Category: Vertical ideas (Page 3 of 6)

Personal leverage for personal data

April 28, 2011 / / 4 Comments

VRM is starting to snowball. You can see it in the Twitter scroll there on the right, and in Twitter searches for #VRM. Gaining velocity lately is personal data. To look down that vector, I’ll connect several links.

The first is Show Us the Data. (It’s Ours, After All), by Richard H. Thaler in the . The gist:

The collection and dissemination of this information raises a host of privacy issues, of course, and the bipartisan team of Senators John Kerry and John McCain has proposed what it is calling the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights to deal with many of them. Protecting our privacy is important, but the senators’ approach doesn’t tackle a broader issue: It doesn’t include the right to access data about ourselves. Not only should our data be secure; it should also be available for us to use for our own purposes. After all, it is our data.

Here is a guiding principle: If a business collects data on consumers electronically, it should provide them with a version of that data that is easy to download and export to another Web site. Think of it this way: you have lent the company your data, and you’d like a copy for your own use.

This month in Britain, the government announced an initiative along these lines called “mydata.” (I was an adviser on this project.) Although British law already requires companies to provide consumers with usage information, this program is aimed at providing the data in a computer-friendly way. The government is working with several leading banks, credit card issuers, mobile calling providers and retailers to get things started.

Here’s the long-form .pdf on mydata. What’s most important about it, especially for U.S. domestic purposes, is that its case is not just for protective legislation to keep customers safe from abuse by big bad companies, but for empowering customers in the marketplace. (When you dig into his work you see that this is Thaler’s case as well.) In this respect, mydata is a very VRM-ish move. But then, the U.K. government has been pro-VRM for awhile now. (Somewhere around here I have a link to a speech by a U.K. official that names VRM specifically. If it shows up, I’ll put it here.)

The good people at Ctrl-SHIFT, a U.K. company that’s highly active in the VRM movement, explains the mydata initiative:

The announcement is a first on two fronts:

1) Its ‘mydata’ programme encourages companies to release data they hold about individuals back to them, so that they can use this data for their own purposes. This is the first major Government initiative, globally, towards a changed personal data consensus: personal data is a personal asset, and individuals should have the right and ability to manage and use this asset to pursue their own goals.

2) The Government programme is also the first official recognition that there is a market for decision-making services (or ‘choice tools’ in Government parlance) that operates independently of existing markets for products and services – the market for what we call Personal Information Management Services (PIMS).

Want to know more?

Do you want to join your peers in debating this initiative and related issues? If so, then join our new Explorers Club on May 12 (in central London). It’s got a packed agenda including slots on both the Government’s new mydata initiative and on PIMS.

They also have a briefing paper on the topic.

Meanwhile, here in the U.S. we’ve been  focused more on prophylaxis than empowerment, at least at the federal level. This is a problem with our obsession with privacy as an issue in itself. Focus on privacy alone, and conversation inevitably veers toward policy. What new laws and regulations do we need to protect ourselves? we ask. That may be a good question, but it ignores answers that are already coming from the marketplace — answers that see today’s privacy problems as secondary effects of market dysfunction, and which pursue opportunities that marginalize and obsolete today’s privacy-threatening business practices.

Rex Hammock deals with this in his post, VRM: I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours, which begins with a response to the same NYTimes piece:

…the examples of initiatives the writer points to may lead the reader to believe that government-led initiatives are the best route to take. That may be the best route one day, if companies don’t, themselves, join in the types of initiatives Project VRM is trying to foster.

However, it is important to recognize there are lots of startups, non-profits, academic and open source / grassroots (note: where I’ll place my bets) and even big-company initiatives in this arena, as well. It is also important to note that this issue is not something that sprang forth last week: For as long as I can remember, there have been those who embrace the internet, but who believe relationships (and identity) should belong to the users and buyers, not just hosts and sellers.

I will be writing more on this topic in the future. I just wanted to post this to alert people that the next big thing is not going to be about what others are doing to collect your data and lock you into their data-protectorates. The next big thing is going to be about you having better ways to access and use the relationships and data that belong to you, in ways that recognizes that markets are conversations — not plantations.

