Category: Intentcasting (Page 3 of 3)

#TakeBackControl with #VRM

June 23, 2014 / Doc Searls / 1 Comment

That’s a big part of what tonight’s Respect Network launch here in London is about. I’ll be speaking briefly tonight at the event and giving the opening keynote at the Immersion Day that will follow tomorrow. Here is a draft of what I’ll say tonight:

This launch is personal.

It’s about privacy.

It’s about control.

It’s about taking back what we lost when Industry won the Industrial Revolution.

It’s about fixing a marketplace that has been ruled by giant companies for a hundred and fifty years — even on the Internet, which was designed — literally — to support our independence, our autonomy, our freedom, our liberty, our agency in the world.

Mass marketing required subordinating the individual to the group, to treat human beings as templates, demographics, typicalities.

The promise of the Internet was to give each of us scale, reach and power.

But the commercial Internet was built on the old model. On the industrial model. What we have now is what the security guru Bruce Schneier calls a feudal system. We are serfs in the Kingdom of Google, the Duchy of Facebook, the Principality of Amazon.

Still, it’s early. The Internet as we know it today — with browsers, ISPs, search engines and social media — is just eighteen years old. In the history of business, and of civilization, this is nothing. We’ve barely started.

But the Internet does something new that nothing else in human history ever did, and we’re only beginning to wrap our heads around the possibilities: It puts everybody and everything at zero functional distance from everybody and everything else — and at costs that want to be zero as well.

This is profound and huge. The fact that we have the Net means we can zero-base new solutions that work for each of us, and not just for our feudal overlords.

Archimedes said “Give me a place to stand and I can move the world.”

That’s why we are here today. Respect Network has been working to give each of us a place to stand, to take back control: of our identities, our data, our lives, our relationships… of everything we do on the Net as free and independent human beings.

And what’s extra cool about this is that Respect Network isn’t just one company. It’s dozens of them, all standing behind the same promise, the same principles, the same commitment to build markets upward from you and me, and not just downward like eyes atop pyramids of control.

I’ll have a lot more to say about this tomorrow at Immersion Day, but for now I invite you to savor participating in a historic occasion.

I’m sure I’ll say something different, because I’ll speak extemporaneously and without the crutchware of slides. But I want to get this up because I can’t print where I am at the moment, and it seems like a fun and useful thing to do in any case.

For more, see A New Data Deal, starting today, at my personal blog.

VRooMy developments

May 1, 2014 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

Youstice is a new VRM company focused on mediating disputes online. Says the home page, “We help customers and retailers resolve shopping issues quickly and effectively.” Here’s the customer side (shop with confidence). Here’s the retailer side (manage claims easily). And here’s the pitch to partners (“help retailers and customers globally reach resolution of thousands of complaints – all through one simple online application”).

Enable your customers to better engage and make them independent. Become a VRooMer! is a new blog post by Zbynek Loebl that nicely explains VRM and the context it provides for Youstice, which is in beta now. So check it out.

Fargo is the online outliner/publishing system brought to us by Dave Winer and friends. As a tool of independence and engagement, it has many VRM possibilities, methinks. I enjoy following it both in use (I often blog through it) and in the Fargo Blog.

Phil Windley‘s The Compuserve of Things speaks to a problem we all suffer but few of us examine: silo-ization. Phil starts by insightfully observing that Web 2.o, for all the progress it brought, did so at the expense of centralization around sites, services and data sources:

Each of these online service businesses sought to offer a complete soup-to-nuts experience and capitalized on their captive audiences in order to get businesses to pay for access. In fact, you don’t have to look very hard to see that much of what’s popular on the Internet today looks a lot like sophisticated versions of these online service businesses. Web 2.0 isn’t so much about the Web as it is about recreating the online business models of the 80’s and early 90’s. Maybe we should call it Online 2.0 instead.

To understand the difference, consider GMail vs. Facebook Messaging. Because GMail is really just a massive Web-client on top of Internet mail protocols like SMTP, IMAP, and POP, you can use your GMail account to send email to any account on any email system on the Internet. And, if you decide you don’t like GMail, you can switch to another email provider (at least if you have your own domain).

Facebook messaging, on the other hand, can only be used to talk to other Facebook users inside Facebook. Not only that, but I only get to use the clients that Facebook chooses for me. Facebook is going to make those choices based on what’s best for Facebook. And most Web 2.0 business models ensure that the interests of Web 2.0 companies are not necessarily aligned with those of their users. Decisions to be non-interoperable aren’t done out of ignorance, but on purpose. For example, WhatsApp uses an open protocol (XMPP), but chooses to be a silo.

He adds,

If we were really building the Internet of Things, with all that that term implies, there’d be open, decentralized, heterarchical systems at its core, just like the Internet itself. There aren’t. Sure, we’re using TCP/IP and HTTP, but we’re doing it in a way that is closed, centralized, and hierarchical with only a minimal nod to interoperability using APIs.

We need the Internet of Things to be the next step in the series that began with the general purpose PC and continued with the Internet and general purpose protocols—systems that support personal autonomy and choice. The coming Internet of Things envisions computing devices that will intermediate every aspect of our lives. I strongly believe that this will only provide the envisioned benefits or even be tolerable if we build an Internet of Things rather than a CompuServe of Things.

When we say the Internet is “open,” we’re using that as a key word for the three key concepts that underlie the Internet:

Decentralization

Heterarchy (what some call peer-to-peer connectivity)

Interoperability

And concludes,

The only way we get an open Internet of Things is to build it. That means we have to do the hard work of figuring out the protocols—and business models—that support it. I’m heartened by developments like Bitcoin’s blockchain algorithm, the #indieweb movement,Telehash, XDI Discovery, MaidSafe, and others. And, of course, I’ve got my own work onKRL, CloudOS, and Fuse. But there is still much to do.

We are at a crossroads, with a decision to make about what kind of future we want. We can build the world we want to live in or we can do what’s easy, and profitable, in the short run. The choice is ours.

This is strong and important stuff.

Here in browser-land (where I’m writing this), Firefox has released a major new upgrade: version 29.0. Here’s an explanation. Firefox matters for VRM purposes because it’s the browser that’s closest to ours alone, and therefore in the best position to become a VRM instrument. The team there has also recently made hires — on purpose — from within our VRM orbit, and this is hugely encouraging. Oh, and they just put out this very cool video.

Same goes for WordPress. Gideon Rosenblatt‘s Automattic for the People: WordPress as a Regenerative Business singles out WordPress for praise as a paradigmatic example. He defines a regenerative business as a people- (rather than a money- or mission-) centric. So, in this respect, it helps to note that the main stakeholders in WordPress, Mozilla and Fargo are the people who put it to use. They are driven by us. This is more important than them being –centric around us. (This distinction is unpacked here and here.)

Regenerative business reminds me a lot of Umair Haque’s concept of thick value. Need to look more deeply into that.

Last but not least, dig Casius, which matches homeowners with pre-screened and qualified contractors in several European countries, so far: intentcasting, of a sort.

Looking forward to seeing lots of you at IIW next week.

Prepping for #VRM Day and #IIW

April 20, 2013 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

The 16th IIW (Internet Identity Workshop) is coming up, Tuesday to Thursday, 7-9 May, will be tat the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. As usual, VRM will be a main topic, with lots of developers and other interested folk participating. Also as usual, we will have a VRM planning day on the Monday preceding: 6 May, also at the CHM. So that’s four straight days during which we’ll get to present, whiteboard, discuss and move forward the many projects we’re working on. From the top of my head at the moment:

Personal Clouds, including —
- The Internet of Me and My Things
- QS (Quantified Self) and Self-Hacking
Fully personal wallets, rather than branded ones that work only with payment silos and their partners
Intentcasting — where customers advertise their purchase intentions in a secure, private and trusted way, outside of any vendor’s silo
Browser add-ons, extensions, related developments
Licensing issues
Sovereign and administrative identity approaches, including Persona, formerly BrowserID, from Mozilla
Legal issues, such as creating terms and policies that individuals assert
Tracking and ad blocking, and harmonizing methods and experiences
Health Care VRM
Devices, such as the freedom box
VRM inSovereign vs./+ Administrative identities
- Real estate
- Banking (including credit cards, payments, transactions)
- Retail
Personal data pain points, e.g. filling out forms
Trust networks
Harnessing adtech science and methods for customers, rather than only for vendors

The morning will be devoted to VRM issues, while the afternoon will concentrate on personal clouds.

We still have eight tickets left here. There is no charge to attend.

In the next few days here on the blog we’ll be going over some of the topics above. Input welcome.

Intentcasting mojo

April 8, 2013 / Doc Searls / 1 Comment

Nice piece on Intently.co and intentcasting in 7 Days. Titled Intently.co – the new website where the firms come to you…, it’s right up the VRM alley. An excerpt:

A global site or rather ‘intention engine’ called Intently.co is making it possible for suppliers who are listening to respond to buyers’ requests in the UAE and beyond.

Neil Harris, founder of Intently.co explained to 7DAYS that he could see the potential of his site pretty clearly – even if the inspiration did come while he was looking for an optician.

“I wanted an optician’s appointment and simply didn’t have the time or energy to wade through 101 opticians’ websites, so I dreamed up the idea of “broadcasting my request” to all of them and waiting for them to reply, eager to have my business,” he said. It’s a practice which has come to be known as ‘intentcasting’ – and in theory it should save you time and money.

“I wanted to be able to submit a request – or a ‘shout’ – for potential suppliers to react to while I was busy doing other things. Then, some time later, I could go back to that request and see how it was getting on,” Harris explained. So far, he said, around 80 per cent of requests worldwide get positive responses – and usually within the hour.

Some have asked all golf clubs in their area for membership prices and selected a new club based how responsive and helpful it was during the process.

Another user sent out a successful ‘shout’ for a surprise party. Such requests, though small on their own, are part of a growing trend which has been dubbed ‘the intention economy’ – and Harris believes it will have big consequences for current marketing and advertising models.

I added the link. Hope Neil and 7Days don’t mind. 🙂

The best VRM post, ever

March 28, 2013 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

One of the most mind-blowing one-liners I ever heard tossed was this one:

“All the significant trends start with technologists.”

It was uttered by Marc Andreessen during an interview I did with him for Linux Journal, in May 1998, for the August issue of the magazine, following up on Netscape’s open source release of Mozilla. The title of the piece was Betting on Darwin. It’s still up at that link, and an interesting piece of history.

That one-liner knocked me over because it is so obvious and true, yet easily overlooked. It is also exactly the reason I started ProjectVRM. I knew it needed technologists. Not just to develop code, but to fully understand the challenges and opportunities that call technology forth into the world.

Lately one of those technologists has stepped forward and written the best VRM post I’ve ever read, including all of my own. It’s by T.Rob, in his blog The Odd is Silent. The title is Futurists Groundhog Day. An excerpt:

Why VRM?

VRM, or Vendor Relationship Management, is a new approach to conducting business in which the missing physical constraints have been replaced by technological and policy constraints that restore the balance of power between individuals and their vendors, and perhaps to some extent also their governments.

One of the issues is asymmetry in the cost of data collection. Vendors spread the capital cost of data collection over a large population of customers. Given enough time, the cost of data collection drops to near-zero or in some cases actually generates returns. Consumers on the other hand have no such infrastructure. You are co-owner of your transactional data but your grocer records each line item of your purchase in real time and you get a cryptic paper receipt which you have the option to transcribe into a database. If you had a database. And knew how to program.

VRM proposes to provide that platform so that individuals will have the means to capture more of their own data at a cost that is competitive with their vendors. Indeed, the vision is that the vendors who already have that data will some day participate in the VRM ecosystem by sharing it with their customers, in real time and full resolution. Instead of just a crappy paper receipt with unreadable abbreviated names, you’ll get the actual line items with UPC codes, prices and for some products possibly even the cradle-to-grave history and status. You’d get your smart meter readings in real time so that you could program home automation behaviors based on load, utility rate, occupancy and so forth. When you purchase online, the terms of the contract, price and all other metadata about the purchase would either be captured by you or delivered to you in real time by the vendor.

