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Tuesday, March 27, 2002
IDblog 
Almost like sex
| | On the Open Spectrum/WiFi panel, Dave LaDuke of Sputnik just set up a Compaq laptop as a new base station, extending the Joltage footprint. Then Boingo's client immediately sniffed it out. My Airport software just sniffed out the Joltage, Sputnik and Boingo networks — all actually Joltage. Confusing, but it works this way: |
| | The orignal signal is Joltage's. Sputnik's extends it. Boingo's clientware lets you choose between them. Today Boingo has a billing relationship with Joltage, but not with Sputnik. Yet. |
Meet the scariest thing the Web's enemies can imagine: a fully autonomous customer.
| | I realized, while talking to Dan and Jakob at lunch, that micropayments won't happen until customers have full control over the relationships that allow them to micropay for microservices and microproducts. And that won't happen until customers have full control over their own identities — and how those identites relate, as customers, to vendors. |
| | Personal identity belongs to the individual alone. Like the Web (thank you, Dr. Weinberger) our personal identities cannot be managed. My identity, like my id (pun intended) is mine alone. All other identities provided by extra-personal entities (Costco, the IRS, the DMV, the bank, VISA) are secondary or tertiary. They exist outside the personal space, in the social space. They are ours rather than just mine. But what's mine is mine alone. Nobody else is in charge of it. |
| | We will only be fully empowered customers when we have full control over our identities and the relationships that are based on them. Until then, we will remain "consumers" — appetites in human form that look to producers like what Jerry Michalski calls "gullets who live only to gulp products and crap cash." |
| | Once I am in control of my own identity, and its relationship with all these other identity-issuing entities — the credit card company, the government, the DMV, the retailer, the bookie — I am ready to participate in a much more intertersting marketplace than suppliers alone can now imagine, much less describe. |
| | My handheld, for example, might recognize from its GPS that I'm in Scottsdale. Thanks to my relationship with Zagat's, that company's recommendation services are available for an agreed-upon microfee. Sensing my presence, Zagat's Jabber server pushes out restaurant recommendations over an XML stream, and receives a micropayment in return from my bank (or Visa, whatever). Later when I go to a restaurant, and I want to know more about what's on the wine list, I invoke my wine curiosity engine, which solicits input from Wine Spectator and two or three individuals whose opinions I value, and with whom I have relationships based on shared tastes and passions. The recommendations come down, and micropayments are made. Note that this is all in addition to the huge amount of information that is properly on the Web for free, generously provided by everybody who knows it's wise to put as much as possible within reach of a browser — or, more importantly, Google. |
| | No company is going to provide the personal ID baseware I need to assert a fully empowered customer identity in the world. That needs to be an open source effort involving independent developers. Think Apache, Sendmail, SOAP, Linux and Jabber. But any number of companies can make use of the presence of my identity in the marketplace — so far as I allow that identity to manifest. Again, I'm the one who manages it. Since I intend to be a customer, it necessarily involves relationships with any number of supplers, and supplier types. Countless new relationships, and whole industries, can emerge. Other industries that require customer-dumb inefficiencies to live — such as mass marketing and junk mail — will face a choice: take advantage of the this new customer-based relationship platform, or meet a swift Darwinian end. |
| | There's a fractal aspect to this as well, since this wouldn't be possible if the Net weren't an unmanageable autonomous entity as well. |
| | Ask not what the Web can do for you, ask what you can do for the Web, somebody said. |
What goes down still comes up
| | The Frontier Wisdom panel is up. Jim Barksdale. Cathy David. Eric Schmidt. |
| | Jim Barksdale: A gored ox is a vigilant ox. |
| | Eric Schmidt: Once the culture of a company is set, it is almost impossible for a human to change it. He gives Novell as an example. |
Keep the id in identity
| | The Identity on the Frontier panel is up. Rick Beluzzo of Microsoft (still despised by many in the Unix/Linux community for nearly killing SGI by punching out and going over to the Dark Side). Some guy from Sun who isn't Ed Zander (the scheduled panelist). Tony Scott from GM. |
| | Rick just said that there are 200 million passports issued already, and some colossal number (billions) for something else. Scary. |
| | [Later...] Eric Norlin found the correct numbers: "...more than 200 million accounts performing more than 3.5 billion authentications each month." |
| | Everybody is talking about "the consumer." |
| | Lost in this conversation is any sense that identity originates with the individual, and is not simply graced upon us by the government, United Airlines, Costco and Microsoft. |
But not only
| | Eric Norlin: Suddenly, markets of one are truly possible. |
Postscripts
| | We also need the buggywhip protection act, mandating that no moving vehicle sold in the US not be equipped with a buggywhip. And the Railway Protection Act, mandating that no mass transportation ticket be sold that for a service that moves faster or less expensively than a train ride. |
| | Unrelated: I'm looking for an exuse to use the headline "fame crash." |
Unintended sucksequences
| | Not least, the filing suggests that America Online's acquisition of Time Warner (news/quote) last year was such a bad deal that the company now intends to record one of the biggest charges in corporate history, $54 billion, to account for it. Early this year, the company said that it would take a charge of up to $60 billion to reflect the reduced value of the combined company since the acquisition was announced in January 2000. |
What he said
| | Dan was actually listening during the last couple of panels. His reactions roughly represent the rest of the people in this corner of the audience. |
What if somebody yelled "fire" in a crowded conference and nobody left?