That last link is mine, pointing to an earlier post that unpacks the agricultural metaphor behind Rex’s point.

In vrm, fourth party and the empowered consumer, Gam Das gives a terrific example of VRM’s potential for radically improving the way markets work:

What appears to be missing is a service where vendors (manufacturers and retailers) are able to locate individuals looking for products that they might supply. Service Magic and Elance allow seekers to find providers in the Service space, yet nothing really exists yet in the consumer-product space.

vrm and the fourth party

The Fourth Party is a concept that has emerged from the VRM movement – it proposes a fourth party that acts on behalf of the Customer in the same way that a Third Party acts on behalf of the Vendor. If the Vendors are the hotel chains, airlines and car rental companies, then the third parties are Expedia, Orbitz andTravelocity and a fourth party might be the “agent” that negotiates with the travel aggregators to find the best deal.

The advantages to the customer of a four party system are huge and easily understandable. Booking my recent trip to Las Vegas involved a large number of parameters (flight times, airline options, hotel locations and star ratings, car rental companies and car sizes and above all the price parameters) – booking the trip took 3 hours and ended up with a deal for flight and hotel from Expedia and car from Hotwire. If there had been a service to whom I could have sent all the parameters and have them take care of it, then I would have paid for that and they would have probably got me a better deal if they do it all the time.

But wait… I remember a service like that from when I was a child, I think we called it a ‘Travel Agent’. But didn’t they become extinct a few years ago? Perhaps it’s time for them to re-emerge, but not only booking travel, but also handling all sorts of complex requirements, particularly bundles of goods and services. If enough people were able to publish their requests for things and there was a fee involved in finding a solution, a human outsource agent model is likely to emerge – something like the Dedicated Assistant service.

The fourth party also gets around the problem faced by Aggregators (such asKelkoo and Nextag) – to ensure that the consumer is presented with all the offers available. With a fourth party, their value will be to ensure this.

the future state

Once this starts to scale and requests are in millions and billions, then eventually the dedicated assistants will need to be augmented with more automated service that respond faster and are perhaps able to bid at auctions or take advantage of limited time / quantity deals, then my belief is that we will see Agent Technology doing our bidding online. I’ll be watching this space closely for many reasons.

Fourth parties are just one of the many VRM topics being tee’d up for IIW in Mountain View next week. It’s also one of the reasons why for the first time we’re inviting investors along with developers, journalists and other usual suspects. (The Ctrl-SHIFT people and Gam will be there, by the way, as will I.)

By the way, I wish I had involved myself in the ‘s this week (hard to do everything while writing a book), because (one of those potential IIW topics, above) would have been a great candidate for the new business model contest. (It got through two rounds of the Knight News Challenge, for whatever that’s worth.) In any case, I highly recommend reading for the event. Here’s an idea to keep in mind: Once customers start driving the music industry bus, that industry will be much bigger than it ever was when the labels drove the thing.

And to loop back to the topic of this post, note the collection of entities in the Personal Data Ecosystem, which will also be well-represented at IIW next week.

Patient-driven health care

April 22, 2011 / / 3 Comments

VRM has been a cause in health care far longer than the term Vendor Relationship Management has been around. (For ProjectVRM, that’s been since late ’06.) And, as a category within VRM, health care could not be larger, more personal, or more contentious. Just yesterday Paul Krugman posted a column titled Patients are not consumers. Can’t get much more VRM than that.

Lately I’ve been urged to front-burner health care as a VRM topic, and I’m obliging here by recommending it as a topic for IIW#12, coming up the first week of May. The top urgers have been , Jon Lebkowsky,  and “.

Brian has been active on the ProjectVRM list, and his latest occupation — CTO of the — follows several years of involvement with and the Alembic Foundation, both at the forefront of patient-driven health care. Here’s a talk Brian gave last summer at OSCON, and some more stuff about Alembic.

Jon has been organizing meetups and conference calls on VRM and health care, as well as taking a lead role on behalf of the topic on the ProjectVRM list. ProjectVRM and e-Patients is a good sample. This slide deck also deals with the issues.

