Category: Vertical ideas (Page 4 of 6)

VRM Impact

November 20, 2009 / Doc Searls / 1 Comment

kynetx_vrm_kml-ribbit

The shot above was made at the Kynetx Impact conference, which is the first one I’ve been to where VRM was a serious topic on its own — an acronym thrown around by participants, in ways that made clear that they knew what it was. No explanation required.

In other words, this wasn’t a VRM conference, but one where VRM was a central issue. The fact that the 140 people who packed the room included lots of developers, some of whom working right there on all kinds of stuff, including VRM.

I’ll have much more to say about the conference later. Right now I’m waiting for a flight at the airport and wanted to make a post while I had a shot at it, on the one browser that survived a really bad crash a couple days ago that seems to have affected some system libraries.

Still, a great conference. Thanks to the Kynetx folks, and to everybody who contributed. Well done.

Advertising in Reverse

November 16, 2009 / Doc Searls / 25 Comments

Here in the VRM development community we’ve been talking (and in some cases working) for several years on the Personal RFP. Technically an RFP is a “buyer-initiated procurement protocol” for businesses doing business with businesses: B2B as they say. With VRM the buyer is an individual. Hence, Personal RFP. Not a great label, but one that businesses understand.

Now comes Scott Adams (Dilbert’s cartoonist), with Hunter Becomes the Prey. His compressed case:

Shopping is broken… Google is nearly worthless when shopping for items that don’t involve technology. It is as if the Internet has become a dense forest where your desired purchases can easily hide.

Advertising is broken too, because there are too many products battling for too little consumer attention. So ads can’t hope to close the can’t-find-what-I-want gap. The standard shopping model needs to be reversed. Instead of the shopper acting as hunter, and the product hiding as prey, you should be able to describe in your own words what sort of thing you are looking for, and the vendors should use those footprints to hunt you down and make their pitch…

You can imagine this service as a web site. The consumer goes to the section that best fits his needs (furniture, cars, computers, etc.) and describes what he wants, in his own words. Vendors could set key word alerts via e-mail or text for any products in their general category.

Once they read the customer’s needs online, they have the option of posting their solution, publicly, which gives other vendors and consumers an opportunity to offer counterpoints.

I assume this service already exists in some weaker form. www.answers.yahoo.com is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t broadcast your needs to vendors.

My prediction is that Broadcast Shopping (as I just decided to name it) will become the normal way to shop.

I love “broadcast shopping.”

Where I veer from Scott’s approach is with the assumption that this requires “a site.” That’s because sites become silos, and silos are a big part of the problem we also have with loyalty cards. All are different. All say We have ways of making you shop. Tll trap and control you in their own ways. We need something that serves as a customer’s own tool, and works as simply as a keyring, a car key, an emailing, or a text message. “Here’s what I want: _________.” That’s it.

In business, RFPs use an open protocol (essentially, formalized paperwork and bidding processes). Anybody can use it. We need the same for broadcast shopping. Any of us should be able to broadcast, in a secure and selective way that protects our privacies, specified goods we’re shopping for.

I use the plural of privacy because what we reveal selectively will depend on who we already relate to. For example, say I have a trusted relationship with Nordstrom, Sears and a variety of smaller clothing retailers. I could broadcast only to those stores my need for a tan cotton dress shirt of a particular brand, with a 17″ neck and 31″ sleeves (my actual dimensions, there — I have a linebacker’s neck and arms like a penguin’s flippers). Or I could broadcast the same need to the general marketplace through a fourth party that intermediates on my behalf, not revealing any information about me beside my actual need.

One scenario Scott describes in his post…

For example, let’s say you’re looking for new patio furniture. The words you might use to describe your needs would be useless for Google. You might say, for example, “I want something that goes with a Mediterranean home. It will be sitting on stained concrete that is sort of amber colored. It needs to be easy to clean because the birds will be all over it. And I’m on a budget.”

Your description would be broadcast to all patio furniture makers, and those who believe they have good solutions could contact you, preferably by leaving comments on the web page where you posted your needs. You could easily ignore any robotic spam responses and consider only the personalized responses that include pictures.

