To the photos.
First, the wine. I like to post interesting bottles here so I can pin them on Pinterest (the only active board I have is called The Wine of My Life). In no particular order…
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Early last month I wrote a piece entitled Do Not Track Is An Opportunity, Not a Threat. In it I covered Microsoft’s controversial decision to incorporate a presumptive “opt out of tracking” flag in the next release of its browser, which many in the ad industry see as a major blow to the future of our business.
In the piece, I argued that Microsoft’s move may well force independent publishers (you know, like Searchblog, as well as larger sites like CNN or the New York Times) to engage in a years-overdue dialog with their readers about the value exchange between publisher, reader, and marketer. I laid out a scenario and proposed some language to kick that dialog off, but I gave short shrift to a problematic and critical framing concept. In this post, I hope to lay that concept out and offer, by way of example, a way forward. (Caveat: I am not an expert in policy or tech. I’ll probably get some things wrong, and hope readers will correct me if and when I do.)
The “concept” has to do with the idea of a first-party relationship – a difficult to define phrase that, for purposes of this post, means the direct relationship a publisher or a service has with its consumer. This matters, a lot, because in the FTC’s recently released privacy framework, “first-party marketing” has been excluded from proposed future regulation around digital privacy and the use of data. However, “third-party” marketing, the framework suggests, will be subject to regulation that could require “consumer choice.”
Read MoreHuh. Anyway, I wanted to see if this was a local thing, or if a lot of folks were experiencing it, so I went to Google+ and asked. Within a minute, I had ten responses, nine people said Twitter was down for them as well. In five minutes, it was 21 of 22. That’s a lot of engagement.
So I got to thinking….if Google was really evil, it’d do something like this when Twitter goes down:
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When you visit Joel Ewanick, CMO of GM, in his offices in Detroit, the first thing you notice is that unlike most C-suite executives, he’s not on the 39th floor of GM’s Renaissance Center headquarters (the highest floor). Instead, you exit the elevators on the 24th floor, less than two thirds up the building.
The second thing that strikes you is the floor itself – it’s bright with natural light, sports an open plan bustling with energy, and features a central video wall sporting constantly updated feeds reflecting consumer sentiment about GM and its brands – Facebook wall postings, Tweets, news stories, and the like.
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Look, I’m not exactly a huge fan of grimy greenbacks, but I do feel a need to point out something that most coverage of current Valley darling Square seems to miss: The “Death of Cash” also means the “death of anonymous transactions” – and no matter your view of the role of government and corporations in our life, the very idea that we might lose the ability to transact without the creation of a record merits serious discussion. Unfortunately, this otherwise worthy cover story in Fortune about Square utterly ignores the issue.
And that’s too bad. A recent book called “The End of Money” does get into some of these issues – it’s on my list to read – but in general, I’ve noticed a lack of attention to the anonymity issue in coverage of hot payment startups. In fact, in interviews I’ve read, the author of “The End of Money” makes the point that cash is pretty much a blight on our society – in that it’s the currency of criminals and a millstone around the necks of the poor.
Call it a hunch, but I sense that many of us are not entirely comfortable with a world in which every single thing we buy creates a cloud of data. I’d like to have an option to not have a record of how much I tipped, or what I bought at 1:08 am at a corner market in New York City. Despite protections of law, technology, and custom, that data will remain forever, and sometimes, we simply don’t want it to.
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(image Edge.org) A month or so ago I had the pleasure of sitting down with Valley legend Marc Andreessen, in the main for the purpose of an interview for my slowly-developing-but-still-moving-forward book. At that point, I had not begun re-reading David Gelernter’s 1991 classic Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox…How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean
Man, I wish I had, because I could have asked Marc if it was his life-goal to turn David’s predictions into reality. Marc is well known for many things, but his recent mantra that “Software Is Eating the World” (Wall St. Journal paid link, more recent overview here) has become nearly everyone’s favorite Go-To Big Valley Trend. And for good reason – the idea seductively resonates on many different levels, and forms the backbone of not just Andreessen’s investment thesis, but of much of the current foment in our startup-driven industry.
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I try to let big news percolate for a few days before weighing in, and it seems even more appropriate to follow that playbook when it came to the scrum around Marissa Mayer joining Yahoo.
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That’s on Pine Mtn. Trail, with Mt. Tamalpais in the background, and the East Bay over his right shoulder. One of my favorite “happy spots” within striking distance of my house. According to my AllSports GPS app, we rode 22.1 miles, climbed about 4500 feet, and were at it 2.5 hours. Talking business the entire time, of course. (Actually, that’s pretty much true). Here’s some context as to where we were in the world:
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The Cain Cuvee, Napa, is a blend that works with just about anything.
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Google was kind enough to send me a Nexus 7 tablet to play with last month, and over the past week or so I’ve had the chance to actually put it to use. Even though I own an iPad, I have serious reservations about the constraints of Apple’s iOS ecosystem (more on that below), so I was eager to see how Google’s alternative performed.
Now, before I get into details, I want to state what I think really matters here: The Nexus device – and others like it – represent a play for something extremely valuable: a hard-wired digital portal to our hearts, minds, and wallets. As I’ve written elsewhere, there are five major companies deeply engaged in this play – Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. All of these companies want us to commit to their services as the basis of our digital lives – how we consume media and entertainment, how we manage our work and personal lives, where we store our most important information (including our money), and of course, how we declare who we are and what we believe (our identity). The more these companies can get us to upload our music, videos, photos, identities, purchases, browsing behaviors, etc. etc. etc. into their nebulae, the more they’ve locked us into a lifetime relationship of revenue and profit.
Put in that frame, your choice of tablet or phone is about much more than feeds and speeds or features and prices (for all that, see this Engadget review). It becomes a choice about what kind of a company you want as a partner in your digital life. Will the company let you export your data easily to other services? Will it be transparent about how your data is used? Will it have the guts to stand up to bad actors, whether they be governments or other corporations? Will the company create dashboards where you can see, edit, delete, and contest how your data is displayed?
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