Nothing you carry is more personal than your wallet, or more essential for interacting with the marketplace. You can change your pants or your purse, but your wallet is a constant. And, while your wallet contains cards and currencies that are issued by companies and governments, your wallet is yours, not theirs. That’s why none of those entities brand your wallet as theirs, nor do you operate your wallet at their grace.
This distinction matters because wallets are becoming a Real Big Topic — partly because a lot of Real Big Companies like having their hands in our pockets, and partly because we really do need digital versions of the wallets we carry in the analog world.
This is why individuals and individual-driven developers need to take over the mobile wallet conversation, before the Big Brands do, with their Big Plans to fill their Big Data coffers with personal information about you, so they (not you) can do the analytics and the routing between your butt and the rest of the marketplace.
IIW — the Internet Identity Workshop — is the perfect place to talk about that. It’s an unconference in Mountain View that takes place tomorrow through Thursday at the Computer History Museum. It’s cheap and informal, and ideal for vetting and discussing developments and moving them forward.
IIW also comes in advance of the Under The Radar conference in San Francisco next month, where mobile wallets will be discussed. The companies working on mobile wallets and listed in this blog post by Beth Burgee are mostly new to me. That’s way cool, and I invite them to show up at IIW too.
Here’s the key, and my challenge to them: they need to be driven by individuals like you and me, and not by Business as Usual, especially what Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter and the rest would like to do with their hands in our pockets. (And I invite them to come as well, and show us how that’s not what they’re trying to do.)
Here’s the thing: if your wallet has a brand, it’s not yours. If it’s for putting companies hands, and not just their instruments of convenience (such as cards, the boundaries of which are mostly clear), in your pockets, it’s not yours.
Let’s give the individual a way to drive here. Just like we did with the PC, the Net, email, web servers, blogging, podcasting, syndication and other instruments created with freedom rather than capture in mind.
Think of Dave Winer‘s “Ask not what the Internet can do for you, ask what you can do for the Internet,” and substitute “individual,” “customer” or “user” for Internet. (They are all the same thing, when you think about it. And Dave was the prime mover between the last three developments listed in the prior paragraph.)
A couple of bonus links, not fresh but perhaps more relevant than ever:
