March 17th, 2008
Jump Point: Data-control, day-parting and success in any age
Tom Hayes has written a new book, Jump Point, that will get you thinking. Jump Point combines the freeconomics ideas recently covered by Wired’s Chris Anderson with a globe-spanning perspective on competitiveness, but, most importantly, suggests that the impact of technology is a trailing phenomenon. In other words, when it comes to the impact of the Internet, we haven’t seen anything yet.
What I like about Hayes’ perspective is his belief that we haven’t seen the real impact of the Internet, which he predicts will come with the three-billionth user sometime in early 2011, and that the coming changes are a mixed blessing. Nevertheless, it will create an environment in which new rules and new businesses will thrive. It is an opportunity. Once that critical mass of users comes online—many solely through mobile handsets—function-based innovation, such as business that grows around a single feature, such as search, will give way to systems-based innovation that will literally wipe the slate clean.
The book progresses through much familiar and standard territory necessary for understanding the magnitude of the changes afoot in the economy today and the near future. I think it is impossible to read a business book today without walking through the concepts of network value, power laws, Dunbar numbers, and the power of personal preference. Hayes does an admirable job of reducing this mandatory lesson to its essentials.
Ultimately, Hayes predicts five major discontinuities that will shape the future economy:
* Attention economics changes the give-and-take we are familiar with in media and transactions;
* Our relationship with time will change to a 24-hour-a-day awareness of the perpetual now;
* Market logistics change from fixed-place retailing to person-based communication;
* Cultures collide, perhaps violently;
* Trust will become the definition of value.
Hayes argues that “antimarketing” will characterize the relationship between buyer and seller, that anticipating when someone will see an offer is the defining skill of the post-jump point marketer. Failure to target offers in a timely manner will be seen as offensive by many consumers. But he makes a mistake, I think, in his focus on attention, arguing that, because attention is scarce, we will trade it for services, Read the rest of this entry »
March 10th, 2008
Creeping totalitarianism: The NSA, personal data and you
Here’s a simple rule for preventing totalitarian rule in any nation: Don’t build the systems for monitoring people’s daily lives closely in the first place, and you will not be at risk of totalitarian rulers using those systems to overwhelm individual choice. The Wall Street Journal today has a long piece on the various ways that the National Security Agency has expanded its ability to monitor individuals within the United States without a warrant. It’s a must-read, whether you think we need this kind of police agency or not.
Originally set up by President Truman to facilitate signals intelligence (wiretapping, radio monitoring and so forth) conducted against foreign governments, the NSA today can gain access to your personal communications without any need to ask permission, including:
Email, such as the to- and from-addresses, subject line content and time sent;
Web sites visited and the content of your searches;
Wireless calling, from your location and that of the person receiving the call to the length and account numbers;
Wired phone calling, including account numbers and length of call (there have been rumors for years that the first minute of calls are monitored for keywords, but this is not confirmed, because, as a national security matter, citizens aren’t supposed to know);
Financial transactions, such as your credit card use, wire transfers and deposits and withdrawals on your checking and savings accounts,
as well as the content of any transaction recorded by a computer that the NSA deems necessary for its pattern recognition analyses.
The NSA has always insisted it works scrupulously within the limits of the laws governing its behavior, but it has, like all human institutions, had lapses in its judgment. For example, during the year immediately after 9/11, NSA attempted to set up a Total Information Awareness network, which was meant to grab all data about people and their transactions and communication for analysis, but Congress prohibited any further spending on the program over civil liberties concerns. Nevertheless, the program has continued in pieces that, in total, add up to the same level of access to domestic civilian communications, as the Journal article makes clear.
Technologists must be aware of this ever-expanding net Read the rest of this entry »
March 3rd, 2008
Presidential candidates: Take a data integrity and transparency pledge
Whomever you support for president, I hope you’ll consider joining me in asking the candidates for a pledge that they will enforce data integrity policies at least as rigorous as expected of publicly traded companies, and that they’ll open their administration to public scrutiny of most public policy.
After eight years of an presidency that considers itself immune to the simplest email storage requirements, the United States could use some insight into how decisions are made at the White House. More than 1,000 days worth of email are missing from the Bush years, in some cases entire weeks’ worth of mail relating to the leaking of CIA operative Virgina Plame’s identity and the application of torture have disappeared. With Bush Administration officials continuing to drag their feet on implementation of email archiving systems, we are threatened with another four or eight years of government operating in the shadows, because an incoming president could blame the faulty storage systems they found for future omissions.
