quote: “The asterisks (**) on the Premiere offer indicates that you must agree to participate in AT&T Internet Preferences behavioral tracking and ad service if you want that price point. Internet Preferences “may use your Web browsing information, like the search terms you enter and the Web pages you visit, to provide you relevant offers and ads tailored to your interests,” says AT&T. That’s a thirty dollar markup from Google Fiber pricing simply for not wanting to have your online activity watched and monetized by AT&T. While Google tracks search history, cookies and GPS location data, AT&T’s Internet Preferences appears to use deep packet inspection (a la Phorm or NebuAD) to monitor each and every packet, including how long you spend on specific websites.
• Johannes Ernst: There are only three business models.

VRM

• There is an interesting correlation happening right now between online advertisers and adblocking technology: they’re both growing. By Till Faida, co-founder of Adblock Plus, in RealBusiness. Pull-quotage…”Our ultimate consideration, however, should lie in keeping these decisions in the users’ hands. So, adblockers should not rid the Internet of all advertising, they should give users the choice to rid their version of the Internet of annoying advertising. Giving the public control is the crux on which the entire issue pivots.”On this front we are not alone. We’ve found common ground with user-rights groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and researchers like Doc Searls and his Harvard-based VRM-Project. In addition, groups like Mozilla and news outlets like CNET have recommended this approach.”We believe in an Acceptable Ads initiative to provide a middle ground for a sustainable advertising landscape. Websites that wish to do so apply to be whitelisted and if their ads conform to the established guidelines, users see the ads they serve under default settings.”
• Till also wrote this piece, in French for Rue89. I believe it’s the same one, but not sure.
• Mobile Is Huge — But Two Key Elements Could Slow Its Growth. By Terry Heaton in StreetFight. Sez Terry…”We’re weary of running a relentless gauntlet of jumping, screaming, frantic warnings, hands grabbing, voices shouting, noise-making, disjointed movements, and the almost demonic reaching for our wallets coming from advertising. This is Madison Avenue’s idea of perfection, and the only way you can get there is to completely ignore the effect of advertising on the very people you’re trying to influence. The Web is, at core, a pull mechanism, not one that pushes. It’s why all those big projections of advertising “potential” have turned into a commodified “pennies for dollars” reality.”Doc Searls is onto something with his “Vendor Relationship Management (Project VRM)” concept at Harvard, for it fits the postmodern cultural shift like a glove. VRM is all about empowered consumers who send advertising messages back to the market, where they are bid on by service and goods providers, and you can bet that it will be primarily a local experience (although let’s not underestimate companies like Amazon). In the VRM model, there are ‘fourth parties’ who work on behalf of consumers to send the messages to third parties representing the manufacturers, retailers, or whatever.”
• Fundamental Features of Persistent Compute Objects by Phil Windley.
• My Dryer: A SquareTag Case Study By Phil Windley.
• CRM Meets VRM: How a Personal Cloud Network Will Enable Real Vendor Relationship Management. A Respect Network event. Watch that space for a recording of the webinar.
• Bill Wendel, Real Estate VRooMer, on the above. In answer to “How can homeowners who are watching the housing market to decide when to sell,” “How would they issue that IntentCast?” and “Right now, there is a shortage of inventory, so seems the opportunity for intentcasting (in real estate) is at hand,” Bill writes,  Eager to pursue answers to that question at IIW, and glad to Hangout on Google before that event with others interested in real estate use cases, or what we call reVRM.  For 22 idea starters, see reVRM-Minifesto on slides 13-15: http://bit.ly/reVRMgameChanger
• #datatuesday, a #VRM event in Paris.
• Personal Clouds Are Rolling In, by Elizabeth Glagowski of Peppers & Rogers Group. A flattering short piece. (Small correction: I am no longer a fellow at the Berkman Center — which I was from 2006-2010 — but remain involved while continuing to run ProjectVRM.)