But VRM is about a lot more than just replacing today’s functionality. Just as electric motors transcended the function occupied by stem engines, VRM enables entirely new capabilities. Many are yet to be discovered but a key new capability is intentcasting. This is a direct signal from the individual to the market about preferences, requirements and purchase intent.

Read the whole thing.

Bonus link.

VRM development work

February 5, 2013 / Doc Searls / 0 Comments

I’ll be having a brown bag lunch today with a group of developers, talking about VRM and personal clouds, among other stuff that’s sure to come up. To make that easier, I’ve copied and pasted the current list from the VRM developers page of the ProjectVRM wiki. If you’d like to improve it in any way, please do — either on the wiki itself, or by letting us know what to change.

While there are entire categories that fit in the larger VRM circle — quantified self (QS) and personal health records (PHRs) are two that often come up — we’ve tried to confine this list to projects and companies that directly address the goals (as well as the principles) listed on the main page of the wiki.

Here is a partial list of VRM development efforts. (See About VRM). Some are organizations, some are commercial entities, some are standing open source code development efforts.

SOFTWARE and SERVICES

Intentcasting

AskForIt † – individual demand aggregation and advocacy

Body Shop Bids † – intentcasting for auto body work bids based on uploaded photos

Have to Have † – “A single destination to store and share everything you want online”

Intently † – Intentcasting “shouts” for services, in the U.K.

Innotribe Funding the Digital Asset Grid prototype, for secure and accountable Intentcasting infrastructure

OffersByMe † – intentcasting for local offers

Prizzm †- social CRM platform rewarding customers for telling businesses what they want, what they like, and what they have problems with

RedBeacon † – intentcasting locally for home services

Thumbtack † – service for finding trustworthy local service providers

Trovi intentcasting; matching searchers and vendors in Portland, OR and Chandler, AZ†

Übokia intentcasting†

Zaarly † intentcasting to community – local so far in SF and NYC

Browser Extensions

Abine † DNT+, deleteme, PrivacyWatch: privacy-protecting browser extentions

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 the trackers

PrivacyScore † browser extensions and services to users and site builders for keeping track of trackers

Databases

InfoGrid – graph database for personal networking applications

ProjectDanube – open source software for identity and personal data services

Messaging Services and Brokers

Gliph †- private, secure identity management and messaging for smartphones

Insidr † – customer service Q&A site connecting to people who have worked in big companies and are willing to help when the company can’t or won’t

PingUp (was Getabl) †- chat utility for customers to engage with merchants the instant customers are looking for something

TrustFabric † – service for managing relationships with sellers

Personal Data and Relationship Management

Azigo.com † – personal data, personal agent

ComplainApp † – An iOS/Android app to “submit complaints to businesses instantly – and find people with similar complaints”

Connect.Me † – peer-to-peer reputation, personal agent

Geddup.com † – personal data and relationship management

Higgins – open source, personal data

The Locker Project – open source, personal data

Mydex †- personal data stores and other services

OneCub †- Le compte unique pour vos inscriptions en ligne (single account for online registration)

Paoga † – personal data, personal agent

Personal.com † – personal data storage, personal agent

Personal Clouds – personal cloud wiki

Privowny † – privacy company for protecting personal identities and for tracking use and abuse of those identities, building relationships

QIY † – independent infrastructure for managing personal data and relationships

Singly † – personal data storage and platform for development, with an API

Transaction Management

Dashlane † – simplified login and checkout

Trust-Based or -Providing Systems and Services

id3 – trust frameworks

Respect Network † – VRM personal cloud network based on OAuth, XDI, KRL, unhosted, and other open standards, open source, and open data initiatives. Respect Network is the parent of Connect.Me.

