#TakeBackControl with #VRM

That’s a big part of what tonight’s Respect Network launch here in London is about. I’ll be speaking briefly tonight at the event and giving the opening keynote at the Immersion Day that will follow tomorrow. Here is a draft of what I’ll say tonight:

This launch is personal.

It’s about privacy.

It’s about control.

It’s about taking back what we lost when Industry won the Industrial Revolution.

It’s about fixing a marketplace that has been ruled by giant companies for a hundred and fifty years — even on the Internet, which was designed — literally — to support our independence, our autonomy, our freedom, our liberty, our agency in the world.

Mass marketing required subordinating the individual to the group, to treat human beings as templates, demographics, typicalities.

The promise of the Internet was to give each of us scale, reach and power.

But the commercial Internet was built on the old model. On the industrial model. What we have now is what the security guru Bruce Schneier calls a feudal system. We are serfs in the Kingdom of Google, the Duchy of Facebook, the Principality of Amazon.

Still, it’s early. The Internet as we know it today — with browsers, ISPs, search engines and social media — is just eighteen years old. In the history of business, and of civilization, this is nothing. We’ve barely started.

But the Internet does something new that nothing else in human history ever did, and we’re only beginning to wrap our heads around the possibilities: It puts everybody and everything at zero functional distance from everybody and everything else — and at costs that want to be zero as well.

This is profound and huge. The fact that we have the Net means we can zero-base new solutions that work for each of us, and not just for our feudal overlords.

Archimedes said “Give me a place to stand and I can move the world.”

That’s why we are here today. Respect Network has been working to give each of us a place to stand, to take back control: of our identities, our data, our lives, our relationships… of everything we do on the Net as free and independent human beings.

And what’s extra cool about this is that Respect Network isn’t just one company. It’s dozens of them, all standing behind the same promise, the same principles, the same commitment to build markets upward from you and me, and not just downward like eyes atop pyramids of control.

I’ll have a lot more to say about this tomorrow at Immersion Day, but for now I invite you to savor participating in a historic occasion.

I’m sure I’ll say something different, because I’ll speak extemporaneously and without the crutchware of slides. But I want to get this up  because I can’t print where I am at the moment, and it seems like a fun and useful thing to do in any case.

For more, see A New Data Deal, starting today, at my personal blog.

Turning the customer journey into a virtuous cycle

Traditional CRM typically looks at customers this way:It’s a cycle. One of the reasons we started ProjectVRM is that actual customers are hard to find in the CRM business. We are “leads” for Sales and Marketing, and  “cases” for Support. At the Orders stage we are destinations to which products and invoices are delivered. That’s it.

Oracle CRM, however, has a nice twist on this (and thanks to @nitinbadjatia of Oracle for sharing it*):

Here we see the “customer journey” as a path that loops between buying and owning. The blue part — OWN, on the right — is literally the customer’s own space. As the text on the OWN loop shows, the company’s job in that space is to support and serve. As we see here…

… the place where that happens is typically the call center.

Now let’s look at how this journey looks in our lives, in terms of how much of the time we own stuff and how much of the time we shop for it. The real ratio is closer to this:

And that’s not an exaggeration, since we own everything 100% of the time and shop only a small % of the time.

Now let’s pause to consider the curb weight of “solutions” in the world of interactivity between company and customer today. In the BUY loop of the customer journey, we have:

1. All of advertising, which Magna Global expects to pass $.5 trillion this year
2. All of CRM, which Gartner pegs at $18b)
3. All the rest of marketing, which has too many segments for me to bother looking up

So, in the OWN loop we have a $0 trillion greenfield. This is where VRM started, with personal data lockers, stores, vaults, services and (just in the last few months) clouds.

Now look around your home. What you see is mostly stuff you own. Meaning you’ve bought it already. How about basing your relationships with companies on those things, rather than over on the BUY side of the loop, where you are forced to stand under a Niagara of advertising and sales-pitching, by companies and agencies trying to “target” and “acquire” you. From marketing’s traditional point of view (the headwaters of that Niagara), the OWN loop is where they can “manage” you, “control” you, “own” you and “lock” you in. To see one way this works, check your wallets, purses, glove compartments and kitchen junk drawers for “loyalty” cards that have little if anything to do with genuine loyalty.