Intention Economy

• The Art and Science of Creating a Psychic Brand, by BusinessWire, for Peppers & Rogers. It begins, “Many companies today are still trying to scale relationships with their customers – by minimizing actual human contact, scripting human interactions and treating customers according to antiquated stereotypes and profiles. In reality, brands should be ‘treating customers like the gods by whose grace every company exists.’ Those words, chosen by Doc Searls, author of The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge, may seem a bit excessive, but they are as true as they are shocking to hear. Customers are the gods of any brand, they can give it life or banish it into obscurity – in order to thrive, it is important for a brand to be psychic, so it can anticipate the will of the gods and avoid their wrath.”
• Everything you think about big data is wrong! By Tracey Parsons in Social Media Explorer. Pull-quotage: “We must change the way we think about customers“When we remember that our customers are people and not “consumers” or “targets” we can better treat them like people. Brands desperately want relationships with their customers. Customers just want their toothpaste. They don’t want big data, but they might want a coupon for toothpaste. They are not thinking about us in the same way we are thinking about them. In fact, customers are getting wise to our trickery and it is having quite the opposite effect. Instead of thinking about our products, they are thinking about ways to block our product messages. They are looking for ways to hide from us. They are feeling stalked.”Trust me when I say that I understand that tracking and building shopper profiles allow us to measure our work. Measuring our work is one of the most critical challenges marketing leaders face today. Showing a return on investment keeps many awake at night. But if the data is bad and turning off our customers, it is time we look for new ways to reach customers. We need to be thinking about small data, personal data, one person’s data, not big data. We should be thinking about intentions and how we can allow our customers to share their intention with us in a way that is not creepy. People are not ones and zeroes. They are more than that, and we need to start treating them that way.”Project VRM inspired this post. If you have some time this fall, do read The Intention Economy.”
• If ad-blockers threaten revenue, then what’s the solution? By Colin Strong in Newsline. Pull-quotage: “Just as robotics expert Masahiro Mori first suggested in the early 1970s, perhaps there is an ‘Uncanney Valley’ where automated systems get too human like and leave us feeling ‘creeped out’. If we accept this premise then there comes a point at which targeted advertising ceases to improve in effectiveness and consumers get turned off. And this is perhaps an indication that a new era of Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) may start to replace the current authority of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). This is a world in which consumers are actively managing their relationship with brands rather than being the passive recipient of advertising. The term for this shift, created by academic and commentator Doc Searls, is the Intention Economy. In the Intention Economy consumers take responsibility for holding their own data about themselves in personal clouds, collecting it from a variety of government agencies and brands – which forms a fundamentally new value exchange between brands and consumers. So consumers are placed firmly at the centre of their own personal data, being able to collect and integrate it from a multitude of different sources. Consumers may choose to provide brands with selected parts of this data when they wish to engage with them on a purchase decision.”
• The Cost of Identity in the Personal Data Economy. By John C. Havens in Huffington Post. Writes John,’We have to rethink our institutional structures.’ John Henry Clippinger is a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab Human Dynamics Group and the cofounder and Executive Director of ID3, (the Institute for Institutional Innovation & Data Driven Design). He and his ID3 cofounder, Alex “Sandy” Pentland have created The Open Mustard Seed Project (OMS) to combat the existing model of data exchange for the Internet economy. ‘There’s a logic among companies that collect data which is, If I can get away with something, I can do it,’ notes Clippinger. ‘But they don’t understand the ecosystem they’re creating.'”OMS is building a data banking methodology through a technical architecture they call the, ‘Trustworthy Compute Framework’ (TCF). This allows users to create their own personal data cloud that reverses the current transactional nature of the ‘freemium’ Internet economy. Instead of individuals sacrificing their data in exchange for services, they create general preferences around which companies they’d like to engage with and how. Here’s how the Open Mustard Seed wiki describes the need for this new paradigm:
  

  Users have not had an easy or reliable means to express their preferences for how their personal data may be accessed and used, especially when one context (a bank) differs so much from another (a health care provider) and still others (family and friends). A user may not know with whom they are really transacting, nor can they readily verify that their privacy preferences are actually respected and enforced.

  “OMS lets users curate their digital personas and manage the data they collect, produce and distribute. They can also pre-determine privacy and other settings for social networks or transactions with brands. This is a critical idea regarding personal data banks — they don’t hinder transactions with companies looking to communicate with consumers. Relationships are actually enhanced via increased trust since people know what organizations will do with their data, and will be more likely to volunteer specifics about their lives in this new transparent framework. (This is an idea known as Vendor Relationship Management, or VRM, eloquently elaborated in the book, The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge, by Doc Searls.)

  “Clippinger is evangelistic about the timing for a solution like OMS, noting what will happen if we don’t change the tide of how our data is managed in the current Internet economy — ‘If you don’t have an open platform, you don’t have an open society.’

  BTW, John was for a long time a Senior Fellow at the Berkman Center, and brought me in as a fellow there, back in 2006.

Trends

• Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2014, in BusinessWire. SD Times (@sdtimes) explains: “Gartner’s Top 10 strategic technology trends for 2014 include:1. Mobile Device Diversity and Management
  2. Mobile Apps and Applications
  3. The Internet of Everything
  4. Hybrid Cloud and IT as Service Broker
  5. Cloud/Client Architecture
  6. The Era of Personal Cloud
  7. Software-Defined Anything
  8. Web-Scale IT
  9. Smart Machines
  10. 3-D Printing”
  You’ll find at least the first six touched upon by the writings of Phil Windley, including those below.