Adrian writes HealthURL, takes the VRM position in his postings on The Health Care Blog, and has been active in our workshops at Harvard., hosted by the . This post, for example, has five helpful links (and lots more where those came from):

The debate between provider-centeredand patient-centered health information exchange is still very much with us. Recent progress with the Direct Project, Blue Buttonand Kaiser’s donation of terminology suggest a trend toward simplicity and open-source collaboration as essential catalysts for health information exchange.

Dave recently gave an outstanding talk at TEDx in the Netherlands. (Pull quote: “patient is not a third-person word.”) Dave’s blogroll is also a trove, so I’m dropping it right in here:

Dave and I got on each other’s radar several years ago after he picked up on my Patient as a Platform post. Everything I wrote there still stands. What’s changed is my own hope for some progress on this whole front. In the past I avoided health care as a VRM topic, for two reasons: 1) I saw other people carrying the ball very well, and 2) I wanted to see results in my lifetime. Thanks to work by people like the four mentioned here, I have hope for that.

Just got an email from Dave, with these additional notes:

The monster-size issue in healthcare is that we’re pre-Copernican-shift.

The establishment completely doesn’t get it:

  • Feb 2011 conference session at HIMSS, describing the shift as if it were new: http://www.himssconference.org/career/careerpavilion04.aspx.
    • HIMSS is the huge health IT association – 30,000 members attend the conference.
    • But here is a 2007 book that cites the shift, and Microsoft cited it often when HealthVault launched in late 2008 / early 2009.

Our pre-Copernican status makes it really hard to pick up your marbles and switch vendors. Your marbles, of course, is your carcass plus your records about it.

(Another factor is the relationship with a trusted physician, who often has relatively little mobility.)

Liberating our records:

I mentioned the Blue Button “download my data” initiative, which is the first truly disruptive effort to liberate our data. I say “disruptive” in the Christensen sense – it gets the data out of the hands of the currently dominant party (the suppliers – docs and hospitals) so innovators can pounce on it and find things to do with it.

At the Markle Foundation meeting last May where Blue Button was conceived, one question from the establishment was “Do people really want this?” The latest stats from the VA say yes. An email from Rachel Lansford, special assistant to VA CTO Peter Levin:

We measure unique registrants and the number of download requests they’ve made. We do collect these stats from beginning of Blue Button in August 2010.

Here are the latest stats as of April 16, 2011:

  • Unique total registrants for VA’s Blue Button: 218,142 (8/29/10-4/16/11)
  • Download requests: 473,510 (8/29/10-4/16/11)

n  PDF downloads: 40,858 (03/19/11-04/16/11) (new feature in March release)

VA is just one Federal partner offering Blue Button. DoD, who recently updated their [Blue Button dataset] to include lab results, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services offer the Blue Button to their beneficiaries too. The total unique registrants for Federal-wide is about 300,000 users.

(She says August; it was announced publicly in October.) 300,000 users in 6-8 months? I’d say some people are interested. And note that there are multiple downloads (473k downloads, by 218k unique users.)

Just the start

Mind you, downloading a blue button dataset is just the beginning, because it’s far from a comprehensive medical history. But it’s a start – the first start – at liberating a large dataset. As I said in a talk in DC last June, to innovators, data is fuel. And I expect this is the start of a new ecosystem.

As a trivial first example, see the TEDMED talk by Wired editor Thomas Goetz on redesigning medical data: http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_goetz_it_s_time_to_redesign_medical_data.html, and this fabulous Wired article from November: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/11/ff_bloodwork/all/1

Today’s norm is totally not patient-centered: rows of stupid, unhighlighted data, with no call to action, no nothing. It’s easy to miss anything important, and disempowering to all (including the busy physician). The redesigns Goetz showed in the video (e.g. around 11:15) and in the Wired article use ordinary good design to draw attention to what you need to know.

The only reason we’re all not getting this kind of result today is because we’re pre-Copernican shift. The people at the center of the universe today don’t mind getting what they’re getting, and the rest of us.

Please let me know other links and sources I should put on this list.