But what if the OWN loop actually belonged to the customer, and not to the CRM system? What if you had VRM going there, working together with CRM, at any number of touch points, including the call center?

This is more than a simple dream. One of the coolest things to happen in the VRM development world is this insight, based on actual technology: everything you own can have its own cloud, and each can live inside your personal cloud. Your stuff doesn’t need to have embedded smarts. You can put your things’ smarts inside clouds of their own. Manufacturers can also include clouds along with everything they sell. Inside that cloud can go all the touchpoint contact data required for a genuine relationship, plus useful extras such as service manuals and shortcuts to product updates.

This means the product itself becomes the platform for relationship between the customer and everybody on the sell side, from manufacturer to distributor to retailer to service company. As I explained in this HBR post, that platform — the product’s cloud — is the level table where all those parties sit, at the grace of the customer. Because it’s the customer’s space.

One tablecloth for that platform is the TalkTag. It’s a simple QR code, like the one on the right. The pioneering company here is Kynetx, through its SquareTag service. It’s a simple way to give anything you have a cloud of its own. Scanning a TalkTag is one way to visit a thing’s cloud, which is also a programmable space. If your thing is lost, you can program it to provide contact information through somebody’s smartphone when they scan it. (Which I have done, and it works.)

You can also program it to, say, notify the call center when you scan it. For example, I want the TalkTag I just put on my cable modem to notify Time Warner Cable when I scan it. If Time Warner Cable’s CRM system is listening (which should be easy enough to make happen), it can send back a message to my phone, telling me there is an outage in my neighborhood. Or, in the event that there isn’t an outage, the “I’ve been scanned” message from me to Time Warner Cable can jump past stages in the company’s IVR (Interactive Voice Response) system and get me straight to the right person or automated response. That might be, “You need to download new firmware,” or “We have three new service tiers you might want to know about,” or “We see you haven’t paid your bill.”

I have shared this kind of scenario with two call center companies recently, and they liked it a lot. In fact they like the whole idea of VRM systems on the customers’ side that can lighten the burdens of relationship (and open opportunities) for both sides.

The customer journey — his or her experiences of owning and buying — will include more than just interacting with call centers. We use the things we own in countless ways that might be useful to share with others, including the companies that make and sell stuff — and not just through “social” systems like Facebook and Twitter, over which we have little or no control.

We should also be able to integrate data from products that don’t relate but should. In the Quantified Self world, for example, there is a standing need to synthesize data from many devices and databases. This need  cannot be solved by asking Nike, Fitbit, Withings, RunKeeper and the rest of them to all make their data un-silo’d and combine-able. And doing it in “social media,” whose only business is advertising at us, won’t work either. We need means of our own.

In the VRM world we’ve been saying the user needs to be the point of integration for his or her own data since Joe Andrieu first expressed that insight in 2007. Now, with personal clouds, in 2013, it’s starting to look possible. In fact the personal cloud, and the whole OWN loop, can also be a platform for intentcasting toward the BUY side.

The OWN side is also where all the privacy technology also sits, chiefly because it is distributed. It is here also that we hold the terms, preferences and policies we express when dealing with companies sitting across the tables set between us.

An interesting case that lies between buying and owning is relationships with service organizations, such as utilities. What we own here is own side of an ongoing relationship. Equipment of our own may be in there, or may not be. Either way, the use of a service — in our homes, cars and pockets — is what we at least control, even if we don’t own it.

So clearly we need a common platform for personal clouds, and for the things we put in them. That platform needs to be small, lightweight, distributed and open source. Right now I see one candidate for that: CloudOS, which is the brainbaby of Phil Windley. (Here’s a search for CloudOS and Windley. Lots of stuff there.) If you’ve got some other hacks, point them out in the comments below.

If we look at the customer experience from the company’s side again, this graphic from Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore does a nice job of framing the possibilities:

Across the table set in a personal cloud, customers can feed back good intelligence to every one of the loops in that graphic. And, because that data arrives directly and voluntarily, it has far higher quality than inferential data gathered by marketing’s many surveillance methods.

It also re-frames relationship and loyalty, as real things rather than as words marketing recites inside its own echo chambers. It will reduce marketing’s urge to manipulate, and advertising’s urge to personalize in the absence of conscious and voluntary signals welcoming it. The customer journey will thus turn into a virtuous cycle rather than the arduous one it is today.

It can also create a demand chain that can work in tandem with the supply chain, providing far better feedback at every stage. I could go on, but I want to get this up before the latest in the series of Important Calls that punctuate my life. (And they are all Good Things, trust me.)

Bonus link.

* In the comments below the post that follows this one, Ray Wang points to Esteban Kolsky as the original author of this graphic. As I say in my comment below Ray’s, I did hear that from Nitin Badjatia (of Oracle and formerly of Right Now), but I didn’t remember it when I wrote both posts in a hurry. Again, it is the verbs — BUY and OWN — that make the image especially useful for VRM, because they are the customer’s. I don’t yet know if those verbs are Esteban’s or Right Now/Oracle’s. Let me know and I’ll give credit where due.

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Prepping for #VRM Day and #IIW

The 16th IIW (Internet Identity Workshop) is coming up, Tuesday to Thursday, 7-9 May, will be tat the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. As usual, VRM will be a main topic, with lots of developers and other interested folk participating. Also as usual, we will have a VRM planning day on the Monday preceding: 6 May, also at the CHM. So that’s four straight days during which we’ll get to present, whiteboard, discuss and move forward the many projects we’re working on. From the top of my head at the moment:

• Personal Clouds, including —
  • The Internet of Me and My Things
  • QS (Quantified Self) and Self-Hacking
• Fully personal wallets, rather than branded ones that work only with payment silos and their partners
• Intentcasting — where customers advertise their purchase intentions in a secure, private and trusted way, outside of any vendor’s silo
• Browser add-ons, extensions, related developments
• Licensing issues
• Sovereign and administrative identity approaches, including Persona, formerly BrowserID, from Mozilla
• Legal issues, such as creating terms and policies that individuals assert
• Tracking and ad blocking, and harmonizing methods and experiences
• Health Care VRM
• Devices, such as the freedom box
• VRM inSovereign vs./+ Administrative identities
  • Real estate
  • Banking (including credit cards, payments, transactions)
  • Retail
• Personal data pain points, e.g. filling out forms
• Trust networks
• Harnessing adtech science and methods for customers, rather than only for vendors

The morning will be devoted to VRM issues, while the afternoon will concentrate on personal clouds.

We still have eight tickets left here. There is no charge to attend.

In the next few days here on the blog we’ll be going over some of the topics above. Input welcome.

 

VRM development work

I’ll be having a brown bag lunch today with a group of developers, talking about VRM and personal clouds, among other stuff that’s sure to come up. To make that easier, I’ve copied and pasted the current list from the VRM developers page of the ProjectVRM wiki. If you’d like to improve it in any way, please do — either on the wiki itself, or by letting us know what to change.

While there are entire categories that fit in the larger VRM circle — quantified self (QS) and personal health records (PHRs) are two that often come up — we’ve tried to confine this list to projects and companies that directly address the goals (as well as the principles) listed on the main page of the wiki.

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Here is a partial list of VRM development efforts. (See About VRM). Some are organizations, some are commercial entities, some are standing open source code development efforts.

SOFTWARE and SERVICES

Intentcasting

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”

Intently † – Intentcasting “shouts” for services, in the U.K.

