Intentcasting – Page 2 – Customer Commons

For personal data, use value beats sale value

May 23, 2013

Companies, Developments, Featured Post, Intentcasting, Intention Economy, Organizations, Tools, VRM

There’s an argument that goes like this:

Companies are making money with personal data, and
They are getting this data for free. Therefore,
People should be able to make money with that data too.

This is not helpful framing, if we want to get full value out of our personal data. Or even to understand what the hell personal data is.

Stop and think about this for a second:

Everything on your hard drives is personal data.
So is every thing you own, if you bother to put it in the Internet of Your Things
So is everything that comes into your life. For example, the pothole in the road in front of your house.

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.

Meet Omie: a truly personal mobile device

April 25, 2013

Doc Searls

Developments, Featured Post, Intentcasting, Intention Economy, Omie, Privacy

This is Omie:

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.

The Promise of the Personal Cloud

May 30, 2012

Doc Searls

C2B, Developments, Intentcasting, The Customer Journal, VRM

The term “personal cloud” is only about a year old and has a wildly disparate set of meanings. For some, services such as Facebook, Dropbox, and SugarSynch are personal clouds. For others the gold standard is iCloud, which stores data and media and manages your apps from all your devices – as long as they are all from Apple. I find myself agreeing with Jon Udell who writes in Wired, “I see signs of the personal cloud in services like Dropbox, Evernote, and Flickr. You can use them for free, or you can pay for higher capacity and enhanced customer service. But the personal cloud also arises from a way of thinking about, and using, any of the services the web provides.”

Yes. The personal cloud is a way of thinking and it is not necessarily a new way. Phil Windley and co-authors Craig Burton, Scott David, Drummond Reed and Doc Searls make this case well in a recent white paper, From Personal Computers to the Personal Cloud. As the title indicates, the authors contend that the best model for thinking about the personal cloud is in fact the personal computer. Gartner analyst Steve Kleyhans seconds this when he writes, “Many call this era the post-PC era, but it isn’t really about being ‘after’ the PC, but rather about a new style of personal computing that frees individuals to use computing in fundamentally new ways to improve multiple aspects of their work and personal lives.”

Most of the folks working on this nascent space agree that personal clouds will emerge because customers will demand secure and trusted access to their apps, data, and media anytime, anywhere from any device. Gartner, among others, believes that the market for personal clouds and everything they imply – connected services, devices and data — will be huge. By 2015 Gartner predicts we will spend some US$2.8 trillion worldwide on connected devices, the services that run them and content transferred through them. While we all agree that this is what the future looks like, how markets and technology will get there remains an open question.

Are Personal Clouds Inevitable?

Nothing is inevitable, but the promise offered by personal clouds of putting us back in charge of our personal data, of seamlessly and securely managing our online lives in a way that meets our own idiosyncratic needs, offers a powerful pull. Windley et at summarize the benefits succinctly. Personal clouds will 1) change how we relate to everything in our lives; 2) rearrange how we buy and sell products; and 3) revolutionize how we communicate with each other. Why? With personal clouds, we set the rules. Our identities can be fluid and flexible. Our data can be broadcast widely, hoarded or selectively shared. We will be able to have infinite channels, that work seamlessly, with people, companies, organizations, accounts, and more. When we have seamless access to all of our information, and control over the tools and services to use and understand it, everything changes.

While the potential is vast, the challenges are equally hard. Personal clouds that live up to the vision of trusted, secure, seamless services will require solving a host of hard problems. Windley et al have begun envisioning the next steps. Core to their vision is the development of a Cloud Operating System. Analogous to the OS that makes your PC run, the CloudOS will track your identity, attributes and preferences; run as many apps as you like; store and manage data distributed across the web; and host services for you to use. Here is a picture that Joaquin Miller put together after a session at the most recent IIW conference. The OS lives inside your cloud.

A Gathering of Clouds

While it is tempting to think of the personal cloud as one thing, living in one place like a personal computer, it is much more likely to be a window into a collection of stuff spread across the net. This makes sense because this is how the Net is structured. Virtual stuff doesn’t have to live anywhere – as long as there is a way for me to find it, I can get value from it. This feature is central to the radical potential of the Net, whose soul is vastly distributed and peer to peer.

We are now living in an era where increasing amounts of our data and services are living in virtual silos maintained and controlled by centralized companies. The personal cloud slices these silos open, letting the data flow around in new ways. This is highly disruptive and why Andrew Johnson of Gartner says, “Providers of consumer devices, services and content must anticipate the risk of sweeping changes to their business models. The personal cloud will force technology providers not only to rethink how they approach markets, but also, more importantly, how they define markets. ‘Emerging’ and ‘mature’ markets are no longer useful market segmentation.”

