Author: Doc Searls (page 19 of 40)

Wanted: a handshake across the paywall

February 6, 2013 / / 4 Comments

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 for a digital-only subscription. Not when I’m also in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and other places, with other papers that I also like to read — and to pay for, preferably on an à la carte basis, or something close to it, like I can when I buy a paper at a newsstand. There’s no way to do that. But I still go to the Globe often, to catch a story, such as this one, which hits a paywall:

I only get that on the browser I use most, and which I assume carries a cookie telling the Globe that I’ve visited too often without subscribing. It’s annoying, but I get around it by using other browsers and other machines.

I don’t do that to avoid paying. In fact I’d be glad to pay, because I believe information wants to be free but value wants to be paid for. That means I’m willing to pay something for all the media I use, including music for which I hold rights to play (one doesn’t really “own” music, but instead holds rights to it). But this is impossible as long as media vendors supply all the mechanisms of relationship. There’s no handshake with that system. Just the sound of one hand slapping.

The promo-covered paywall in the screen shot above tells me the Globe’s subscription system has no idea that I was a loyal subscriber for a long time, and am willing to pay more than the $0 that I’m paying when I go around their wall. It also tells me the Globe values data justifying its 99¢/week promo more than its relationship with me as a reader and a long-term subscriber. But I’m not insulted because I know I’m not dealing with human beings here; just a software routine.

Many questions come to mind when I look at a fail like this. Like, Why should a new subscriber get a better deal than a veteran one? Why not have, say, a frequent-reader program, modeled on airline frequent flyer programs?

The answer is that it’s a pain in the ass for a paper (or any business) to do something different than what it already does. In the Globe’s case the bureaucratic overhead is even higher than it looks, because the Globe is a subsidiary of the New York Times, which has the same 99¢ promo (that I wrote about almost a year ago). Even if the two papers don’t use the same content management and subscription software, the policies obviously work in tandem, meaning there is at least twice the inertia to overcome.

Additional inertia is locked up in the heavy burden of sole responsibility for a “relationship” that barely qualifies for the noun. If I had a real relationship with the Globe, I could respond to the above with a message that says “Hi, there. You know me. Remember? I do. Here’s the evidence. Now, can we come up with something that works for both of us here?”  CRM (Customer Relationship Management systems should help, but typically don’t. “Social” CRM is built to listen for signals from prospects or customers; but neither Twitter nor Facebook are mine, nor do they represent me as fourth parties — ones that work for me.  (Twitter and Facebook may serve me, in a way; but they are paid for that work by advertisers.)

There are some VRM-friendly signs on the horizon. For example, in this Guardian interview, Tien Tzuo, the founder and CEO of Zuora, explains what he calls “Paywall 2.0.” Here’s what he says about 3:50 into the video:

Don’t think about it as just a paywall. Don’t think about it as just a tollbooth for you to make money. Think about it as an ongoing dialog with your customers, and allow your paywall to stretch, and go to where your customers really want to go.

(Disclosure: last year I gave a speech at a Zuora event in London.) I want the Globe and the Times to have 2.0-generation paywalls: ones that stretch to embrace my loyalty and my good intentions. I would also like that embrace to appreciate independent signaling from my side of the relationship, not just what it picks up from CRM radar pointed at social media. (And let’s face it: If I have to go on Twitter to get some action out of a company, there’s a failure in direct communication. Here’s one example.)

We also need the VRM tools that match up with 2.0 generation ones on the media sellers’ side. For example, let’s say I budget $2 per day toward all the media I use. (A lexical digression: I don’t “consume” media any more than I consume a hammer. That’s why I say “use” instead of “consume.”) And let’s say  I have the capacity to track what I use, in a QS (quantified self) kind of way. Then let’s say that I’m ready to divide that $2 up and parse it out, using an EmanciPay system. This would put money on the market’s table.

Then maybe, once the money is on the table, we can shake hands over it and actually do business.

Bonus link: House of news

 

 

VRM development work

February 5, 2013 / / Comments Off on VRM development work

I’ll be having a brown bag lunch today with a group of developers, talking about VRM and personal clouds, among other stuff that’s sure to come up. To make that easier, I’ve copied and pasted the current list from the VRM developers page of the ProjectVRM wiki. If you’d like to improve it in any way, please do — either on the wiki itself, or by letting us know what to change.