Innotribe Funding the Digital Asset Grid prototype, for secure and accountable Intentcasting infrastructure

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

Browser Extensions

Abine † DNT+, deleteme, PrivacyWatch: privacy-protecting browser extentions

Collusion Firefox add-on for viewing third parties tracking your movements

Disconnect.me † browser extentions to stop unwanted tracking, control data sharing

Ghostery † browser extension for tracking the trackers

PrivacyScore † browser extensions and services to users and site builders for keeping track of trackers

Databases

InfoGrid – graph database for personal networking applications

ProjectDanube – open source software for identity and personal data services

Messaging Services and Brokers

Gliph †- private, secure identity management and messaging for smartphones

Insidr † – customer service Q&A site connecting to people who have worked in big companies and are willing to help when the company can’t or won’t

PingUp (was Getabl) †- chat utility for customers to engage with merchants the instant customers are looking for something

TrustFabric † – service for managing relationships with sellers

Personal Data and Relationship Management

Azigo.com † – personal data, personal agent

ComplainApp † – An iOS/Android app to “submit complaints to businesses instantly – and find people with similar complaints”

Connect.Me † – peer-to-peer reputation, personal agent

Geddup.com † – personal data and relationship management

Higgins – open source, personal data

The Locker Project – open source, personal data

Mydex †- personal data stores and other services

OneCub †- Le compte unique pour vos inscriptions en ligne (single account for online registration)

Paoga † – personal data, personal agent

Personal.com † – personal data storage, personal agent

Personal Clouds – personal cloud wiki

Privowny † – privacy company for protecting personal identities and for tracking use and abuse of those identities, building relationships

QIY † – independent infrastructure for managing personal data and relationships

Singly † – personal data storage and platform for development, with an API

Transaction Management

Dashlane † – simplified login and checkout

Trust-Based or -Providing Systems and Services

id3 – trust frameworks

Respect Network † – VRM personal cloud network based on OAuth, XDI, KRL, unhosted, and other open standards, open source, and open data initiatives. Respect Network is the parent of Connect.Me.

Trust.cc Personal social graph based fraud prevention, affiliated with Social Islands

SERVICE PROVIDERS OR PROJECTS BUILT ON VRM PRINCIPLES

First Retail Inc. † commodity infrastructure for bi-directional marketplaces to enable the Personal RFP

dotui.com † intelligent media solutions for retail and hospitality customers

Edentiti Customer driven verification of idenity

Real Estate Cafe † money-saving services for DIY homebuyers & FSBOs

Hover.com Customer-driven domain management†

Hypothes.is – open source, peer review

MyInfo.cl (Transitioning from VRM.cl) †

Neustar “Cooperation through trusted connections” †

NewGov.us – GRM

[1] † – Service for controlling one’s reputation online

Spotflux † malware, tracking, unwanted ad filtration through an encrypted tunnel

SwitchBook † – personal search

Tangled Web † – mobile, P2P & PDS

The Banyan Project– community news co-ops owned by reader/members

TiddlyWiki – a reusable non-linear personal Web notebook

Ting † – customer-driven mobile virtual network operator (MVNO – a cell phone company)

Tucows †

VirtualZero – Open food platform, supply chain transparency

INFRASTRUCTURE

Concepts

EmanciPay – dev project for customer-driven payment choices

GRM: Government Relationship Management – subcategory of VRM

ListenLog – personal data logging

Personal RFP – crowdsourcing, standards

R-button – UI elements for relationship members

Hardware

Freedom Box – personal server on free software and hardware

Precipitat, WebBox – new architecture for decentralizing the Web, little server

Standards, Frameworks, Code bases and Protocols

Datownia † – builds APIs from Excel spreadsheets held in Dropbox

Evented APIs – new standard for live web interactivity

KRL (Kinetic Rules Language) – personal event networks, personal rulesets, programming Live Web interactions

Kynetx † – personal event networks, personal rulesets

https://github.com/CSEMike/OneSwarm Oneswarm] – privacy protecting peer-to-peer data sharing

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/persona/ Mozila Persona] – a privacy-protecting one-click email-based way to do single sign on at websites

TAS3.eu — Trusted Architecture for Securely Shared Services – R&D toward a trusted architecture and set of adaptive security services for individuals

Telehash – standards, personal data protocols

Tent – open decentralized protocol for personal autonomy and social networking

The Mine! Project – personal data, personal agent

UMA – standards

webfinger – personal Web discovery, finger over HTTP

XDI – OASIS semantic data interchange standard

PEOPLE

Analysts and Consultants

Ctrl-SHIFT † – analysts

Synergetics † – VRM for job markets

VRM Labs – Research

HealthURL – Medical

Consortia, Workgroups

Fing.org – VRM fostering organization

Information Sharing Workgroup at Kantara – legal agreements, trust frameworks

Pegasus – eID smart cards

Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium (PDEC) – industry collaborative

Meetups, Conferences, and Events

IIW: Internet Identity Workshop – yearly unconference in Mountain View

VRM Hub – meeting in LondonNOTES: † Indicates companies. Others are organizations, development projects or both. Some development projects are affiliated with companies. (e.g. Telehash and The Locker Project with Singly, and KRL with Kynetx.) A – creating standard B – Using other standards 1 – EventedAPI

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.