One of the reasons that the personal cloud will be so disruptive is that it’s not one cloud. There will be many clouds, capable of talking to each other, with many channels between them. As long as everything is interoperable, there could be many operating systems, many identity and trust networks, many services, and more. These “federated personal clouds” as Windley et al call them, mean that there will likely be many vendors in the mix offering different apps and services that work together. Federated clouds are much more likely to escape centralized control. This could engender huge new levels of innovation while empowering each of us at the same time.

This dynamic reminds me of one of my most beloved philosophical maxims, drawn from process theology. An omnipotent god who exerts absolute control over the universe creates a system that limits each individual’s creativity, resulting in a less creative whole. The god that grants creative control to the creatures and then lets each of them do their thing, ends up with a much richer and more powerful universe. The moral: centralized control constrains creativity and innovation. Something similar is afoot with the personal cloud. When each of us gains creative control over our virtual lives, the whole virtual universe becomes more innovative, creative and powerful.

Aligning Incentives

Much of the current conversation is necessarily still in the programming weeds. My hope is that in parallel with much-needed technical development, we will continue to think through real world use cases that test emerging solutions. These use cases will not only offer leverage to those trying to build business models for the personal cloud, but they will help us ferret out the ethical issues that will inevitably arise.

I personally worry as much about the cloud doing too much for me as too little. If it does too little, then it will not have real value. If it does too much filtering, sorting and aggregating then I will potentially be replicating a new version of the filter bubble inside my own cloud. That’s just migrating creepy practices from our current silos into the personal cloud. We have to get the filters right. The trick will be to always, always err on the side of giving users control over their settings, channels, permissions and preferences. This is the beauty of putting the user in the center. The vendors that give me choice and control are the ones I will pick. The incentives between customer and vendor will align.

(This post was originally published at www.spruceadvisers.com.)

How C2B becomes more like B2B

May 16, 2012

Doc Searls

C2B, Intentcasting, The Customer Journal, VRM

Ray Collins in Buyer Insights asks, How Long Before Consumers Start Buying Like Corporations? He sees “B2C markets going the way of B2B markets with a dramatic shift in power from seller to buyer.”

In business-speak, B2B is business-to-business, and C2B is consumer- (or customer-) to-business. Or vice versa, as used above. The context here is an increase in power on the buy side in general.

Ray adds,

For many decades there has been talk of an end to the era of mass marketing. However, until now it was just talk. That is because although targeting the ‘customer of one’ sounded good, the technology did not exist to make it possible.

A new book by Doc Searls called ‘The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge‘ envisions how new technology will kill the age of mass marketing. It means an end to the ‘Calf – Cow model’ where the consumer is powerless and the supplier is all-powerful.

No longer will consumers be simply”targeted” “captured”,” “locked-in,” “owned” and “managed” by sellers!

… This is the information or ’Big Data’ age. As consumers we leave a rich digital trail through our use of; loyalty cards, online retailers, web browsers and online search engines, as well as our social networking pages.

For sellers this information is power. But that may not always be the case.

Instead of sellers using this data to sell more effectively to consumers, how can consumers use it to buy more effectively from sellers? Well, the answer is an emerging technology called VRM.

‘VRM, or vendor relationship management is a category of business activity made possible by software tools that provide customers with both independence from vendors and better means for engaging with vendors.’ That is the definition fromProject VRM at Harvard.

To quote Doc Searls: ‘For most of the industrial age, companies have been obsessed with getting the attention of prospects and customers…’ But now ‘we can make our intentions known personally and in ways that can cause and sustain genuine relationships. And, where no relationship is required, we can connect, do business, and move on, with less cost and hassle than ever.’

…In the Attention Economy of mass marketing vendors focused on getting the buyer’s attention and marketing, or advertising was all powerful. But in The Intention Economy the consumer buyer notifies the market of the intent to buy, and sellers compete for the buyer’s purchase. It is a shift in the balance of power and that is something that B2B sellers know all about.

Iain Henderson of The Customer’s Voice has done much research comparing B2B relations with C2B, and found many thousands of variables in the former and just a handful in the latter. This owed to a relatively even balance of power between customers and vendors in the B2B world (even given the changes Ray notes in his post), and a lopsided one in the C2B world, in favor of the vendor’s (B) side. As customers get more power, however, the variables will only go up, and with them will also rise choices for both sides.

For example, today no company is ready to hear a customer name his or her own terms (or preference for terms) in a C2B interaction (sometimes called a “ceremony”). Few companies are ready to hear a personal RFP or “intentcast” by customers in the wild. Ray (who writes in the U.K.) gives two examples of those:

I am looking for a mountain bike, in Hull, with 500 pounds to spend – p.s. as my facebook wall shows I am into extreme biking and am rather tall!
I am looking for a child’s stroller in the Lewisham area and have 150 to spend – p.s. I am a member of the fair trade alliance, so ethical products appeal to me.

As VRM development matures, we’ll start seeing these scenarios becoming common.