Driving VRM with car data and APIs

Go read OnStar gives Volt owners what they want: their data, in the cloud, by Sean Gallagher, in Ars Technica. It’s a VRM story. The vendor is Chevrolet, the vended product is the Volt, and the relationship management is a DIY hack by one customer. The story begins,

You probably don’t think of your car as a developer platform, but Mike Rosack did. A few days after buying his Chevy Volt, Rosack started slowly mining his driving data. But he eventually revved up his efforts and created a community platform for drivers to track their own efficiency. Today more than 1,800 Volt owners compare stats with each other, jockeying for position on Rosack’s Volt Stats leader board.

The Volt uses OnStar, a GM subsidiary known through its advertising for providing a way for drivers to call for roadside assistance; but which is actually a sophisticated cell-based data system through which cars communicate constantly with the mother ship’s cloud. While OnStar generously shares data back to customers through an app called RemoteLink, much more can be done with it, since it’s data and comes out through an API. Now here is where the story gets VRooMy:

Rosack initially wanted to do more with his own driving data than just view it on his phone. So he built what eventually became Volt Stats to capture this data, then started sharing it with other Volt owners. There was just one small problem: Volt Stats relied on Rosack’s reverse engineering of an interface for OnStar’s RemoteLink mobile application (iOS and Android). When OnStar moved to shut down the Web services interface Rosack had plugged into in mid-October, Volt Stats arrived at a screeching halt.

Rather than leaving Volt Stats stalled on the roadside, GM and OnStar accelerated efforts to give developers a new public Web API to create services on top of OnStar data. The companies even worked with Rosack to get him onboard and get Volt Stats re-launched. Now, Volt Stats is back online and other would-be car data hackers will soon be able to connect their Web applications to GM owners’ vehicle data (provided, of course, that they have privacy policies that meet with the approval of GM and OnStar lawyers).

OnStar had already developed an API for GM partners such as the car-sharing service RelayRides, who need to get access to some of the remote control and telematics elements of the service. But this new interface takes advantage of technologies such as OAuth and JAX-RS and it’s a step toward turning OnStar into a broader platform for the “Internet of things.” It’s also a way to give car enthusiasts a new kind of access to something they’ve always thought of as their own—their cars’ data.

Now come the VRM questions:

• Where and how might customers store that data? Are current PDS (personal data stores) compatible and ready for it?
• How might customers use that data — especially outside and between multiple vendors’ apps, APIs and relationship silos?
• Might we see an  ⊂ (r-button) on the dashboards of car? How might that work? And if it does, how do we make it standard?
• What usage and new market-driving scenarios might we start to imagine here?
• How might customers assert their own privacy policies and terms as demand begins to drive supply?
• What other interfaces do cars have that might be brought into the picture?
• How can what happens here model what we do with the rest of the “Internet of things?”
• What are the meshy wireless things we can do among ourselves and our cars, outside any vendor’s box? (Would love Robin Chase‘s thinking here.)

These are questions especially for VRM developers. Look for answers (and more questions) here and on various blogs.

VRM happenings in the U.K.

The tweets have been rolling in…

@Ctrl-Shift 

Identity Assurance: Mydex’s unique contribution. An interview with @dejalexander @MydexCIC http://www.ctrl-shift.co.uk/news/2012/11/15/identity-assurance-mydexs-unique-contribution/ …

@williamheath‏

@321CtrlShift interview with my colleague @dejalexander on @MydexCIC and #IDAssurance http://is.gd/7yyiZk  #VRM

@Mydex CIC‏

Very thoughtful @SimonTucker blog post about today’s DWP announcement http://is.gd/zRslHa  #IDAssurance #VRM

@williamheath‏

For those who wondered how #VRM would first break in the popular press: http://bit.ly/107SqT9  #DailyMirror #Midata #CtrlShift

So let’s unpack those.

First, the DWP (Department for Work and Pensions) announcement. What Mydex and others will provide is online identity assurance. (Note: not “providing” an identity.) To explain, Out-Law.com gives us Online identity scheme providers selected to design new DWP framework for verifying claims by benefits seekers.

This is one step in a march of reform led by the U.K. government, and moving in a generally VRooMy direction through the Midata program. Here are some links, starting in late 2011, and listed roughly chronologically:

• Midata Vision of Consumer Empowerment
• Personal Data
• Midata Consumer Data Principles
• Midata empowerment
• A midata future: 10 ways it could shape your choices
• Next Steps Making Midata a Reality
• Midata supporting companies and bodies

The piece in the Mirror focuses on health and retail discounts. VRM is much broader than that, but it’s a good start.

