Today nearly every commercial website infects our browsers with tracking files that report our activities back to parties we may not know or trust.
So we’re providing a way to draw that line: Web Pal — a browser extension that blocks tracking and advertising*, eliminating the browser slowdowns caused by both.
Web Pal was developed for Customer Commons by Emmett Global, which provides privacy solutions to nonprofits. It combines Adblock Plus and Tampermonkey — two open source code bases — in one simple install that requires no additional work or maintenance. It also gives you a Customer Commons start page, which carries updates of news about surveillance and other topics of interest to Customer Commons members.
Here’s a video explaining the Web Pal:
We offer the Web Pal on Chrome. This gives you one safe browser with maximized protection, and the opportunity both to try out other protection systems on other browsers and to compare performance. Here is a list of those systems, from ProjectVRM at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society:
Emmett † “An easy to install browser plugin that protects your privacy online”
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 and controlling the trackers
Privacyfix † “One dashboard for your Facebook®, LinkedIn®, and Google® privacy. Blocks over 1200 trackers.”
PrivacyScore † browser extensions and services to users and site builders for keeping track of trackers
Privowny † – “Your personal data coach. Protect your identity/privacy. Track what the Internet knows about you.”
Note that these are maintained on a wiki and subject to change. In fact, we invite Customer Commons members to participate in ProjectVRM, and help drive development of these and other tools.
And, of course, we welcome feedback and suggestions for improving the Web Pal. And we encourage everybody to support development of all tools and services that make customers liberated, powerful and respected in the open marketplace.
* What Adblock Plus calls acceptable ads are passed through by default, but you can change it to block all ads. Just go to Chrome’s Windows menu and click down through Extensions / Emmett Web Pal / Options / Adblock Plus / Filter List. Then uncheck “Allow some non-intrusive advertising”.
That data has far more use value than sale value. This use value is almost entirely untapped. Thinking about its sale value requires that you think the same way big companies do. This is as big a mistake in 2013 as it was —
in 1980 to think about personal computing in terms of what big enterprises did with mainframes; and
in 1993 to think about personal networking in terms of services provided by phone and cable companies.
In 1982 the IBM PC came along, and MS-DOS. And then the Macintosh in 1984. By 1985 there were tens of thousands of personal apps running on personal computers, doing far more than any company could do with its own computers, no matter how big those computers were. This turned out to be good for everybody, including the big companies with the big computers.
Likewise, in 1995 the Internet came along in a big way (ISPs, email, browsing, dial-up, e-commerce), and within months it was clear than anybody could network together with anybody else in the world at a cost that rounded to zero, and with a degree of freedom that was unimaginable within the systems controlled by phone and cable companies. (Eighteen years later, the phone and cable companies, with help from the copyright maximalists in Hollywood, are still trying to corral the Net’s horse back into the old barn.)
What companies are doing with your personal data today is all happening inside a B2B — Business-to-Business — context. That context is as limited as mainframe thinking in 1980 and telco/cableco thinking in 1993.
The other day in London we were talking with Nic Brisbourne about the massive quantity of opportunity and ready-to-spend money on the demand side of the marketplace — and the ironic absence (outside the still-small VRM world) of interest by developers in equipping demand to engage and drive supply. The market seem stuck inside the same old supply-driving-demand mentality. That’s what you hear coming from the mainframe-think world of Big Data mongering and analytics today.
Mind these words: Big Data talk today is as clueless about what people can do for themselves as mainframe talk was in 1980 and networking talk was in 1993. It’s big business-as-usual, in its big B2B bubble, talking itself into ever-ripening stages of vulnerability to massive disruption by the C’s of the world.
Speaking of which, we also met in Europe with Qiy, MesInfos, Midata, Intently, Mydex, Privowny and other VRM efforts (who will be insulted that I haven’t yet listed them here, but we can correct that). All of them are laying the groundwork required for unlocking the full use value of personal data — and not just its sale value, which is tiny at best anyway. Bravo for them, and for us as the beneficiaries of their good work.
