Category: Uncategorized (Page 3 of 3)

Privacy and VRM

June 16, 2009 / / 3 Comments

In Privacy is Relative my column in May’s Linux Journal, I wrote,

there are essentially two forms of privacy. One is the kind where you hide out. You minimize exposure by confining it to yourself. The other is where you trust somebody with your information.

In order to trust somebody, you need a relationship with them. You’re their spouse, friend, client or patient.

This isn’t so easy if you’re just a customer, or worse, a “consumer”. There the obligation is minimized, usually through call centers and other customer-avoidance mechanisms that get only worse as technology improves. Today, the call center wants to scrape you off onto a Web site or a chat system.

Minimizing human contact isolates your private information inside machines that have little interest in relating to you as a human being or in putting you in contact with a human being inside the company. Hence, your data is indeed safe—from you. It’s also safe from the assumption that this data might in any way also belong to you—meaning, under your control. It’s still private, but only on the company’s terms. Not on yours.

This mess can’t be fixed just by humanizing call centers. It can be fixed only by humanizing companies. This has to be done from both inside and out.

There isn’t enough room in a column like that to unpack that last statement. But there is in a thread like this one, if you’re game.

First VRM West Coast Workshop: 15-16 May 2009

April 13, 2009 / / 1 Comment

We’re a little more than a month away from The first ProjectVRM West Coast Workshop. It will will take place on Friday-Saturday 15-16 May, 2009 in Palo Alto. Graciously providing space is SAP Labs which is a beautiful facility at 1410 Hillview Street in Palo Alto. That’s up in the hills overlooking Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay. (With plenty of parking too.)

It’s free. Sign up here.

The event will go from 9am to roughly 5pm on both days, and come just ahead of the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW2009a), down the hill in Mountain View, at the Computer History Museum. If things go the way they have for the last couple years, VRM conversation and sessions will continue at the IIW.

The tags are vrm2009 and vrm2009a.

As with earlier VRM gatherings, the purpose of the workshop is to bring people together and make progress on any number of VRM topics and projects. The workshop will be run as an “unconference” on the open space model, which means session topics will be chosen by participants. Here is the Wikipedia page on open space. In open space there are no speakers or panels — just participants, gathered to get work done and enjoy doing it. VRM Workshop 2009 wiki is now set up and ready for more detailing.

Our previous workshop was held last summer at Harvard Law School. Here’s the wiki for that. Here are some pictures as well. Those give a good sense of how things will go.

Answering tweeted questions about VRM

November 20, 2008 / / 2 Comments

So, with the help of vangeest and Twitter Search for #vrmevent, I’m addressing questions tweeted from the virtual floor here at the VRM Event in Amsterdam. Here goes…

vangeest: @dsearls: retweet @vangeest: #vrmevent: what is the relationship between the good old B2B marketplaces like Ariba and VRM?

As an idea VRM owes something to B2B, for the simple reason that B2B relationships tend to be between equals. Thus they can be rich and complex as well. B2C tend to be simplified on the B side, mostly so maximum numbers of templated Cs can be “managed”. Iain Henderson has talked about how there are thousands of variables involved in B2B VRM, while only a handful with CRM, which is B2C.

VRM essentially turns B2C into a breed of B2B — to the degree that both terms no longer apply. VRM equips individuals to express their demand in ways that B2C never allowed, and B2B never included.

But VRM is not a site, or a marketplace. That makes it different from Ariba, eBay, or online marketplaces. VRM may happen inside of those places, but VRM is not about those places.

Most importantly, VRM is not something that companies give to customers. It’s something customers bring to companies.

zantinghbozic: #vrmevent ichoosr: vrm is socialism 2.0 – http://mobypicture.com/?pcg0qr

This reports a provocative tease by Bart Stevens of iChoosr in his opening slide. I don’t agree with the statement, but his deeper point rings true: it involves a shift in power in the marketplace, from producers to consumers. Except I wouldn’t use the word consumers. I’ll explain that later.

VRM link roundup

April 29, 2008 / / 0 Comments

PGreenburg: should we call CRM 2.0….duh…..VRM?

Bart Stevens: VRM vrs the “I waste a 1 billion dollar/year industry, and The wheel, fire and… VRM.

Nick Brisbourne: VRM – requirements of a good service.

Keith Hopper:  Empowering the individual creates beneficial outcomes and cultivates an environment where these contributions are most valuable. Since the best participatory environments exist to serve individuals and address their interests first and foremost, the heavy-handed, centralized actions or exploitation of participants corrupts an online collective environment irreparably. Ideally, participants develop a feeling of ownership over the environment, and providing such an atmosphere is indispensable to ensure the environment’s continuance.

Martin Kuppinger: For me, VRM, infocards and technologies like U-Prove are the pieces of a puzzle which, when ready, shows personalization and profiling as the picture.

Nilhan: The Web 2.0 Social VRM impact on Insurance and Financial Services.

How about demand-driven flexy bandwidth?

March 13, 2007 / / 0 Comments

What would happen if network speed was driven by usage rather than fixed provisioning?

That’s the question on the floor of the Berkman Center Fellows meeting I’m attending right now. (Or the ceiling, which is where I am, via teleconferencing speakers.) We’re so used to thinking of connectivity, and bandwidth, as something entirely controlled by the supply-side.

But what happens when we actually respect the power of the marketplace? What happens when the supply side listens to, and responds to, and provisions against, individual customer demand? Instead of broadband, call it…um, flexband.
The supply side would get a lot more business, wouldn’t ya think?
Rather than the few uses suppliers can imagine (TV, voip, downloads), there would be an infinite variety of uses (games, offsite storage, business services, whatever).

Obviously, this requires VRM equippage.

What would that be?

Newer posts »

© 2026 ProjectVRM

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