Privacy and Transparency: Are They Mutually Exclusive?
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is looking out for you and me again. But this time, I’m a little worried that their appropriately principled position may get in the way of real progress.
Essentially, EFF is worried about the significant presence of third-party technologies being used by the Whitehouse.gov website and their standard practice of collecting personally identifiable information.
Specifically at issue are YouTube.com, Akamai, Inc. and Amazon S3. EFF asserts that by collecting cookies and IP addresses (as is part of their normal course of business), private citizens are being put at risk. The theory is that the government (or some other nefarious organization) could come along and piece together a profile of private citizens and their interaction with government websites.
Alternatively, EFF suggests that the federal government host more of its own content and outsource less.
So, in this effort to create an administration that is as open as possible, the White House is partnering with third parties and creating a (presumably unintentional) privacy risk.
How does the administration need to prioritize the various requirements being presented by its constituency in this case?
Is it reasonable to expect the White House to be open and transparent (online) and also guarantee that no third party collects any personally identifiable data?
If so, do we extend this requirement to a search engine’s collection of personally identifiable data by anyone who clicks a link leading to a government website?
Or do we accept that privacy online is a utopian concept that cannot effectively be guaranteed by anyone, anywhere, and instead focus on legislation that regulates how private information must be protected by companies doing business with the government?
Sound off in the comments below!
Technorati Tags: privacy, product strategy, open government, eff, electronic frontier foundation
Yesterday’s Thoughts
These are a few of the articles and events that influenced my thinking yesterday, along with a few comments.
How Not to be a Key Online Influencer | David Henderson – author, journalist
There’s been a lot of flap about @keyinfluencer‘s tweet, and FedEX’s response.
In the world of social media, nothing you say is private, and everything you say can have repercussions, even if unintended. No great leap of thought leadership there, I know. But here are my lessons (or reinforcements from this episode)
1. If you don’t have something nice to say, at least try to say it in a constructive, or explanatory way. If you’ve just gotta say it on twitter, 2 tweets is better than 1 misunderstood one. Sometimes, one word can make the difference in clarity. Mark Twain once wrote “The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter–it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
2. FedEX has some really unprofessional snippy people in their corporate communications organization. The FedEX response letter to Mr. Andrew’s unclear and unwise tweet was completely reasonable. Their indignation was justified and deserved explanation.
The intentional release of the letter to the public by forwarding to Peter Shankman for publication was unprofessional and inappropriate. I’m a fan of Shankman, and of FedEX, but this display–using a misunderstood “soundbyte” (tweet) to provide a platform for a press release extolling the virtues of FedEX at the expense of a so-called business partner–is PR at its worst, worthy of the cheapest grade of political spinmeisters.
So there is plenty of reprimand to go around, and in my opinion, both parties owe each other an apology.
(For those who don’t know the details of the story, Andrews claims that his tweet was actually inspired by an encounter with an “intolerant” individual when he arrived at the Memphis airport.)
AppleInsider | iPhone developer: App Store rewards “crap” apps
The market on simplicity has not been cornered. According to the article, a single free app with a simple function drives $200 per hour in advertising revenue.
Not bad for a lunchtime effort, huh?
PDMA • Product Development and Management Association
I went to the Georgia PDMA meeting last night where Amanda Setili spoke about “Developing Winning Value Propositions.”
Above all other thoughts from the evening, I was reminded that the concept of the “defining a value proposition,” as old as it is, is still largely misunderstood and misprioritized even in some of the most notable companies, as is the true nature of product innovation.
At one point, a light back and forth emerged between two attendees on the result of successful innovation. Ms. Setili suggested that ultimately, innovation results in delivering greater value for a lower price. Ken Westray (the founder of the Georgia chapter of PDMA) challenged that premise, although I’m frankly unclear as to the exact point he was making.
My view: the root of innovation (in purely academic terms) is delivering the greatest value at the lowest cost. Cost and Price are two entirely different concepts, which should have little bearing on each other, save as a check for viability.
How I found one of my favorite “new” blogs
I’ve been following FeverBee for a about a week now, I think, and I was really glad that @cwestbrook made a tweet about it. Richard Millington has some great insights, and he delivers them in nice, bite-sized pieces that suit my reading style very well.
I hadn’t really been following Chuck’s blog, either until I caught another tweet earlier today that prompted me to take a look. It turns out that Chuck is actively seeking great, under-appreciated blogs to drive traffic for.
Cool idea, Chuck. I’m in. If you are reading this, you should check it out, too.
How You Can Help End the Problem of Blogs With Great Content and No Readers
Jumbis: Now what is that idea again?
Pitch the right points.
That’s the number one lesson I’ve taken away from Startup Weekend Atlanta. So, I’ll start there. If you are already lost about what Startup Weekend is, or what I’m talking about, you should visit these posts and then come back. Not that I don’t want you here. I do.
Before I get started, let me state clearly: Jumbis.com is a platform for using social media networks to drive product sales.
In the entrepreneurial world, we are told repeatedly how important our “elevator pitch” is and that it should be ready to go at all times. Jumbis.com presents an amazing example of the impacts of a weak elevator pitch, and I’d like to share that with you.
