ProjectVRM Blog

That question came to me this morning, in response to RedBeacon being named the winner of this year’s TechCrunch 50.

What RedBeacon offers is a form of what in the VRM community we call a personal RFP. As the company’s site says, RedBeacon provides a way to …

• 1
  Request a local service
• 2
  Compare prices
  from qualified providers
• 3
  Schedule the job online

(Whoa. I didn’t know Wordpress would let you copy and paste images and text together like that. Nice. An old dog learns a new trick.)

As it says here, you can request a service, review qualified buyers, select a provider, and schedule the job, all at the RedBeacon site.

Is that VRM? In a number of ways, yes. RedBeacon to me looks like a fourth party service, such as those outlined in VRM and the Four Party System.

I would like to see how it fits as what Joe Andrieu outlines as a user-driven service. What do the rest of ya’ll think?

It’s shocking and sad to read Jason Kincaid’s  Tipjoy Heads To The Deadpool story this morning in TechCrunch. Ivan and Abby Kirigin were neighbors just up the road from Cambridge (I understand they’ve recently moved back to California), and kindred spirits to the VRM community as well. Keith Hopper and I had a nice get-acquainted lunch with them a couple months back, and talked often in ProjectVRM conversations about how EmanciPay might use the excellent TipJoy API, among other possibilities. The key paragraph from their final blog post:

When we evaluate why there’s been so much hype about payments on Twitter, and yet so little traction for us (and even far less for our competitors) it is clear to us that the reason is that a 3rd party payment service doesn’t add enough value. We strongly believe that social payments will work on a social network, provided that they’re done within the platform and not as a 3rd party. “Simple, social payments” is *the* philosophy needed to do digital payments right, but once a service groks that, they need only to implement it on their own. We’ve been the thought leaders in this space, we see the hype and excitement, and yet we know very intimately the difficulties in gaining actual traction. The only way to get around this is for the platforms themselves to control payments – then all people wanting to operate on that platform would have to play along. We believe that a payments system directly and officially integrated into social networks such as Twitter and Facebook will be a huge success.

This is consistent with our thinking as well. It’s why we’re designing EmanciPay not as a payment system but rather as a lightweight customer-native and -controlled set of methods (rather than a “system,” which implies something big, heavy and central) for choosing not only how much to pay, but when, where and under what terms — and leaving payment itself up to the Twitters, Facebooks, PayPals and Google Checkouts of the world.

EmanciPay is also not a business in itself. When it’s done it will be a set of specifications (data types, protocols, logic) rather than a commercial venture. It will add to the still-small portfolio of native customer capabilities as independent actors in the marketplace.

To leverage what Dave said long ago, Ask not what the marketplace can do for you. Ask what you can do for the marketplace. VRM is about answering that second question.

Meanwhile, we salute the pioneers. TipJoy did much for the marketplace. I just hope that the marketplace will repay Abby, Ivan and their colleagues generously. In fact, I have faith that it will.

Arlington cafe serves gourmet food and lets customers pay what they want, by Shane Stephens in the Dallas Morning News, probes some of our assumptions with EmanciPay—a customer-controlled way to choose how much to pay for online goods that cost nothing but are worth more than that. The financial end of the story:

The no-set-price concept is intriguing, especially in this economy. Chippindale says it was inspired by One World Cafe in Salt Lake City, a pay-what-you-want community kitchen founded by her friend Denise Cerreta. But while One World Cafe is nonprofit, Chippindale intends to make money. “I definitely do not turn away from a profit,” she says.

So far, she’s not getting rich; in fact, she’s not even breaking even. Customers have been leaving an average of about $7 per person in the envelopes, and Potager’s food costs are running about $8 per person, she says.

That’s two small tests in a trial that needs many more. Think payment levels might change if the restaurants’ costs were fully exposed?

So how do we get out of this place?