While there are entire categories that fit in the larger VRM circle — quantified self (QS) and personal health records (PHRs) are two that often come up — we’ve tried to confine this list to projects and companies that directly address the goals (as well as the principles) listed on the main page of the wiki.

Here is a partial list of VRM development efforts. (See About VRM). Some are organizations, some are commercial entities, some are standing open source code development efforts.

SOFTWARE and SERVICES
Intentcasting
AskForIt † – individual demand aggregation and advocacy
Body Shop Bids † – intentcasting for auto body work bids based on uploaded photos
Have to Have † – “A single destination to store and share everything you want online”
Intently † – Intentcasting “shouts” for services, in the U.K.
Innotribe Funding the Digital Asset Grid prototype, for secure and accountable Intentcasting infrastructure
OffersByMe † – intentcasting for local offers
Prizzm †- social CRM platform rewarding customers for telling businesses what they want, what they like, and what they have problems with
RedBeacon † – intentcasting locally for home services
Thumbtack † – service for finding trustworthy local service providers
Trovi intentcasting; matching searchers and vendors in Portland, OR and Chandler, AZ†
Übokia intentcasting†
Zaarly † intentcasting to community – local so far in SF and NYC
Browser Extensions
Abine † DNT+, deleteme, PrivacyWatch: privacy-protecting browser extentions
Collusion Firefox add-on for viewing third parties tracking your movements
Disconnect.me † browser extentions to stop unwanted tracking, control data sharing
Ghostery † browser extension for tracking the trackers
PrivacyScore † browser extensions and services to users and site builders for keeping track of trackers
Databases
InfoGrid – graph database for personal networking applications
ProjectDanube – open source software for identity and personal data services
Messaging Services and Brokers
Gliph †- private, secure identity management and messaging for smartphones
Insidr † – customer service Q&A site connecting to people who have worked in big companies and are willing to help when the company can’t or won’t
PingUp (was Getabl) †- chat utility for customers to engage with merchants the instant customers are looking for something
TrustFabric † – service for managing relationships with sellers
Personal Data and Relationship Management
Azigo.com † – personal data, personal agent
ComplainApp † – An iOS/Android app to “submit complaints to businesses instantly – and find people with similar complaints”
Connect.Me † – peer-to-peer reputation, personal agent
Geddup.com † – personal data and relationship management
Higgins – open source, personal data
The Locker Project – open source, personal data
Mydex †- personal data stores and other services
OneCub †- Le compte unique pour vos inscriptions en ligne (single account for online registration)
Paoga † – personal data, personal agent
Personal.com † – personal data storage, personal agent
Personal Clouds – personal cloud wiki
Privowny † – privacy company for protecting personal identities and for tracking use and abuse of those identities, building relationships
QIY † – independent infrastructure for managing personal data and relationships
Singly † – personal data storage and platform for development, with an API
Transaction Management
Dashlane † – simplified login and checkout
Trust-Based or -Providing Systems and Services
id3 – trust frameworks
Respect Network † – VRM personal cloud network based on OAuth, XDI, KRL, unhosted, and other open standards, open source, and open data initiatives. Respect Network is the parent of Connect.Me.
Trust.cc Personal social graph based fraud prevention, affiliated with Social Islands
SERVICE PROVIDERS OR PROJECTS BUILT ON VRM PRINCIPLES
First Retail Inc. † commodity infrastructure for bi-directional marketplaces to enable the Personal RFP
dotui.com † intelligent media solutions for retail and hospitality customers
Edentiti Customer driven verification of idenity
Real Estate Cafe † money-saving services for DIY homebuyers & FSBOs
Hover.com Customer-driven domain management†
Hypothes.is – open source, peer review
MyInfo.cl (Transitioning from VRM.cl) †
Neustar “Cooperation through trusted connections” †
NewGov.us – GRM
[1] † – Service for controlling one’s reputation online
Spotflux † malware, tracking, unwanted ad filtration through an encrypted tunnel
SwitchBook † – personal search
Tangled Web † – mobile, P2P & PDS
The Banyan Project– community news co-ops owned by reader/members
TiddlyWiki – a reusable non-linear personal Web notebook
Ting † – customer-driven mobile virtual network operator (MVNO – a cell phone company)
Tucows †
VirtualZero – Open food platform, supply chain transparency
INFRASTRUCTURE
Concepts
EmanciPay – dev project for customer-driven payment choices
GRM: Government Relationship Management – subcategory of VRM
ListenLog – personal data logging
Personal RFP – crowdsourcing, standards
R-button – UI elements for relationship members
Hardware
Freedom Box – personal server on free software and hardware
Precipitat, WebBox – new architecture for decentralizing the Web, little server
Standards, Frameworks, Code bases and Protocols
Datownia † – builds APIs from Excel spreadsheets held in Dropbox
Evented APIs – new standard for live web interactivity
KRL (Kinetic Rules Language) – personal event networks, personal rulesets, programming Live Web interactions
Kynetx † – personal event networks, personal rulesets
https://github.com/CSEMike/OneSwarm Oneswarm] – privacy protecting peer-to-peer data sharing
http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/persona/ Mozila Persona] – a privacy-protecting one-click email-based way to do single sign on at websites
TAS3.eu — Trusted Architecture for Securely Shared Services – R&D toward a trusted architecture and set of adaptive security services for individuals
Telehash – standards, personal data protocols
Tent – open decentralized protocol for personal autonomy and social networking
The Mine! Project – personal data, personal agent
UMA – standards
webfinger – personal Web discovery, finger over HTTP
XDI – OASIS semantic data interchange standard
PEOPLE
Analysts and Consultants
Ctrl-SHIFT † – analysts
Synergetics † – VRM for job markets
VRM Labs – Research
HealthURL – Medical
Consortia, Workgroups
Fing.org – VRM fostering organization
Information Sharing Workgroup at Kantara – legal agreements, trust frameworks
Pegasus – eID smart cards
Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium (PDEC) – industry collaborative
Meetups, Conferences, and Events
IIW: Internet Identity Workshop – yearly unconference in Mountain View
VRM Hub – meeting in LondonNOTES:
† Indicates companies. Others are organizations, development projects or both. Some development projects are affiliated with companies. (e.g. Telehash and The Locker Project with Singly, and KRL with Kynetx.)
A – creating standard
B – Using other standards
1 – EventedAPI