… outlines a broad class of needs where the customer’s mind is not yet made up. Those are within the scope of VRM, but I think we should start with cases where the actual requirements are known by the buyer, and the buyer can set the terms of engagement. For example, “I want my receipt emailed to me in (this specified) data format, and I don’t want to receive any promotional material.”

All this is not only do-able, but inevitable.

I’ll conclude with a pitch of my own for funding research and development on this work.

Google should be interested because Advertising in Reverse, or Broadcast Shopping (a term I love, by the way), will either undermine or replace the company’s standing business model (which pays for all those freebies we enjoy).

Microsoft should be interested because this could give them something Google doesn’t have yet.

Yahoo should be interested because they need something new that’s a winning idea. Amazon and eBay should be interested because they’re already in that business, though in a silo’d way.

Oracle should be interested because it will sell more databases and Sun gear.

Apple should be interested because it’s one more area where they can push for new standards on which the range of innovation goes through the roof.

Every retailer and intermediary should be interested because the promise of the Net for buyers is not an infinite variety of closed silos, but a truly open marketplace where any buyer can do business with any seller — and on the buyer’s terms and not just the seller’s.

Like everything else we will come to depend on utterly while remaining absent in the present, VRM is thoroughly disruptive idea. It’s always smart to get ahead of the curve by getting behind what will bend it.

Event horizons

October 21, 2009 / Doc Searls / 1 Comment

Photo galleries from the VRM West Coast Workshop and VRooM Boston 2009 are up. Tim Hwang has an excellent follow up (Geek Insurance! — go read it) to the Getting Personal With Data panel, which turned (as we had intended) into a round-table discussion involving everybody in the room (including Adriana Lukas, via live video from London) that lasted two hours.

In discussions since VRooM, some of us have started thinking that a better approach to VRM events is to pick single topics (health care, governance, search, VRM+CRM, personal RFP, personal informatics, whatever) and have separate workshops on those. Or to weigh in on VRM-related topics at other events, as we’ve done all along at the Internet Identity Workshops — or as Keith Hopper did for VRM at Public Media Camp. Or both.

The problem is that VRM itself is extremely broad, and still lacks working code that applies to all VRM topics. In the absence of that code — some personal tool as universal in the digital world as the wallet is in the physical one — we end up scattered across many topics. This isn’t bad, but it might not be the best way to get traction in any one topic.

Thoughts?

Real Estate and VRM

October 10, 2009 / Doc Searls / 1 Comment

Bill Wendel of Real Estate Cafe is one of the first people I met after becoming a fellow at the Berkman Center three years ago. What he’s been doing for a long time is right up the VRM alley: equipping users (whether buyers or sellers) with the means to become independent of controlling institutions and ways of doing business — and improving the marketplace while saving themselves money and hassle.

Bill will be at VRooM Boston 2009 and has told me he would like to bring up real estate as a session topic. I encouraged Bill to do that, and I encourage others to jump in and talk about it (and move some balls down the field too). Looking forward to it.

Hot Fodder for next week’s VRM Workshop

October 6, 2009 / Doc Searls / 2 Comments

A few weeks ago I was interviewed by Neil Davey of MyCustomer.com, a major voice in the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) field. The results are up at Doc Searls: Customers will use ID data to force CRM change. Much of what Neil sources for that piece come from my new chapter (“Markets are Relationships”) in the latest edition of The Cluetrain Manifesto (Now with 30% more clues!). In that chapter, Neil says,

Searls sticks the boot into customer relationship management. And even though CRM has become accustomed to bruising encounters, some of these blows hurt – perhaps because there are some painful truths being delivered. CRM, as Searls sees it, would rather have captive customers rather than free ones. To demonstrate this, we only have to examine the language organisations use when referring to customers – how they try to ‘lock in’ customers and ‘retain’ them after they have been ‘acquired’.

Later this week, after I’ve looked more closely at what did and didn’t make it into Neil’s piece (what I said to him, by emai, was quite long), I’ll post some of what was missed.

Meanwhile, a little summary for VRM newbies arriving from the lands of CRM…

The purpose of VRM is to improve markets by enlarging what customers can do, not just what vendors can do. The latter is necessary too; but that’s what all good sellers have always been doing. And there’s a limit to how far that can go.

