Doc,
Answering your questions:
1.
We rebranded from SocialSafe to digi.me in Nov 14; however, fully completing the transition in the software is a task and
a half because of certificates and more, so for a while you’ll see SocialSafe in places and not digi.me. Slowly over the year everything will fully transition to digi.me.
a.
(Why did we change? – because we are broadening your library beyond Social. Also “safe” which was meant to mean “secure
& private”, was sometimes misinterpreted as a “big thing in the corner you lock away your data in and never look at again” which is the reverse of what we are aiming for which is use and reuse of your data controlled by you. We think digi.me, apart from being
short and pithy, together with our tag line “It’s your life”, more fully reflects what we are doing.)
2.
Re the mobile app this is being released later this month. It has been ready for a while, but we’ve delayed release to firstly
make sure the private cloud aspect works fully (Dropbox initially) and to ensure its robust. You’d be amazed at the different sizes and complexities of data that our users have. Simple things like 75K Facebook messages between a husband and wife, or users
with over 750K Facebook messages. (By the way the only way we know this is because people tell us, or report it when they have an issue – we NEVER see anyone’s data – EVER.)
a.
The mobile will be iOS all screen sizes. It is “read only” initially, meaning you have to created your library on Mac or
PC first and synced with personal cloud. Mobile onboarding as we call it, i.e. ability to create and sync directly from mobile, will be phased in over next 6 months.
b.
If you look at the digi.me YouTube channel, the last three videos posted give you a peak at the mobile version
3.
The prime example in the video gives an example of sharing your data to get offers – that is correct, and was chosen as it
is usually the first thought of prospective partners we talk to; however, it is FAR from the only example we use. Firstly we use the phrase re sharing (and please see my post last week about definition of Privacy including sharing) that it is for “service,
convenience or reward” – not just for money or offers (reward). We make no restriction whatsoever on what people will share (via Permission Access) their data for. Maybe some of these examples that we are actively working on for partners right now will help
illustrate that:
a.
As I mentioned in my reply to T. Rob, we are working on getting step data and Transport for London data for a particular
application we are working with a health provider in London on – over 2,000 people in London die each year because they do not walk enough! The Health app will determine what your ideal no. of steps should be and will then, for example, suggest you get off
at Monument tube rather than Bank tube station so that you achieve your extra steps
b.
A major FMCG company is looking at apps to deepen engagement with their brands. E.g. for a shampoo product they could have
a “hair app” that asks for pictures of yourself. Then by analysis they could determine, say, that you have long blond curly hair and hence need to use Variant X of their shampoo and then provide other hair care tips for you.
i. (Note: many examples never actually end up removing your data from
your device, so provide fully tailored functionality and engagement whilst keeping your data 100% private. This is a real benefit when you own and control your own data.)
c.
Moving to the IoT, we are working with a major car manufacturer to look at how car data can come back to you the individual
to own and control and how that data, melded with other data from digi.me, can then be used to provide, via an app on your device, a better car and travel experience.
d.
We are working with a major space program to use digi.me as the conduit for people to create their digital memories which
will be carried to the moon as a part of a Humanity time capsule.
i. (I am a Virgin Galactic future astronaut, an investor in space
through Astrobotic, the leading Google X Prize contender, and my previous military comms business worked as the systems architect for the President’s Mars mission when that was going in early 2000s.)
VRM: Interestingly we have no “intent casting” partners today – we assumed they would come from the Respect
network community initially. However, we would totally support such a service from any of multiple providers and envisage businesses providing the service and using your data from digi.me to help with that service. Your other examples are all valid uses
too – innovation will be legion I predict once people realise that the opportunity exists to provide new services on the back of any combination of your data – IF their value proposition convinces you the individual to Permission Access your data of course.
4.
I won’t be attending at IIW on current plans. As you know we are based in the UK and whilst 25% of our users are US based
we have been concentrating on European partners to date. (We did have major US partner last year but they sacked their CEO and the team dealing with the product area we were working with so that ended up going nowhere – guessing games can start as to who
that very big company was!). I will be coming to US with members of our team for the Collide conference in Las Vegas that we are exhibiting at on 5th/6th May and if anyone is interested in meeting up we are likely to be around other
US venues later that same week and possibly the week before. (We do plan a US office later this year too.)
a.
If there was a benefit to the community then I’d be happy to attend an IIW session virtually via Skype/similar, though I
suspect you’ve got a lot on the agenda already.
I hope the above answers your questions, but happy to provide further clarification or answer any further questions/thoughts.
Cheers, Jules
From: Doc Searls [mailto:
]
Sent: 14 March 2015 02:54
To: Julian Ranger
Cc: ProjectVRM list; T.Rob
Subject: Re: [projectvrm] Can I tell you a story ....
Julian,
Thanks for sharing so much with us here, and answering so many questions. Here are a few more.
1) I’ve had SocialSafe since we met in London last summer, and just downloaded the latest update at
digi.me I’m now at v7.0.3. It’s still called SocialSafe. Is this correct? I wonder because at the digi.me site, it says “formerly SocialSafe.”
2) The video suggests that there is a mobile app. (John, your unseen counterpart, seems to have an iPad there, but I might be seeing it wrong.) I don’t see
Digi.me in the app stores, so I’m wondering if there is a mobile app, or if you plan to have one. Or if I’m just missing something obvious (which happens all the time).
3) One of the things I gather from the video is that the main purpose for sharing personal data with companies is to get offers from them. I get the appeal of that, but — speaking personally — I am interested in other things. Here are three:
a) A conduit for working relationships with companies, especially when I need service.
b) The ability to intentcast to multiple companies, for example to Etsy, eBay and Amazon.
c) The ability to make logical connections between companies, in an IFTTT way, or perhaps to bring in IFTTT “recipes” for logical connections between the APIs of companies in my digi.me cloud.
On Mar 13, 2015, at 7:52 PM, Julian Ranger <
">
> wrote:
Thank you for your kind words – all offers of marriage gratefully considered (but unfortunately my wife has final say!). More seriously we will of course work
with anyone who wants to further the progress of personal data.
Answering your questions as follows:
Q1: You
mention the ability to choose a cloud storage provider but do not mention that the data is encrypted. After the discussion of how we would not trust any one vendor with all that data, I assume that it is encrypted locally before transmission to the cloud
storage provider, yes?
A1: Yes the data is encrypted.
Q2:
The video mentions Amazon, FitBit and others but the Pricing page lists only "social network accounts." Are the vendor accounts free, counted as social media accounts,
or are they not there yet? Have you considered collaborating (or merging) with FileThis who already fetch tons of utility bills and bank account statements?
A2: As of today we have implemented only social media accounts (which have massive amounts of data I might add) – because they are the most evocative. As we
progress through 2015 and into 2016 we will add the other accounts we mention. For example we are working on getting step data and Transport for London data for a particular application we are working with a health provider in London on – over 2,000 people
in London die each year because they do not walk enough!
Q3:
Is there an open API to develop our own apps against the data? One of the biggest issues with Internet of Things is that proprietary devices interface only with
whatever other devices the vendor thinks have a possibility of strong ROI for the development costs. As cool as Digi.me sounds,
the idea of waiting endlessly for the company to clear off the high priority interfaces and get to the niche integrations is a total turn-off. (For those who haven't realized it yet, the long tail *is* the tail. If your Internet biz doesn't scale
to handle niche cases, it isn't an Internet biz, or if it is it won't be for long.)
A3: You won’t be surprised to know that we are constrained by funding as to what we can do when. Clearly, distribution is key – no one
will want to access data (with user Permission of course!) if there aren’t many users. Cost of acquisition with a direct acquisition model gets expensive quickly, so we have a partnership model as our main user acquisition channel initially. Therefore in
2015 Permission Access is being worked on for our main partners only – those who can strategically get us lots of users (Telcos, FMSCG, banks, insurers – all whilst following our strict Permission Access principles) and who can gives us some money as well.
We expect to have an anyone can access your data API (again with Permission of course) by mid 2016 at the latest. If anyone wants earlier access then just email me and we’ll see what we can do – we’re moving as fast as we can.
Q4: Can I route my email receipts through Digi.me?
For example my bank, department store, sporting goods store, and most online stores will send me an email receipt. These are almost all text so they can be dropped as-is into a DB and become instantly searchable.
A4:Not on the plan for 2015 nor 2016. Others may do this and move the data when we have the general purpose API available in 2016, but
for now we are concentrating on direct access to data via APIs only. (I’d love to buy one of the companies that does a lot of this already, but strategically it’s not the most important think we can do – I think.)
Q5: Is the pricing structure scalable? At some point do you stop counting accounts and just go by bandwidth? Because I hit 20 social
media accounts before I even start counting the vendor accounts and I probably have way more than 20 of those. Thinking of the Long Tail again, I'm not worried that Digi.mewill
capture my Duke Power interactions, it's the appliance repair guy or the tree surgeon I used a couple of years ago that I *really* need help remembering. If Digi.me believes
per-account pricing is the way to go, there's a natural incentive to *not* load up data from occasional vendors, which would by design omit large swathes of useful info, thereby crippling the app to some extent. I'm the CEO of my family and I want
an enterprise license, dammit!
A5: Taking the pricing answer from my email to JP:
“The video doesn’t really explain our charging model, so as you mention the “The Free is the Lie” syndrome I’ll address it. Today we DO charge for the basic software
– at a low $7 a year for basic premium features; however, in time the software functionality of digi.me will
be free. Our main revenue will be from postal charges – when you Permission Access to some element(s) of your data and your digi.me app
”posts” that data to another app/web page/etc then a postal fee is charged by digi.me to
the receiving entity. This postal fee will only be cents/tens of cents each time (or for a regular “subscription”) but will add to $20 or so per user per year (roughly)and when you consider we don’t hold data, process it or have bandwidth then that makes
us profitable without the need to take commission, sell your data or anything else. Our mission is to be dreadfully boring – be your Librarian and Postman and nothing else”
So you won’t in the medium term pay per channel at all – only when you Permission Access to your data, and then you won’t pay, but the receiver will. Yes, we charge now, but that is because until
our Permission Access API is up and running we have to make some money – and we have partners who do get many customers for us by selling our software. For example FNAC in France sell our software as part of a security pack.
I hope that gives you further detail and responds to your questions adequately, but do fire in my thoughts questions, comments.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: T.Rob <
">
>
Date: Fri, Mar 13, 2015 at 1:51 PM
Subject: RE: [projectvrm] Can I tell you a story ....
To: Julian Ranger <
">
>, ProjectVRM list <
">
>
Seriously though, I do have a couple of questions from the video.
· You
mention the ability to choose a cloud storage provider but do not mention that the data is encrypted. After the discussion of how we would not trust any one vendor with all that data, I assume that it is encrypted locally before transmission to the cloud
storage provider, yes?
· The
video mentions Amazon, FitBit and others but the Pricing page lists only "social network accounts." Are the vendor accounts free, counted as social media accounts, or are they not there yet? Have you considered collaborating (or merging) with FileThis who
already fetch tons of utility bills and bank account statements?
· Is
there an open API to develop our own apps against the data? One of the biggest issues with Internet of Things is that proprietary devices interface only with whatever other devices the vendor thinks have a possibility of strong ROI for the development costs.
As cool as Digi.me sounds,
the idea of waiting endlessly for the company to clear off the high priority interfaces and get to the niche integrations is a total turn-off. (For those who haven't realized it yet, the long tail *is* the tail. If your Internet biz doesn't scale
to handle niche cases, it isn't an Internet biz, or if it is it won't be for long.)
· Can
I route my email receipts through Digi.me? For example my bank, department store, sporting
goods store, and most online stores will send me an email receipt. These are almost all text so they can be dropped as-is into a DB and become instantly searchable.
· Is
the pricing structure scalable? At some point do you stop counting accounts and just go by bandwidth? Because I hit 20 social media accounts before I even start counting the vendor accounts and I probably have way more than 20 of those. Thinking of the
Long Tail again, I'm not worried that Digi.mewill capture my Duke Power interactions, it's
the appliance repair guy or the tree surgeon I used a couple of years ago that I *really* need help remembering. If Digi.me believes
per-account pricing is the way to go, there's a natural incentive to *not* load up data from occasional vendors, which would by design omit large swathes of useful info, thereby crippling the app to some extent. I'm the CEO of my family and I want
an enterprise license, dammit! J
I'll go sign up later. Tonight I'm in charge of dinner and, as I posted earlier to Facebook, my soup has that "new crock pot smell." I think I'll have to run to the store for something to grill
real fast.
I have availability! For a good time (with IBM MQ) call:
T.Robert Wyatt, Managing partner
+1 704-443-TROB (8762) Voice/Text
From: Julian
Ranger [mailto:
" target="_blank">
]
Sent: Friday, March 13, 2015 12:34 PM
To: ProjectVRM list
Subject: [projectvrm] Can I tell you a story ....
…. using a pack of cards?
We’re over 270K licences out there now, growing fast, and expect some major partnerships we have in final stages to take us beyond first million this year – moving. The personal cloud and iOS mobile versions mentioned in the video all
get released this month; the PC/Mac versions have been around for a long time and are now at a true V7. Permission Access will be open to select partners this year and to the world from mid-2016.
Comments, questions, thoughts all very welcome.
Founder & Chairman, digi.me (formerly
SocialSafe)
|