When consumers become media for themselves

January 30, 2013 / / 10 Comments

I was talking recently with Edi Immonen of Glome about the idea behind it: turning users into publishers. He used the word “media,” but I’m going with “publishers” for now, because that’s the word used in this graphic (one of many like it — all amazing and excellent) from LUMA partners:

That’s the marketer’s view. But how about yours, as the consumer over there on the right. In fact it’s actually more like this:

Because all you do is consume. You have no direct influence on all that intermediary stuff; so it just presses down on you.

But what if you become the publisher — a form of producer, and not just of consumer? Then the system, simplified, would look like this:

This is in alignment with what Tim Berners-Lee designed the Web to look like in the first place, but in in a commercial setting. (Remember that Sir Tim was then working in high energy physics at CERN, looking for ways to share and edit documents across the Internet as it existed at the turn of the ’90s.) It is also what blogging, as originally conceived, also did. If this blog were commercial (which it is not, on purpose), that would be me (or us) on the right.

Now, if we, as publishers, look at our data, or of our personal space — our state as a medium — as a platform for selling and buying stuff, including services, a whole new horizon opens up.

What Edi and his colleagues at Glome envision is a way for you, as a medium, to sell your space (however you chose to define that word) to:

  1. brands with which you already have a relationship;
  2. brands in which you have an interest; or
  3. brands in which you might have an interest.

From the traditional marketing perspective, #3 makes you “qualified lead,” for which the brand should be willing to pay. But that’s a far too reduced view of what you really are, or might be, to that brand.

Think of this marketplace frame from a CRM+VRM perspective. Between those two rectangles, inside the black two-pointed arrow, are cycles of buying and owning, of use and re-use, of live interactions and of long periods of idle time where neither is paying much attention to the other. Lots of stuff can go on within the boundaries of that two-way arrow.

What Glome proposes here is not zero-basing the marketplace, but instead to re-start our thinking, and our work, atop three well-understood existing roles: brand, publisher (or medium) and marketplace. The main re-characterization is of the individual, who is now a publisher or a medium, and not just a consumer.

Obviously much can get disintermediated here, including all the stuff between the marketer and the publisher in the graphic up top.

But much new intermediation is now possible, especially if the individual has a personal cloud through which one (or one’s fourth party) can program interactions, for the individual, among API-based services (in the manner of IFTTT, or using KRL) and the “Internet of things”. (For developers, I believe Singly fits in here too.)

