June 24 2009 Conference Call

Conference Call Notes

Drafted by Joe Andrieu, June 24, 2009

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#vrm at chat.freenode.net

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Attendees

• Joe Andrieu
• Doc Searls
• Adriana Lukas
• Chris Carfi
• Judi Clark
• Sean Bohan
• Allan Gregory

Notes

Allan Gregory

Doc has a new intern at Berkman. He's going to help Doc out with VRM, helping coordinate. The internship is being paid for by Serdna.

Allan will be helping with some wiki cleaning, syncing up all the different projects, all the different committee members.

Much going on

Lots of things going on right now. For example, while Doc was in the UK, the ctrl-shift folks (who overlap a bit with MyDex). They gave a talk to the Guardian newspaper. A whole room full of people about Emancipay, which was well received.

In the US, journalism is following the RIAA-style insanity, while the Guardian seems to be inclined towards an open source approach.

Doc's been walking through a user experience description for EmanciPay. So, for example, at the Guardian, we'd like users to be able to track readership offline. Do we add a short code to every story (ala VCR Plus) so that users can.

Perhaps like QR codes (Quick Response)? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_codes They are like bar codes, but with a bit more information. So, you might see a QR on a billboard and take a picture of that on an iPhone, then the iPhone opens a specific web page. These should work with any phone that has a camera.

Community Reports

The Mine

Working on UI. There are no deadlines. Coded in Python. Working code at end of August, with a hacking session.

Looking at Opera Unite. Dinner with Simon Phipps recently and he introduced Adriana to the CTO. There seems to be a lot of overlap with what Opera is doing.

[Judi] You still have to coordinate with Opera's servers, which is a bit closed.

Yep. In fact, it's not clear how, for example, cached copies are being used.

Similarities with Google Wave. Except of course that Wave is vaporware.

Also critical HTML5 is moving in this direction, offering a much richer application framework.

At the VRM Workshop, Craig Burton raised questions about the notion that we live in a cookie based world for a very long time. And its time to move to a card selector framework. In the cookie framework, the website is in charge. VRM is now a way to revert the cookie.

SwitchBook

Heads down in development. Currently going to production on UI assets and pushing to super-minimal feature set for a limited alpha release this next month. Currently working on Portable Context as a concept and standard.

The idea of the portable context is that it is a way for users to track what they are doing and share it as appropriate with potential service providers.

ListenLog

We need/are creating a new framework for attributing value. The ListenLog is essentially exposing value by showing users what they've been listening to.

Tom Forensky, the Internet is somewhat counter-inflationary, but it isn't about losing value, it is about moving value around.

People do have loyalty to newspapers. They just may not feel like compensating in the old way. So what's the new way?

Chris Carfi & Retail

Not much more detail on the conversation with Chris Heuer. The net-net is that he'd like to get involved and the main thing Chris said is that if there are places they can splice in with other things going on, let's do it, but not yet into details.

Loyalty Cards

Going gang buster. Simplified version on the iphone in July. Syncing up with Iain. Great example of phone as personal datastore. But how do we hook this up with other types of things. iCards, the Mine, etc. How do we pull from the iPhone into other repositories. This is not quite safe for blogging, so please hold off on promoting this more widely. Chris would like to get through the App Store approval process first, so we don't lose any momentum or buzz that might occur before the product is actually available to end users.

Next West Coast Workshop

Set up a meeting in November, just before IIW? The Sunday/Monday just before?

Let's leave that day before open.

And, if we are going to do an October event in Boston, then perhaps a January or February event in Silicon Valley would create a good rhythm. October Boston, November IIW Silicon Valley, Jan/Feb VRM Silicon Valley.

East Coast Workshop

August? Looks challenging, but October might work. So let's look for a date in October.

Next Meeting

• July 08 2009 Conference Call