Better selling alone can’t make better buying. Better marketing alone can’t make better markets. Better CRM alone can’t make better customers. At a certain point customers have to do that for themselves.

That point came when the Internet arrived. It was announced by Chris Locke in The Cluetrain Manifesto, with this very graphic:

There was an equipment problem with that statement. Customers were not yet self-equipped with the means for reaching beyond the grasp of old-school marketers and sellers—a school that is still very much in session.

VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) is about equipping customers with their own ways of of relating to vendors. In the larger sense, it’s also for equipping individuals with their own ways of relating to any organization.

Thats the mission of ProjectVRM.org, which I lead as a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center. It’s also the mission of a variety of related projects and companies: The Mine! Project, PAOGA, The Banyan Project, MyDex, ListenLog, EmanciPay, Scanaroo, Kynetx, r-button and SwitchBook, to name a subset of the whole community.

Adriana Lukas, who started The Mine! Project, has something new at Market RIOT (Relationships on Individuals’ Own Terms): MINT, for My Information, Not Theirs. She calls it “a movement to redress the balance of market power between vendors and customers, institutions and individuals, web services/platforms and users.” Its obectives:

“to create an ecosystem where customer data belongs to the customer, is freely available to individual customer or user, in open formats
‘to help the individual to become the point of integration for his or her transactional data
“to encourage development of applications that enable individuals to enjoy the value they can add by managing and analysing their own data (buying behaviour, purchasing patterns and preferences) and potentially benefit vendors, when such information is voluntarily shared by customers.”

This should bring up plenty of discussion at the VRM East Coast Workshop next Monday and Tuesday at Harvard Law School. It’s free. The agenda will be set by participants (on the “open space” model). In addition I am working right now on lining up an opening panel on Tuesday to lead off discussion of user control of data. Stay tuned for more on that.

Meanwhile, if you haven’t signed up already, go here to register for the workshop.

Is RedBeacon VRM?

September 16, 2009 / Doc Searls / 4 Comments

That question came to me this morning, in response to RedBeacon being named the winner of this year’s TechCrunch 50.

What RedBeacon offers is a form of what in the VRM community we call a personal RFP. As the company’s site says, RedBeacon provides a way to …

1
Request a local service
2
Compare prices
from qualified providers
3
Schedule the job online

(Whoa. I didn’t know WordPress would let you copy and paste images and text together like that. Nice. An old dog learns a new trick.)

As it says here, you can request a service, review qualified buyers, select a provider, and schedule the job, all at the RedBeacon site.

Is that VRM? In a number of ways, yes. RedBeacon to me looks like a fourth party service, such as those outlined in VRM and the Four Party System.

I would like to see how it fits as what Joe Andrieu outlines as a user-driven service. What do the rest of ya’ll think?

Unf*cking car rental

August 24, 2009 / Doc Searls / 16 Comments

The oldest case for VRM is one that has hardly improved in decades: car rental. Few business categories do a worse job of matching specific customer needs. Or a worse job of doing even the very limited range of services to which they limit themselves.

For example, Enterprise. I had a car booked for this evening in Santa Barbara that I would drive for the next week and return to the same airport. Price: $205 for an economyh car. Nice deal. But, thanks to the common difficulty of getting from Airport A to Airport B, I’m arriving at 11:45 this evening, after Enterprise is closed. So I called the company from the airport in Denver, where I’m sitting now.

The robot asked if I’d like to answer a one-question survey if I stayed on line after the call. I pressed 1 for yes. The reservations agent explained that I couldn’t change the reservation for pick-up tomorrow morning, but would need a new reservation. This one would be $245. Why? The short answer: because that’s what The System says.

So the survey robot asked me to say whether I was satisfied with the agent’s service (not the company’s, meaning the agent gets penalized, I would guess). On a scale of 1 to 5 (where 5 is most satisfied), I punched in 2. The robot expressed electronic unhappiness with my dissatisfaction, and told me to leave a detailed message. When the promt for that came, I started to talk and the robot instantly interrupted with a “Thank you,” and hung up the line. Is there a better way to compound customer unhappiness than that?

