The following excerpts a recent Project VRM Conversation on Geocasting — the ability to share your location data with the world, how you could optionally share it, and how it could be abused.
A thread on privacy developed as often happens in these discussions about the ongoing digitization of our thoughts, movements, and actions. Continue reading
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Think of the industrialized world as Kansas and the Internet as Oz. The difference is actually more radical than that, because the Internet is real. From the perspective of industry, the Internet is actually surreal. It’s a place that calls for depiction by Dalí, or Escher or Magritte. For example, the term “content” suggests a quantity of stuff we can “upload”, “download” and “distribute.” Yet, most of the time we are actually copying and proliferating. That’s because data moves by a process of replication. “The Internet is a copy machine”, Kevin Kelly says.
So, how do we “protect” something that is not a thing, has value, and is easily copied? Well, there are lots of ways, but maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe the better question is, Who do we share it with, and what decisions about it do we, as a couple, make about it?
Questions about protection usually devolve into arguments about ownership, and that’s a red herring. As Joe Andrieu explains in Beyond Data Ownership to Information Sharing, “sometimes the arguments behind these efforts are based on who owns—or who should own–the data. This is not just an intellectual debate or political rallying call, it often undermines our common efforts to build a better system.” Joe offers five propositions for consideration:
Of #3, Joe says,
In the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High, in a confrontation with Mr. Hand, Spicoli argues “If I’m here and you’re here, doesn’t that make it our time?” Just like the time shared between Spicoli and Mr. Hand, the information created by visiting a website is co-created and co-owned by both the visitor and the website. Every single interaction between two endpoints on the web generates at least two owners of the underlying data.
This is not a minor issue. The courts have already ruled that if an email is stored for any period of time on a server, the owner of that server has a right to read the email. So, when “my” email is out there at GMail or AOL or on our company’s servers, know that it is also, legally, factually, and functionally, already their data.
Because of all five points, Joe suggests,
Rather than building a regime based on data ownership, I believe we would be better served by building one based on authority, rights, and responsibilities. That is, based on Information Sharing.
Joe isn’t just talking here. He and others are working on exactly that regime:
At the Information Sharing Work Group at the Kantara Initiative, Iain Henderson and I are leading a conversation to create a framework for sharing information with service providers, online and off. We are coordinating with folks involved in privacy and dataportability and distinguish our effort by focusing on new information, information created for the purposes of sharing with others to enable a better service experience. Our goal is to create the technical and legal framework for Information Sharing that both protects the individual and enables new services built on previously unshared and unsharable information. In short, we are setting aside the questions of data ownership and focusing on the means for individuals to control that magical, digital pixie dust we sprinkle across every website we visit.
Because the fact is, we want to share information. We want Google to know what we are searching for. We want Orbitz to know where we want to fly. We want Cars.com to know the kind of car we are looking for.
We just don’t want that information to be abused. We don’t want to be spammed, telemarketed, and adverblasted to death. We don’t want companies stockpiling vast data warehouses of personal information outside of our control. We don’t want to be exploited by corporations leveraging asymmetric power to force us to divulge and relinquish control over our addresses, dates of birth, and the names of our friends and family.
What we want is to share our information, on our terms. We want to protect our interests and enable service providers to do truly amazing things for us and on our behalf. This is the promise of the digital age: fabulous new services, under the guidance and control of each of us, individually.
And that is precisely what Information Sharing work group at Kantara is enabling.
The work is a continuation of several years of collaboration with Doc Searls and others at ProjectVRM. We’re building on the principles and conversations of Vendor Relationship Management and User Driven Services to create an industry standard for a legal and technical solution to individually-driven Information Sharing.
Our work group, like all Kantara work groups, is open to all contributors–and non-contributing participants–at no cost. I invite everyone interested in helping create a user-driven world to join us.
It should be an exciting future.
It isn’t easy to “set aside questions of data ownership”, of course, because possession is 9/10ths of human perception. We are grabby animals. Our thumbs do not oppose for nothing. We even “grasp” ideas. This is why one of the first words a toddler utters is “mine!”
As it happens, this is also a key insight of The Mine! Project, whose About page says,
The Mine! project is about equipping people with tools and functionality that will help them:
- take charge of their data (content, relationships, transactions, knowledge),
- arrange (analyse, manipulate, combine, mash-up) it according to their needs and preferences and
- share it on their own terms
- whilst connected and networked on the web.