Granted, the Clinton administration hasn’t thrown open the doors to its archives, but, at least, they maintained a record of intra-administration communication, even at a time when email was barely mature and archival requirements were uncertain. It’s a standard we should expect of every administration, more so now that there are well-known best practices for records-retention available for public companies, investment banks and government agencies.
“I don’t want you reading my personal stuff,” President Bush has told the press when asked about why his administration has failed to comply with records-retention laws during his time in office. Unfortunately, Mr. President, nothing you do at your desk, or in the airplanes, cars and buildings we give you to use as president, is “your personal stuff.” It is the property of the people. As voters, we must demand greater accountability of the next president.
Just as a company needs to be able to review its internal communications to find out why it made mistakes, the U.S. government should be able to benefit from the experience of previous administrations, as well as the scholarly study of records, so that we constantly improve the handling of day-to-day and crisis situations. Democracy demands that we have the ability to review what our leaders have discussed as they decide on our behalf how money will be spent, what policies will be enforced and why and when we go to war.
So, let’s pull together as Americans and demand more of our political leaders. Join me in urging the candidates to commit to store all email and documents created or used by their staffs during their tenure in the White House. Regardless of the winner in the upcoming election, the infrastructure for the people’s participation in, and review of, executive decisions is ready for a president that will honor the people’s right to know what has been done in their name.
Logon to your candidate’s site to urge them to take the data integrity and transparency pledge:
John McCain. Mike Huckabee. Ron Paul. Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton.
February 22nd, 2008
FCC sure we’re headed to Hell, ass first
WASHINGTON (AdAge.com) — ABC is appealing the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to fine the Walt Disney network and 45 of its stations a total of $1,237,500 for airing scenes of a woman’s buttocks on a 2003 episode of “NYPD Blue.”
Five years after the fact, the FCC is fining ABC for showing the backside of a woman in an encounter with her lover’s young son. The visual joke, which is captured in the screen shot to the right, depended on portraying a very normal morning behavior, getting into the shower. Yet, this is what the FCC, which endorses greater and greater consolidation of media, spends fives years on.
The FCC is supposed to be managing the airwaves and cabled media in the public interest, not acting as a nanny to the television viewers of the United States.
The viewer can turn off what they don’t want to watch. But if the FCC lets three or four companies own all the media in the country, we won’t have a choice in the future. After all the progress of the past 60 years, it will be as though the major networks that gave us three viewing choices in 1960 have conspired to give us 500 variations on a single right-conforming puritan viewing choice in 2008.
February 20th, 2008
GenieTown: Local services as local community
In a market where many of the global players have local listings for businesses and service providers, GenieTown is starting at the ground level and building up. The company, which made its public debut today, is a knowledge-sharing community built around person-to-person and small-business services providers in the Bay Area.
Today, GenieTown featured service providers that include a coach to help you run a marathon, an investment adviser and several electrical wiring companies. They can build their reputations with articles, through customer introductions and ratings and/or reviews by previous customers.
With $2 million in funding, GenieTown faces a daunting challenge, as Mike Arrington pointed out earlier today. It doesn’t look easy to beat Google, Yahoo and the Yellow Pages businesses around the country.
The interesting element at GenieTown is a community approach similar to social networks and eBay’s marketplace, which gives local service providers (”genies,” in the company’s language) a platform for building a loyal fan base.
The traditional approach to local services is the paid listing we consult in the Yellow Pages. Google, Yahoo and others have followed that model, turning the transaction opportunity into a pay-for-performance event. So far, then, the big change in local services in the Internet age has been a shift from traditional advertising to CPC advertising.
GenieTown is the foundation for community building that has made local stars of realtors, gardeners, restauranteurs, and others that have a lot of information to offer while providing a unique quality of service that isn’t easy to replicate. Think of the radio talk shows on any weekend in every radio market in the United States, where a local businessperson does an hour or two on their area of expertise and benefits from the exposure through the rest of the week as customers think of their names first.
A local star can afford to give away a lot of ideas if customers are willing to pay the premium necessary to get their personal attention.
Participating “genies” contribute to the community to earn their credibility, similar to function of the eBay reputation system, before they begin to earn any revenue from actual transactions with customers. Winning early genies will be the greatest challenge for the company, which can afford to run a local community for a long while, because site operations are the least expensive investment they can make, but only if every day yields new service providers and, ultimately, potential customers.