 

 

 

VRM vertical: real estate

August 25, 2010 / / 1 Comment

Bill Wendell of Real Estate Cafe poses a good Idea Starter question: What if homebuyers and sellers managed their own data? Sez Bill, Here are ten of our favorites ideas about how to retool the real estate industry with VRM.  What are yours? He actually provides more than ten. Here’s a sample:

5.  Buyers will be able to sign into open houses, and transfer their buyer profile or homesearchID by “bumping” their smart phone.  (See comments received / Discuss)

6.  Fourth parties, like locally initiated homebuyer club, will aggregate and deliver savings to buyers and sellers.  (See comments received / Discuss)

10.  Buyers will be able to manage and release their listing clickstreams so sellers, including distressed sellers, auctioneers, and leanders or government agencies with foreclosures, can invite them to bid on properties.  (See comments received / Discuss)

15.  Fourth parties will develop platforms to certify trust worthiness of real estate professionals based on terms of service, eg. No conflicts of interest because brokerage prohibits dual agency.  (See comments received / Discuss)

18.  Geoloco apps, augmented reality, and smartphones / mobile devices will enable real estate consumers to connect at hyperlocal level and engage in meaningful conversations that translate into more informed decisions and savings opportunities.  (See comments received / Discuss)

20.  eGov will embrace VRM tools, particularly homebuyerIDs, to reduce paperwork and help make sense of morass of competing housing program guidelines.  (See comments received / Discuss)

These are also in the reVRM Minifesto.

And Bill is tweeting with the hashtag #reVRM.

Also dig the CRM+VRM 2010 workshop tomorrow (where Bill and many other VRooMers and CRooMers will be). That hashtag is #vrmcrm2010.

Beyond Brainwash

May 6, 2010 / / 1 Comment

Recently I learned about a good idea that had been killed by a marketing meeting. This prompted from me an email venting my frustration. Here’s what I wrote:

Marketing is bullshitting — especially to itself. It’s poisoned by the fecal brainwash it’s been gargling for the duration. It sees nothing more than what it wants, fears, or both. It can’t listen. It can’t be conversational. “Conversation marketing” is oxymoronic beyond the bounds of irony.

It must die.

Well, it won’t, and it shouldn’t. I got carried away there.

But there isn’t any shortage of brainwash, or those willing or eager to gargle it. Thus Gartner is probably right when it says,

Internet marketing will be regulated by 2015, controlling more than US$250 billion in Internet marketing spending worldwide. Despite international efforts to eliminate “spam,” marketing “clutter” is abundant in every marketing channel. Pressure for greater accountability means the backlash from annoyed consumers will eventually drive legislation to regulate Internet marketing. Companies that focus primarily on the Internet for marketing purposes could find themselves unable to market effectively to customers, putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage when new regulations take effect. Although experiencing high growth, vendors who focus solely on, and sell predominately to, Internet marketing solutions could find themselves faced with a declining market, as companies shift marketing funds to other channels to compensate.

Which will happen if nothing changes. But some things will. For example (continuing from Gartner),

By 2014, over 3 billion of the world’s adult population will be able to transact electronically via mobile or Internet technology. Emerging economies will see rapidly rising mobile and Internet adoption through 2014. At the same time, advances in mobile payment, commerce and banking are making it easier to electronically transact via mobile or PC Internet. Combining these two trends creates a situation in which a significant majority of the world’s adult population will be able to electronically transact by 2014.

Yes, this is good. But will they transact only with today’s Internet marketers? How about with anybody they deal with, period, including friends and businesses (or combinations of both) in the brick, mortar and social contact worlds? Why not? Consider the interactive devices we’ll carry in our pockets:

Gartner research predicts that by 2014, there will be a 90 percent mobile penetration rate and 6.5 billion mobile connections. Penetration will not be uniform, as continents like Asia (excluding Japan) will see a 68 percent penetration and Africa will see a 56 percent mobile penetration. Although not every individual with a mobile phone or Internet access will transact electronically, each will have the ability to do so. Cash transactions will remain dominant in emerging markets by 2014, but the foundation for electronic transactions will be well under way for much of the adult world.