The Mine! aims to be an (infra)structure for other solutions – VRM (relationships with individuals and vendors, transactions), self-defined identity, authentication, data portability and hopefully many more.
These and other projects are visited by Neil Davey in a post in MyCustomer.com on VRM and the new tools of engagement. This follows up on an earlier post, based on the same interview with me. I wrote about it as well in How VRM helps CRM.
When we started ProjectVRM here at the Berkman Center, the idea was never that we’d do this development ourselves, but would instead provide a place where we could share our thoughts, show our work, do research, publish what we’ve learned, and encourage more development.
Nice to see the mojo working.
Imagine you’re at a party where you’re introduced to an interesting person who turns out to be a psychologist. You get to talking about personality types. Then, in the course of the conversation, the shrink tells you he’ll give you some insights about yourself, in response to a few questions. You say okay, and in the next few minutes you reveal a portfolio of characteristics: that you’re empathetic and extroverted, a bit disorganized, a lover of old buildings and new music, an ex-jock, mother of three, and a repeat parking rules violator. Then, just when the shrink is about to reveal his insights, he says you first need to give him your business card, and insists that you also choose a password, make up a special nickname for yourself, just for him, to provide your date of birth and then answer a “security question”, just so he’s sure you’re you, or whomever you say you are. After seeing the skeptical look on your face, he tells you all this information is “required”. He also assures you that he has a “privacy policy”, and that if you want to read it, he has it in his back pocket. You say, “Yeah, let me see that.”
The policy tells you that, if you fill out this guy’s form, he will plant on your person a tracking device that will report your movements back to him. Collected data might include the type of car you drive, the routes you take, the names and addresses of the places you visit, and the times and dates for all this activity — just to improve his services and your “experience” of them. The form assures you that this information is all kept “private”, but on terms that he defines, and reserves the right to revise. For example, the form says this guy does not “currently provide” personal information to “third parties”, except for those “who may perform certain services” either through him or on their own. “Nevertheless”, it continues, “I may at a later time choose to make certain offers or services available to you from third parties”.
At the bottom of the form, under a heading titled “Your Consent”, it says “In dealing with me, you consent to the terms of my Privacy Policy, my Terms and Conditions, and my processing of Personal Information for the purposes given above. If you do not agree to this Privacy Policy, please stop talking to me. If you continue talking to me, I reserve the right, at my discretion, to change, modify, add, or remove portions from this Privacy Policy at any time. Your continued conversation with me, after I put a new form like this in my back pocket, means means you accept these changes”.
“This is your ‘Privacy Policy'”? you say.
“Yes”.
“And your ‘Terms and Conditions’ are something else? Did I hear that right?”
“Yes”.
“Let me see those”.
“Okay”, he says, and pulls another form out of his back pocket. He hands it to you.
At the top it says “Terms and Conditions of Use”. Your eye scans down to the all-caps paragraph at the bottom, under the heading “DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTIES”. It says,
YOUR INTERACTION WITH ME IS SOLELY AT YOUR OWN RISK. I AM PROVIDED ON AN “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE” BASIS. I EXPRESSLY DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND WITH RESPECT MYSELF, WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. I MAKES NO WARRANTY THAT I AND/OR ANYTHING I SAY OR DO WILL MEET YOUR REQUIREMENTS, OR WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, TIMELY, SECURE, CURRENT, ACCURATE, COMPLETE OR ERROR-FREE OR THAT THE RESULTS THAT MAY BE OBTAINED BY USE OF ME AND/OR ANYTHING I SAY OR DO WILL BE ACCURATE OR RELIABLE. YOU UNDERSTAND AND ACKNOWLEDGE THAT YOUR SOLE AND EXCLUSIVE REMEDY WITH RESPECT TO ANY DEFECT IN OR DISSATISFACTION WITH ME IS TO CEASE CONVERSATION AND WALK AWAY.
So, at this point, what do you do?
If you’re a normal human being, you walk away.
If you’re a normal Web user, you accept all of it, use the provided services, and blithely browse on, carrying a cookie that reports back your activities.
Without normal Web users, sites like SignalPatterns.com, which inspired this post, would not be able to do what they do.