So we are looking here at a whole new market for information and relationships, within the larger marketplace of everything else. This isn’t complicated, really. It’s actually what markets looked like in the first place:

This is the context we meant by “Markets are conversations” in The Cluetrain Manifesto.

LUMAscapes (such as the top one above) brilliantly depict the ecosystems of marketing as they have evolved so far, down different branches of discipline. The tree from which they branch, however, is the old advertising and direct marketing one, now operating inside the Internet . (“Big data” and analytics in marketing are hardly new. They were what direct mail was all about long before it evolved into direct marketing and then spread into online advertising.)

So this is a shout-to —

— as well as all the VRM developers in the world (and it seems there are more every day).

The last graphic above is our new frame. It helps that it’s also the oldest frame.

I also look forward to the day when Terence Kawaja and his colleagues at LUMA partners draw up VRM+CRM and other new ecosystems that are bound to evolve, once enough of us get our heads out of the old marketing frame and into the oldest marketplace one. So this is a shout-out to them too. 🙂

VRM taking root in France

January 22, 2013 / / Comments Off on VRM taking root in France

I love this tweet from @CaroCondamin

Le concept du Vendor Relationship Management par ProjectVRM http://www.caroline-condamin.com/vrm/  #VRM

Following the links, I see she works for OneCub, a VRM company in France. Here she also includes this simple and handy graphic, which nicely illustrates the reciprocity between CRM and VRM:

Thanks to the good work done by Fing and others in France, when I spoke at an event there last year, all the hands in the room went up when I asked how many were familiar with VRM.

And, even though there is some argument in VRM circles over whether this proposed tax is a good or bad thing, there is no doubt that the spirit behind it is aligned with the one behind VRM development. In fact, this 2oo page report, written in what one source calls “administrative French,” sources The Cluetrain Manifesto and The Intention Economy.  Here is Caroline’s post about the proposal. (In Chrome, it translates to English for me.) Anybody interested in the intersection between public interest, policy and market dynamics should read it.

 

VRM in 2013

January 2, 2013 / / Comments Off on VRM in 2013

Two positive pats on the VRM back greeted the new year and got me thinking.

The first is Jim Harris’ Small Data and VRM — his prediction for 2013 in the @DataRoundtable blog. He writes,

One of the reasons that vendors are getting geeky over Big Data is because they claim that they want to use it to become more customer-centric and better understand customer behavior when, in reality, what vendors really want is to become more customer-captive and better control customer behavior.

However, the alternative to each individual vendor using Big Data to collect and manage HoardaBytesof information about multiple customers is to invert the one-vendor-to-many-customers paradigm by embracing a one-customer-to-many-vendors paradigm. Individual customers would own and manage the Small Data needed to accurately describe themselves, protect the privacy of their data and decide for themselves how their data – and how much of their data – is shared with vendors.

My lament over vendors historically not allowing us to own our own data, which I have been referring to as the Fundamental Flaw of Customer MDM since 2010, is a topic I return to on a regular basis, including my recent blog series about social MDM that received some thought-provoking commentary, among which was an excellent book recommendation made by Jean-Michel Franco.

… and then quotes The Intention Economy for several paragraphs before concluding,

The status quo will always fight the future, but change is the only universal constant. I hope 2013 will see the beginning of the changes – almost none of which are technological in nature – needed to bring about this long overdue paradigm shift in data and customer relationship management.

Keith Teare in Techcrunch sees the same changes coming, and visits them at length in Unnatural Acts and the Rise of Mobile. Here’s a compressed version of his post:

There is a new law emerging in cyberspace. As desktop traffic growth declines, and mobile adoption explodes, predatory marketers need to monetize mobile traffic or die trying.

As this law takes hold, bad behavior is replacing smart long-term product thinking. The result is an explosion of unnatural acts of engagement. Facebook allows users to escape its filters (designed to give a good experience) by paying to force their Facebook posts in front of their friends — $7 a time and you’re golden. Twitter sends constant reminders about “what you missed” on its service. Google Plus has notification defaults set to a level that results in constant stream of inane emails.