Our data supporting the paper is here: Addendum Q&A and shortly we’ll upload a .xls of the data for those who want to do a deep dive into the results.
We all know that many people hide or submit incorrect data, click away from sites or refuse to install an app on a phone. We’ve all mostly done it. But how many? How much is this happening?
We’re at IIW today and of course, the age old dilemma is happening in sessions where one guy in the room says: “People will click through anything; they don’t care about privacy.” And the next guy will say, “People are angry and frustrated and they don’t like what’s happening.” But what’s real? What’s right?
We conducted this survey to get a baseline about what people do now as they engage in strategies to create privacy for themselves, to try to control their personal data.
The amazing thing is.. 92 % hide, lie, refuse to install or click, some of the time. We surveyed 1704 people, and had an astonishing 95% completion rate for this survey. We also had 35% of these people writing comments in the “comment more” boxes at the bottom of the multiple choice answers. Also astonishingly high.
People expressed anger, cynicism, frustration. And they said overwhelmingly that the sites and services that ask for data DON’T NEED it. Unless they have to get something shipped from a seller. But people don’t believe the sites. There is distrust. The services have failed to enroll the people they want using their services that something necessary is happening, and the people who use the services are mad.
We know the numbers are high, and that it’s likely due to many not having a way to give feedback on this topic. So when we offered the survey, people did vent.
But we think it also indicates the need for qualitative and quantitative research on what is true now for people online. We want more nuanced information about what people believe, and how we might fix this problem. Many sites only look at user logs to figure out what is happening on a site or with an app, and therefore, they miss this problem and the user feelings behind them. We want to see this studied much more seriously so that people no longer make the conflicting statements at conferences, so that developers say the user’s don’t care, so that business models are developed that think different than we do now, where sites and services just take personal data. We want to get beyond the dispute over whether people care, to real solutions that involve customers and individuals in ways that respect them and their desires when they interact with companies.
She is, literally, a clean slate. And she is your clean slate. Not Apple’s. Not Google’s. Not some phone company’s.
She can be what you want her to be, do what you want her to do, run whatever apps you want her to run, and use data you alone collect and control.
Being a clean slate makes Omie very different.
On your iPhone and iPad you can run only what Apple lets you run, and you can get only from Apple’s own store. On an Android phone you have to run Google’s pre-loaded apps, which means somebody is already not only telling you what you must do, but is following you as well.
Omie uses Android, but bows to Google only in respect of its intention to create an open Linux-based OS for mobile devices.
So Omie is yours, alone. Fully private, by design, from the start.
At Omie’s heart is your data, in your own personal cloud — not Google’s cloud or Apple’s cloud or Amazon’s cloud or the cloud of any other silo’d service.
Think of your personal cloud as a place for your stuff. Right now most of the data you use in the online marketplace — what should be your stuff — really isn’t. It’s out in clouds that aren’t yours: one for every Web site and service you deal with.
Consider your wallet — the one in your pocket or purse. That’s your wallet. Not Google’s or Paypal’s. Yet right now Google, Paypal and a dozen other companies think the wallet you carry online should be theirs. Wouldn’t it be better to carry all their wallets inside one that’s yours alone? Omie is desgned to make that possible, simply because she is yours alone.
Consider your shopping cart. Today that’s not even imaginable, because eevery shopping cart you’ve ever seen belongs to a company. Amazon, Ebay, Etsy, Walmart and the rest of them all have their own shopping carts for you. Why shouldn’t you have your own shopping cart, where you can see all the stuff you’ve almost-bought from all those online stores? With Omie you can at least imagine that, because Omie is yours. And imagining is the first step toward making.
So: what apps would you like Omie to run? Once we get the first few nailed down, we’ll crowdsource funding for developing both Omie and her first apps, or at least the specs for them.
To make that easy, here are just two requirements:
Each app must be a kind that can only run on a device that is the owner’s alone. It can’t be one that only a corporate platform-owner (such as Google or Apple) can provide.