I was directed this morning by a friend to SignalPatterns, which I had never heard of before. At the top of SignalPatterns’ home page it says they develop “psychology-based mobile and web applications that help their well-being and relationships with others”. Their iPhone apps include Stress Free with Deepak Chopra and Great Career from Franklin Covey. They have social network apps that run on Facebook. They have Web apps that test for musical tastes, parenting styles and personality patterns. I took the last one of those. That’s where, just after flashing the results, they turned the screen gray and gave me one of these:
I followed the Privacy Policy link from there, and then the Terms and Conditions link from the Privacy Policy. Text from those was barely altered (to make it personal rather than corporate) from those originals.
So, why do companies behave like this? Why do they act on the Web in ways that nobody would act in person, whether at a party or even in the privacy of, say, a doctor’s office? The answer is that the Web isn’t human. At least not yet.
You are not a human being on the Web. In fact, as Paul Trevithick put it (at one of our first VRM meetings at the Berkman Center), the Web has no concept of a human being. It is fundamentally an arrangement of files and connections between those files. Hyperlinks on the Web may subvert hieraraches, especially when they are authored by human beings (such as here, in a blog, which is a human expression); but the Web itself is oblivious to that. We still lack the means, on top of the Web (and the Net) to form and maintain relationships that are anything more than a very crude, partial and highly distorted imitation of those we have out in the real, human, social world.
Put another way, social contracts in cyberspace have a long way to go before they catch up with those in real-world social space. In fact, they may be two hundred and fifty years behind. “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”, Rousseau wrote (in The Social Contract, Or Principles of Political Right (Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique), in 1762. The Age of Enlightenment followed, during which we began to work out a variety of social contracts involving governance, commerce, education and religion. I submit that we have hardly begun to do the same on the Net or the Web.
“Markets are conversations,” the famous first thesis of The Cluetrain Manifesto (and later a chapter of the book by the same title) was meant to help model the social contract in cyberspace after the ones we have in meat/meet space. This has happened only in those places where the interactions are most human. It has barely happened where the interactions are most corporate.
I am sure that SignalPatterns is a fine company. The person who recommended them to me says they’re among the best of their type. But, in the absence of a social contract that says “this is a line you will not cross,” the line simply isn’t there. And, in its absence, systems for scaffolding real relationships, modeled on real interactions between real human beings, don’t get built.
We’ve been talking lately on the ProjectVRM list about defining that line, perhaps by creating a site where we can talk about it. The idea would not be to beg companies for better treatment (which would be like petitioning sovereigns in Rousseau’s time for rights they would rather not yield), but to explore how best to define in cyberspace those lines of rudeness one either does not find in civilized discourse, or finds only where suckers don’t get an even break. (Meaning, a lot of real-world business, still.)
Your thoughts are invited.
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.
The shot above was made at the Kynetx Impact conference, which is the first one I’ve been to where VRM was a serious topic on its own — an acronym thrown around by participants, in ways that made clear that they knew what it was. No explanation required.
In other words, this wasn’t a VRM conference, but one where VRM was a central issue. The fact that the 140 people who packed the room included lots of developers, some of whom working right there on all kinds of stuff, including VRM.
I’ll have much more to say about the conference later. Right now I’m waiting for a flight at the airport and wanted to make a post while I had a shot at it, on the one browser that survived a really bad crash a couple days ago that seems to have affected some system libraries.
Still, a great conference. Thanks to the Kynetx folks, and to everybody who contributed. Well done.
Here in the VRM development community we’ve been talking (and in some cases working) for several years on the Personal RFP. Technically an RFP is a “buyer-initiated procurement protocol” for businesses doing business with businesses: B2B as they say. With VRM the buyer is an individual. Hence, Personal RFP. Not a great label, but one that businesses understand.
Now comes Scott Adams (Dilbert’s cartoonist), with Hunter Becomes the Prey. His compressed case:
Shopping is broken… Google is nearly worthless when shopping for items that don’t involve technology. It is as if the Internet has become a dense forest where your desired purchases can easily hide.
Advertising is broken too, because there are too many products battling for too little consumer attention. So ads can’t hope to close the can’t-find-what-I-want gap. The standard shopping model needs to be reversed. Instead of the shopper acting as hunter, and the product hiding as prey, you should be able to describe in your own words what sort of thing you are looking for, and the vendors should use those footprints to hunt you down and make their pitch…
You can imagine this service as a web site. The consumer goes to the section that best fits his needs (furniture, cars, computers, etc.) and describes what he wants, in his own words. Vendors could set key word alerts via e-mail or text for any products in their general category.