Let’s face it. Mike Arrington’s problem with the iPhone, Om Malik’s problem with AT&T, the FCC’s problem with Apple + AT&T together, my own problems with Cox, Dish Network and Sprint, David Pogue’s problem with the whole freaking cell phone industry … all of these are a great big WAAAH! in the wilderness of industrial oblivity to what customers want. We’re in the graveyard of what Umair Haque calls the zombieconomy. We’re living in Night of the Living Dead and complaining that the zombies want to eat us alive.

What they really want is to strap us down while they bleed us for small change—tiny amounts of ARPU. They do this, for example, by forcing us to sit through “The … number … you … have … dialed … eight … zero … five … seven …” until a small ka-ching happens somewhere deep in their billing system, so you get bled whether or not you’ve left (or received) a message. David Pogue:

Is 15 seconds here and there that big a deal? Well, Verizon has 70 million customers. If each customer leaves one message and checks voicemail once a day, Verizon rakes in — are you sitting down? — $850 million a year. That’s right: $850 million, just from making us sit through those 15-second airtime-eating instructions.

It was JP Rangaswami (disclosure: I consult JP and his company, BT) who first pointed out to me that the primary competence of phone companies isn’t technical. It’s financial. They’re billing machines. That’s their core competency. And it was r0ml who pointed out, way back when he was with AT&T Wireless (before it became Cingular, and then the AT&T we all know and hate today), that phone companies arrived at the holy grail of micropayments decades ago. They don’t charge small amounts, but they know how to add them up, and round piles of microminutes into billions of dollars.

A better movie metaphor is The Matrix. We’re all wet cell batteries inside giant phone company billing systems. The machines took over a long time ago, and they’re still running the world.

Not that acting like machines does them much good in the long run. Umair Haque:

Profit through economic harm to others results in what I’ve termed “thin value.” Thin value is an economic illusion: profit that is economically meaningless, because it leaves others worse off, or, at best, no one better off. When you have to spend an extra 30 seconds for no reason, mobile operators win — but you lose time, money, and productivity. Mobile networks’ marginal profits are simply counterbalanced by your marginal losses. That marginal profit doesn’t reflect, often, the creation of authentic, meaningful value.

He adds,

The fundamental challenge for 21st Century businesses — and economies — is learning to create thick value. We’re seeing the endgame of a global economy built to create thin value: collapse. Why? Simple: thin value is a mirage — and like all mirages, it ultimately evaporates. In the 21st Century, we’ve got to reconceive value creation.

Constructive Capitalists are disrupting their rivals by creating thicker value. Thick value is sustainable, meaningful value — and a new generation of radical innovators is wielding it like a strategic superweapon.

Rick Segal thinks Mike Arrington’s CrunchPad is one of those superweapons. Here’s what the Crunchies say will look like:

Sez Rick,

No, this probably isn’t the next Apple or Motion Computing, but here’s the secret.

Let’s assume there are just 1000 people out of all the TechCrunch people in the world that want this device.  If this device gets made and sold to 1000 happy people and the result is a manufacturing world and process which can now do these “one off” type devices, the game changes.

That’s why I want this device to get made. It begins a high profile (and positive) disruption at the point of manufacture and that can mean exciting things to you.

One way to blow up silos and walled gardens is de-verticalize industry itself. Not by making it horizontal (that’s too abstract), but by making it personal. Rick’s angle here is to go all the way to the source, and make manufacturing personal.

That’s what Rick thinks Mike & Co. are doing here. I also think the Crunchpad is compliant with what Dave says in this post here:

I’ve been through this loop many times, this is Mike’s first. The only platform that really works is a platform with no platform vendor, and that’s the Internet.

Right. The Crunchpad, as I understand it (and the Crunchies have explained it) is a Net-native device. Standards-based. Commodity parts. Full of open source stuff. The platform is the Net. The vendor is TechCrunch, but trapping users isn’t their game. They’d rather have thick value than thin.

So how do we contribute, besides paying cash for goods? By being constructive customers, rather than passive consumers. That’s what Rick is calling for here, and why we, as free and independent customers, can choose to support something that uses the Net as the platform, and is built to be user-driven.