Do you think the browser alone will be the interactive system through which we’ll do that? I don’t. You might use a browser, just like you use a grocery store’s shopping cart; but the interactive mechanisms provided for you are not yours. They are the store’s (just like the cart). The context is theirs, not yours.

You switch from one vendor context to the next when you go from NewEgg to Amazon to eBay to wherever. In each virtual place a cookie in your browser identifies you as an entity that has been there before, and the system reacts accordingly, giving you a context: a half-filled shopping cart, a history, some recommendations based on that history, and now (thanks to Facebook and others) a social context as well. Remember, this context is not yours. It is theirs, customized for you. Gartner again:

By 2015, context will be as influential to mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Web. Whereas search provides the “key” to organizing information and services for the Web, context will provide the “key” to delivering hyperpersonalized experiences across smartphones and any session or experience an end user has with information technology. Search centered on creating content that drew attention and could be analyzed. Context will center on observing patterns, particularly location, presence and social interactions. Furthermore, whereas search was based on a “pull” of information from the Web, context-enriched services will, in many cases, prepopulate or push information to users. The most powerful position in the context business model will be a context provider. Web, device, social platforms, telecom service providers, enterprise software vendors and communication infrastructure vendors.

This is fine. But can the sellers provide you with all the context you need? What about your own context? What about your shopping list, which might contain stuff available only from five, ten or more different stores? What about the standing relationships you have with different stores? How about improving those in ways those stores’ systems can’t imagine or anticipate?

Phil Windley gives a great talk (here’s a .pdf) about the history of e-commerce, in which he says, “1965: We got cookies and said ‘Good enough’. The end.” As a result, the context we still take for granted is the seller’s. Not our own.

I was talking to Joe Andrieu the other day about this, and in the course of the conversation we both realized that the browser itself serves as a kind of shopping cart, the owner of which changes as you go from one retail site to another. Think about how every shopping cart you use is provided by the store. Thus the question my wife asked in 1995 (see slide #3) still hangs in the air: “Why can’t I take my shopping cart from ome site to another?” The short answer is, Because it’s not yours.

Well, what would be yours? Whatever the answer, the context needs to be yours too. If you’d like to chew on this, start with Phil’s Building the Purpose-Centered Web.

Being a platform for your own health

April 29, 2010 / / 5 Comments

In “Gimme my damn data!” The stage is being set to enable patient-driven disruptive innovation, Vince Kuraitis says,

We assert that to disrupt within a non-working system is to bark up a pointless tree: even if you win, you haven’t altered what matters. Business planners and policy people who do this will miss the mark. Here’s what we see when we step back and look anew from the consumer’s view:

  1. We’ve been disrupting on the wrong channel.
  2. It’s about the consumer’s appetite.
  3. Patient as platform:
    • Doc Searls was right
    • Lean says data should travel with the “job.”
    • “Nothing about me without me.”
  4. Raw Data Now: Give us the information and the game changes.
  5. HITECH begins to enable patient-driven disruptive innovation.
  6. Let’s see patient-driven disruption. Our data will be the fuel.

Well, to point #3, it’s more than just me. I wrote what Vince calls “right“, and that Dave deBronkhart (e-Patient Dave) also cites, when I was in the hospital and observed the system up close and personal, and found that others have been advocating Patient as Platform for a long time, though with different names. Kudos to all of them.

I have one small quibble, and that’s with the word “consumer.” Patients today no longer only consume. They produce.  What they want and need is more responsibility for their own health care. More importantly, a patient cannot be a platform if he or she is only consuming. By nature and definition, a consumer is a subordinate creature. It lives downhill from the flow of services. Platforms stand below what they support, but are not subordinate. They are the independent variable on which the variable ones standing on it depend.

For more along these lines, follow Adriana Lukas here, where (among other things), she has MINT, which stands for My Information Not Theirs.

Wanted: User-usable data

March 22, 2010 / / 0 Comments

For years makers of many kinds of goods and services have provided means for them to monitor how things are going. Now they need to include us in on the action, for the simple reason that we can do it better than they can. That’s the point of Driving by the Numbers, Robin Chase‘s recent op-ed in The New York Times.