Users are the net losers in this festival of lowering the bar when it comes to how badly behaved a marketer is permitted to be in order to drive use…

The possibility exists in 2013 that the absolute revenues of the major players will decline as desktop revenues suffer and mobile revenues fail to make up the difference, even as they grow dramatically. This nightmare scenario is key to understanding what is driving bad behavior by marketers and product leaders. Bradley Horowitz recently made some pretty good jokes about Facebook’s bad behavior, but Google is not immune from this disease…

The need to monetize mobile traffic will dominate Google, Facebook, Twitter and others in 2013. And the pressure is to do it quickly due to the collapse in the growth of desktop-based traffic. Successful CMOs will avoid the pitfalls of driving unnatural acts of engagement and focus on user-benefits derived from monetization strategies…

I have lost count of how many ads offering me products that I have already purchased have flown past me on various sites and devices recently. Even the ad stream is becoming polluted. Targeting efforts are at the bottom of this trend. But from a user point of view targeting is poor and therefore irritating. The recent attempt by Facebook to alter the Instagram terms and conditions, and privacy policy, was a mistake, and acknowledged, but nonetheless it was driven by these desperate efforts…

currently all roads point to several varied attempts to re-portalize; that is to say, to own your own traffic and seek to monetize it. This is the old Yahoo view of the world and it clearly represents a limited mindset that will not scale to the huge mobile opportunity. For Twitter in particular, which has a large global opportunity as a platform, this trend represents a shrinking of its real opportunity…

Advertising is so far disappointing both in terms of its scale and its growth trajectory, as well as the value of a CPM. This disappointment forces mobile marketers to either innovate in the meaning of advertising on mobile or to systematically force feed both a large volume of ads, as well as attempt to target those ads in such a way that higher CPMs can be achieved. Everybody becoming an advertiser and paying for one’s attention is one way we see this. Limiting the distribution of a post, and then incenting payment for the post to be seen, is the ultimate in bad behavior. It won’t work out well…

Intimacy and long-term relationships are a forgotten goal.

The essence of good behavior is to start by helping the user achieve a goal. The essence of a mobile device is that it is intimate… The short-term revenue win from displaying an ad is offset by the long-term relationship damage done between the user and the publisher showing the ad. The sense of being a “target” rather than a person is a growing experience, as our sensibilities are increasingly offended…

The net impact of desperation-driven bad behavior is that users become cynical of publishers they formerly embraced. Privacy invasions, behavior changes by apps, and other experiences lead to the assumption that we, the users, are nothing more than ad fodder. The sad thing here is that users want their favorite publishers to make money, so that they can fund the app or service in question. But the crude methods of monetization are leading to alienation, not love…

The real nightmare for the industry here is that advertisers also become cynical. Upsetting users is not high on the list of advertisers’ goals. As users react, advertisers will run in the opposite direction. The already slow growth of mobile advertising will slow even further and the already large gap between the hours spent on mobile and the advertising dollars focused on it will grow further. Nobody wants this, but everybody is fuelling it. It is time to take a deep breath and collectively think about how to have the opposite impact…

New apps and services can grow quickly by offering intimacy and control to users.

Intimacy is the currency on mobile. Intimacy is a great thing, of course. Users love the ability to engage with those they like, love, and admire, and even those they hate and detest, in a personal mobile space. Apps that feed or empower this intimacy have prospered. Apps that trample over it have suffered… Mobile is 100 percent intimate, and bad behavior – and I include targeting here – will fail to produce scalable revenues. Doc Searls, in his Vendor Realtionship Management thoughts, has captured much of this thinking. His book “The Intention Economy, When Customers Take Charge” is a must-read book for the class of 2013 CMOs…

I definitely long for an unpolluted stream that is 100 percent capable of telling me things I want to be told. I also would love a way to tell the advertisers which brands I love, whether it be my favorite airline, movie theater, restaurant, camera vendor or whatever. I would love a way to regulate or control how my favorite vendors interact with me. Throttling them when they send too much or the wrong stuff, killing their ability to reach me when they behave badly, embracing them when they serve me well. Mobile, as an intimate device, is a great area to place the controls needed to realize much of this. And it scales too. Every human being on the planet has intimate tastes and relationships they love. This is true for their relationships to people, brands, products, organizations, and other entities. Two billion smartphones by the end of 2013 and every entity on the planet makes for a very large opportunity to allow users to become the boss, and for brands to enter into adult relationships with the customers who love them. Mobile is the perfect platform for the dream of one-to-one marketing to finally exist.