Each app must rely first and foremost on data in the owner’s personal cloud.
The box we need to think outside of is the one that starts with a company. Here we’re starting with you.
Omie should be an instrument of control — by you. That’s why we’re stepping forward with it. Our job at Customer Commons is to stand on the side of the customer. That means we want apps that work for the customer first, and not just the seller. We need something solid to hold at our end of the demand chain — rather than, once again, to hold a device that serves as the far end of the supply chain’s whip.
We’ll bring up Omie at IIW. If you’re one of the 250 people here, come to the Omie session and let’s talk about where to go with the project. If you’re not here, put your thoughts and requests below.
A lot of big companies are eager to get their hands in your pockets — literally. They want your mobile phone to work as a digital wallet, and they want the digital wallet app you use to be theirs.
Naturally, this looks like it should be a big business — and to some degree it is already. But it also hasn’t met promotional expectations. This became clear a few days ago, when comScore released Digital Wallet Road Map 2013, a $4995 report on the digital wallet business. In a press release highlighting the report’s findings, Andrea Jacobs, comScore Payments Practice Leader, said “Digital wallets represent an innovative technology that has not yet reached critical mass among consumers due to a variety of factors, including low awareness and a muddied understanding of their benefits.” Here’s how the release unpacks that:
The current digital wallet landscape remains fragmented among providers because of low consumer adoption outside of PayPal, with only 12 percent of consumers claiming to have used a digital wallet other than PayPal. However, study results indicated that the digital wallet market opportunity could eventually reach 1 in 2 consumers as consumers become more aware of the offerings and educated on their benefits.
Percentage of Total Respondents Aware of Digital Wallet
Percentage of Total Respondents Who Used the Digital Wallet
PayPal
72%
48%
Google Wallet
41%
8%
MasterCard PayPass Wallet
13%
3%
Square Wallet
8%
2%
V.me by Visa
8%
2%
ISIS
6%
1%
Lemon Wallet
5%
1%
LevelUp
5%
2%
One clear barrier to use of digital wallets is that the concept is often difficult to convey and prone to misinterpretation. Even after being asked to review the websites of particular digital wallets, respondents across all wallet brands still scored an average of just 45 percent in terms of demonstrated level of understanding.
Here’s the problem: wallets are personal. Even if you have a wallet with a brand name on it (say, Gucci or Fossil), it isn’t their wallet. It’s yours. What you keep in it, and how you use it, are none of their business. In fact, those companies would never think of making it their business, because all they’re providing you is a place to put your credit cards, your cash, or whatever other flat things you feel like carrying around in your pocket or purse.
So far, all the digital wallets out there are not yours. They belong to some company. You merely use the app. The wallet is their business, not yours. In this respect they aren’t much different than credit cards or various loyalty cards, which are things you put in your wallet; not the wallet itself. The wallet itself should be agnostic, if not oblivious, to what you put in there. It should be like a toolbox, where you can store lots of different tools, made by lots of different companies, made for serving different purposes.
All the digital wallet companies in comScore’s chart have isolated, proprietary and silo’d ways of providing payment benefits to users. Imagine buying a tool box from Sears that could only hold its own brand of tools, which would only work with devices from companies that were partners of Sears. That’s what we have with digital wallets so far. It’s the same problem we had with online systems (AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc.) before the Internet came along. They were closed silos.
The Net works because it is a general purpose system. It isn’t run by any one company. Likewise, PCs are also general purpose systems. The company making them doesn’t insist that it only works with certain other partner companies. In that respect it’s open, just like the wallet in your pocket or purse. Smartphones, on the other hand, are general purpose to a more limited degree. Apple tells you what apps can and can’t run on your phone. Google makes sure some of its own apps (such as its wallet) run only on Android phones — or run better on Android than on Apple’s or other companies’ phones (as it did for years with Google maps for Apple).