Says Robin,

…sometimes the solution to a safety problem is simply more transparency. Indeed, there is a relatively easy solution that would help identify problems before they affect thousands of cars, or kill and injure dozens of people: allow drivers and carmakers real-time access to the data that’s already being monitored.

Most cars now undergo regular state emissions and safety inspections. A mechanic plugs an electronic reader into what’s known as the onboard diagnostic unit, a computer that sits under your dashboard, monitoring data on acceleration, emissions, fuel levels and engine problems. The mechanic can then download the data to his own computer and analyze it.

Because carmakers believe such diagnostic data to be their property, much of it is accessible only by the manufacturer and authorized dealers and their mechanics. And even then, only a small amount of the data is available — most cars’ computers don’t store data, they only monitor it. Though newer Toyotas have data recorders that gather information in the moments before an air bag is deployed, the carmaker has been frustratingly vague about what kind of data is collected (other manufacturers have been more forthcoming).

But what if a car’s entire data stream was made available to drivers in real time? You could use, for instance, a hypothetical “analyze-my-drive” application for your smart phone to tell you when it was time to change the oil or why your “check engine” light was on. The application could tell you how many miles you were getting to the gallon, and how much yesterday’s commute cost you in time, fuel and emissions. It could even tell you, say, that your spouse’s trips to the grocery store were 20 percent more fuel-efficient than yours.

Carmakers could collect the data, too. Aberrant engine and driving behavior would leap out of the carmakers’ now-large data set…

For those companies, keeping that data to themselves — in fact, not realizing in the least that the largest body of intelligence about their own goods and services is out there among the actual users of them — is mainframe thinking at its worst.

In 1943, Thomas Watson of IBM famously said, “”I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” That’s the kind of thinking that IBM (which invented the PC as most of us know it, in 1982) gave up generations ago. But it’s still alive and well in big companies of nearly all other kinds.

What I’d like to know is if there are any hacks on Toyota’s or Honda’s or any car maker”s data reporting systems. Betcha there is. If not, let’s attack this from our side of the fence, rather than the car makers’ — or even the governent’s. (They’re even less likely to get it right.) To wrap that case, here’s Robin’s bottom line:

Cars would continue to break down and even cause accidents, but it wouldn’t take a Congressional hearing to figure out why.

Hat tip to Bart Stevens of iChoosr for sharing Robin’s piece with fellow VRooMers.

VRM on the CRM radar

March 17, 2010 / / 0 Comments

From the last paragraph the latest post by in the : “Stay tuned for the May issue of , which will focus on vendor relationship management (VRM). You’ll hear about tools (such as mobile coupons) that provide customers with both independence from vendors and better ways of engaging with vendors. It’s a cool concept that I look forward to share more about.”

I talked with Laura last November, and believe Iain Henderson did too. It’ll be interesting to see how the story comes out.

MyCubi: a Personal RFP Play

February 2, 2010 / / 1 Comment

John Federico (@gadgetboy) writes this in MyCubi: A Local Auction Marketplace for Services in Your Neighborhood:

MyCubi (pronounced “My Cubee”)wants to make local marketplaces more efficient by bringing buyers and service providers together.

Service providers visiting MyCubi are encourage to create a Cubi – a free web page that enables businesses to market, trade and communicate with potential customers in their local market.Visitors to MyCubi that are looking for services can post a Cubi Call – a free RFP that let’s service providers bid against each other for the project.

All of these buy and sell requests are placed on a map, so you know not with whom you’re doing business but where they’re located.

This is the start of a marketplace of intentions or what some call Vendor Relationship Management, albeti a simple version of it. No longer do you need to narrow your search for a provider based on referrals and recommendations. Sure, you’ll still want to get those, but you can simultaneously post to MyCubi and have local companies compete for your business.

And it’s not just Business-to-Business – consumers can use MyCubi, too. For instance, there are numerous entries in MyCubi for babysitters. Why not landscapers, house painters and dog walkers?

While it will certainly improve as more providers and buyers join the platform, you can start using MyCubi right now – there are no geographical restrictions.