[Later…] More below, from William Heath.

Intentcasting

I’ve lately been posting under Dave Winer‘s threads, using an OPML editor. One of Dave’s latest posts bowls right up a big VRM alley, as he says in this tweet here. That alley is Intentcasting.

From my reply:

In the VRM development community, we started out calling the latter category “Personal RFPs,” but in the last few months we’ve started calling it Intentcasting. (Scott Adams of Dilbert fame called it “broadcast shopping.”)

A partial list of intentcasting developers is listed here.

An intentcasting scenario ten years hence is described in my Wall Street Journal essay from July. Let’s make it sooner than that. 🙂

Also take a look at this video demo of an intentcasting scenario, produced by @HeatherVescent for Innotribe, the innovation arm of SWIFT, the Belgium-based nonprofit that transfers $trillions per day:

That involves the Digital Asset Grid, which was demo’d two weeks ago in Osaka at SWIFT’s Sibos conference. A number of VRM developers have been involved with that, as well as myself. The main two contributing to the prototype, and there to demo it at Sibos, were Phil Windley of Kynetx and Drummond Reed of Respect Network. Phil has a nice rundown on the session.

A huge thanks to @Petervan for leading the whole project, over the last two years.

Here’s the current list of intentcasting developers at the ProjectVRM wiki:

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”

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

I know there are more, and that the descriptions need updating and de-bugging. That’s why I’m listing these here. Write to me with corrections, or fix the wiki yourself. (If you’re not known to it, you’ll need to go through the registration thing.)

VRM happenings in France

Before I spoke briefly to the Cap Digital innovation cluster in Paris a few weeks ago, I asked how many in the audience had heard of VRM. Every hand went up.

FING, the Foundation Internet Nouvelle Génération, has been hip to VRM for some time. So have many of its members, which overlap with Cap Digital and other tech/business circles.

Companies such as Privowny (founded a by Hervé Le Jouan and HQ’d in Palo Alto) and OneCub are addressing multiple VRM challenges.

The latest bit of encouragement comes in the form of a tweet from @DigiWorldIDATE, posted from the DigiWorld Summit, a three-day event that wrapped today in Montpelier, France. The tweet is in this haystack here. If anybody was there and wants to report on what got talked about, please share it. From what little I read, sounds like it was good.

Bonus link.

 

Linklings

Here’s an overdue compilation of stuff I’ve been saving up to share. Many items have slipped through the cracks, but I want to get at least these up.

The plural of personal is social, by JP Rangaswami. The punchlines (read through — there are many):

Business is personal. It’s about relationships. It has always been so. Until we tried to forget it and concentrated on making money, not shoes. [As Peter Drucker said, people make shoes, not money]. Then, for a short while, business became not-personal.

As the Cluetrain guys signalled way back in 1999, the web was changing all that. Business was becoming personal again.

It comes as no surprise to me that salesforce.com was born during those heady times, as business started becoming personal again. It comes as no surprise to me that Marc Benioff understood that the plural of personal is social, and that it’s in the DNA of the company that he and Parker Harris founded. That’s why I went to work for them.

“Social” is not a layer. “Social” is not a feature. “Social” isn’t a product.

Social is about bringing being human back into business. About how we conduct business. About why we conduct business.

Social is something in people’s hearts, in people’s beings, in their DNA.

Man is born social.

Many companies were not.

And the companies that weren’t, they can’t just become social by buying layers or features or even products. Porcine unguents, nothing more.

You need to be reborn social.

You need to start thinking of the customer as someone to have a relationship with, to get to know, to invest in, to trust, to respect.

And you need to get everyone in the company to think that way, to act that way, in everything they do.

And you need to do this everywhere, not just with your customers. Not just with your supply web or your trading partners. Not just with your staff and your consultants.

Everyone. Everywhere.

The plural of personal is social.

Proof That Loyalty Is For Suckers: Best Customers Get Penalized With Higher Bills, by Brad Tuttle in Time. It begins,

We appreciate your business. And as thanks for being a loyal customer all these years, we’re going to overcharge you.

Auto insurers and other service providers don’t say this explicitly, of course. But that’s the message sent via the rates they charge different customers.