Once they read the customer’s needs online, they have the option of posting their solution, publicly, which gives other vendors and consumers an opportunity to offer counterpoints.
I assume this service already exists in some weaker form. www.answers.yahoo.com is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t broadcast your needs to vendors.
My prediction is that Broadcast Shopping (as I just decided to name it) will become the normal way to shop.
I love “broadcast shopping.”
Where I veer from Scott’s approach is with the assumption that this requires “a site.” That’s because sites become silos, and silos are a big part of the problem we also have with loyalty cards. All are different. All say We have ways of making you shop. Tll trap and control you in their own ways. We need something that serves as a customer’s own tool, and works as simply as a keyring, a car key, an emailing, or a text message. “Here’s what I want: _________.” That’s it.
In business, RFPs use an open protocol (essentially, formalized paperwork and bidding processes). Anybody can use it. We need the same for broadcast shopping. Any of us should be able to broadcast, in a secure and selective way that protects our privacies, specified goods we’re shopping for.
I use the plural of privacy because what we reveal selectively will depend on who we already relate to. For example, say I have a trusted relationship with Nordstrom, Sears and a variety of smaller clothing retailers. I could broadcast only to those stores my need for a tan cotton dress shirt of a particular brand, with a 17″ neck and 31″ sleeves (my actual dimensions, there — I have a linebacker’s neck and arms like a penguin’s flippers). Or I could broadcast the same need to the general marketplace through a fourth party that intermediates on my behalf, not revealing any information about me beside my actual need.
One scenario Scott describes in his post…
For example, let’s say you’re looking for new patio furniture. The words you might use to describe your needs would be useless for Google. You might say, for example, “I want something that goes with a Mediterranean home. It will be sitting on stained concrete that is sort of amber colored. It needs to be easy to clean because the birds will be all over it. And I’m on a budget.”
Your description would be broadcast to all patio furniture makers, and those who believe they have good solutions could contact you, preferably by leaving comments on the web page where you posted your needs. You could easily ignore any robotic spam responses and consider only the personalized responses that include pictures.
… outlines a broad class of needs where the customer’s mind is not yet made up. Those are within the scope of VRM, but I think we should start with cases where the actual requirements are known by the buyer, and the buyer can set the terms of engagement. For example, “I want my receipt emailed to me in (this specified) data format, and I don’t want to receive any promotional material.”
All this is not only do-able, but inevitable.
I’ll conclude with a pitch of my own for funding research and development on this work.
Google should be interested because Advertising in Reverse, or Broadcast Shopping (a term I love, by the way), will either undermine or replace the company’s standing business model (which pays for all those freebies we enjoy).
Microsoft should be interested because this could give them something Google doesn’t have yet.
Yahoo should be interested because they need something new that’s a winning idea. Amazon and eBay should be interested because they’re already in that business, though in a silo’d way.
Oracle should be interested because it will sell more databases and Sun gear.
Apple should be interested because it’s one more area where they can push for new standards on which the range of innovation goes through the roof.
Every retailer and intermediary should be interested because the promise of the Net for buyers is not an infinite variety of closed silos, but a truly open marketplace where any buyer can do business with any seller — and on the buyer’s terms and not just the seller’s.
Like everything else we will come to depend on utterly while remaining absent in the present, VRM is thoroughly disruptive idea. It’s always smart to get ahead of the curve by getting behind what will bend it.
Photo galleries from the VRM West Coast Workshop and VRooM Boston 2009 are up. Tim Hwang has an excellent follow up (Geek Insurance! — go read it) to the Getting Personal With Data panel, which turned (as we had intended) into a round-table discussion involving everybody in the room (including Adriana Lukas, via live video from London) that lasted two hours.
In discussions since VRooM, some of us have started thinking that a better approach to VRM events is to pick single topics (health care, governance, search, VRM+CRM, personal RFP, personal informatics, whatever) and have separate workshops on those. Or to weigh in on VRM-related topics at other events, as we’ve done all along at the Internet Identity Workshops — or as Keith Hopper did for VRM at Public Media Camp. Or both.
The problem is that VRM itself is extremely broad, and still lacks working code that applies to all VRM topics. In the absence of that code — some personal tool as universal in the digital world as the wallet is in the physical one — we end up scattered across many topics. This isn’t bad, but it might not be the best way to get traction in any one topic.
Thoughts?
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