Of course, the big question has yet to be answered: how does MyCubi make money? No idea, yet. The service is currently free for buyers and providers.

Anybody checked it out? Be curious to see how it goes.

VRMspotting

February 2, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Graham Sadd (@grahamsadd) in VRM Trust Matters:

MyCustomer.com publishes the second half of Doc Searls predictions and emerging forms of VRM but I couldn’t resist adding a few to his list.

As a long term advocate of VRM (or SRM as I used to call it back in the last century) I fully agree with Doc and the ProjectVRM core principle of ‘user-driven’. However we at PAOGA prefer ‘user’ to ‘customer’ in this context as we provide secure VRM tools and services extending beyond the ‘Vendor Relationship’ to enhance individuals participation in their relationships as a citizen, patient, employee, client, student, et al. Let’s call it XRM.

Whilst Doc provides a number of examples whereby VRM can provide significant mutual benefits to both buyer and seller, I think there are a few more worthy of mention.

The full text of that MyCustomer.com interview is at How VRM helps CRM.

In Accepting Payments on the Real-Time Web Damon Cortesi (@dacort) visits issues we face from the user/customer’s side with EmanciPay:

Here’s the thing – I build products. Lots of them. And I want to charge for them. I don’t want to have to drive tens of thousands of uniques per month before ads even start to think about paying out. I’m tired of visiting websites and having ads about people’s ugly teeth be the first thing I see. Dave McClure had an interesting, if curse-word-infused, post on the future of subscriptions. The basic gist is that startups have focused on growth and advertising-based revenue models in the past decade and that now we are heading more towards a subscription and transaction-based model.

His spot-on rant is ridiculously close to what I almost ended up posting this morning, and I’m glad I didn’t, as I haven’t quite earned the the respect to swear online like that yet. But here’s how it looks from the ground floor as a developer on a 2-person team that is trying to avoid the CPM/CPC model and instead focus on building useful products that people want to pay for. A crazy concept, I know!

Then he reviews, at length, a number of company offerings, and concludes,

Since the weekend, I’ve been contacted by a number of other subscription billing companies. Of the couple I checked out (Vindicia and Aria Systems), their websites were primarily marketing fluff – white papers, best practice guides and webinars. In order to actually determine their feasibility, I had to fill in a form and have a sales person contact me. This may work for larger corporations, but we’re a startup. Putting up a sales gateway in front of your documentation makes it pretty damn difficult to evaluate the efficacy of your solution. When we’re building products in a matter of hours or days, your 9-5, Monday-Friday attitude is simply not going to be compatible with our workflow. But maybe we’re not your target audience.

All that being said, there’s hope. Spreedly, Recurly, and Chargify are all brand new and all appear to both be listening and care about their  current and potential customers. I don’t doubt that they’ll all get to where I want them to be in the near future, but they’re not quite there yet.

Perhaps useful to other folks is this spreadsheet where we tracked different recurring billing solutions against our requirements. I’d love to hear other people’s experiences with these, or other payment solutions.

Nicolas Shriver:

I like the VRM concept. The Vendor Relationship Management is somehow a reverse CRM. A customer exposes his needs for a product, and the brand gets in contact with him to provide the accurate information, via social media or its website. This is the reason why community management is getting so huge.

John Cass:

I’m reading Paul Greenberg’s CRM and the speed of light, just getting into the second chapter where he discusses various CRM related terms. Including VRM, Doc Searls’ baby, the idea of vendor relationship management, customers manage their data and relationships instead of companies managing customer data. Companies provide customers with the tools to manage their data. Google Health would be an example of VRM. Paul and I discussed VRM back in 2008. I think it will be a hot topic in the years to come. Glad Paul included the term in the book, and I picked up some extra points from Paul’s more detailed research. Really enjoying the book.

Paul’s blog is here. And here’s the book at Amazon.

Paul Madsen:

With appropriate #micro-syntax, could #plancast serve as a #VRM RFI/RFP platform, ie ‘plan to buy’?

The Liverpool Chamber of Commerce points to Loyalty Marketing: The Nature and Scope of CRM and VRM Systems. Reading the promo text, I’m not sure the speaker is talking about our kind of VRM or another one, but I’m curious to know.