Your personal cloud is your personal space, which you run for yourself in the networked world. In it you define the ways that your personal data interacts with the world of things, and of services from companies and other entities. That may sound complicated, but it’s actually no different than the personal space you call your house, your car, and your body. In fact, you can think of a personal cloud as something akin to all three, but in the networked world rather than in the physical one. For more on this read Phil Windley, starting here; and follow what Kuppinger-Colesays about Life Management Platforms (which I recently visited here).
So, to sum up, the main thing wrong with digital wallets today isn’t what they do. It’s that they are called “wallets.” Instead they should be called what they really are, which is payment services. (Yes, they do more, but the main thing they do is facilitate transactions.)
The notion that something so personal as a wallet should be provided for you, as a service, by a company, is typical of the calf-cow thinking that has dominated computing for the duration. There is nothing wrong with this, if it’s still 1995. But it’s now 2013, and it’s time we moved on. And, to do that, I’d like to see real digital wallets — personal ones — come up as a feature of personal clouds. So, let the conversation begin. Then the development.
The Cluetrain Manifesto was a success, and remains so, because it gives lessons in manners to marketing. Thus Cluetrain is also highly sourced by manners-minded marketing folk, who have eagerly leveraged Cluetrain‘s first thesis: “markets are conversations.”
It is now almost fourteen years since the Cluetrain website went up, thirteen since the original book came out, and three since the 10th anniversary edition hit the streets.Here are some stats, as of today:
“Cluetrain,” a word that did not exist before 1999, appears in 9,689 books
“conversational marketing” brings up about a hundred thousand results
Most of those results are generated by polite marketers. Unfortunately, there are still too many marketers of the rude sort. To these marketers, customers are “targets” to be “captured,” “controlled,” “managed,” “locked in” and otherwise treated without the full respect we grant human beings we interact with personally, in actual conversation. These marketers are the types about which the great Bill Hicks said this:
That was in 1992. Imagine what Bill would say about marketing at the dawn of 2013. Here’s how that picture looks to Luma Partners:
Rotate that thing 90° to the right, so the movement is top to bottom, rather than left to right. Then think about the combined weight of all that marketing, pressing down on the consumer.
No doubt some small pieces of that great mess of marketing are respectful of the consumer. And some of these categories (such as, for example, “publisher tools”) are comprised of companies providing tools for actually interacting with customers, rather than just for targeting at consumers. (The distinction is critical. Doug Rauch, retired President of Trader Joe’s, calls consumer “a statistical category.” He says, “We say customer, person, or individual.”)
Cluetrain was written in 1999, when — compared to the above — digital marketing was still in its Precambrian stage, and was essentially a declaration of independence from marketing. As Jakob Nielsen told me later, Cluetrain‘s four authors essentially defected from marketing and sided with markets against marketing. This was made clear by the Manifesto’s alpha clue, which was written by Chris Locke. Though less quoted than the 95 numbered theses below, it remains the most important:
if you only have time for one clue this year, this is the one to get…
Unfortunately, that clue was not yet true. Our reach did not exceed marketers’ grasp. That much became clear after Cluetrain became a favorite of clueful marketers, but remained largely unheard-of by the rest of us — who were the ones Cluetrain spoke for, and who actually needed help against marketing’s persistent bad manners.
So, in 2006, I launched ProjectVRM to foster development of tools and services that would provide the reach to exceed marketing’s grasp. As of today there are dozens of VRM developers working on the customers’ side.
We have a model for that reach in the brick & mortar world, in the form of well-mannered one-to-one interactions between vendors and customers, in what the CRM business calls the buy cycle and the own cycle. As I wrote here, “Nobody from a store on Main Street would follow you around with a hand in your pocket and tell you ‘I’m only doing this so I can give you a better shopping experience.'” But online, and through our mobile devices, we are being tracked like animals by a business that often rationalizes the (almost literal) hell out of it.