So I want to take this opportunity to appeal to anybody in a responsible position anywhere in the car rental business to work together with us at ProjectVRM on a customer-based solution to this kind of automated lameness. It can’t be done from the inside alone. That’s been tried and proven inadequate for way too long. Leave a message below or write me at dsearls at cyber dot law dot harvard dot edu.

Let’s build The Intention Economy — based on real, existing, money-in-hand intentions of real customers, rather than the broken attention-seeking and customer-screwing system we have now.

[Later…] Just booked a Budget compact car through United for $196.86. Got miles with it. By the way, I am a long-standing member of Budget’s FastBreak club. There was nowhere on the reservation I just made to note that. Makes no difference. Just pointing out how lame “loyalty” programs are too. I have minimal loyalty to Budget (which, over the years, has generally been okay). As of now, I have antipathy toward Enterprise.

Testing the all-tip system

August 21, 2009 / Doc Searls / 1 Comment

Arlington cafe serves gourmet food and lets customers pay what they want, by Shane Stephens in the Dallas Morning News, probes some of our assumptions with EmanciPay—a customer-controlled way to choose how much to pay for online goods that cost nothing but are worth more than that. The financial end of the story:

The no-set-price concept is intriguing, especially in this economy. Chippindale says it was inspired by One World Cafe in Salt Lake City, a pay-what-you-want community kitchen founded by her friend Denise Cerreta. But while One World Cafe is nonprofit, Chippindale intends to make money. “I definitely do not turn away from a profit,” she says.

So far, she’s not getting rich; in fact, she’s not even breaking even. Customers have been leaving an average of about $7 per person in the envelopes, and Potager’s food costs are running about $8 per person, she says.

That’s two small tests in a trial that needs many more. Think payment levels might change if the restaurants’ costs were fully exposed?

Dawn of the Living Infrastructure

August 2, 2009 / Doc Searls / 21 Comments

So how do we get out of this place?

infrastructure_of_living_dead

Let’s face it. Mike Arrington’s problem with the iPhone, Om Malik’s problem with AT&T, the FCC’s problem with Apple + AT&T together, my own problems with Cox, Dish Network and Sprint, David Pogue’s problem with the whole freaking cell phone industry … all of these are a great big WAAAH! in the wilderness of industrial oblivity to what customers want. We’re in the graveyard of what Umair Haque calls the zombieconomy. We’re living in Night of the Living Dead and complaining that the zombies want to eat us alive.

What they really want is to strap us down while they bleed us for small change—tiny amounts of ARPU. They do this, for example, by forcing us to sit through “The … number … you … have … dialed … eight … zero … five … seven …” until a small ka-ching happens somewhere deep in their billing system, so you get bled whether or not you’ve left (or received) a message. David Pogue:

Is 15 seconds here and there that big a deal? Well, Verizon has 70 million customers. If each customer leaves one message and checks voicemail once a day, Verizon rakes in — are you sitting down? — $850 million a year. That’s right: $850 million, just from making us sit through those 15-second airtime-eating instructions.

It was JP Rangaswami (disclosure: I consult JP and his company, BT) who first pointed out to me that the primary competence of phone companies isn’t technical. It’s financial. They’re billing machines. That’s their core competency. And it was r0ml who pointed out, way back when he was with AT&T Wireless (before it became Cingular, and then the AT&T we all know and hate today), that phone companies arrived at the holy grail of micropayments decades ago. They don’t charge small amounts, but they know how to add them up, and round piles of microminutes into billions of dollars.

A better movie metaphor is The Matrix. We’re all wet cell batteries inside giant phone company billing systems. The machines took over a long time ago, and they’re still running the world.

Not that acting like machines does them much good in the long run. Umair Haque:

Profit through economic harm to others results in what I’ve termed “thin value.” Thin value is an economic illusion: profit that is economically meaningless, because it leaves others worse off, or, at best, no one better off. When you have to spend an extra 30 seconds for no reason, mobile operators win — but you lose time, money, and productivity. Mobile networks’ marginal profits are simply counterbalanced by your marginal losses. That marginal profit doesn’t reflect, often, the creation of authentic, meaningful value.