| | That's what just happened. The fire alarm is going off right now, and .... well, finally, people are leaving. |
| | ... and now that the room is clear, the alarm is off. |
What I didn't say
| | Around our breakfast table were Jay Haynes, myself, Cory Doctorow, Albhy Galuten, Steven Levy, Stewart Baker, Mike Homer and Andre Durand. Talking about the music industry in the midst of sharing and storage systems that let "consumers" (not "customers") traffic in music libraries of up to many thousand copies. Albhy, who is the industry's man on the case here at the conference, is a very powerful intellect who raises nothing but tough questions. He kinda dominated the conversation, though everybody who spoke had strong, interesting things to say — mostly in challenge to Albhy. |
| | It seems to me that too much of the converation is obsessed with What Will The Big Suppliers Do? And, How Can We Save Them? |
| | I find myself thinking about public radio and televsion, which is supported by customers (not "consumers") paying for something they already get for free. |
| | I also find myself thinking about conversations I've had with folks familiar with third world markets (of the bazaar sort) who tell me that what's really going on in these markets is more about relationship than exchange — that conversations are mostly concerned with arriving at agreements about both value and price (rather than price alone), and that as the customer learns more about the value of the goods, the price he or she is willing to pay may actually go up, not down. In the process, my friends make clear, what both parties value is both getting to know each other, and advancing connoisseurship around what we would call the product category and they might call craft. |
| | It seems to me we have the beginnings of a music bazaar here, and that the price many customers voluntarily pay for music may end up being significantly higher than zero. |
What becomes of The Media when you don't need them?
| | Through all the conversations I'm having here at PC Forum, I become more and more convinced that the most powerful economic trend of our time is the increase in the demand side's power to also supply. Here's one remark from comments to my Beating the Hand that Bites You piece: |
| | If you want to have a good music product, then two people will matter and cost you money : the producer, which will guide your style, and the technician/mixer, who is responsible for the quality of your sound. If you are talented enough, you do not need these people. An investment in your instruments, digital recording music cards for a PC and a good music editing package can get you a long ride thses days. |
| | I brought that one up indirectly yesterday in a question to a panel of folks from TiVo, Moxi, Napster and others. I called Napster's original success "the people's workaround of the failed commercial broadcasting system." I don't think the Napster guy understood what I was talking about. But I think Steve Perlman, the Moxi guy, did. He said his system would play Internet radio, which was cool. I think I heard the TiVo guy say that Internet radio couldn't list songs and stuff like that, which was flat-out wrong. |
| | Afterwards I got some nice feedback on the question. Tom Feegel of Blue Falcon Networks declared himself an Internet radio fan, and talk about that led into a long, very deep conversation about cynicism, among other things. We wondered if the audience here had a bit of a withering regard for some of the new "debutante" companies here (of which Blue Falcon is one — it presents later today). Not sure. |
| | J.C. Herz is another Internet radio fan. She told Tom and I (and earlier, the whole conference, when she was on a panel) that the Bose WavePC system was a really cool way to tune in webcasts from all over the world. I need to check it out. |
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