It would seem a lot worse if surveillance-fed “big data” advertising algorithms didn’t also suck at it, most of the time. One case in point: Facebook. Here is my Facebook profile picture and top-level data, plus some screen shots of ads Facebook has presented to me in the last few minutes:
Here Facebook fails to respect a fact recorded in my Facebook profile — that I’m married — and assumes I’m cool with being reminded of my age (which has edged into the final demographic). There is zero evidence that I have (or am interested in) foot fungus. (Is that something old people get? If so, is this ad how one would want to find out about it?) There is no evidence, on Facebook or anywhere in the world, that I might be interested in referral marketing, home security, or a career in hospital medicine (much less in Ohio, to which I have been just once since 1963), or that I’m up for a place in South Beach (where I’ve been just twice, long ago). I’ve also told Facebook, back when its ads came with a feedback mechanism, that I consider Classmates.com a rude pain in the ass. (I am sure they are the source of “classof1996.net” — a year off from my actual high school graduation, by the way.)
So, almost across the board, the ads I see on Facebook are rude, wrong, or both. And I’m sure, in this respect, that I’m no exception.
A couple years ago, the top guy at one of the advertising companies told me something interesting about Facebook and Google. He said they were extremely jealous of what the other could do with advertising, but that they could not do themselves — or, at least, not yet. Facebook was jealous of Google, he said, because Google could advertise all over the Web. And Google was jealous of Facebook, because Facebook could get far more personal with its advertising than Google could. Yet, because we are consumers of those companies’ services, rather than customers, we have no direct, money-backed, truly conversational mechanisms for giving them useful feedback. Such as, “Excuse me, but your manners really suck here.”
Although I am not a heavy Facebook user, I have been on the thing since 2006, and have hundreds of friends there. I am also a highly public person and not hard to figure out if you want to get personal with me. Yet I have never seen a personalized ad that appealed to me with anything I’d call accuracy. Once in awhile I’ll see an ad for something photographic, but I don’t know whether that’s because I do a lot of photography, or because the advertiser is carpet-bombing some large population, or… whatever. As Don Marti eloquently pointsout, the targeted individual in the system diagramed above doesn’t know what’s actually going on. Should he or she bother to care about an ad, the thought balloon over his or her head would say “I don’t know if your company is really spending a lot on advertising, or if you’re just targeting me.”
In Facebook and Google may be forced to ask permission to use personal data, The Guardian visits the prospect of regulatory relief. My problem with that approach is that it assumes that we, as poor “consumers,” are naturally weak. But I don’t think we are. I think we are strong, and only bound to get stronger. That’s why I invite everybody reading this to join Customer Commons, and to start using VRM tools and services. Let’s demonstrate genuine market power, for our good, for the health of the Internet we share, and to give real help to every business that wants to treat real customers with real respect.
While the history of computing and communications often appears to be one led by big entities in business and government, the biggest revolution has actually been a personal one. Each of us, as individuals, have acquired abilities that were once those of organizations alone — and have done far more with those abilities than the big players ever could — for those big players as well as for ourselves.
It started in the early ’80s, when the IBM PC became host to thousands of new applications for individuals. Personal computers suddenly proved to be a far more fertile ground for application development and new ueses than were the old corporate mainframes and minicomputers. Computing was no longer only about calculating and data processing. It was about everything one could imagine. The result was a profusion of new capabilities for individuals that also brought great benefits to organizations of all kinds and sizes.
A little more than a decade later, in the mid-’90s, the Internet did for communications what the PC did for computing. It gave individuals abilities that went far beyond those enjoyed by big organizations anywhere. Thanks to the Net, anybody could connect with anybody (or anything), anywhere in the world, using protocols that nobody owned, everybody could use, and anybody could improve. Even though there were many owned networks within the Internet, none governed the whole, and the result was a system that put every connected thing at zero functional distance from every other thing, at costs that could often be treated as zero. The positive economic and social externalities of the Internet today are beyond calculation. Again, as with PCs, this owes to new power in the hands of individuals that proved good for organizations as well.