Advertising and Marketing

• The Rise of Ad-Blocking. A .pdf report by PageFair. Average rate: 22.7%. Growth rate: 43%. Expected rate by 2018: 100%
• Adblocking — Looking for a solution. By Sue Gee in I Programmer. Part II: Fighting Back.
• Contrarian Marketing in the “Us” vs. “Them” era. By Marc Canter in Holding Office Hours at the Creamery. “This is the era where US (the users) are increasingly figuring out that commercial interests (THEM) are exploiting and manipulating US for the purposes of generating the evil dollar.  While the social networking powerhouses do their IPOs and desperately search for additional revenue streams; true sharing-economy powerhouses are being born every day – which bring true disruptive power to the masses (AirBnb, Uber, etc.)”
• Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful. By Don Marti.
• Targeted advertising to be subject to ‘do not track’ standard. At Out-Law.com.
• Resignation from the Tracking Protection Working Group, by Jonathan Mayer.
• Jonathan Mayer To ‘Do Not Track’ Working Group: I Quit. By Judith Aquino in Ad Exchanger.
• Pinterest Won’t Collect Data When Users Turn On Do-Not-Track.By Wendy Davis in MediaPost.
• Third Party. Mozilla Wiki. “Prevents automatic tracking by third parties across different sites.”
• Let’s Turn Do Not Track Into a Dialog. By yours truly, last September. Still holds.
• What Matters to Users? Factors that Affect Users’ Willingness to Share Information with Online Advertisers. By Pedro Giovanni Leon, Blase Ur, Yang Wang, Manya Sleeper, Rebecca Balebako, Richard Shay, Lujo Bauer, Mihai Christodorescu, and Lorrie Faith Cranor, of Carnegie Mellon University, Syracuse University and Qualcomm.

Midata Innovation Lab Launches. By Alan Mitchell at  Ctrl-Shift. Pull-quotage:

The Lab is a world first in three ways.

• It’s the first time individuals will be empowered as the point of integration of data about their own lives. Financial transactions, energy consumption data, phone data and lots of other data sets including previously uncollected data such as individuals’ plans, preferences and intentions will be gathered and orchestrated by individuals, around those individuals.
• It’s the first time that some of the infrastructure individuals can use to protect, manage and control the sharing of this data will be tested in anger: personal data stores.
• And, for the first time, organisations will be able to play with the data, on a permissioned and controlled basis – data that gives them a genuine single customer view, a view that spans many aspects of the individual’s life, not just relating to their dealings with that organisation – to innovate new services.

Follow the Midata project at @midataBIS, and visit Midatalab.org.uk.

Also by Alan and Ctrl-Shift: How to value personal data.

Personal Cloud London Meet-up: Thursday, July 11, 2013 from 6:00 PM to 9:00 PM (BST). Hosted by Iain Henderson and Peter Stepman.

Personal Data and CloudOS, by Phil Windley. Pull-quote: “You could imagine things like openPDS or personal.com serving as a foundational store for the CloudOS PDS without applications needing to understand or know their specific APIs. I recently demonstrated how Dropbox can be linked into CloudOS. The PDS could provide a consistent API for some or all of these.” Also by Phil: Facebook for my stuff.

Start controlling your data, by Jay Deragon. Pull-quotage:

…our medical records are stuck in silos and difficult for different providers to access. Yet patients do have rights to their records and because of technology you can collect and store your records (medications, health history, treating physicians, hospitals, recent lab reports etc. etc. on a wristband or a necklace in a tiny USB Medical Alert Drive. Think about downloading this kind of data to a cloud and having it accessible through a device you wear.

There are other tools in the marketplace for users to begin to gather their own data but it is still far from what should be made available if only the suppliers understood the value they could create by unleashing data from their silos. Anytime you create more value for buyers and value that saves them time, money and enhances their life you are do so by enabling them to do it with their own data.

That is the opposite of using the buyer’s data to create more value for limited selfish gains and calling it competitive advantage.  By empowering the buyer with their own data you are in fact creating more value for your business by expanding your marketplace.

That is called creating intangible value. Of course that is something you can’t see but know it is real and must believe it is so in order to see and make it tangible.

Lunch with Alibaba: If C2B Replaces B2C, Then What Happens to B2B?. By Michael Cole in Mingtiandi. Pull-quote: “According to Zeng’s vision, e-commerce in China, and around the world, is moving toward a Dell-style model, which he terms C2B because it is driven by the consumer, wherein the buyer makes the decisions about what is on offer, and companies will compete to supply these products in the fastest time and at the lowest price.”

Centrify CEO on Dropbox, KNOX, Microsoft, and the future of identity, by Matt Rosoff in CiteWorld. Pull-quote: “Soon, we’ll have to add another ‘BYO’ to the list — BYO Identity.”

Exchange Rate: Want someone’s data? Then what are you going to offer them in return? Colin Strong examines the quid pro quos of the Intention Economy. By Colin Strong in Research. Pull-quote: “Will the emerging personal data ecosystem make people less likely to simply give away their information to research firms?”

CVS App Brings Home Hard-To-Get CRM Data, by Evan Schuman in StoreforntBacktalk. @tdotrob calls it “an article straight from The Twilight Zone “.

What can people do with data that companies can’t? By Cheryl Snapp Connor in Forbes. Pull-quote: “Think about how much better we could be as customers if we — and companies we hire to help us — had access to all the data collected from us. We could look not only at how we spend our money, but at how we can spend it better. We could get a lot smarter, and so would the companies with which we have genuine rather than coerced relationships. And we could do betterintentcasting: that is, advertising exactly what we want, to the open marketplace, favoring companies we know will respect us. This would eliminate a huge amount of guesswork on the marketing side. I mean, who better to qualify us as a lead than each of us ourselves?”

• Firefox mobile device.