Can we each be our own Amazon?

The most far-out chapter in The Intention Economy is one set in a future when free customers are known to be more valuable than captive ones. It’s called “The Promised Market,” and describes the imagined activities of a family traveling to a wedding in San Diego. Among the graces their lives enjoy are these (in the order the chapter presents them):

1. Customer freedom and intentions are not restrained by one-sided “agreements” provided only by sellers and service providers.
2. Fourth parties — service organizations working as agents for the customer — are a major breed among user driven services.
3. The competencies of nearly all companies are exposed through interactive APIs that customers and others can engage in real time. These will be fundamental to what Phil Windley calls The Live Web.
4. Personal RFPs (now also called intentcasts), will be common and widespread means for demand finding and driving supply in the marketplace.
5. Augmented reality views of the marketplace will be normative, as will mobile payments through virtual wallets on mobile devices.
6. Loyalty will be defined by customers as well as sellers, in ways that do far more for both than today’s one-sided and coercive loyalty programs.
7. Relationships between customers and vendors will be genuine, two-way, and defined cooperatively by both sides, which will each possess the technical means to carry appropriate relationship burdens. In other words, VRM and CRM will work together, at many touch-points.
8. Customers will be able to proffer prices on their own, independently of intermediaries (though those, as fourth parties, can be involved). Something like EmanciPay will facilitate the process.
9. Supply chains will become “empathic” as well as mechanical. That is, supply chains will be sensitive to the demand chain: signals of demand, in the context of genuine relationships, from customers and fourth parties.
10. The advertising bubble of today has burst, because the economic benefits of knowing actual customer intention — and relating to customers as independent and powerful economic actors, worthy of genuine relationships rather than coercive — bob will have became obvious and operative. Advertising will continue to do what it does best, but not more.
11. Search has evolved to become far more user-driven and interactive, involving agents other than search engines.
12. Bob Frankston‘s ambient connectivity will be taken for granted. There will still be businesses that provide connections, but nobody will be trapped into any one provider’s “plan” that excludes connection through other providers. This will open vast new opportunities for economic activity in the marketplace.

In VRM: The Amazon Example, Sheila Bounford provides the first in-depth volley on that chapter, focusing on #4: personal RFPs. I’ll try to condense her case:

I’ve written recently of a certain frustration with the seemingly endless futurology discussions going on in the publishing world, and it’s probably for this reason that I had to fight my way through the hypothesis in this chapter. However on subsequent reflection I’ve found that thinking about the way in which Amazon currently behaves as a customer through its Advantage programme sheds light on Searls’ suggestions and projections…

What Searls describes as the future for individual consumers is in fact very close to the empowered relationship that Amazon currently enjoys with its many suppliers via Amazon Advantage…  Amazon is the customer – and a highly empowered one at that.

Any supplier trading with Amazon via Advantage (and that includes most UK publishing houses and a significant portion of American publishers) has to meet all of the criteria specified by Amazon in order to be accepted into Advantage and must communicate online through formats and channels entirely prescribed and controlled by Amazon…

Alone, an individual customer is never going to be able to exert the same kind of leverage over vendors in the market place as a giant like Amazon. However individual customers online are greater than the sum of their parts: making up a crucial market for retailers and service providers. Online, customers have a much louder voice, and a much greater ability to collect, organise and mobilise than offline. Searls posits that as online customers become more attuned to their lack of privacy and control – in particular of data that they consider personal – in current normative contracts of adhesion, they will require and elect to participate in VRM programmes that empower them as individual customers and not leave them as faceless, impotent consumers.