Then in the late ’00s, smartphones and tablets put personal computing and communications advances — won by the PC and the Internet — into devices that fit in pockets and purses, running on platforms that invited millions of new applications. Once again, the increase in personal power and freedom proved essential to organizations as well. Initial resistance to BYOD (bring your own device) has ended, and companies now develop their own apps for employees and customers to use on their smartphones and tablets.
The upward trend in personal empowerment will move next to the “Internet of things,” as more of those objects and devices become equipped with computing and communication abilities — and as individuals gain the power to combine and program interactions between those things and the many services available through APIs ( application programming interfaces) and apps. Each of us will be able, either by ourselves or with the help of “fourth parties” (ones that work for us, as do brokers and banks) to control our identities, secure our privacy, and manage our many interactions in the world, without having to rely on any one platform, vendor or other enabling party. Far better economic signaling will move in both directions between demand and supply. Genuine, trusting and productive relationships will develop, and earned loyalty will prove far more useful than the coerced kind. In sum, the market will discover that free customers and citizens will prove more capable and productive than captive ones, and that this will be good for both business and society.
Progress in this direction will not be easy or even. All through the history just outlined, there have also been constant efforts to contain and limit what individuals can do with their computing and communications abilities. Large incumbent players have worked to create dependencies from which we cannot escape, and to resist competition in open markets. In spite of the many advances they have brought to the market’s table, phone and cable companies today still operate actual or virtual monopolies, and have been working from the start — aided by captive legislators and regulators — to subordinate the Internet’s boundless positive economic externalities to their own legacy business interests. Copyright and patent absolutists have also pushed successfully for laws and regulations that thwart or stop innovation and growth outside their own virtual castles.
And now, in many countries that value neither free markets nor free citizens, efforts are afoot to move Internet “governance” (an oxymoron from the angle of the Internet’s founding protocols) from organizations such as ICANN to the ITU (International Telecommunications Union, now part of the U.N.), where they can partition the Net along national lines, censor it (as in China today), and impose tariffs on data traffic across borders — enriching governments at great expense to economic growth and prosperity, and the welfare of citizens.
Yet the computing, communications and programming genies continue to do their magic for individuals and the organizations they comprise and support. Those genies will not go back in their old bottles. Thus the way to bet in the long run is on personal and economic freedom, and the general prosperity that arises from both. The only way to make that bet pay off, however, is to work on the side of individuals and the developers that empower them. That’s our job here at Customer Commons, and we invite you to join us in that work.
A confusopoly is a situation in which companies pretend to compete on price, service, and features but in fact they are just trying to confuse customers so no one can do comparison shopping.
Cell [mobile] phone companies are the best example of confusopolies. The average consumer finds it impossible to decipher which carrier has the best deal, so carriers don’t have normal market pressure to lower prices. It’s a virtual cartel without the illegal part.
Now let’s just take data (and leave text and voice charges aside). Whether you choose the mobile share or the individual plan, you’re certain to pay for more than you use, unless you work carefully to use exactly 300Mb, 3Gb, 5Gb or whatever you guessed you’d use when you set the plan up in the first place.
But how can you know exactly what you’ve used? Well, by doing this:
You go into settings, hit General, then Cellular, then Cellular Usage (be sure to scroll down, because it’s off the screen), then Reset Statistics. But first you’ll want to freeze the prior total by taking a screen shot. You do this by pressing the round button in the front and the rectangular one on the top, at exactly the same time. Since resetting causes the phone to forget all prior data usage, you’ll need to save the screen shots so you can track that usage, by eyeball (since you don’t have the data, just a snapshot), and do all this repeatedly, over time. Not easy. (For example, I missed screen-shooting the middle bottom one in the example above, so I created a new one just to illustrate how disadvantaged your ability to track usage actually is.