The curious, but obviously profitable business model, in which new customers get wooed with discounts and special deals, while the oldest, most loyal, best customers are “thanked” with bills that escalate over time, is standard practice among pay TV and wireless providers. The companies play up the idea that their products and services come with special introductory rates for new customers, rather than noting that there are penalties for customers who stick with the business for the long haul and don’t complain. But no matter which way the rate changes are spun, the results are the same.

Some VRooM-ish tools and services:

• YaCy: “Web search by the people, for the people.” Some copy:  “YaCy is a free search engine that anyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet or to help search the public internet. When contributing to the world-wide peer network, the scale of YaCy is limited only by the number of users in the world and can index billions of web pages. It is fully decentralized, all users of the search engine network are equal, the network does not store user search requests and it is not possible for anyone to censor the content of the shared index. We want to achieve freedom of information through a free, distributed web search which is powered by the world’s users.”
• Tails: “The amnesiac incognito live system.” Copy: “It helps you to use the Internet anonymously almost anywhere you go and on any computer but leave no trace using unless you ask it explicitly.”
• Silent Circle: “Private encrypted communications tools.” Email, mobile phone, VoIP, text. Scroll down to founders & leadership. One is Phil Zimmerman, father of PGP.
• Request Policy is “an extension for Mozilla browsers that increases your browsing privacy, security, and speed by giving you control over cross-site requests.”

Market Research (MR to its denizens) gets an earful about VRM and The Intention Economy in
The 21st Century Battle for the Future of MR has begun: Empowered Consumers Versus “Darth Data”, by Kevin Lonnie in The Greenbook Blog.

I see some hope for getting more digital books out of silos in An RDF for Books, by Brian O’Leary.

For the privacy corner of VRM, dig Privacy, Masks and Religion, by Omer Tene in Concurring Opinions. It begins, “One of the most significant developments for privacy law over the past few years has been the rapid erosion of privacy in public.”

Klint Finley in TechCrunch makes some right-on observations about The Cloud, though he says “there being a few examples of … “vendor relationship management” idea in the wild, it still feels like vaporware to me.” Obviously I think he’s wrong, but we report the negative stuff here too. On the positive side, Scott Merrill wrote Doc Searls Would Like You to Join Him in the The Intention Economy, also in TechCrunch, back in May.

From Selling You: Not Just on Facebook, by Haydn Shaughnessy writes this in Forbes:

The reality is we need a different way of thinking about data, and in an age marked by innovation we shouldn’t find a reframe too difficult. We shouldn’t but we do. Generations of marketers have been brought up on an adversarial view of the customer, the target, the win…

In all the discussions we’ve had here in Forbes about social business we have yet to stray into the use and purpose of social data, as if we too largely accept that the adversarial view is the only one.

A couple of days back I tried to reflect an alternative view in for, example, how we might use LinkedIn data – it’s not only my view of course and I don’t want to claim any originality in it. For five years or more, maybe as far back as The ClueTrain Manifesto, people like Doc Searls have been arguing that the web makes a better commerce engine if we recognize all the power symmetries it brings. And there is an increasing number of projects that are taking up that logic.

CRM type data is old school – Tesco in the UK had signed up more than 15 million people to its ClubCard by 2009, that is over a third of the adult population of the country. It’s what companies did before the web. But it seems to be continuing even now that we have new possibilities.

There is no need to collect inference data on people and their possible choices. There is no adversary called customer. We have scaled up human interaction online where we can get closer to asking people, suggesting to them, and interacting with them.

So the future actually belongs to companies that take a symmetrical view of power…

From Another Bubble; Not Housing, by Francine Hardaway of Stealthmode Blog in Business Insider:

Guys, we ARE in a bubble. I don’t care what you say. As an outsider, I can see it…

Like Facebook, Pinterest and Instgram have valuations that are guesses about the future of advertising.Will they be the next great places to advertise as we shift to mobile?

Pinterest may be worth more “nothing” than Instgram, however, because as Scoble pointed out, women have buying power, which is why brands cozy up to mommy bloggers. But they haven’t bought BlogHer, the platform on which those women express opinions, have they? Lisa, Jory and Elisa were pioneers in bringing women’s voices to the marketplace, and no one has offered them a billion. That’s because BlogHer is not a tool. But it should expose also the fact that simply being favored by women doesn’t confer $7b in value on a company.

More worrisome is the supposition that these apps will someday be good carriers of mobile advertising, even though as yet the advertising industry hasn’t solved the online ad effectiveness problem and even Facebook reported diminished revenues this quarter.