Dennis Howlett, in Rationalizing the E2.0, SCRM, social business discussion:

A constructive next step?

It’s always easy to throw brickbats but on this occasion I’d prefer to add something I hope is fresh into the conversation while representing a challenge. In doing so, I am asking people to think beyond their silos of expertise in an effort to articulate the strategic intent that seems implied but is never quite said.

Doc Searls has long talked about Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) as a socially constructed way of looking at the vendor-customer relationship. It’s kind of the inverse of CRM but with the same philosophical grounding.

The last time we discussed this, more than a year ago, he acknowledged that making VRM work in anything other than relatively simple supply chain situations was likely to prove tough. Yet real customer service means having some reach into the supply chain. Even now Doc acknowledges that many of the tools don’t exist to make the VRM dream a reality. But maybe there’s a way where E2.0/SCRM thinkers can see where their ideas start to disintegrate and use the conversation Doc has going to make this more relevant to the real world. At the same time, maybe think also about how Sig’s BRP impacts the broad sweep of E2.0/SCRM.

Finally, when thinking about E2.0/SCRM, pay attention to the way in which organizational change occurs in the context of nuanced cultures. Don’t be constrained by one or other theory simply because it makes for an attractive sounding buzz phrase. Without that, much of what passes for this new way of thinking will be lost.

It’s early days. I’m sure it is happening. Somewhere. I’d just like to see it.

For additional context there I’ll point to Enterprise 2.0 (the subject for which E2.0 is an abbreviation), the excellent new book by my colleague Andrew McAfee.

Robin Wilton in Paying for Privacy:

The older reason is that “point” privacy protection products can usually do little or nothing about the elephant in the room… the vested and mostly-invisible commercial interests behind online advertising are so huge, so entrenched and so opaque to the user that it is all but impossible to change the balance of power between the ‘data subject’ and the ‘data gatherer’. As an example, look at the difficulty some very bright people have had with turning VRM from concept into reality. (VRM, or “Vendor Relationship Management” was coined as a flip-side to “Customer Relationship Management” – CRM – … the idea being that my interests would be better served if I took control of my data and used it as the leverage to change vendors’ behaviour). The idea, the principles and the technology might all be fine, but those factors are not enough to convince/persuade/force vendors to do things your way instead of theirs.

Yep.

Dear Hollywood,

December 26, 2009 / / 4 Comments

Please get rid of the @#$%^& region coding on your movies.

We meant to bring along some movies when we came to Switzerland for our holiday vacation, which we’re on now. Forgetting the DVDs was my fault. Not being able to watch other movies, however — ones that we would be glad to pay for and watch on our laptop, is not our fault. It’s yours. It’s way past time to fix that.

Thanks to the insanity of region coding, we can’t play DVDs rented or bought here, because they’re encoded for Region 2, while our laptops are set for Region 1. There are workarounds, but we don’t feel like screwing with those.

But, we thought, Hey, we’re Netflix customers. Maybe we could watch live online. The wi-fi connection at the hotel here is surprisingly good (considering that we’re way back up in the Alps). Alas, when we go to Netflix, it says,

Watching Instantly is Not Available Outside the US

Our systems indicate that the computer you are using is not located within the 50 United States or District of Columbia. Due to studio licensing reasons, movies are available to watch instantly only on computers in those locations.

I don’t know if this retro craziness actually creates any business for the studios, but it clearly prevents business in our case, and many others.

So, Hollywood, why screw your own customers? You have a direct relationship with me. I pay to watch your movies. We have a relationship. Why should that relationship fail when I leave the country? This is the freaking Internet we’re on. My watching a Netflix movie should not have a damn thing to do with where I am in the world. What am I going to do that’s a risk to you? Copy and re-encode it for sale over here? Let’s get real.

There has to be a better way than this.

If you can’t figure one out for yourselves (and, after eleven years, there is good reason to believe you won’t), how about working with customers to develop a solution that involves point-to-point, customer-seller relationships that enable business and support good will, rather than preventing both?

If you’re interested, let us know.

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