He adds,

The fundamental challenge for 21st Century businesses — and economies — is learning to create thick value. We’re seeing the endgame of a global economy built to create thin value: collapse. Why? Simple: thin value is a mirage — and like all mirages, it ultimately evaporates. In the 21st Century, we’ve got to reconceive value creation.

Constructive Capitalists are disrupting their rivals by creating thicker value. Thick value is sustainable, meaningful value — and a new generation of radical innovators is wielding it like a strategic superweapon.

Rick Segal thinks Mike Arrington‘s CrunchPad is one of those superweapons. Here’s what the Crunchies say will look like:

Sez Rick,

No, this probably isn’t the next Apple or Motion Computing, but here’s the secret.

Let’s assume there are just 1000 people out of all the TechCrunch people in the world that want this device. If this device gets made and sold to 1000 happy people and the result is a manufacturing world and process which can now do these “one off” type devices, the game changes.

That’s why I want this device to get made. It begins a high profile (and positive) disruption at the point of manufacture and that can mean exciting things to you.

One way to blow up silos and walled gardens is de-verticalize industry itself. Not by making it horizontal (that’s too abstract), but by making it personal. Rick’s angle here is to go all the way to the source, and make manufacturing personal.

That’s what Rick thinks Mike & Co. are doing here. I also think the Crunchpad is compliant with what Dave says in this post here:

I’ve been through this loop many times, this is Mike’s first. The only platform that really works is a platform with no platform vendor, and that’s the Internet.

Right. The Crunchpad, as I understand it (and the Crunchies have explained it) is a Net-native device. Standards-based. Commodity parts. Full of open source stuff. The platform is the Net. The vendor is TechCrunch, but trapping users isn’t their game. They’d rather have thick value than thin.

So how do we contribute, besides paying cash for goods? By being constructive customers, rather than passive consumers. That’s what Rick is calling for here, and why we, as free and independent customers, can choose to support something that uses the Net as the platform, and is built to be user-driven.

Think about it. Is the Crunchpad crippled by any deals with a major vendor of any kind? Is it locked into any phone company’s billing and application approval systems? Is it locked into any one industry’s Business-as-Usual? No.

So who is in the best position to contribute to its continued improvement, besides the Crunchies themselves?

You. Me. Users. Customers.

We can drive this thing. Even if what Dan Frommer says is right, and Apple comes out with the world’s most beautiful pad ever, and pwns the whole category, there’s more vroom for improvement in the Crunchpad, because Apple’s device will be closed and the Crunchpad will be open. Or should be.

You listening, Mike?

Health Care vs. Risk Snare

July 15, 2009 / Doc Searls / 3 Comments

So I’m a guest on the latest TWiL (This Week in Law) podcast. Lots of VRM links at that link, below the topic, “How modernization of health data management is changing the health system.”

Here’s what I tried to say, or would like to have said better than I did.

Health care now lives in the networked world. That world is comprised of data. And the network is, as Kevin Kelly perfectly puts it, a copy machine. The result is, as Bob Frankston perfectly puts it, a sea of bits. Health care needs to adapt to this world, embrace it, take full advantage of it.

This imperative is at odds with the calculation of risk that is at the heart of our health care system here in the U.S. It would not be unfair, or even wrong, to call our health care system a risk management system. To see what I mean, imagine removing the insurance business from the middle of it.

Of course risk is always involved where odds must be calculated, and much of health care is legitimately about calculating the odds involved in a given condition, procedure or whatever. But huge hunks of our health care system, in addition to the culture surrounding it, is built around managing risk that has little to do with what our bodies and minds might require. Here are where we have fears of exposure, of disclosure, of mistakes, of all kinds of stuff that wouldn’t be a worry if we didn’t have to weigh the costs of knowning too much or too little in one circumstance or another, because something (a procedure, a doctor or a patient’s ass) might not be covered.

The nature of the networked world — of the big copy machine that constantly enlarges the sea of bits — is to reduce the risk of knowing too little, of having insufficient information, of reconciling data conflicts, or even conflicting judgment calls.

In the long run we must abandon a system that values risk more than care. I believe we have the former, to a dangerous degree, today. We will eventually require the latter. And that requires a health care system that essentially insures everybody.