So? So Amazon provides us with a neat example of what it might look like if we, as individuals, could control our suppliers and set our terms of engagement. That’s going to be a very different online world to the one we trade in now.  Although I confess to frustration with the hot air generated by publishing futurology, it seems to me that the potential for the emergence VRM and online customer empowerment is one aspect of the future we’d all do well to work towards and plan for.

From the start of ProjectVRM, Iain Henderson (now of The Customer’s Voice) has been pointing to B2B as the future model for B2C. Not only are B2B relationships rich, complex and rewarding in ways that B2C are not today (with their simplifications through customer captivity and disempowerment), he says, but they also provide helpful modeling for B2C as customers obtain more freedom and empowerment, outside the systems built to capture and milk them.

Amazon Advantage indeed does provide an helpful example of where we should be headed as VRM-enabled customers. Since writing the book (which, except for a few late tweaks, was finished last December) I have become more aware than ever of Amazon’s near-monopoly power in the book marketplace, and possibly in other categories as well. I have heard many retailers complain about “scan and scram” customers who treat brick-and-mortar stores as showrooms for Amazon. But perhaps the modeling isn’t bad in the sense that we ought to have monopoly power over our selves. Today the norm in B2C is to disregard that need by customers. In the future I expect that need to be respected, simply because it produces more for everybody in the marketplace.

It is highly astute of Sheila to look toward Amazon as a model for individual customers. I love it when others think of stuff I haven’t, and add to shared understanding — especially of a subject as protean as this one. So I look forward to the follow-up posts this week on her blog.

Life Management Platforms

Kuppinger Cole, an analyst firm headquartered in Germany, has been hip to VRM for a long time. They gave ProjectVRM an award (that’s it there on the right) at the EIC (European Identity Conference) in 2008, and have been following VRM developments closely ever since. A number of VRM developers were there again at this year’s EIC, where I gave a keynote titled “Free Customers: The New Platform”, and the topic was front and center.

In fact VRM has always been about more than relating to vendors, which is another thing Kuppinger Cole has believed as well. It’s been about personal empowerment, and better means for dealing with all kinds of organizations. There are also many more VRM developers now than there were back then, with many different labels for what they do. We have personal data stores, lockers, vaults, clouds, services and networks, for example. We also have and much activity in overlapping and adjacent development areas, such as with quantified self work, which includes self-hacking, personal informatics, self-tracking and much more.

Martin Kuppinger now throws a loop around all of these with Life Management Platforms, which is also the subject of his paper here. I like the term, and think it does a good job of encompassing both the internal (self-managing) and external (relating with others) sides of VRM.

Martin’s latest post is Intention and Attention – how Life Management Platforms can improve Marketing, in which he notes the main thrust of The Intention Economy, and adds,

Taking this view, the one of Doc Searls, and the idea of Life Management Platforms the way we at KuppingerCole have it in mind shows that this is where things become really interesting: A Life Management Platforms allows expressing your Intention. The Intention is nothing other than a vital part of where your current Attention is focused. In other words: Knowing the Intention is about knowing at least an important part of the current Attention, which is much better than trying to change the Attention. Furthermore, Life Management Platforms could provide more information about the current Attention in real-time, but in a controlled way – controlled by the individual. That allows getting even more targeted information and makes this concept extremely attractive for everybody – the vendors and the individuals.

Control by the individual is what VRM has been about since the start. What I’d like to know now is how Life Management Platforms sits with VRM developers, and others who have been following or involved with VRM from the start.