Usually you don’t need to pay much attention, especially if you’ve got a data plan in the GB rather than the MB range. But you need to do this often if you leave the country and need to get on the Internet. Because, according to AT&T’s Affordable World Packages page, every KB will cost you $0.0150 in Canada and $0.0195 in the rest of the world. Since there are 1000KB in a MB, and 1000MB in a GB, we’re talking $15/MB and $15,000/GB in Canada and $19.50/MB and $19,500.00/GB elsewhere. This kind of non-plan tends to cause “bill shock.” In many cases, shock is an understatement. (Here’s a report on my own run-in with Sprint several years back.)
So instead you go for one of the “affordable” plans, which look like this:
The overage in each case is $30/120MB, which is 25¢/MB, or $250/GB, which is 25x the overage AT&T charges on its 3GB and 5GB domestic plans for individuals.
Confused? Of course. The whole system is partially opaque, like a cataract, or frosted glass. On purpose. This whole thing is designed so the phone company’s billing system knows constantly what’s going on while you don’t. Knowledge, by intent, is highly asymmetrical. That way they win and you lose — while thinking you’re winning because you’ve picked the “best” plan, and have avoided getting a $10,000 bill after making the mistake of watching a movie over a cell connection in London when you thought you were on the hotel wi-fi. (Easy to do. The only thing that looks different while you’re watching is a tiny wi-fi symbol at the top of the screen, which you won’t see if you’re watching the movie in landscape mode.)
Yes, AT&T does send little text warnings when you land in another country, and notifies you as well when you hit an overage threshold, at least stateside. (I dunno about overseas.) But they still hold nearly all the cards, while all you’ve got is guesswork up front and a labyrinth of screens to spelunk through just to see where you stand, cringing every time you go there, in fear that maybe you didn’t set things right in the first place, or that you forgot to turn off cellular data (steps 1-3, above) when you left your hotel room’s wi-fi zone.
This actually sucks for the phone companies as well as for their customers. That’s because customers are a company’s nerve endings in the marketplace. If a company has a genuine and respectful relationship with customers, those customers send clear and strong signals reporting on what’s actually happening in the marketplace. Company and customer see clearly together, rather than with one clear and one half-blind eye.
Mobile phone companies don’t have to suck. A good case in point is Ting, an independent mobile phone company operating here in the U.S. With Ting, you pay only for what you use. They do publish plans, but they do that only because plans are what people are used to. Beyond that it couldn’t be more simple. Each month you are either credited for what you didn’t use, or charged for what you did, if you went over your planed amount. They also publish their phone number right on the home page, and have clear help pages and forums linked there too. They do sell phones, as cheaply as they can; but they don’t subsidize any. You either bring your own phone or buy one from them. They don’t care. There is also no charge for stopping your account. Or (and this is cool) for tethering, for example by using your phone as a wi-fi hotspot.
Ting was started by customers who were tired of having to deal with mobile phone companies that game customers with gimmicks and gotchas. They’re a great model for what innovative companies in other industries can do to break up confusopolies there as well.
And I do have some* hope for AT&T. At the Retailing Summit in Dallas this week, Kelly King of AT&T did a good job reporting how hard the company is working to change its ways, and to become more customer-friendly and helpful. It was an impressive talk, and made clear how much catching up to demand all mobile data carriers have to do.
Do you know of other companies breaking out of the confusopoly mold? Let us know in the comments below.
* I don’t mean to pick on AT&T. They just happen to be my mobile phone carrier, and the one I know best. One could say the same of Sprint, TMobile and Verizon, I’m sure. (And yes, there is this, about a different division of AT&T. It matters, but it is also beside the points being made here.)
Heather Kulper is one of those people who really wants to get a good deal. She’s a mom in a suburb north of Seattle who writes a blog about coupon clipping and saving money.
On a recent shopping trip to Safeway, Kulper pulls up a special Safeway app on her phone called Just For U. It shows her deeper discounts on products that she’s likely to buy based on her shopping history. The deals are lower than the club card discount listed in the aisle. When she checks out, she gets that personalized sale price.
