Category: EmanciPay (Page 4 of 4)

Loose Links Raise Ships

May 8, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Little Brother TV for Every Single One of Us is a VRooMy project from Jonathan MacDonald. Writes Jonathan,

Today I want to share ‘littlebrother.tv‘ with you.

I am fascinated by the movement from ‘Big Brother’ type of activities in spying, behavioural targeting and deep packet inspection, to a society that is now empowered to turn the cameras back around on the corporations and vendors. I am also inspired by Michael Rosenblum who I feel very much aligned to in the empowerment by video…

So – down to business, here is the first goal of VRM:

Provide tools for individuals to manage relationships with organizations. These tools are personal. That is, they belong to the individual in the sense that they are under the individual’s control. They can also be social, in the sense that they can connect with others and support group formation and action. But they need to be personal first.

To this end, and within the principles of VRM at the forefront I would like to form a collaboration with others to create littlebrother.tv to enable a space where people can upload and store their recorded observations of companies, retailers and service providers.

This blog post is an open invitation to anyone who is thinks they could help bring this to life.

In Personal datastore: The future of the relationship economy, Uwe Hook gives props to VRM in a post that starts, “We’re not consumers anymore.” Yessss.

In Is HITECH Working? #5: “Gimme my damn data!” The stage is being set to enable patient-driven disruptive innovation, Dave deBronkart (e-PatientDave), Vince Kuraitis, and David C. Kibbe say some kind things about what I (and others in the VRM circle) have said, and go on to cover a variety of VRM-type items in respect to health care. They conclude,

Put the data in the consumer’s hands, and let real patient-driven disruption begin.

Here’s Jon Lebkowsky’s report. And, though he doesn’t mention VRM, Andy Oram has a customarily thorough and terrific report from the same event.)

And more from e-PatientDave.

Nicholas Schriver writes about VRM, noting that we can do some VRM-type stuff already with Twitter.

VRM shows up on this 21 Tips post.

mrtoff’s page two references VRM in a summary of Eve Maler session on UMA a the European Identity Conference.

And, while Pete Blackshaw doesn’t mention VRM in a post about trust, he does say,

In the 10th-anniversary edition of the classic “all markets are conversations” “Cluetrain Manifesto,” co-author Doc Searls warns of a coming “advertising bubble” and a push-media “attention economy” crash. Eventually, he suggests, an “intention economy” will “come along in which demand drives supply at least as well as supply drives demand.” If he’s right, one presumes new rules of trust will come along for the ride.

Last but far from least, we have a Google Summer of Code programmer (and others) working with us on EmanciPay. More on that in due time.

Hot Fodder for next week’s VRM Workshop

October 6, 2009 / / 2 Comments

A few weeks ago I was interviewed by Neil Davey of MyCustomer.com, a major voice in the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) field. The results are up at Doc Searls: Customers will use ID data to force CRM change. Much of what Neil sources for that piece come from my new chapter (“Markets are Relationships”) in the latest edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto (Now with 30% more clues!). In that chapter, Neil says,

Searls sticks the boot into customer relationship management. And even though CRM has become accustomed to bruising encounters, some of these blows hurt – perhaps because there are some painful truths being delivered. CRM, as Searls sees it, would rather have captive customers rather than free ones. To demonstrate this, we only have to examine the language organisations use when referring to customers – how they try to ‘lock in’ customers and ‘retain’ them after they have been ‘acquired’.

Later this week, after I’ve looked more closely at what did and didn’t make it into Neil’s piece (what I said to him, by emai, was quite long), I’ll post some of what was missed.

Meanwhile, a little summary for VRM newbies arriving from the lands of CRM…

The purpose of VRM is to improve markets by enlarging what customers can do, not just what vendors can do. The latter is necessary too; but that’s what all good sellers have always been doing. And there’s a limit to how far that can go.

Better selling alone can’t make better buying. Better marketing alone can’t make better markets. Better CRM alone can’t make better customers. At a certain point customers have to do that for themselves.

That point came when the Internet arrived. It was announced by Chris Locke in The Cluetrain Manifesto, with this very graphic:

notThere was an equipment problem with that statement. Customers were not yet self-equipped with the means for reaching beyond the grasp of old-school marketers and sellers—a school that is still very much in session.

VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) is about equipping customers with their own ways of of relating to vendors. In the larger sense, it’s also for equipping individuals with their own ways of relating to any organization.

Thats the mission of ProjectVRM.org, which I lead as a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center. It’s also the mission of a variety of related projects and companies: The Mine! Project, PAOGA, The Banyan Project, MyDex, ListenLog, EmanciPay, Scanaroo, Kynetx, r-button and SwitchBook, to name a subset of the whole community.

Adriana Lukas, who started The Mine! Project, has something new at Market RIOT (Relationships on Individuals’ Own Terms): MINT, for My Information, Not Theirs. She calls it “a movement to redress the balance of market power between vendors and customers, institutions and individuals, web services/platforms and users.” Its obectives:

  • “to create an ecosystem where customer data belongs to the customer, is freely available to individual customer or user, in open formats
  • ‘to help the individual to become the point of integration for his or her transactional data
  • “to encourage development of applications that enable individuals to enjoy the value they can add by managing and analysing their own data (buying behaviour, purchasing patterns and preferences) and potentially benefit vendors, when such information is voluntarily shared by customers.”

This should bring up plenty of discussion at the VRM East Coast Workshop next Monday and Tuesday at Harvard Law School. It’s free. The agenda will be set by participants (on the “open space” model). In addition I am working right now on lining up an opening panel on Tuesday to lead off discussion of user control of data. Stay tuned for more on that.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t signed up already, go here to register for the workshop.

Appreciating TipJoy

August 21, 2009 / / 5 Comments

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 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.

Testing the all-tip system

August 21, 2009 / / 1 Comment

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?

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