VRM at IIW

VRM was a hot topic at IIW last week, with at least one VRM or VRM-related breakout per session — and that was on top of the VRM workshop held at Ericsson on Monday, April 30, the day before IIW started. (Thanks to Nitin Shah and the Ericsson folks for making the time and space available, in a great facility.) Here’s a quick rundown from the #IIW14 wiki:

Tuesday, May 1, Session 1

• F: VRM Intro (Vendor Relation Management) Developments (T1F)

Tuesday, May 1,Session 2

• D: Find Out And Control You Digital Footprint (T2D)
• H: Building a 4th Party VRM Start-Up (T2H)

Tuesday, May 1, Session 3

• E: How to Educate Consumers on privacy/identity/security issues? (T3E)
• F: VRM 2012 Outreach Planning / What vendors will go first? (T3F)
• G: Standard Information Sharing /Label (T3G)
• K: What is a Personal Cloud? (T3K)

Tuesday, May 1,Session 4

• F: VRM Language (lockers vs smelly socks) Lexicon = what do we call the WHO and WHAT we work on? (T4F)

Tuesday, May 1,Session 5

• J: Sovereign ID vs Admin ID (T5J)
• K: User – Managed Access F.A.Q: How UMA Enables – Selective Sharing (T5K)

Wednesday, May 2, Session 1

• B: VRM + CRM(need help) Event – Sept 2012 Santa Clara (W1B)

Wednesday, May 2,Session 2

• A: Personal Data Rights Language / Self Asserted Terms – Policies – Preferences (W2A)
• D: API’s (W2D)
• G: Personal Data Tagging a Utopia? (W2G)

Wednesday, May 2,Session 3

• A: Data Wallet (W3A)
• B: VRM Personas & Faceted Identity (W3B)
• J: Personal Cloud work (W3J)

Wednesday, May 2,Session 4

• A: F: Setting up an Open Source Community – To drive adoption of a cool ID technology (W4F)
• H: Communication Channels in our Personal Clouds (W4H)

Wednesday, May 2,Session 5

• B: Commercializing VRM – in the marketplace
• (W5B)J: Personal Data Rights and Underlying Principles (W5J)

Thurssday, May 3,Sessions 1-5

• F: VRM: Where does it start? (TH1F)
• F: Trust Framework System Rules – Business, Legal, Technical (TH3F)
• H: XDI the Killer App? (TH3H)
• F: Personal Data Rights Language NEXT STEPS PDEC StartUp Circle (TH4F)
• J: UMA (User Managed Access) Open Meeting – Part 1 (TH4J)

On Friday, May 4, I also visited with Jeremie Miller, Jason Cavnar and the Locker Project / Singly team in San Francisco. Very impressed with what they’re up to as well.

Bonus IIW linkage:

• Coexistence: Thoughts from IIW14 (blogs.gartner.com)
• Customer Commons Salon on Monday (customercommons.org)
• Off to a good start (blogs.law.harvard.edu)
• PDS Interoperability (windley.com)

Your actual wallet vs./+ Google’s and Apple’s

Now comes news that Apple has been granted a patent for the iWallet. Here’s one image among many at that last link:

Note the use of the term “rules.” Keep that word in mind. It is a Good Word.

Now look at this diagram from Phil Windley‘s Event Channels post:

Another term for personal event network is personal cloud. Phil visits this in An Operating System for Your Personal Cloud, where he says, “In contrast a personal event network is like an OS for your personal cloud. You can install apps to customize it for your purpose, it canstore and manage your personal data, and it provides generalized services through APIsthat any app can take advantage of.” One of Phil’s inventions is the Kinetic Rules Language, or KRL, and the rules engine for executing those rules, in real time. Both are open source. Using KRL you (or a programmer working for you, perhaps at a fourth party working on your behalf, can write the logic for connecting many different kinds of events on the Live Web, as Phil describes here).

What matters here is that you write your own rules. It’s your life, your relationships and your data. Yes, there are many relationships, but you’re in charge of your own stuff, and your own ends of those relationships. And you operate as  free, independent and sovereign human being. Not as a “user” inside a walled garden, where the closest thing you can get to a free market is “your choice of captor.”

Underneath your personal cloud is your personal data store (MyDex, et. al.), service (Higgins), locker (Locker Project / Singly), or vault (Personal.com). Doesn’t matter what you call it, as long as it’s yours, and you can move the data from one of these things into another, if you like, compliant with the principles Joe Andrieu lays out in his posts on data portability, transparency, self-hosting and service endpoint portability.