“This is the artisan caramelized onion bread, which is normally $4.29. Priced with the Safeway club card, it’s $2.99,” Kulper says. “But with the Just For U personalized deal, it’s 99 cents.”
Kulper says it feels a little bit like she’s getting a secret deal.
It’s kind of like the old days, when you walked into a relative’s small grocery store, and they gave you the family discount. Except now, this is a big corporation using computers to calculate exactly your propensity to buy and at what price.
She concludes,
On this most recent trip, Kulper saved 41 percent with the Just for U app and coupons — $21 altogether — on her purchases. She says she’s happy with her discount, and she doesn’t mind that Safeway knows every tiny little detail of what groceries she buys. To Kulper, it’s worth it, as long as she can save money.
I can’t find Heather Kulper’s blog (the story doesn’t provide a link, and searches go mostly to the story), but it’s clear that she’s one kind of shopper: the aggressive bargain hunter. Is Safeway trying to turn all customers into full-time bargain hunters? Hard to say at this point, because it’s not clear whether a card-carrying Safeway customer is hunting for bargains, or simply forced to use the card to avoid paying the inflated “normal” price. It’s also not clear whether a personalized discount is any different than a coupon. The image above is one I shot of a Stop & Shop scanner, telling me about one in a series of discounts it offered me, based (presumably) on past purchases at the store.
Let’s think about about turning this around, to a system you control as a customer. You share your shopping list with the stores where you like to shop, and they come back with information about what they’ve got. Maybe they tell you they’ll give you a discounted price, or maybe they’ll tell you something is out of stock, or maybe they try to switch you to buying something else. In any of those cases you should also be able to tell them what you like or don’t like about what they’re telling you, and why. What matters in this alternative system is that the system is yours, not theirs. You take the lead, you control the information you share, and you aren’t trapped into many separate relationships, each with its own system for relating with you. In other words, it’s personal — by you —rather than personalizedfor you.
It’s still early, so there’s lots of room for customers to take the lead in helping develop VRM tools and services. You’ll find a list here, in the ProjectVRM wiki.
The 2012 Summer Olympics are almost over, but not the challenge of a world where more and more customers are looking to watch coverage — especially of the live kind — on devices other than TVs, and through connections other than cable and satellite.
This has proved hard for many cable and satellite TV customers (myself, for example.) who would also like to watch NBC’s coverage on computers, smartphones, tablets, or large screens connected directly over the Internet.
For example, in spite of NBC’s good efforts (in the form, for example, of smartphone and tablet apps), it has often proven hard for cable and satellite TV customers to authenticate with their providers, or to find what programming packages are required to obtain NBC’s coverage services for the olympics.
No doubt NBC will soon be sitting down with itself, and with its distribution partners, to discuss what they have learned over the last few weeks, and to begin preparing for the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi, Russia. Customer Commons wishes to help with that, by convening an independent forum where all of us can discuss what we’ve learned, and where customers can offer constructive help.
This will not be the place to complain, or to assume that the only parties in a position to come up with good ideas and solutions are NBC and its distribution partners. Out here in the long tail, we have plenty of good ideas too, and are willing to help any way we can. (In fact, I did that for NBC’s Winter 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, by contributing ice crystal images that appeared on screen throughout the event.) We are mindful that the goods are not free for the taking, and that improvements must be worthwhile for everybody, starting with NBC and its bottom line.
We’ll start with comments here, while we set up the forum. If the forum proves successful, we will also have a body of experience that can be leveraged in other markets where meeting demands of a fast-arriving future are daunting for everybody involved. We also invite ProjectVRM and PDE.Cc developers to come help out too. (These are developers working to solve market problems from the customer side, in cooperation with sellers.)
We have a unique opportunity here, while the olympics are still going on, to direct everybody’s interests in a positive and mutually helpful direction, a year and a half before the next olympics begin. So let’s go for it.
A lot of big companies are eager to get their hands in your pockets — literally. They want your mobile phone to work as a 