The advertising industry is in upheaval, over the value of online advertising per se, before it even tackles mobile. Publishers are going under right and left because customers don’t want to see ads online, and truly hate them on mobile . Here, especially, the user will control the conversation.

So the valuations of Pinterest and Instgram/FB are merely expensive guesses about the future of advertising, about whether the ad tech industry will figure out mobile in a non-invasive way. Yes, the open graph will be part of it, and the advertising will be targeted. But I am guessing that Doc Searls will be quoted here gain and again: markets are conversations, and customers will control them.

In Vendor Relationship Management: Making the Customer King, Stephen F. DeAngelis visits both The Intention Economy and The Customer As a God (my Wall Street Journal essay from July)

 

The identity problem

Robin Wilton (@futureidentity) has been wrestling with identity issues for longer than I have, and deeper in the trenches. It is from one of those — IGF2012 (The Internet Governance Forum for Sustainable Human and Economic Development) — that he issued a deep and thoughtful post today on the topic of identity. His central distinction:

2. So let me describe two ways of looking at digital identity. I’ll describe the first one and then contrast its characteristics with the second. The first, I’ll call the Classic model. It is based on:

– Single authoritative source

– Credential

– Authentication

– Binary (Y or N)

– Level of assurance and a chain of trust, both of which can be formalised into procedures and assigned liability models (retroactive).

The second is what I’ll call the Emerging model. It looks like this:

– Multiple, low-assurance sources

– Attributes

– Authorisation

– Contextual and adaptive

– A web of trust, notions of mutable reputation, and quantifiable mainly in terms of risk management (predictive).

The Classic model is “fundamentally retrospective,” he writes; and

The Emerging model is future-facing. It is much more dynamic, and it is also completely compatible with anonymous authorisation. But it alters our conception of identity and trust, and relies on immature disciplines such as reputation management and contextual authorisation.

This is correct and astute. It also lays out much to be feared if we stick with either one. So I weighed in at his post with a long comment from a VRM perspective:

The reason “your digital identity” is not “close to being a reflection of your personal identity” is that you are a “user” on the Web and not a sovereign and independent human being.

The reason you are a user and not a human being on the Web is that in 1995 we settled on a model called “client-server” in which every server carried responsibility for authentication and pretty much everything else. You, as an individual, were just a user. It is not a coincidence that only two industries call individual human beings “users.” The other is drugs.

Nothing substantive has yet been built toward independence for individuals on the client side. We remain dependent variables rather than independent ones — a situation that has not changed in the seventeen years since. Client-server has become calf-cow, where users are the calves and sites are the cows. (More here.)

Both the classic and the emergent models you describe rely on cows. Neither allows the user to perform as an independent individual. Neither attempts to fix the problem of identity from the individual’s side.

Truly fixing identity is un-done work. Some companies and development efforts listed in the ProjectVRM wiki are working on it. Every six months it also comes up at Internet Identity Workshops (http://www.internetidentityworkshop.com/). But it’s a hard problem, akin to solving personal transportation with better railroads.

What we need online are the digital equivalents of cars and bicycles: personal transportation. Remember the “information superhighway” — this communications path on which you would “drive”? The idea was that each browser was a personal vehicle on which we “surfed” from place to place. Think of the literal meanings of drive, browse and surf. They are what independent human beings do. When all we do is “use,” we are dependent. Simple as that.

This is why the browser morphed from a car or a surfboard into a shopping cart that gets re-skinned with every commercial site it “uses.” At each site the user iis known in ways exclusive to the site, over which the individual has little control, except to opt out of the site and its systems. Add Twitter or Facebook login to the mix, and you just have more, and bigger, cows involved.

The burden of subordination to each of us is hundreds of different login/password combinations and acceptance of one-sided “agreements” offered by each site or service we use, on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. The “agreements” are ones we never read because they are written by and for lawyers, and are built to offload as much risk and liability as possible to users, along with minimized control over the user’s “experience.”

So there is much more to fix here than identity alone. But identity is the oldest challenge, and perhaps still the largest one.

I  hope it helps. I also want to tip my hat toward Devon Loffreto, aka Moxy Tongue and @EnzionXavier, who writes posts such as this one. It is to Devon that I owe the adjective sovereign for what matters most about personal identity. I also owe much to Walt Whitman, who writes,

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me.
He complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed. I too am untranslatable.
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

To mix metaphors one more time, we have ceased being hawks, or inspired by them.

If now is not the time to fly, when will we?

[Later…] Crosbie Fitch has also been a helpful influence. His is the first comment below.