Think about it. Is the Crunchpad crippled by any deals with a major vendor of any kind? Is it locked into any phone company’s billing and application approval systems? Is it locked into any one industry’s Business-as-Usual? No.

So who is in the best position to contribute to its continued improvement, besides the Crunchies themselves?

You. Me. Users. Customers.

We can drive this thing. Even if what Dan Frommer says is right, and Apple comes out with the world’s most beautiful pad ever, and pwns the whole category, there’s more vroom for improvement in the Crunchpad, because Apple’s device will be closed and the Crunchpad will be open. Or should be.

You listening, Mike?

In this post at ReadWriteWeb, Bernard Lumm interviews Richard de Silva of Highland Capital Partners (a neighbor of ours here in the Boston metro’s northwest quarter). It’s about advertising, primarily. Richard and Bernard both agree that advertising is moving more toward “performance-based” models. “Closer to the sale.”

It’s a sell-side conversation, framed by the need to sell goods, move inventory, do branding, and all that. Which is good. Advertising needs all the help it can get, and both Bernard and Richard are clearly ahead of the curve on the topic.

I’m less comfortable with these remarks in Bernard’s post:

Some recent blog chatter says that online advertising is doomed. The best reasoned case for this is made by Doc Searls (of ClueTrain Manifesto fame), who is touting his radical Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) as an alternative. Searls is an academic (Harvard Berkman Center). Another academic, Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, kicked up a storm with his guest post on TechCrunch titled “Why Advertising Is Failing on the Internet.”

Academics are often right, if you don’t mind waiting an eon or two for their pronouncements to be realized. In business, you need a more pragmatic view.

First, I didn’t say that advertising is doomed. I said it was a bubble, and has been for a long time. I explained that in After the Advertising Bubble Bursts, and among the comments below it. (As well as in many prior posts, to which I linked in that one.)

Second, while I’m flattered to be called an academic, technically speaking I’m a fellow at two university centers. What got me those fellowships was my work as a writer and a tech activist, not as an academic (by any definition). For most of my adult life I’ve worked in the private sector, including many years in the advertising business. From the mid-80s to the late 90s, Hodskins Simone & Searls was one of the top tech advertising agencies in Silicon Valley, much of that time occupying a whole building in downtown Palo Alto. So I know a few things about the topic.

Third, and most importantly, if VRM is radical, it’s not in an oppositional way. It’s not against advertising, or CRM. It’s merely an effort to equip customers with better tools for expressing their wants and needs, and for engaging with sellers. I think VRM can eliminate the need for much guesswork in the marketplace, and — as I said in my post — most advertising is guesswork. But that doesn’t mean guesswork, or advertising, goes away. But it does change. If you don’t believe me, listen to Bob Garfield of Advertising Age:

There is no longer a need to warn of a gathering Chaos Scenario, in which the yin of media and yang of marketing fly apart, symbiotic no more. There is no need to seed doubt about the internet’s prospects as an advertising medium, nor otherwise be a prophet of doom.

Chicken Little, don your hardhat. Nudged by recession, doom has arrived.

The toll will be so vast — and the institutions of media and marketing are so central to our economy, our culture, our democracy and our very selves — that it’s easy to fantasize about some miraculous preserver of “reach” dangling just out of reach. We need “mass,” so mass, therefore, must survive. Alas, economies are unsentimental and denial unproductive. The post-advertising age is under way.

This isn’t about the end of commerce or the end of marketing or news or entertainment. All of the above are finding new expressions online, and in time will flourish thanks to the very digital revolution that is now ravaging them. The future is bright. But the present is apocalyptic. Any hope for a seamless transition — or any transition at all — from mass media and marketing to micro media and marketing are absurd.

The sky is falling, the frog in the pot has come to a boil and, oh yeah, we are, most of us, exquisitely, irretrievably fucked.

ReadWriteWeb is a micro medium. So is Digg, in which Highland is an investor. They may be big on the Web, but they’re micro next to the giants of mass marketing that have kept Madison Avenue in business.

