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Category: Issues

  • Giving Customers Scale

    Customers need scale. Scale is leverage. A way to get lift. Big business gets scale by aggregating resources, production methods, delivery services — and, especially, customers: you, me and billions of others without whom business would not exist. Big business is heavy by nature. That’s why we use mass as an adjective for much of what big…

  • Privacy is an Inside Job

    Start here: clothing and shelter are privacy technologies. We use them to create secluded spaces for ourselves. Spaces we control. Our ancestors have been wearing clothing for at least 170,000 years and building shelters for at least half a million years. So we’ve had some time to work out what privacy means. Yes, it differs among cultures and settings,…

  • Customers need scale

  • Electronic Health Records and Patient-Centric Design

    CIO’s story Why Electronic Health Records aren’t more usable offers an interesting perspective on the current (improved?) state of affairs in medical care records. From the article: The American Medical Association in 2014 issued an eight-point framework for improving EHR usability. According to this framework, EHRs should: enhance physicians’ ability to provide high-quality patient care…

  • Volvo’s In-Car Delivery Service

    In Volvo launches in-car package delivery service in Gothenburg, Volvo’s new service “lets you have your Christmas shopping delivered directly to your car.” Intriguing idea that saves on parking hassles like those people who are waiting/idling around the favored spots. With just days to go before Black Friday and Cyber Monday – the busiest online…

  • We are not fish and advertising is not food

    This is how the Internet looks to the online advertising business today: This is how they approach it: And this is the result: Advertising is a huge source of the “data pollution” Fred Wilson talked about at LeWeb a few weeks ago. (See here, starting at about 23 minutes in.) What’s wrong with this view,…

  • AT&T’s paint job on confusing pricing

    In AT&T Ridding Some Retail Stores of Cash Register, Counters and Other Clutter, John McDermott of AdAge explains how the company is making its stores “warmer” to improve the “shopping experience” there. Which is all fine, as far as it goes. Where it doesn’t go is toward fixing AT&T’s pricing. I explain that in a…

  • Bringing manners to marketing

    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…

  • Free vs. Followed

    The fight between the free market and the followed market is about to begin. And the way to bet is on the free market, because it’s what we know works best. Also because the followed market is nuts.  It only persists because it’s normative at the moment, and an enormous sum of investment is going…

  • Free customers are the new platform

    Doc Searls keynoted the European Identity and Cloud Conference in April, 2012. Full stream of Doc’s keynote in the video below.