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Re: [projectvrm] Fwd: Introducing Singly Health Data Fabric


Chronological Thread 
  • From: Katherine Warman Kern < >
  • To: Peter Cranstone < >
  • Cc: Doc Searls < >, ProjectVRM list < >
  • Subject: Re: [projectvrm] Fwd: Introducing Singly Health Data Fabric
  • Date: Thu, 4 Jul 2013 10:14:01 -0400
 We tend to have parallel tech and marketing conversations about VRM and search for a common ground to work from.

In case there  is any doubt, I represent the marketing side.  I've been analyzing this market for investors and marketers for decades.

I like the idea of creating a network of VRM developers. I think it would be even better if it we could find a common ground and include marketers, too.  

I get that the future is creating API's and APPs (they all look the same to me) that work on multiple browsers and mobile platforms.  I get that to raise money we have to figure out how to get paid.  And that's hard when no one pays for APPS AND API's.  Yet.

Maybe this perspective on Google offers some insight (and hopefully contributes to the conversation among both developers and marketers).

When Google launched it was elegantly simple.  The results were so much better that we actually spent less time searching/surfing the web (remember that term?).

Then someone had the brilliant and courageous idea of letting the market determine the value of searched words via a bidding war and Adwords was born.  Brilliant because they knew that the 80/20 rule applied.  80% of the search was for 20% of the words.  I suspect the "commercial" words are even more concentrated.  Courageous because not controlling the price makes it really hard to manage a company.  NET: they garnered a PREMIUM PRICE, more than they would have ever dreamed putting on a rate card, from big spenders like the car companies, entertainment companies, tech companies.  The rest of the market - mid to small companies- piled on, driving the prices bid for even obscure (longtail) words up and up.  

GAMECHANGING BETTER. PREMIUM PRICE.

They changed the game from searching to finding. They changed pricing to performance based and garnered a premium because it was worth it. That is sustainability. 

Until Google, search engines made more money by maximizing the number of clicks to get to the right target. That made for a very complex objective for product designers - the more they failed, the more money they made. That ambiguous business model made them vulnerable to a competitor on so many levels.  Which company would you rather work for?

Adtech, direct marketing, CRM is similar.  Everyone is resigned to the fact that they have to annoy, offend, violate consumers to get the info they need to serve buyers better. 

Really? 

In a simpler world, how would sellers serve buyers better? 

Is it really collecting more information or less? 

Establish a value proposition that disrupts the current ambiguous business model.

Once that value proposition is clear, then the issue will not be how to make money, it will be how much money market demand supports.

K-

Katherine Warman Kern
www.comradity.com
@comradity
203-918-2617

On Jul 3, 2013, at 6:36 PM, Peter Cranstone < "> > wrote:

Katherine,

Great stuff! 

The more I dig into Intent Casting the more complex it's becoming. The amount of data flowing around is enormous, let alone all the messaging (now I see why T.Rob is advocating a very lightweight notification/message scheme). Plus on top of this you have to write yet even more apps to access all this data. 

Wow – to me this is going to blow the consumers mind. Supporting all these apps, which invariably are free, is going to be really hard for the developers because they now have to pay for the API access that their customers are using. Guess we're going to see even more advertising.

The VRM dependencies are now becoming very clear:
  1. Sufficient funding for VRM networks to support and maintain APIs that allow access to social networks, personal clouds and other databases
  2. A developer network that can monetize the above with the customer paying for it

That's a tall ask. In fact just looking at companies in the VRM space (Thumbtack, and Singly, there's another one which is a reputation play) you can see that double digit millions are required to just host the backend infrastructure to tie this all together. Thumbtack does an awesome job on mobile so you can just use a browser. However Singly is all about apps which is a different deal altogether. 

Developers won't pay for APIs unless they can monetize their apps. As they have to support a minimum of two mobile platforms (Android and iPhone) that means they have to either give away the app for free and throw in advertising (there goes your data) OR have a 'subscription' service that they can monetize. 

Here's a question for you (and anybody else who can answer it). Here's Google's network effect which generates a ton of money. What does the VRM network effect look like? Anybody like to take a stab a diagramming it?


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Hmm.  Started out as this:  http://lockerproject.org/ 

“A Locker is a container for personal data, which gives the owner the ability to control how it's protected and shared. It retrieves and consolidates data from multiple sources, to create a single collection of the things you see and do online: the photos you take, the places you visit, the links you share, contact details for the people you communicate with, and much more. It also provides flexible APIs for developers to build rich applications with access to all of this information.�

 

But that last sentence, implying rich applications will access info and go in unforeseen directions with it,  seems to have morphed into this:  http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/10/singly-launches-app-fabric-platform-for-developers-to-speed-up-integrations-with-dozens-of-services/

 

“Singly offers to speed up the process of manually having to write code to authenticate users via third-party services, pull in their friends list and other data (think photos, bios, etc.) from various social networks and other services, and then allow those users to share to social networks, as well.�

 

Maybe that’s because the hitch is how to give consumers total control and developers the freedom to build rich applications.

 

Consumers may be willing to give developers that freedom IF they get to decide who sees the “rich applicationâ€�  or know it is only published if they see it and “opt inâ€�. 

 

K-

 

 

 

 

From: Doc Searls [ ">mailto: ]
Sent: Wednesday, July 03, 2013 5:15 PM
To: ProjectVRM list
Subject: [projectvrm] Fwd: Introducing Singly Health Data Fabric

 

FYI. thoughts? hacks?

 

Doc

 

Begin forwarded message:



Subject: Introducing Singly Health Data Fabric

Date: July 3, 2013 1:38:47 PM EDT

 

We’ve launched a new product, and we are thrilled to share it with you!

View this email in your browser

After syncing more than one million profiles and five billion objects, we've launched an exciting new product.  Health Data Fabric is a better way to manage connections to health and fitness services from FitBit to BodyMedia to Runkeeper and more. It's available today for private early access. Here are some key improvements from our previous technology:

  • Initial data sync times are drastically reduced
  • All data is pushed directly to your servers
  • Syncing reliability is vastly improved
  • A new dashboard showing the current status of syncing, any auth errors, etc.

 

 

Core to Singly's vision of data portability on the web is our authentication/login product, which provides access to 30+ services and will continue to be supported and improved.

Need non-health data like photos, videos, contacts and more? Stay tuned for announcements.

Copyright © 2013 Singly, All rights reserved.
You are a developer contact of Singly.

Our mailing address is:

Singly

North Bulkhead Office

Pier 26, The Embarcadero

San Francisco, CA 94105


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