Markets are dance floors. If marketers want to dance one-to-one with customers, they need to let customers take the lead at least half the time. Here’s what I say about that in a chapter of The Intention Economy titled “The Dance”:

Right now, most retail market categories are dance floors where every customer hears dozens, hundreds, or thousands of companies, each with a megaphone, calling out dance moves. What those companies need to do instead is put down the megaphone, and—in the manner of Trader Joe’s and Zappos—shop along with customers. Dance. Sure, lead sometimes, but follow, too.

Not easy. Throughout the industrial age, business on the whole has always taken the lead—or thought it had to. But for customers to take charge—which they will, at least half the time—they have to take the lead, too.

It helps that vendors and customers both bring qualities to the dance floor that the other does not, and that both need each other for the economy to work and for civilization to thrive. They don’t always need to love each other or even to know each other. But they do need to respect, understand, and learn from each other. They can’t do that to full effect if one side tries constantly to dominate the other.

One thing companies are free to do is please and delight customers with products and services that are truly worthwhile. The chances of doing that only go up if customers are both heard and engaged as equals, and not as slaves or suckling calves.

So if you, Mr. or Ms. CMO, want to dance with customers, start by taking a look at the VRM developments that are already underway, because they’re supplying the dance shoes customers are starting to wear. (In some cases, such as browser extensions for blocking ads and tracking, the shoes have cleats, and customers are putting them on to run away from you.)

If you, big data masters, want to truly understand customers, do two things: 1) Look in the mirror. There you’ll find a human being who will never be fully described by data of any size — least of all by data gained by unwelcome surveillance; and 2) Give people, especially customers, the data you have about them. Remember what happened to computing with PCs and communications with the Net: individuals could do far more with both than could any big companies — least of all ones that thought they could do it all with big centralized systems.

If you, investors (and investment-focused media such as Techcrunch), want to ride a true sea change rather than surf the next buzz wave, consider this: VRM is about equipping the entire buy side of the market with its own tools of engagement — tools that can signal true intention, good will and countless other forms of economic signaling. This was a promise from the start of personal computing, of the Net, and of mobile devices. Rather than looking at those things as ways to target, capture, drive, trap, own or lock in customers, look at them as ways for customers to reach out and engage you, in their own ways and on their own terms. Remember that customers are where the money that matters comes from. They’re also the ones in the best position to keep it mattering, by exercising genuine loyalty, rather than the kind coerced or enticed with gimmicks like loyalty cards, rewards and discounts.

And happy new year.

 

What if qualified leads were free?

December 31, 2012 / / 2 Comments

In terms of economic signaling, think about which is worth more:

  1. A ready-to-sell-something message from an advertiser
  2. 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 Big Data, an ad can be personalized to a high degree: timed and targeted to reach a customer at exactly the right place and time. (Or that’s the idea, anyway.) Customers are also separate individuals. They may only be worth something to a company in aggregate. So we’re talking about lots of variables here.

But let’s look at a single vendor and a single customer for a moment, and say you’re the vendor. What would a ready-to-buy signal from a customer be worth to you? The answer today is called the qualified leads business. Search for that and you’ll get lots of results, most of which pitch you on paying for those leads.

But what if the leads were free, or close to that price? They are with intentcasting. (In Hunter becomes the prey, Scott Adams calls this “broadcast shopping.”) With intentcasting, customers advertise their wants and needs. For vendors, listening to the signals is free.

From the list of VRM development efforts on the ProjectVRM wiki, here’s the current list of intentcasting efforts:

AskForIt † – individual demand aggregation and advocacy
Body Shop Bids † – intentcasting for auto body work bids based on uploaded photos
Have to Have † – “A single destination to store and share everything you want online”
Intently † – Intentcasting “shouts” for services, in the U.K.
Innotribe Funding the Digital Asset Grid prototype, for secure and accountable Intentcasting infrastructure
OffersByMe † – intentcasting for local offers
Prizzm †- social CRM platform rewarding customers for telling businesses what they want, what they like, and what they have problems with
RedBeacon † – intentcasting locally for home services
Thumbtack † – service for finding trustworthy local service providers
Trovi intentcasting; matching searchers and vendors in Portland, OR and Chandler, AZ†
Übokia intentcasting†
Zaarly † intentcasting to community – local so far in SF and NYC

I’m sure it’s far from complete or up-to-date, but you can see some of what’s already going on. I guarantee that a lot more will be happening here in 2013 and beyond.

Toward a matrix of APIs

December 16, 2012 / / 5 Comments

At  the 2006 O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference, Cal Henderson, then of Flickr, gave a long session called “Launching and scaling new Web services.” As I recall, among the many things he explained well were some principles behind the Flickr API. One of those principles was user access to data. The API should be one that allowed the user to haul all of her data out of the system, even if it was to federate that data into a competing system. That’s because Flickr believed that user data is the user’s first, and not just the company’s. Another principle was keeping the API stable, so as not to disrupt users and other services that depended on the API.

Cal left Flickr a couple years after that, but Flickr’s API remains a model of stability and utility — so much so that Dave Winer this morning suggested it be declared a national treasure.

Many of us depend in large ways to the APIs of companies great and small — and more get added to that collection every day. For a good picture of what’s going on with APIs, check out ProgrammableWeb.com. Between Dave’s respect for durable APIs like Flickr’s, and ProgrammableWeb’s roster of current and future dependencies, we start to see a matrix of APIs that Craig Burton compares to a city filled with buildings and relationships. Each API provider, like each building, exposes the provider’s core competencies in ways that can be engaged.

But what happens when we each have our own APIs — when our own core competencies become exposed in ways that can be engaged? And when we start managing our lives through relationships between our APIs and those in the rest of the world — especially in ways that are live and full-duplex (two ways at the same time, like a phone call)? And where each of us, or a trusted agent, can do the required IF, THEN, OR and other programming logic, between our own personal clouds and the clouds of others? What will we have then?

There is lots of blogging out loud about this, about both the downsides of dependency (as both Phil Windley and I have, toward Flickr in particular). But I think the upside deserves more than equal consideration, especially as companies begin to realize the importance of direct and engaged relationships with customers and users, which is what we’ll have when VRM and CRM (along with allied functions on both sides) fully engage. The result, I believe, will be a matrix of useful dependencies, based on APIs everywhere, thick with accountability and responsibility. The result will be far more opportunity, and boundless positive economic and social externalities based on the Net’s and the Web’s founding virtues. What will end, or at least be obsoleted, are Matrix-like worlds where users and customers are held captive.

Thus our goal for VRM: to prove that free customers are more valuable than captive ones — both to themselves and to everyone and everything else with which they engage.

 

 

Driving VRM with car data and APIs

November 26, 2012 / / 6 Comments

Go read OnStar gives Volt owners what they want: their data, in the cloud, by Sean Gallagher, in Ars Technica. It’s a VRM story. The vendor is Chevrolet, the vended product is the Volt, and the relationship management is a DIY hack by one customer. The story begins,

You probably don’t think of your car as a developer platform, but Mike Rosack did. A few days after buying his Chevy Volt, Rosack started slowly mining his driving data. But he eventually revved up his efforts and created a community platform for drivers to track their own efficiency. Today more than 1,800 Volt owners compare stats with each other, jockeying for position on Rosack’s Volt Stats leader board.

volt dash with r-buttonThe Volt uses OnStar, a GM subsidiary known through its advertising for providing a way for drivers to call for roadside assistance; but which is actually a sophisticated cell-based data system through which cars communicate constantly with the mother ship’s cloud. While OnStar generously shares data back to customers through an app called RemoteLink, much more can be done with it, since it’s data and comes out through an API. Now here is where the story gets VRooMy:

Rosack initially wanted to do more with his own driving data than just view it on his phone. So he built what eventually became Volt Stats to capture this data, then started sharing it with other Volt owners. There was just one small problem: Volt Stats relied on Rosack’s reverse engineering of an interface for OnStar’s RemoteLink mobile application (iOS and Android). When OnStar moved to shut down the Web services interface Rosack had plugged into in mid-October, Volt Stats arrived at a screeching halt.

Rather than leaving Volt Stats stalled on the roadside, GM and OnStar accelerated efforts to give developers a new public Web API to create services on top of OnStar data. The companies even worked with Rosack to get him onboard and get Volt Stats re-launched. Now, Volt Stats is back online and other would-be car data hackers will soon be able to connect their Web applications to GM owners’ vehicle data (provided, of course, that they have privacy policies that meet with the approval of GM and OnStar lawyers).