Which makes the long-term question of GenieTown’s viability clear: Growing a national service requires many marketing-intensive local launches. A $2 million kitty is not much when you may spend that much for each of the major markets you enter during the first few months of marketing efforts. The opportunity, of course, is to create valuable markets that can be sold to a media conglomerate seeking a local edge.
It’s an interesting business, one that will require more than a little magic to succeed. Since GenieTown is staffed by a “group of Stanford entrepreneurs,” it comes to market with the requisite Silicon Valley magic formula. GenieTown is worth keeping an eye on, as these kinds of bottom-up experiments yield more surprising results than national campaigns for local services.
February 11th, 2008
Retail displays transform transactions and markets
I was invited to a Microsoft forum on advanced retail display technology last week and came away with a strange sense that, although the future is going to look a lot like BladeRunner’s stifling advertising environment, it could also be useful and powerful for the customer, not just the advertiser. We have to think about how to display information in a way that is important to purchase decision-making, not just try to tell people why they should buy, buy, buy!
The standout technology at the event, to my eye, was LevelVision’s “horizontal signage,” which include floor, table/countertop and ceiling displays. Among interesting displays that could be manipulated by waving one’s hand or projected onto a retailer’s window, LevelVision attracted my attention with the potential to add interactivity to many more settings, from the restaurant to the retail countertop to the gym and sidewalk. The company’s patents cover a wide range of hypothetical applications, since the screens can capture information as well as simply display video.
What if, for example, you were able to weigh someone as they were looking at a pair of pants? Or take their temperature by having them place their hand on a tabletop display in the doctor’s waiting room? In either case, you’d be prepared to ask the next round of questions you need to better serve them before an human intervenes. You could take five or 10 minutes out of a trip to the doctor with these screens, if they were placed in the waiting room or, even, in the consultation room for use by patients as they wait for the doc. Fitting clothes with interactive systems that display and capture data would transform the way off-the-shelf clothing was sold—no more sifting through hangars to find a good fit.
LevelVision has tested its floor-level displays in malls and college bookstores, seeing substantial increases in traffic and purchasing where the displays were able to capture a passer-by’s attention or engage shoppers in the store with a particular offer.
Jim Currie, the CEO of LevelVision, told me that he envisions a new kind of medium in these horizontal displays. It starts with showing advertising and offers on the LCD panels at floor- and counter-level, but can grow to encompass all sorts of engagement as the initial novelty of the technology passes (the initial novelty, based on customer responses in tests, is enough to kickstart this medium). At some point, simply showing pictures and ads on the floor don’t Read the rest of this entry »
January 3rd, 2008
Becoming cyborg: Beware inequalities ahead
For the past couple of months I have been exploring a different kind of technology, the biological ones. You see, I need a new neck.
Most of the big news in medical technology seems these days to revolve around genetic discoveries. Nevertheless, the first kind of commonly used advanced medical technologies will be in medical devices. In fact, if you have an older relative, they probably already have an artificial knee, hip or device that assists in the operation of key bodily functions. We’ll all be somewhat cyborg before we ever start routinely relying on gene therapies, which are many years from widespread use.
Most people I talk to about this expect something from the Six Million Dollar Man when they think of replacement joints. No, I will not be able to jack up a car with my neck after this surgery. I’ll just have the neck of a younger person, one made of nickel, stainless steel and plastics.
Like 27 million American adults, I have osteoarthritis. In my case, the vertebrae in my neck are expanding and have needles of calcium growing into the muscles and nerves in my neck. But the real problem is my degenerative disc disease, which 85 percent of adults begin to experience by age 50. A piece of what’s left of three completely destroyed cervical discs began compressing the nerve that leads to my left arm.
I’m 47 and have had Degenerative Disc Disease for years. During October, it became unendurable, causing searing pain all day and night. I lost the feeling in several fingers of my left hand. It is awful. I needed a body upgrade like the one in the image to the right above, a ProDisc cervical disc replacement.
Now, here’s where the inequalities start to kick in. My insurer doesn’t particularly like paying for the disc replacement surgery, preferring the established treatment, which is Read the rest of this entry »
December 27th, 2007
Erosion of privacy is a corporate strategy
CNET reports on Google’s efforts to expose Google Reader user’s shared items to Google Talk contacts.
The article compares this to the Facebook Beacon project, which would have made purchases and other personal preferences available to people who are Facebook friends. That’s not an exact analogy, since the Google systems bridged two different applications to expose personal data—it’s actually worse. At least, on Facebook, it wasn’t a matter of creating links between different application services, just an extension of what was shared with “friends.”
For many years, since I started covering technology in the late 80s, companies have tried these experiments with “services” that diminish personal privacy. Cookies, referral spam programs, hosted home pages that include personal data in selecting ad placements without any permission from the user—all these and many more have slowly eroded what we think of as “privacy.”
From the perspective of the long view, this is plainly a corporate strategy to diminish the expectation of privacy. It is wrong.
Let’s make 2008 the year we all work together to establish a boundary that defines personal privacy as something we, individual users, have complete control over. Freedom begins with our decisions. Make sure the user agreements you click are compatible with your expectations of privacy. Don’t sell out your personal information for empty promises. Hold vendors like Google and Facebook, among many others, to the promises they make that they will protect, not violate, your privacy.
December 9th, 2007
We will all miss Marc
It was only a few weeks ago that Marc Orchant and I were exchanging mail about his new gig with the David Allen Company, and planning to meet this past week at one of Buzz Bruggeman’s amazing dinners.
It’s an incredible tragedy, one no one could have expected of such a warm and engaged person, that today would be Marc’s last. Marc Orchant died this afternoon surrounded by family in a hospital room one week after suffering a heart attack.
I spent a tremendously enjoyable evening with Marc and his wife, Sue, at DEMO a couple years back. In an industry packed with interesting people, he was one of the friendliest, most enquiring people I’d met. He probed for knowledge with real passion, talking about how we use technology and what ways it can be improved with genuine humanity. We became friends that evening and traded mail, talked at conferences and I followed his writings because they always conveyed the warmth of the person behind the screen.
Ironically, it was my health that was in question as we tried to coordinate a meeting in Seattle. We were going to circle back and set a time before the trip, which he had to cancel for other reasons. His last note: “K - hope it goes well. Let’s try next week.”
I know it will go well with you, Marc. You’ve provided an inspiring model for those of us who knew you and everyone who experienced your work.
November 5th, 2007
Google: Does it have to be all FUD all the time?
Fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD–see Wikipedia) is how IBM tried to retain its dominance, what Microsoft used to cement its monopoly and, now, I suggest we review recent Google news and wonder:
Industry Leaders Announce Open Platform for Mobile Devices: In which Google and “a broad alliance of leading technology and wireless companies today joined forces to announce the development of Android, the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices.”
Google Launches OpenSocial to Spread Social Applications Across the Web: When we learn that Google’s “release of OpenSocial marks the first time that multiple social networks have been made accessible under a common API to make development and distribution easier and more efficient for developers.”
MySpace and Google Join Forces to Launch Open Platform for Social Application Development: Which marks the “joining forces” of “MySpace, the world’s largest social network, and Google as founding members of OpenSocial.
The Nielsen Company and Google Establish Strategic Relationship: Announcing the launching of “a first step,” a Web analytics “relationship [that] leverages Nielsen’s experience in television audience measurement to bring demographic data to the Google TV Ads™ advertising platform.”
Basically, four of the last five press releases from Google have amounted to “me and my friends are going to…” beat a major competitor or rule a marketplace based on pre-announcements without a great deal of substance or products that can be seen and used today. Google sounds more like Microsoft circa 1988-to-1992, when it was launching consortia right and left to block competitors without delivering much, or any, real product. Microsoft still does this, but it doesn’t enjoy the credibility (or, better, the credulousness) that greet Google announcements.
Google says “me and my friends are going to…” beat you with technologies that can’t be seen or used today.Android, the Google open mobile platform introduced today is months or years away from release, albeit some companies claim it will be part of products in the next year. Reality is nowhere to be seen or held, nor can you buy any of these big ideas.
OpenSocial, for all the noise, is little more than a loose collection of APIs that solve no new problems in social networking. I agree with Dare Obasanjo of Microsoft that “OpenSocial is to a standardized widget platform as an internal combustion engine is to an airplane. A step in the right direction but still very far from the end goal.” Sure, Dare works for Microsoft, but Read the rest of this entry »
Mitch Ratcliffe is a veteran journalist, media executive and entrepreneur. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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- Presidential candidates: Take a data integrity and transparency pledge
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