Trust.cc Personal social graph based fraud prevention, affiliated with Social Islands

SERVICE PROVIDERS OR PROJECTS BUILT ON VRM PRINCIPLES

First Retail Inc. † commodity infrastructure for bi-directional marketplaces to enable the Personal RFP

dotui.com † intelligent media solutions for retail and hospitality customers

Edentiti Customer driven verification of idenity

Real Estate Cafe † money-saving services for DIY homebuyers & FSBOs

Hover.com Customer-driven domain management†

Hypothes.is – open source, peer review

MyInfo.cl (Transitioning from VRM.cl) †

Neustar “Cooperation through trusted connections” †

NewGov.us – GRM

[1] † – Service for controlling one’s reputation online

Spotflux † malware, tracking, unwanted ad filtration through an encrypted tunnel

SwitchBook † – personal search

Tangled Web † – mobile, P2P & PDS

The Banyan Project– community news co-ops owned by reader/members

TiddlyWiki – a reusable non-linear personal Web notebook

Ting † – customer-driven mobile virtual network operator (MVNO – a cell phone company)

Tucows †

VirtualZero – Open food platform, supply chain transparency

INFRASTRUCTURE

Concepts

EmanciPay – dev project for customer-driven payment choices

GRM: Government Relationship Management – subcategory of VRM

ListenLog – personal data logging

Personal RFP – crowdsourcing, standards

R-button – UI elements for relationship members

Hardware

Freedom Box – personal server on free software and hardware

Precipitat, WebBox – new architecture for decentralizing the Web, little server

Standards, Frameworks, Code bases and Protocols

Datownia † – builds APIs from Excel spreadsheets held in Dropbox

Evented APIs – new standard for live web interactivity

KRL (Kinetic Rules Language) – personal event networks, personal rulesets, programming Live Web interactions

Kynetx † – personal event networks, personal rulesets

https://github.com/CSEMike/OneSwarm Oneswarm] – privacy protecting peer-to-peer data sharing

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/persona/ Mozila Persona] – a privacy-protecting one-click email-based way to do single sign on at websites

TAS3.eu — Trusted Architecture for Securely Shared Services – R&D toward a trusted architecture and set of adaptive security services for individuals

Telehash – standards, personal data protocols

Tent – open decentralized protocol for personal autonomy and social networking

The Mine! Project – personal data, personal agent

UMA – standards

webfinger – personal Web discovery, finger over HTTP

XDI – OASIS semantic data interchange standard

PEOPLE

Analysts and Consultants

Ctrl-SHIFT † – analysts

Synergetics † – VRM for job markets

VRM Labs – Research

HealthURL – Medical

Consortia, Workgroups

Fing.org – VRM fostering organization

Information Sharing Workgroup at Kantara – legal agreements, trust frameworks

Pegasus – eID smart cards

Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium (PDEC) – industry collaborative

Meetups, Conferences, and Events

IIW: Internet Identity Workshop – yearly unconference in Mountain View

VRM Hub – meeting in LondonNOTES:
† Indicates companies. Others are organizations, development projects or both. Some development projects are affiliated with companies. (e.g. Telehash and The Locker Project with Singly, and KRL with Kynetx.)
A – creating standard
B – Using other standards
1 – EventedAPI

What if qualified leads were free?

December 31, 2012 / Doc Searls / 2 Comments

In terms of economic signaling, think about which is worth more:

A ready-to-sell-something message from an advertiser
A ready-to-buy-something message from a customer

Of course it depends. A company can use an ad to signal many people at once, and to signal far more than a readiness to sell something. And now, with advanced analytics and Big Data, an ad can be personalized to a high degree: timed and targeted to reach a customer at exactly the right place and time. (Or that’s the idea, anyway.) Customers are also separate individuals. They may only be worth something to a company in aggregate. So we’re talking about lots of variables here.

But let’s look at a single vendor and a single customer for a moment, and say you’re the vendor. What would a ready-to-buy signal from a customer be worth to you? The answer today is called the qualified leads business. Search for that and you’ll get lots of results, most of which pitch you on paying for those leads.

But what if the leads were free, or close to that price? They are with intentcasting. (In Hunter becomes the prey, Scott Adams calls this “broadcast shopping.”) With intentcasting, customers advertise their wants and needs. For vendors, listening to the signals is free.

From the list of VRM development efforts on the ProjectVRM wiki, here’s the current list of intentcasting efforts: