Empowerment Thoughts

Certainty of demand

2009-02-03T11:43:00.006Z

In a demand and supply economy it is the interaction of both sides of the market that sets the price. Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' working with self-interest to ensure the market serves for all. He wrote about the self-interest of the individual but over time, non human entities were given the legal status of an individual and it has been the corporation i.e. companies that have taken up the self-interest mantel and almost made it their own.

While I find the notion of demand and supply economy a historical definition, lets keep with it for now. A corporation makes the goods and services for the demand side? Right? No demand equals no sales, no sales = no revenue, no revenue no cash to pay for wages, materials, energy costs etc. of creating the goods. There is risk and corporations have felt it right to minimise the risk and thus started extending their reach to the demand side and supported it with large sums of resources, cash to people. It is a straight forward logic, if we are taking on this risk, it would be better to have the probability of customer demand at 100%, or as close as you can get it.

New industries emerged, broadly called marketing and advertising and all support the goal of establishing demand. This involves the demand side receiving information for the corporation, how that is done is a topic all on its own. Let just say, the corporations are prepared to pay cash (to a level that keeps them profitable) to a value that will mean, what they make will be sold. Over time economies of scale, compound to produce larger volumes, goods tend to commodities and prices drop dramatically. The corporation make more profit so has more resources to spend on the demand side and for some aspects of life it would appear to be a complete take over of demand. It is a completely self fulfilling cycle and a triumph of self-interest.

Looking from the supply side for sure, but what about from the demand side? The demand side has benefited greatly, abundance of goods at commodity prices. That is a massive improvement from a pre-industrialized society. But corporation have gone past demand now. The self-interest model has no stop button. If the speed of turnover of goods can increase then supply can increase further, then more sales will result and we are off on another cycle. The demand side does not live life solely out of one corporation. Individual demand may use many corporation but much of life is still lived out with supply e.g. meeting with friends. But have no doubt that the supply side knows of the massive opportunities to get involved in those activities too. This is not surprising as the the supply side, while a legal individual is made up of human individuals. Each living life and it is no surprise their experiences of real life bring ideas and opportunities to their work. Entrepreneurs even have the vision to live a whole life doing this.

The blurring of demand and supply exists, I'd argue their is only demand. What is more, the certainty of demand is always going to be a holy grail chase for the supply side. Why put so much energy into that chase when with certainty of demand of the demand side is known exactly every second of every day? The demand side is far from networked let alone perfectly networked but the build out to achieve that started years ago, just watch as demand self-interest asserts itself to control the whole economy.

A dividend cheque for consuming

2008-02-14T16:45:00.003Z

I created a t-shirt on www.zazzle.com about 18 months ago and just before Christmas I received a dividend cheque from zazzle.com, why? Because another individual use my base design to include in the purchase of their item. This is the future of shopping, you create products and get paid. Compare the proposition, you get a personalized product at a lower cost than the mass produced commoditized offering already on the shelf. The incentive motive, the more you create, the more personalized your purchase and the more dividends you will receive. Shopping, but not as we know it.

Creation cycles (supply chains retired)

2007-07-30T12:47:00.000+01:00

Demand and supply are the vocabulary of the economics of monetary capitalism. An industrial economic model that is so good (successful) at making stuff a whole industry almost as large has been created to help distribute (sell) the stuff. And that is where the supply chain finished, with a sale, OK some service contract tagged on to monetize a financial service commission.

In the abundance economy, lead by the digitialists, supply chains have not end, (nor beginning) they are all cycles, cycles of information creating new information that turn into the stuff we need. And really need, want, desire, necessities etc. etc.

Creation cycles are the new demand and supply.

Organising demand & VRM

2007-07-17T16:55:00.000+01:00

The supply side of the economy is well organised. Small businesses to the largest corporations have the ability to deploy employees, technology and capital/money to put together their offering in a supply chain. Massive silos of data surround these activities.

All the supply in the world is meaningless without demand. Demand is not well organised today. An individual, yes can have employess working for them, yes has access to technology, yes can have access to capital/money but all not on the scale of a business. Plus the main point is, from an individuals point of view, you would need to create a corporations capability for multiple industries, food, energy, transport etc. Why, life dictates the need for these services and products every day.

There is an industry that wants to solve this multiple service management issue, they call it VRM, Vendor Relationship Management.

Within the VRM framework there will be the need to provide not only this multiple vendor management interface (why would you want a different 'flavour of tool' for every service/product you need to manage?) but also tools that allow individuals to build/find/share information with other individuals i.e. social networks.

Social networks within VRM will look and feel like existing social networks but I don't foresee a world that you belong to a myspace or facebook or flickr sized for all the activities within VRM but you could if you needed to.

This organising of demand is just starting. We can look to the supply side to see what can be done. Demand will become as well organised as the supply side and I don't think it will take centuries to get there.

DIY Privacy

2007-07-17T13:54:00.001+01:00

Accept my terms of service and privacy statement.

In the end of the day, individuals finance all business, so why do we not get a say in these important contract document of exchange?

capitial all becomes flow

2007-06-29T11:36:00.001+01:00

In economics we talk about stocks and flows. No more so in terms of describing capital. Capital in the economic sense of providing the capacity to create goods and services. No more so is capital the life blood than in the worlds financial markets. I have listened to the Chairman of the Federal Reserve in USA talk about 'how efficient' the market is at allocating capital. Meaning, switching cash resources from e.g. energy into healthcare or selling Microsoft stock to invest in a venture capital fund etc. etc.

I am not sure I share is 'efficient' claims. Two fold reseaons. Only a minority of the worlds capital is directly traded on the words financial markets. Secondly, any market which requires a stock of capital has huge efficiencies to be gained. Ideally, we want a market with nil capital stock.

We still need capital, just that the capital will be 100% flow. This is what the financial markets want to achieve in theory but I don't believe they have the information flows or property laws or incentive systems to come anywhere close to realising this. A world of 100% flow of capital requires no financial markets. No need for third parties to make capital allocation choices, usually on aggregate for others, no need to incur a needless transaction cost on moving the capital and no speculative flows.

It's not that these processes won't continue to exist. They will it is just that the individuals directly impacting the flow of capital will be participating. It will be too costly to outsource these activities.

To be thought about: the transistion to 100% flow of capital, how financial markets will evolve and then disappear.

life transactions

2007-06-26T11:09:00.000+01:00

Life transactions, today we talk about monetary transactions. Money has been successful as a currency. A currency allows for an exchange of different commodities, services or even money itself. Acts as a store of wealth and all because society has created/found a way to trust the record keeping associated with money. Such a task that it accounts for twenty odd percent of the market capitalisation of major stock market indexes but even more impressively is bound into every transaction in our recorded economy every second of every day, of every year, year in year out. Such an impressive situation you would find it hard to believe it being so pre its implementation.

Capitalism forces are now ready to expand its ambitions for its currency. Money transactions summaries a much wider set of events. The cost of wrapping those in a monetary transaction are too high. In fact, I read that half the GDP of the world is accounted for by transaction costs. (I have no evidence to support this). There is a transaction framework that has more or less put those costs to zero. The framework, the Internet.

The cost of authoring or publishing information is near zero. For those transaction formed online then we have a new currency able to capture all events that are meaningful in the creation of a monetary transaction. This currency exist today and as time passes more and more of all monetary transaction processes are being authored to the Web. It is just a matter of time before society migrates to this new currency framework.

Society will be comfortable in it the way, we are with money and banking services today. However, life transaction will improve the incentive systems of capitalism. In monetary transaction the legal frame work governing the transaction is the mechanism to create trust. However, this does not lead to a transaction doing the right thing or allocationg resources best, most efficiently or even fairly. Life transaction authored online will have incentives to rewards transactors that deliver the outcomes sought be each party. Life transaction will be complete when what needs to be done is done. This does not need to be the case with a monetary transaction, this disconnect being money Achilles heel.

Capitalism will always need a currency, that name and purpose will change, as society evolves. Timing these evolutions is never easy but from what I see happening in the world, a new currency is in the making.

Creation chains (demand and supply retire)

2007-06-01T21:19:00.000+01:00

1991-1995 I studied economics at The University of Aberdeen. If you had said to me then, that in little over 10 years years time, we would start to question and then retire demand and supply curves from the teaching of economics, I probably won't have believed you.

It is clear that this is what the next stage of capitalism will demand. The Internet has given capitalism a new currency to expand its reach with, information. This bottoms up approach to capitalism focuses on creating an economy that focuses on sustaining life. The mechanism it will choose to 'allocate' resources will be creation chains. JIT time applied to the future. Monetary capitalism biased itself towards supply chains, where JIT of that supply chain being the holy grail.

Economies of scale, was a friend of supply chains. In creation chains they will increase costs.

The division of labour led to specialisation, but due to primitive communications those conversation became, in effect talking to yourself. Collaboration will allow all to communicate with all required in creation chains.

Commodity market, created monetary markets, that created derivatives of both to try and model the real word is saw. The Internet sees all that happen when people author to the internet. Money has a competition, its the incumbent but sure to be replaces in time.

The way the economy will be

2007-04-05T18:53:00.000+01:00

example.

I want to purchase a car powered by 'black light power'.

This car does not exist today so I will need to fund the entire project. Here is how I will do it.

1. I use the Internet to tell the story about the car I want to drive, I input all my personal information and express my design of the car as compete as best I can ( luckily for me get tools are provided online, almost nil time and its fun and easy). I am 100% certain I will buy the car in 24 months time and use a marketplace to guarantee the purchase price of $80,000.

Two, challenges, I can not build the car, $80,000 is not enough to create the new car.

I go to the Internet again. Here, I find a pool of knowledge workers capable of creating the car, the marketplace tells me that the knowledge worker cost to create the car is $12,000,000.

I can not afford that but luckily, the word has got out on the de-centralised social network and 200 other people have join my 'black light power' car. And 19 others have committed $80,000. The cash is 100% committed now, now we have $1,600,000 (80k * 20) committed to creating the car.

A new attention economy outlook hedge fund has been analysing the Internet marketplaces. It notes that 201 * $80k $16,080,000 of potential income for the market (they note only 10% of that income is guaranteed) but on the upside they reckon more than 200 people in the world will want to purchase a personalised 'black light powered' car.

So, they go to the marketplace and pledge, $10,400,000 to the group of knowledge workers. The projects contracts are signed and to the total of $12m (10.4m investment + customer guaranteed $1.6m)

I and my fellow customers, guaranteed buyers, plus those not guaranteed plus new people that keep hearing about the project provide continues feedback, the same goes for the knowledge workers. Technical and design milestones are hit and the car is delivered in 24 months.

Return on investment for Hedge Fund. I was thinking you will pay them? Customers, knowledge workers, further users of the 'knowledge'.

OK, they invested $10.4m Where and how do they get a return?

Lets assume it is from the knowledge workers as they receive the cash for customer sales, in the context of they will need paid from the investors cash pre the sale of the first car from those not committed to pay up front.
So, in effect the non-committed future customer buying cars provide the new cash flows. Lets assume some sales,

200 expressed interest, 20 pre paid up front ( so they should get a return in the same way as the investors, thus reducing the cost of their product, this a positive incentive to pre pay, this does not exist in today's economy.)

We have 190 customer that see the completed car and want to purchase @ $80,000 Total sales $15,200,000.

The return for the investor (there percentage of income) 87% of $15.2 = $13.2m Profit ($13.2-10.4) $2.8m 27% return over 24 months plus the upside.

Lets assume 2000 new orders come in return 87% of $150.2 = £130m Profit ($130-10.4) 120m 1152%

So, the maths seem to stack up. I would envision that compared to building a car today, in the future the development cost per car will become less as we get more and more personalization coming into the market. Thus smaller absolute number of customers pooling together will be required to stimulate demand for new products.

Life Capitalism - Future looking supply chains

2007-04-03T19:25:00.001+01:00

Profits = Personalization

Businesses and eventually all businesses will be able to deliver products in speeds reaching real time. However, this does not guarantee profits, probably quiet the opposite. The new incentive will be to eliminate or manage this risk. Future looking supply chains will be the tool. Ironically, the success of this economy will not be gained by the supply chain. It will be from its complementary partner in Monetary Capitalism, the Demand Chain. I never thought thinking of two chains was particularly useful and if we continue to think in those terms a lack of profits will flow your way. Demand, what is demand? An individuals, groups of individuals that want to do or consume some thing right now in the world or plan to do that in some point in the future, a second from now to days, weeks or even years ahead.

This demand sets up future looking supply chains, demand will be used as the currency to use Personalization In Time (PIT) tools that maximise those businesses servicing demand. The better you do this the higher the profits and the lower the risk of manufacturing, whether that be information, products, services or thoughts.

supplychaintimetravel3
Originally uploaded by ecotorch.

Approaching High Noon for Monetary Capitalism Supply chains JIT

2007-04-03T18:20:00.001+01:00

I introduced this diagram when looking at the attributes of Personalization and TIME in supply chains. We started a 9pm on the clock, with no supply chain, we consumed what we required in real time. Now we are at 12 noon, the successful conclusion of Monetary Capitalism. I am confident we are there, some take the view that it still has some way to go but I don't share this view, in fact, I feel the opposite, the end was reached a while a go (many years) and we are now bumping along the top.

In terms of supply chain management the economic model of the industrialisation era has brought us COMMODITY supply chains that are approaching real time. Real time in the sense that Just In Time techniques (JIT) have squeezed the natural realities of material good and service manufacture to their limit. Even if businesses reach this point this does not guarantee success or profits. It is probably more likely that a business reaching this point will be making losses, unless it has guessed what to make. As this is all happening really fast, so fast that years of profitable history and a balance sheet cash rich can be broken. This will become too risky for a business. They will seek a new model of stability. Future looking supply chains will be the path to pursue.

supplychaintimetravel2
Originally uploaded by ecotorch.

Common Sense - the wisdom of the crowd

2007-03-21T22:38:00.000Z

See my posting here.

Supply chain time travel PART 1

2007-01-31T17:19:00.000Z

In the next few postings I am going to discuss the topic I call, Supply Chain Time Travel. I'll talk through the evolutionary path I see from the Industrial Revolution to the present day ( approaching 12 on the clock metaphor) and then a look ahead to 3 O'Clock. Next posting, the Industrial Evolution.

Social networks beats Search (more)

2007-01-31T12:32:00.000Z

A saying I use a lot these days. I have written about this before on one of my blogs but I had not thought deeper about why this would be the case. I think I have an answer.

I made the point last time that by using the term, 'social network' I was not referring exclusively to web2.0 websites, they are still at a primitive stage of evolution. I mean the personal interactions with individuals, whether be in person, land line or online call, email etc. It is that social network that find s the best information. People, people in the network are processing information that I do not have. People have great processing abilities and we can input impressive amounts of data from our senses, sight dominating information flow to the brain but all the other senses contribute. A machine + a bit of software code, is not on this level, well not yet. But even when they are it will be the priorities set by our social network interactions that biases the rules by which we want to receive information on. Our Senses give the social network the lead over key word search processing power.

Profit on the march

2007-01-26T14:43:00.000Z

Today's use of the word profit has a definition that has become too narrow; money left after sales income minus expenditures. This is an extremely narrow definition. In Volition Science the word 'profit' is defined a lot broader, profit includes intellectual capital creation. This is a much more natural definition of the word.

Society is quite happy for a monetary value to be placed on commercial activities, mainly with a material object is at stake, e.g. a car to a human in a recruitment business. The one area where an Intangible services is making high monetary profits is online with targeted ad's. In effect the companies serving up these links are selling our attention data. Conclusion, the current world is expanding the meaning of profit, the first little steps and as the volume of attention data expands then that in itself will be where this expand profit definition will take hold. What will be the new currency after money? Influence?, it will be an intangible but as measurable as cash is today but the big difference being the biggest profits will be had in services derived from intellectual capital, the thoughts in your head minus the thoughts is another persons head. Step by step this will become the norm.

Profits natural definition and meaning is to value life, not physical token of exchange we call money, cash, cheques, digital cash etc.

Volition Science An introduction

2007-01-23T13:09:00.000Z

Across on my personal blog, I wrote a posting on Volition . The book in question, Sic Itur Ad Astra by Galambos, Andrew J. I am now a few chapters in and have read more pages out of sequence. There is a lot to blog on and given the 'Power of the Individual' is key to volition science I have decided the natural home for my thoughts on Volition Science will be this blog.

What Andrew Galambos does in the first few chapters (lessons, the book is based on his lectures) is give precise definitions of words. You may agree or disagree with those but given what they are it allows for a robust intellectual framework. That framework, can create a 'natural society'. I'll post on topics along the way to that conclusion.

But to conclude for now, I found it interesting reading the amazon.com book review comments, 5 stars all the way.

Freedom

2007-01-21T14:54:00.001Z

Freedom
Originally uploaded by ecotorch.

life capitalism

2007-01-06T19:38:00.000Z

I am not sure whey I have not linked these words together before, life capitalism. Monetary capitalism has brought us thus far, it has been successful but reaching its limit of success. Life Capitalism has the intellectual framework to drive society forward, much further forward and under the rules of attention that we are just starting to understand.

More on this to come.

spinning too fast for money

2007-01-04T13:52:00.000Z

P.Q = M.V

Brings me back to my days at University and monetary economics lectures. I listened to Michael Goldhaber at BayChi on the Emerging Attention Economy in July 2006 and one of his slides showed how in an attention economy, the number of transaction that happen are exponentially greater in volume than those in the current monetary/market based economy. I have been thinking about that slide and that lead me to recall the above equation. If you want some back ground on it, read the wikipedia entry.

are The half I was thinking about was the M.V and in particular the V. The velocity at which the speed of money needs to move. M is the amount of money in circulation. Then for economic progress to be made, lets simply say, that requires the number to get larger and increase over time. The point, I want to focus on. In today's economy, the framework has become too successful, we have the ability to make all the stuff (material) we need, in many cases, we are creating excess amounts. This means the V variable in the equation takes most, if not all the responsibility to contribute to 'making progress'. What happens? V spins, faster and faster and given the phyical nature of the cash, even digital cash this is creating an artificial sped up pace for economic life. We still are reving up the V, it seems to be still responding but the externalities are evident for all to see, from personal health to environmental imbalance.

Is there a way out? Yes, let assume we replace M with A. We replace Money with Attention. Attention is much lighter than cash (even digital cash). It is happy to spin quick, it can even spin at levels unimaginable to M. Given attention is human focused, the higher the rate of attention speed the better the social and I would speculate the wider environmental harmony will be put in place.

The intellectual equations are the easy part. However, I see plenty of evidence society is creating the necessary moves to allow A, Attention to replace money.

The economy contenders match up

2006-09-20T14:15:00.000+01:00

economytype
Originally uploaded by ecotorch.

One clear winner

social network beats search every time?

2006-09-12T15:47:00.000+01:00

If there were only a choice between using my social network or a search engine to find a bit of information, for me the social network wins every time.

We are just at the very beginning of the creation of social networks online but combined with off line networks, whether it be looking for somewhere to stay or the right venture capitalist, social networks have proved the best results for me.

Of course the reality is that the social network and search and deeply intermixed and one without the other would be see a world with poorer information.

Watch out for impressive new social networking services, they are going to continue to be everywhere.

collaboration is the new competition

2006-09-12T13:05:00.000+01:00

How many times have we heard economist to policitians espoucing that competition is the key influencer in keeping markets efficient and staving off monopoly tendencies. The classic story being how if a market is producing excess profits then that will encourage new market entrants in to share in those profit but the net effect is that prices lower and thus all end consumers benefit.

That is the economics of the market driven economy, the economics of the 'attention' economy will see collaboration as the new competition mantra by the attionomists and policitians. How will that story go?

An individual demands a new service. The current flow of service has never been asked for that service before, those with the skills and talents contribute to that new service by offering up their time. The service is delivered. Other individuals are inspired by the new service and add their demand. The colloborators devote more of their time to this new service. However, demand keep coming and it's not a mass flow for homogeneous service, these are individual, personalized service demands, new iterations or even new evolutions of the original. The existing collaborators can not serve all the demand, attention pricing does not increase because new collaborators enter to serve the demand, (time will have allowed for retraining of skills and automation of key limiting factors now in the new service creation) and all individuals receive the service they require.

the average paradox

2006-09-05T16:01:00.000+01:00

The clothes manufacturers and retailers produce piles of the same products. Given this mass homogeneous economy I do find it interesting to observe that on any given day the individual choices produce no to same outfit next to one another on the streets. I call this the average paradox.

an economy content to deliver AVERAGE

2006-08-25T20:58:00.000+01:00

The current economy is optimized to deliver 'average'. Mass economies of scale being the underlying economic rational, the pile them high, sell them low mantra. The economies of stock (think Just in Time, end consumer personalization), being the challenger.

I had an interesting conversation the other week that lead me to conclude there was another force at work too that was driving us towards 'average'. Scarcity is the constraining resource that the science of economics was built on. And while information, in my mind is limitless, the current economy sets out to minimize the availability of information, the logic being the less information there is, the more perceived scarcity is created and the end result is the ability to drive up prices. The case can be made that we now live in a world with unlimited resources, (we produce too many cars to clothing) and the current role of the corporate suppliers is to create the illusions of scarcity, while mass producing average, which they call maximizing profits.

That is the old game for the economy. We are now seeing the re-purposing of the economy to focus on LIFE. Life is unique, we are all unique. This economy is being grown from the grass roots up and is here and now if you want to participate.

Individuals ready for identity empowerment

2006-07-31T20:51:00.000+01:00

A call to all identity visionaries, entrepreneurs and existing providers, stop all your technical to technical - business to business conversations and focus all that energy and talent on giving the individual the power to create their own identity. Let the individual users create the market, we will move faster, wider and thus create the environment for an explosion of innovation in this new market place.

Have the courage to take this path. Show leadership.

The empowerment industry

2006-07-30T23:23:00.000+01:00

A whole new industry is going to form around empowering the individual. These businesses will provide indentity services, attention services, tools etc. The common nature of all will be that their goal will be to listen to the individual and to deliver the empowerment they need. It is highly unlikely that these businesses will be able to stride both empowering the individual and provide services to another business entity.

It is not because there services won't touch other businesses, they will do, many, maybe many more than exist today but that interaction will come from the empowered individual selecting to engage with a business to serve their demands.

Empower the individual

2006-07-30T22:29:00.000+01:00

I have put together this set of picture to illustrate my view on what empowering the individual is about.

h

Center of the universe = The individual

2006-07-26T21:00:00.000+01:00

That is the individual, living, breathing and real.

Not, a windows operating system.
Not, an attention operating system.
Not, an identity management operating system.

Us as individuals will tell what mix of the above and other services and tools we require. This will give the suppliers of such services the empowerment to do what they have to do deliver the demand.

I don't believe this world hardly even exists today. As for tomorrow? It will be the norm.

Pinko marketing = telling the truth

2006-07-26T19:25:00.000+01:00

Tara Hunt gave a thoughtful presentation at the Attention Trust last night. What is PinkoMarketing? To me it is all about telling the truth. Tara sets out 5 guiding rules/principles guiding this new era of marketing:

1. Listening, listen to your customers, no out bound messages required whether they be advertisements on television, online or email etc.

2. Be community advocates, help your customers by listening to their feedback by participating with them

3. 100% authenticity, live with the highest of ethics

4. Think small, customers in the end of the day are individuals

5. Open source principles, empowering of individuals, no silos of data, no wall gardens to restict information flowing to the customer.

Tara is giving inspiring leadership as we enter this new era of honest information.

P to T to B, NOT TtoT + BtoB Identity empowerment

2006-07-19T22:37:00.000+01:00

I have been soaking in all the information I can on where the world is with IDENTITY management. I am greatly encouraged that there is lots going on and it only seems a matter of time before empowered individuals have control over their identity online and on land.

Encouraged that there is a lot of individuals passionate about making this service real and the amount of technical brainpower being applied is vast. I may be calling this wrong based upon my limited involvement in meetings on the subject but I feel all the technical chat is taking our eye of the individual. As the technical chats then evolved to business-to-business chats, e.g. OK, we agree this ABC protocol, then your business and my business will adhere to that standard and then that will open up value to the end user.

I agree such chats are necessary in creating a new service but I feel this strategy is too disconnected from the end user, or individuals that are seeking to manage their identity for themselves.

Here is what I would like to see more of: Individuals are the starting point. We are demand the convenience and the promise of more personalised services and control our identities is a path we want to pursue to get to that value. The demand is here and now but what are we doing with it today? Nothing? We have to wait for until all the TtoT (technical to technical) stuff has been worked out and then for the businesses to act upon those changes. We are dis-empowering individuals from getting directly involved. I feel we could have a much stronger market adoption time line if we get individuals more involved today.

Here is a suggestion: The browsers all offer to remember our identity e.g. usernames and passwords. Why can we not release an identity service that is controlled by the individuals not the browser company today? The service would provide the 'glue' that would automate my log in to all the website I use today. OK, that's the win, no release of personalised information to the website to invite a personalized service as the standard are not complete at that level.

So, in connection with the individual use of the service we can aggregate the user power for website of share interest e.g. at flickr.com and that will show them that XX thousands of people are expressing demand. This will force change at the speed of the individual i.e. true demand and not of those of the technical standards or business deals. This expression of demand is missing for the current market I feel. If I am wrong please send me link to the sites that provide me with this expression of my empowerment.

Expectations & future mind warfare

2006-07-17T04:42:00.000+01:00

How do we decide what we are going to do in the next second, minute, hour, day, tomorrow, weekend, next week, year in year out until the next second does not appear?

I think it will take the whole lifetime of this blog to answer but I want to focus on the role Advertising plays in the context of the question above.

My economics studies taught me there were two type of advertising, 1. Provide product/service information to the market, 2. Provides information to persuade demand to choose between products/services. If I recall rightly, the hypothesis is that the second adds no economics value to the wider economy, infect it could be argued it will reduce the size of the overall economy as scarce resources are allocated to create no.2 type advertising, labor, capital, natural resources and time.

By way of a sweeping generalization most income from Internet businesses is in the form of ad's. Well, those are the revenues I am going to focus on. Ad sense, introduced by google, on one hand can be seen as the savour of the Internet economy, a way has been found to make an internet business sustainable, more than that it is a corner stone of an investment portfolio with its Fortune 500 status. Question, is ad sense and the others, yahoo, msn, myspace etc. offering type 1 or type 2 advertising?

It's type 1. Millions upon millions of clicks on ads up to billions of dollars of revenue therefore, it must have provided the individuals with information that they were looking for.

It's type 2. These product/services are already 'real' and are competing for the right to be consumed. In short, they are adding to the cost of other individuals products and diverting scarce resources away from the 'fathering of mankind'.

Both right?

I feel the answer lies in the hands in each and every individual. Do you set out with the goal of building an experience you have aleady envisioned or are you at the mercy of others to influence the future decisions forming in your mind? If you can be persuaded to change via ads is that alright? Even if you know what you are seeking to create, ads can still provide information that will help you create the unique experience you would not be able to create on your own.

Individual empowerment and control suggests and I am of the opinion that type 2 advertising will soon disappear from economic models. What does this mean for ad based businesses? They will go out of business right? Could do, but the smart ones will realize they are in the individual empowering business and the ad income was a stepping stone route they chose to take along the way. The years ahead will tell if that evolution can be made or will a new start ups, pure to the individual empowerment vision arrive and take over?

Individuals will decide.

Attention

2006-05-02T20:52:00.000+01:00

I was initially surprised to read this blog posting at the Attention Trust about a member re assessing their commitment to the concept of Attention. However, after some thought I understood their issues and I believe two factor will help the advancement of the attention cause.

1. More debate on the intellectual concept of attention.

2. More practical relevance to every day lifestyles and to business.

I'll expand on point 2. in the context of my start up www.healthXY.com . Lets assume we have launched our service and are empowering baby boomers to live their chosen lifestyle and to minimizing their risk of developing chronic heart disease. It's working great for the boomer and they hear of another new start up that is providing a cancer prevention service. From the baby boomers point of view they have invested a lot of time to capture their lifestyle data and bio profile that is used to personalize the delivery of information that supports their chronic heart disease prevention services. If we did not adhere to the concepts of Attention: the data belonging to the individual, they probably would not sign up to the cancer prevention service. Why? This is obviously not an optimal status for the baby boomer and that is a lost opportunity for the start up. Maybe even to the whole of society as the start up fails due to lack of demand due to the structural silo isolation of the data held at our service. This is not the world we want to create, therefore, our service will enable the baby boomer to export the data they want and import it into the cancer prevention service. Both businesses should also enable the baby boomer to combine the logic of our software and User Interface to create a seamless and easy to use service and experience for the baby boomer.

I believe we need to build a whole portfolio of practical uses for the individual and business. www.root.net focuses on the mortgage market and provides an exchange of all attention data.

More examples will follow.

The Individual

2006-05-02T20:41:00.000+01:00

Identity
+
Attention

=

Empowerment

Identity: Read Kaliya Hamlin's, Identity Woman blog to find out more about her and other efforts to empower your identity online.

Attention: It your attention, own it and empower yourself with the help of the Attention Trust or Interra Project.

D.I.Y. Search II

2005-11-24T17:10:00.000Z

As predicted in the first D.I.Y. Search posting the new services keep coming in this area, the latest being Yahoo! Shoposphere. This service focuses on Yahoo! Shopping content only but how does it compare to Kaboodle.com, wists.com, Clipmarks.com etc. ?

Setup: No need for the addition to the links or the installation of a new toolbar. A positive but that is because they only offer the service over their own content which is a major drawback in the medium and long term.

Clipmarks is the 'heaviest' toolbar to install with Kaboodle and wist using the familiar del.icio.us link URL option.

Collecting content: Shoposphere provide a + to lists at each product. Yahoo! Automatically captures all product data.

The other service provide much more choice here with Clipmarks boarder highlighting being a nice feature.

Adding your comments and ratings: All services provide the ability to add comments and most allow the addition of a star rating. Kaboodle make this easy to do in my opinion.

Comparison Shopping: Shoposphere impresses here with the selection and visualization of products and prices. The list of retailer links in order of price being another convenient feature.

The other service lack substance but I expect to see a lot of innovation in this area.

Social Community and sharing: Shoposphere does not do a great job here. Yahoo! are trying to link into their existing community/people profile/personal home pages but for those of us that choose to host our webpages else where this is a pain.

RSS and feeds: Keep tracking of your list or list from the community with a simple click to your MyYahoo! account. Again, it would be good to see a one click button posting to independent services.

Wists.com community is particularly well presented with the 'show tags' feature bringing big value to shoppers searching niche products.

In the next posting on D.I.Y. search, what can we expect to see from these services and other startups in the near future?

Pre thought search engine

2005-11-10T11:03:00.000Z

I read about PreviewSeek on techcrunch and they suggested Previewseek help support searchers to apply the right context to their search words. On my review of the service this proved to be limited but having the wiki dictionary link does add pre search education to users.

The most impressive pre search help I have come across has been from our friends at Google. Google labs have the concept of sets and a word predictor e.g. for use on froogle. Become.com also use this technique. Sets are a way for a searcher to express the thoughts in their head when they do not have an exact search word to look for. This is to help identify context I feel and this context can be used to provide better search results.

There is a lot more to value to be provided in the area of pre-search. I predict that the level of service creation in pre search will equal the amount of innovation that has and will continue to be invested in the technology when you press the search button.

I'll highlight what we can expect to see in pre search in a future blog.

Consumer Control with Service Flow

2005-11-10T11:00:00.000Z

That is what we require from a consumer focused search engine. It should allow us to enter in a medium or format of our choice the search variables i.e. key words, thoughts, images etc. Providing education/support to help build the ideal search profile. The results should be presented in a medium/format that we have chosen along with a set of tools again that we have chosen to allow us to make trade-offs or decisions depending on the task we have set out to achieve. These should hold over time, that is be updated with fresh data and comparison to the original results highlighted, again if we so choose.

In future postings I will highlighting a range of search engines that are delivering on parts of the search engine profiled above.

Consumer D.I.Y. search

2005-11-08T13:01:00.000Z

We have great entrepreneurs and teams building great search services for us consumers. Making life just that little bit more convenient online. Some of us, hopefully all with time will see the logic of searching by focusing on education pre, during and after a search experience.

Kaboodle.com are equipping us consumers with an online service that enables us to stitch together our own comparison shopping experience. You use their service in harmony with your choice of search engine(s). However, once you have found information you want to remember or to compare against other products they allow you to save it to your own webpage. This allows us consumers to compare information independent of the source website. This is a big deal. As us consumers know for certain their is no bias in presenting this information as we have total control over what is included.

The power of this service takes legs when put in a social community context. Post your searches to the community and benefit from using searches from like minded souls from the community who have made posts to explore new search areas. Key to this is the visualization of trust of community members.

There is going to be a massive amount of innovation in this space I feel. Pre web 2.o days I prototyped a toolbar at www.ecotorch.com to allow consumers to set up shopping templates and then to gather information from any website and then independent of any website the consumer can educate, compare or visualize the search results to assist them make informed decisions. I turned this idea into the concept of a ConsumerPlayer.

Education + Search

2005-11-08T07:58:00.000Z

Building on the theme of pre-thought by the consumer pre-search. When shopping online this need becomes clear and so much so that this search engine Become.com splits their search service in two with research and shopping search buttons.

This just fits in naturally with the shopping experience. We all set out to find the best product or service to meet our needs or wants. But what product features are available and what are the pros and cons of these? By product feature I mean any attribute that either you or the manufacturer or retailer has choose to provide information on. In effect this is the consumer self educating themselves and become.com are making it more convenient to undertake this task. This convenience extending to highlighting products that meet your shopping criteria.

The key consumer issue with this service is the independence of the links made between the research and products. Is the research biased by paying retailers or manufacturers to plug good reviews of their products? Become.com make it clear this is not the case and that their priority is to the consumer.

General Search

2005-11-07T19:57:00.000Z

General Search
Google, Yahoo!, MSNsearch,

These services try their best to capture the whole universe of information. With every passing moment this becomes an ever increasing challenge. They provide a great service all in all.

What I feel is missing from the search engine equation are the steps taken by a searcher before typing in a keyword(s). That is to say the human typing in the keyword(s) own education, logic, thoughts and intellect pre-typing in the key search words has an equally important part to play. No matter how high powered the technology hardware, software and brains that put the search service online. Seconds of pre-thought can cut down search time.

I often used to find myself typing a generic keyword and then if the results were too diverse I would then add another pretty generic word etc. However, what I evolved to learn was to think about how I perceived the information I was searching for would look like. For example, if I was searching for a scientific medical report, my thoughts on language would be completely different from searching for a ski resort. (I am going to come back to this point when I have figured about a clearer explanation.)

I use search engines as the starting point to find the first island of new information that will help me find the next piece of information that will further refine what I am looking for. Search to me turns into island hopping to get to where you need to be.

General search is also not just about text, image searching I found can also be a great way to find text information.

Search engine choices

2005-11-07T16:46:00.000Z

The term Search engine covers a lot of ground so here I group together some services:

General Search
Google, Yahoo!, MSNsearch,

Comparison/Shopping search
Become.com, Froogle, YahooShopping, Kelkoo.com,

independent consumer services
Kaboodle, ConsumerPlayer

Consumer choosing to make a purchase require a retailer to fulfill
Amazon.com, Tesco

With each of these categories having niche or specialist players. I will devote future blogs to these innovative businesses.

Search engines

2005-10-05T16:06:00.000+01:00

Search engines play an important role in connecting consumers with information. If it's your first time on the Internet how do you find a search engine? It's a great question because I believe the answer to this question goes a long way to explaining how we select information and then make decisions.

From my experience we don't have much choice. The PC or device that has been purchased will have made the initial choices for you. Choices made by a series of business to business deals that were necessary for the delivery of the PC to the consumer, the business with the biggest influence having the final say. Inherently this is not bad, the world is a better place with PC's? So, we inherit the choices of others and to some degree we will have trusted some business that enabled us to purchase the PC visa vie the other choices in the market at that time.

The browser provided is opened and a search engine will either be presented or a link. Or the consumer will have the information from an offline source that will have educated them the need to use a search engine, assuming they don't just want to live in a one URL online or that they already know all the URL's they will ever need to use! (maybe someday)

Next, how do consumers choose a search engine given a free choice?

Practical Consumer Information

2005-10-04T11:45:00.000+01:00

Ok, we have had a bit of theory but what are the information demands of consumers?

If we can believe Internet statistics then surfing for health information tops the polls followed by shopping and product searching. I'll come back to health in a later posting but for now lets focus on shopping info.

Shopping covers many industries/products Amazon.com, travel Expedia.com, music itunes.com, groceries Tesco.com, etc, these example focused at the retail level. The (brand)manufacturers make the products or services e.g. food Mars, Hotels Hilton, music U2, etc. With the Internet evening up the access so that small, local or niche producers can be found, Food FoveranStore, local joiner WBLittlejohn.com (disclaimer, my parents business), niche music The Sundowns, etc.

With the whole supply chain of businesses on the web too. At the other end of the demand chain of information are what I class as information advisors, these cover an equally wide range of sources, e.g. news newspapers, consumer review Which?, Experts environment, fashion Glossy Mags , consumer themselves, blogs etc. All these competing sources online, also have competitors off line, family members, friends or professional advisors you trust.

Each online source aims to make life easy for consumers but consuming lots of 'easy to use' websites becomes complex. And how do we select or find the sources we trust or are willing to trust. The Search Engines come center stage, for the whole web Google, Yahoo!, product Froogle, products with research Become.com, Images Flickr.com, Blogs, music, video etc. I'll examine the role search engines play in the next posting.

To conclude, the consumers world of information is a complex universe which needs to be made simple and easy to consume. Future posting will highlight my views on who's doing what to deliver this goal to consumers.

The History of Information

2005-09-28T14:09:00.000+01:00

Here's my take on how we've got to where we are today. . ..

To simplify greatly, well I suppose us humans used facial, hand and body movements to kick it all off. Geoffrey Nunberg has an informative time line on his site. It is interesting to read, time and time again how each wave of information evolution is pulsed along by a never ending tug and pull created from the human need to communicate with each other and technological innovations that gives information wider room to expand into.

Thus giving the opportunity for information to become more freely and openly available. In terms of information volume I like to use the following metaphor to visualize how near the start we are: imagine the size of the universe a micro * ten to the power of -10000 of a second after big bang and compare it to the size of the Universe today, in other words, hold a pea in your hand and compare it to the size of the Universe. So, we are at the earliest of days in my view.

What is Perfect Information?

2005-09-26T08:58:00.000+01:00

A good definition is supplied by Wikipedia here. I want to highlight this sentence, 'perfect information would practically mean that all consumers know all things about all products, and therefore always make the best decision regarding purchase.' This is what I believe.

I also feel these traditional or historical definitions need evolving, consumer purchases are becoming less a series of one-off events but turning into a flow of services over time, derived sometimes by the supply of a product. I always stand in the consumers shoes, as that is what I am, to consider what a world of perfect information looks and feels like?

Lets examine the key ingredients of perfect information: It has to be visualized and by that I mean in its broadest sense, viewed by eye, listened to by hear, felt by touch etc. The point I need to state early on is that the consumer should have control over these 'visualization' options.

Trust. We need to trust the source of the information, who is supplying it? Therefore, visualization needs to extended over the source to give the consumer a way of identifying the author. On this a consumer can make a personal value decision. The consumers inherent people/social skills combined with their education or prevailing wisdom are important here.

Timing. Perfect information demands all information is up dated instantly another piece of information is authored or consumed. Increasingly consumers are also building in future expectations into their decision making thus the world of information is more than just historical or real time focused.

Visualization, Trust and Timing. The pillars of consumer confidence in perfect information. I am going to regularly come back to test these and I welcome comments and feedback to help in that process.

Consumer Information

2005-09-23T20:00:00.000+01:00

My fascination with information really got started when studying Economics at The University of Aberdeen. I quickly realized the answer to the question that all economics starts with: How to allocate scarce resources? answer was to provide perfect information to the end point of consumption, I.e. to the consumer.

Before my University days I had started to think about how our small family business fitted into the wider economy and what impact it was having on the planet? I would spend holidays carrying hardwood mahogany into customers homes and then go home at night and listen to the news that another area of Amazon rainforest the size of Wales had been lost. Two separate world's, surely? However, with education and better information I quickly realized the connection. The rest of my University days and now entrepreneurial career are driven by realizing this goal of delivering perfect information to consumers.

We all have to consume? Food and water are the daily basics but beyond these rudimentaries of life our economy has expanded vastly to produce an enormous selection of goods and services. Before the act of consuming a product we all consume information but what information?

This blog is dedicated to exploring, questioning and providing practical help that will enable consumers to make real time decisions based upon perfect information.