What keeps ReadWriteWeb and Digg in business isn’t Madison Avenue. It’s Highway 101.

My point: VRM is also about Highway 101. It’s one more stage in the not-very-seamless transition to whatever succeeds mass marketing.

What Bernard misses here is that VRM is also pragmatic. This is why I’m very insistent that VRM be built on strong open source foundations. Open source work is always pragmatic. That’s its nature.

But VRM is also unproven. People can knock it all they want and not be wrong. Yet.

Our job is to make the pudding that proves our ideas. I beg the patience of Bernard and others while we do that. I promise it won’t take eons.

Lots of VRM Hub action. Here’s the page for the one coming up on 30 March. Be sure not to miss the related VRM Labs. Here’s a review there of chi.mp.  VRM Hub last night and this post by Graham Sadd both report on the latest. So does Jake at omelette.es.

Nic Brisbourne sources Joe Andrieu in If You Love Your Customer, Set Her Free. Joe also sees $300 million in the One night stand use case.

Also in London, The Mine! Project has a developer meeting coming up next week. In a parallel way, other VRMers, including Iain Henderson (coming over from the London hotbed) will be coming to SXSW in Austin, where we plan to bring VRM up at a Barcamp there.

Jeff Jarvis brings up VRM in his end of a volley with Richard Edelman. (I had posted a long response here, but half of it got lost and I yanked it off the blog. Maybe I’ll give it another try soon.)

Live From Gartner CRM Summit UK: Customers Take Ownership. No VRM, but “social CRM” and “customer managed relationships.” Via Graham Hill. Geoff finds no VRM here, either.

Get ready for “fourth party” services. An intro to user-driven services. A new category driven by customers. Brings up PayChoice. So does Echovar.

Here’s a podcast of a call in which I explain VRM to skeptics.

Josh Young writes Why I dislike micropayments, don’t mind charity, but really have a better idea. He mentions VRM and his idea is VRM-like, in the sense that it involves relationships between the buyers and sellers of journalism, in which buyers are — at least to some degree (as I understand it) — in charge of their own side of the thing. An excerpt:

…let’s sum it up. Shifting the news relationship from reader-newspaper to user-creator increases potential trust, an economic good, and unlocks value, which people may pay for. But even the strongest value proposition does not a business model equal.

So let’s move to the concrete: the business model. How do we monetize this theoretical value tucked away in user-creator relationships?

You do it with an idea I’ve been flogging the past couple weeks. You do it with Mitch Ratcliffe’s idea, in which users pay creators for “added convenience or increased interaction.” Note the elegant fit: increased interaction between one person and another is what fosters relationships and trust. Giving paying users otherwise exclusive twitter access to the creator could work. SMS updates could work, as could a permission only room on friendfeed. Even something as simple as a gold star on paying users’ comments—a symbol that they support the creator financially—would provide incentive for the creator to reply. Tiers of stars—bronze, silver, gold—are possible too.

Sounds to me like journals-as-clubs. Anyway, see whatcha think.

I got a note saying that Walter Isaacson’s latest Time Magazine piece — How To Save Newspapers — cries out for VRM. I agree. Here’s the exciting text amongst his closing paragraphs:

Under a micropayment system, a newspaper might decide to charge a nickel for an article or a dime for that day’s full edition or $2 for a month’s worth of Web access. Some surfers would balk, but I suspect most would merrily click through if it were cheap and easy enough.

The system could be used for all forms of media: magazines and blogs, games and apps, TV newscasts and amateur videos, porn pictures and policy monographs, the reports of citizen journalists, recipes of great cooks and songs of garage bands. This would not only offer a lifeline to traditional media outlets but also nourish citizen journalists and bloggers…

…The need to be valued by readers — serving them first and foremost rather than relying solely on advertising revenue — will allow the media once again to set their compass true to what journalism should always be about.