Into that personal cloud you should also be able to pull in, say, fitness data from Digifit and social data from any number of services, as Singly demonstrates in its App Gallery. One of those is Excessive Mapper, which pulls together checkins with Foursquare, Facebook and Twitter. I only check in with Foursquare, which gives me this (for the U.S. at least):

The thing is, your personal cloud should be yours, not somebody else’s. It should contain your data assets. The valuable nature of personal data is what got the World Economic Forum to consider personal data an asset class of its own. To help manage this asset class (which has enormous use value, and not just sale value), a number of us (listed by Tony Fish in his post on the matter) spec’d out the Digital Asset Grid, or DAG…

… which was developed with Peter Vander Auwera and other good folks at SWIFT (and continues to evolve).

There are more pieces than that, but I want to bring this back around to where your wallet lives, in your purse or your back pocket.

Wallets are personal. They are yours. They are not Apple’s or Google’s or Microsoft’s, or any other company’s, although they contain rectangles representing relationships with various companies and organizations:

Still, the container you carry them in — your wallet — is yours. It isn’t somebody else’s.

But it’s clear, from Apple’s iWallet patent, that they want to own a thing called a wallet that lives in your phone. Does Google Wallet intend to be the same kind of thing? One might say yes, but it’s not yet clear. When Google Wallet appeared on the development horizon last May, I wrote Google Wallet and VRM. In August, when flames rose around “real names” and Google +, I wrote Circling Around Your Wallet, expanding on some of the same points.

What I still hope is that Google will want its wallet to be as open as Android, and to differentiate their wallet from Apple’s through simple openness.  But, as Dave Winer said a few days ago…

Big tech companies don’t trust users, small tech companies have no choice. This is why smaller companies, like Dropbox, tend to be forces against lock-in, and big tech companies try to lock users in.

Yet that wasn’t the idea behind Android, which is why I have a degree of hope for Google Wallet. I don’t know enough yet about Apple’s iWallet; but I think it’s a safe bet that Apple’s context will be calf-cow, the architecture I wrote about here and here. (In that architecture, you’re the calf, and Apple’s the cow.) Could also be that you will have multiple wallets and a way to unify them. In fact, that’s probably the way to bet.

So, in the meantime, we should continue working on writing our own rules for our own digital assets, building constructive infrastructure that will prove out in ways that require the digital wallet-makers to adapt rather than to control.

I also invite VRM and VRooMy developers to feed me other pieces that fit in the digital assets picture, and I’ll add them to this post.

A bar(code) too high?

Two pieces in today’s Boston Globe worth checking out. Pun intended.

First is “Some markets bagging self-checkout: Cite problems and variables with system,” by Peggy Hernandez. Second is “Scan on a mission: Stop & Shop’s new smartphone app works as a super-fast self-checkout,” by Jane Dornbusch.

I’ve played quite a bit with self-check-out, and with Stop & Shop’s SCAN-IT! in particular. While I rarely find myself moving faster through check-out by doing it by myself, I do see the advantages for both customers and retailers. As Mike Grimes, CEO of Modiv told Peggy Hernandez, “Self-checkout is what you make of it. True customer service means choice. Albertsons and Big Y took that away from their customers. That is very likely not a good move.” Indeed, the report begins with news that Big Y is giving up on the self-checkout experiment. Didn’t work for them.

Stop & Shop seems quite committed to SCAN-IT. (I’m leaving off the exclamation mark, as I do with Yahoo.) Their shopping carts come with a metal holster for SCAN-IT’s scanning gun. And using the thing is almost entertaining.  (You can also scan with your iPhone or Android.) From the story:

Both the app and the hand-held scanners keep track of your purchases — and you. The app knows where you are in the store. The result is that coupons tailored to your preferences and location pop up on your device as you shop. This has a creepy Big Brother feeling, but you get to save 35 cents on the jar of mayonnaise on your list.

The problem is, guesses about what you might want are made not only by your location in the store, but on your purchase history. Meaning that the pile of crap food you bought for a school picnic last Summer still looks to the store’s system like something you’ll want to buy over and over again. So, up come the coupons.

One of these days I’ll put up the photo essay of my tours of stores, including Stop & Shop, for the book I just wrote. The book tells the story in text, but the pictures are also telling. Stay tuned for that.