Re: [projectvrm] Disruption and consumer power

[Katherine Warman Kern < >]

Don, Your bonus link has a point that resonates with my thinking about what 
should be the "rule that balances what technology can do with what it should 
do"

> “The concern outweighed the value of the data,” he told me, as we sat 
> drinking coffees on an outside bench in front of the now-cleared window 
> where the Euclid sticker used to be stuck. Jaber said Philz wasn’t actually 
> using the data to make decisions — beyond that Berkeley loitering-enabling 
> one — and that it had simply continued to collect the data because it was 
> there and it was free, thanks to the pilot program. And this is what 
> companies (and all of us really) so often do: we collect data because we 
> can, whether we really need it or not.

When it is free - both in terms of money and time spent - people or 
businesses do it whether it has any value or not.  

When a business model is aware of the cost to value relationship (and I mean 
both money and the time spent to master and then use something), fewer 
technologies will be launched "just because you can" and more will be 
launched that are worthy the consumers' time to learn how to take advantage 
of.

The other point made in this article regarding the impact of technology 
eliminating jobs is in the next paragraph:

> Jaber says he thinks the data would be more useful for an apparel retailer 
> that changes the display in its storefront frequently; that retailer would 
> want to know which mannequin outfits lure the passers-by in and which 
> don’t. 

Retailers should ask their sales people which mannequin outfits lure more 
customers and a lot of other questions that then motivate the sales person to 
actually pay attention to what customers are doing and have a conversation 
with them.  

The Venture guys who control what technology does and doesn't set out to do 
(with no knowledge of a market) often look at on the surface, looking for 
ways data could be collected more efficiently, with little appreciation for 
where the real value lies.  

For example, in the media and marketing world, venture guys looked at the 
surface and decided that measuring advertising performance is the benefit of 
digital media. But they didn't realize that advertising's performance had 
been declining precipitously since television choices increased exponentially 
with cable television. 

Katherine Warman Kern
@comradity

> On Jun 21, 2014, at 2:22 PM, Don Marti 
> <
 >
>  wrote:
> 
> begin Mary Hodder quotation of Fri, Jun 20, 2014 at 03:02:51PM -0700:
> 
>> Again.. it's a balance. We can still love our technology.. but critically 
>> assess what is going on and deal with it accordingly.
> 
> We worry about technology imbalance the most.
> 
> Spammers used to have better technology than
> end users (Canter and Siegel used a Perl script...
> http://www.wired.com/2010/04/0412canter-siegel-usenet-spam/
> ).  People worried about spam.  Then companies
> chose sides and it all settled down to a
> electricity-wasting spam vs. antispam background
> struggl
> 
> Today, surveillance marketing is ahead technically.
> The worst part of the problem is that the business
> has not yet consolidated, and everyone thinks that
> his or her company can get a piece of it. 
> 
> (Will be interesting to watch IT vendors switch
> sides as their Big Data Rush claims fail to pan out.
> If you think today's FUD is bad, get ready for ads
> that appeal to the hard-wired UNSEEN ENEMY IS WATCHING
> YOU circuit in our monkey brains...)
> 
> Bonus link:
>  Why A San Francisco Coffee Shop Stopped Tracking
>  Customers' Phones
>  
> http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/06/20/why-a-san-francisco-coffee-shop-stopped-tracking-customers-phones/
> 
>  (there is also a Kashmir Hill RSS feed...
>  http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/feed/
>  )
> 
> -- 
> Don Marti                    
> http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
> 
 
>