OnStar had already developed an API for GM partners such as the car-sharing service RelayRides, who need to get access to some of the remote control and telematics elements of the service. But this new interface takes advantage of technologies such as OAuth and JAX-RS and it’s a step toward turning OnStar into a broader platform for the “Internet of things.” It’s also a way to give car enthusiasts a new kind of access to something they’ve always thought of as their own—their cars’ data.

Now come the VRM questions:

  • Where and how might customers store that data? Are current PDS (personal data stores) compatible and ready for it?
  • How might customers use that data — especially outside and between multiple vendors’ apps, APIs and relationship silos?
  • Might we see an  ⊂ (r-button) on the dashboards of car? How might that work? And if it does, how do we make it standard?
  • What usage and new market-driving scenarios might we start to imagine here?
  • How might customers assert their own privacy policies and terms as demand begins to drive supply?
  • What other interfaces do cars have that might be brought into the picture?
  • How can what happens here model what we do with the rest of the “Internet of things?”
  • What are the meshy wireless things we can do among ourselves and our cars, outside any vendor’s box? (Would love Robin Chase‘s thinking here.)

These are questions especially for VRM developers. Look for answers (and more questions) here and on various blogs.

VRM happenings in the U.K.

November 20, 2012 / / 1 Comment

The tweets have been rolling in…

Identity Assurance: Mydex’s unique contribution. An interview with @dejalexander @MydexCIC http://www.ctrl-shift.co.uk/news/2012/11/15/identity-assurance-mydexs-unique-contribution/ …

@321CtrlShift interview with my colleague @dejalexander on @MydexCIC and #IDAssurance http://is.gd/7yyiZk  #VRM

Very thoughtful @SimonTucker blog post about today’s DWP announcement http://is.gd/zRslHa  #IDAssurance #VRM

williamheath@williamheath‏

For those who wondered how #VRM would first break in the popular press: http://bit.ly/107SqT9  #DailyMirror #Midata #CtrlShift

So let’s unpack those.

First, the DWP (Department for Work and Pensions) announcement. What Mydex and others will provide is online identity assurance. (Note: not “providing” an identity.) To explain, Out-Law.com gives us Online identity scheme providers selected to design new DWP framework for verifying claims by benefits seekers.

This is one step in a march of reform led by the U.K. government, and moving in a generally VRooMy direction through the Midata program. Here are some links, starting in late 2011, and listed roughly chronologically:

The piece in the Mirror focuses on health and retail discounts. VRM is much broader than that, but it’s a good start.

[Later…] More below, from William Heath.

Intentcasting

November 15, 2012 / / Comments Off on 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 few months we’ve started calling it Intentcasting. (Scott Adams of Dilbert fame called it “broadcast shopping.”)

A partial list of intentcasting developers is listed here.

An intentcasting scenario ten years hence is described in my Wall Street Journal essay from July. Let’s make it sooner than that. 🙂

Also take a look at this video demo of an intentcasting scenario, produced by @HeatherVescent for Innotribe, the innovation arm of SWIFT, the Belgium-based nonprofit that transfers $trillions per day:

That involves the Digital Asset Grid, which was demo’d two weeks ago in Osaka at SWIFT’s Sibos conference. A number of VRM developers have been involved with that, as well as myself. The main two contributing to the prototype, and there to demo it at Sibos, were Phil Windley of Kynetx and Drummond Reed of Respect Network. Phil has a nice rundown on the session.

A huge thanks to @Petervan for leading the whole project, over the last two years.

Here’s the current list of intentcasting developers at the ProjectVRM wiki:

AskForIt † – individual demand aggregation and advocacy
Body Shop Bids † – intentcasting for auto body work bids based on uploaded photos
Have to Have † – “A single destination to store and share everything you want online”
OffersByMe † – intentcasting for local offers
Prizzm †- social CRM platform rewarding customers for telling businesses what they want, what they like, and what they have problems with
RedBeacon † – intentcasting locally for home services
Thumbtack † – service for finding trustworthy local service providers
Trovi intentcasting; matching searchers and vendors in Portland, OR and Chandler, AZ†
Übokia intentcasting†
Zaarly † intentcasting to community – local so far in SF and NYC

I know there are more, and that the descriptions need updating and de-bugging. That’s why I’m listing these here. Write to me with corrections, or fix the wiki yourself. (If you’re not known to it, you’ll need to go through the registration thing.)

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