PayChoice is what he’s calling for here. It’s not a micropayment system. Instead call it a microaccounting sysem. It will start with something essential that we don’t yet have: accounting for actual uses, including reading, listening and watching. Journalism, music and other currently free stuff is worth more than $zero. How much more? We need to be able to say.

PayChoice would also —

1. Provide a single way and easy way that consumers of “content” can become customers of it — rather than the multiple (and often difficult) ways that the producers are currently coming up with. (I’ve never been able to pay for public radio on a station website in less than three minutes. That’s too much friction.)
2. Provide ways for customers to look back through their media usage histories, inform themselves about what they have been enjoying, and how much of it — and to determine how much it is worth to them. The Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP), and later the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), both came up with “rates and terms that would have been negotiated in the marketplace between a willing buyer and a willing seller” — language that first appeared in the 1995 Digital Performance Royalty Act (DPRA), and tweaked in 1998 by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), under which both the CARP and the CRB operated.  The rates they came up with peaked at $.0001 per “performance” (a song or recording), per listener. PayChoice creates the “willing buyer” that the DRPA thought wouldn’t exist. And I can tell you, as a lover of music and radio, I am willing to pay far more than that rate. That’s why I came up with the PayChoice idea. I want to be a customer of otherwise free stuff. And I believe the buy side can come up with that system — one that works the same way for all content providers — a helluva lot better (and faster) than the providers can.
3. Stigmatize non-payment for worthwhile media goods. This is where “social” will finally come to be something more than yet another tech buzzmodifier.

So, stay tuned.

Rex Hammock is right to gripe about the newspaper turtles pulling their heads in their shells and complaining that readers aren’t paying for the goods papers offer for free online. In that post he runs down some of the drumbeats he’s been hearing:

• “The notion that newspapers should become financially endowed institutions was published a few days ago in the New York Times. (My response.)
• Buried in this Q&A with Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, is the suggestion that the NYTimes is considering once-again putting some of its content behind a pay-wall in the future.
• Philadelphia° Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky tees-off on free-lunch readers and says they should start paying $5 a month to read the Daily News online — and, oh yeah, newspapers should get $1 billion from Google.
• Former Time magazine managing editor Walter Issacson writes at Time.com that newspapers should revisit the idea of micro-payments that might replicate the iTunes model. Pay, say, a nickle per story you want to read. (He’s riffing on the idea floated by David Carr of the New York Times last month.)…”

Here’s the problem with all of those systems: they’ll all be different, silo’d, inconsistent with each other. And doomed to fail for all those reasons.

Here’s the solution: One new system that makes it as easy as possible for readers to pay for the goods, but voluntarily, on their own terms. This new system would turn consumers into customers by giving them the pricing gun. And here’s what’s also cool about it: We’re already working on it at ProjectVRM. It’s called EmanciPay. (Note: when this was written, it was still called “PayChoice”. DS – 1 September 2009)

It’s still early. But it will get a lot less early if some of these pubs stop complaining and put their shoulders (and their wallets) behind work that’s already going on.

We’ve had a lot of discussion, both online and off, about the V in VRM. It speaks one kind of relating, in the economic sphere. Which is just one sphere.

Britt Blaser has spoken often of the kind of RM that begins with a G — GRM for Government Relationship Management.

We’ve also talked about why we start with the individual in our work with VRM. Why not start with groups, and group empowerment? Especially since “social” is such a hot theme?

The answer is that relating starts with individuals. Even though it always involves more. One’s relationship with one’s self may be interesting to a shrink, but it’s too small for building a society, an economy, a politiy.

Erik Cecil, a friend and freshly minted blogger, almost poetically captures something about relating in this paragraph from his latest post:

IntERdependence is the engine of democracy; it creates the nanostructures of new economies.  People lined 137 miles of railroad track, therefore, not to see some new Hercules.   They came to see in their new President a reflection of their individual importance reflected back to them in the President they just elected.   He not only moved the power of democracy to the edge, but opened the path back to the middle.   Reverberating throughout the crowds was the music of interdependence.  Let the new freedom ring.

We’re in new territory here — one we’re just beginning to make for ourselves.