When I wrote down my pitch for a “Turnkey Single Product Sales Platform,” I knew that I was dealing with multiple value propositions. I chose to pitch the easy revenue angle in the 60 seconds I was allotted by drawing comparisons to the wildly popular Woot! websites and similar comparisons, and I tagged on a statement to the effect of “oh yeah, and we’re going to use social media to promote the site.”
Of course, this isn’t a particularly sexy pitch for a room full of gifted developers who are looking for fun and profitable challenges, but the whole idea of “self-funding” is particularly sexy to me. So that’s the approach I took.
The idea for Jumbis.com is, and always was, to use social media networks to drive customers to an ecommerce website, by making it easy and attractive for them to refer their friends, without subjecting those friends to loads of spam, thereby losing their friendship status. The single product approach is due to the fact that from a marketing perspective, a single product is easy to digest and understand, and won’t overwhelm the customer.
Fortunately, the pitch was strong enough to attract some amazingly talented folks. Once we got into our group, I was immediately faced with the task of resetting expectations. The team had signed up for a project, but didn’t have a clear understanding of what that project was really supposed to be.
Throughout the weekend, the impression that Jumbis.com was intended to be a Woot! clone and competitor continued to thrive, both inside the team and out in the rest of the ASW2 world. And on Saturday evening our team finally tore down the mental blocks that had been driving us in a less effective development direction for the past 24 hours.
All because the concept wasn’t pitched clearly at the beginning.
Sunday morning, Yale Zhang came in with the fruits of his overnight brainstorming and made a suggestion that focused us even further on the target for presentation. After some pretty heavy selling on his part, he convinced me of a massive change to the business model itself.
When we presented on Sunday evening the response was notably different from Friday night. There was a real enthusiasm for what we were doing. Several attendees spoke to me afterward expressing interest in our next steps, and surprise at the “changes” to our product.
Now Jumbis is in a good place. Our team knows what we are trying to accomplish, and we’ll be continuing forward next week. A few will move on to other projects, and we may add a few new folks if needed, but we’ll certainly take our learnings and grow with them.
So, to sum it up for you, here are some specific things that would have likely unfolded differently had the 60 second pitch on Friday night been more effectively focused:
- We would have attracted more social media experts to the team. There were a few in the house that didn’t catch on to that aspect of the business
- Our Saturday development efforts would have been targeted more effectively and we wouldn’t have spent the majority of Saturday designing the wrong aspects of the product.
- Team members would have been more focused in their thinking and presented their game changing ideas earlier in the process.
- We would have gotten more pre-launch PR, because our message would have been clearer to the “outside” world.
- We would have probably launched with a fully functional application that could support vendors today.
I’m very satisfied with where Jumbis is today, and I’m looking forward to the weeks and months ahead as we continue to evolve and realize our vision. But there are plenty of lessons to be learned, and I felt like this one was worth sharing.
It’s easy to analyze what the successful projects did right, and what the imploded projects did wrong. I’d be interested in reading about other successful projects and their missteps along the way.
If you aren’t already doing it, follow Jumbis on Twitter. There will be more to come.
And subscribe to my RSS feed. I’ve got more to say about Startup Weekend as time allows.
I’d like to take a moment to recognize the exceptional team who helped to make Jumbis a successful project:
- Jason Daenzer – Graphic Design and UI Design
- Larry Goddard – Marketing, Copywriting and IP Watchdog
- Karthik Halukurike – Software development
- Ben McMillan – UI Design, System Architecture, Software development
- Chris Rankine – Social Media integration, Software development
- Yale Zhang – Prototyping Project Manager, e-commerce development, Procurement
There were many others involved too, including the facilitators and staff, as well as folks from other teams who stopped in to lend a helping hand from time to time. I can’t list everyone by name, but I thank you all.
I would like to give special thanks to Blake, Colin, Dan, George, Hsiu, Lance and Sanjay.
New Feature: Skribit
I’ve been putting this off for a while, but over the last couple of weeks I’ve been really paying attention to how people such as Lance Weatherby, Sanjay Parekh and Colin Ake have been using Skribit on their websites. To be fair, Lance is the only one I think has actually written a post based on a Skribit suggestion, but I know that Sanjay and Colin shape thought and conversations based on questions and topics they see there.
Skribit is a really great product. It works, and it’s a product of the Atlanta startup community, and specifically Startup Weekend Atlanta, which I’ll talk about more in my next post.
The idea behind Skribit is pretty neat. The execution is even better. In the right sidebar of my website, you’ll see a Skribit widgit. Just click on the link that says “What Should I Write About?” and give me a suggestion. Or, if you like, vote on suggestions that are already there.
Skribit will help me know what the 3 or 4 of you who visit my blog regularly are interested in reading about, and should help me keep my constantly restated objective of writing more frequently.
So, now, I’ve got to post about this whole Startup Weekend thing.
2 Stroke Gas Powered Party Blender. Do. Want.
Any appliance that is banned in at least one state has my attention. If it takes gasoline and has a setting for puree, then done deal.
[Via JC Whitney]
On The Edge Marketing 2 Stroke Gas Powered Party Blender : JC Whitney: Auto Parts & Accessories
Nuevasync Beta Burp
I’ve noticed a significant increase in visits searching for info on Nuevasync in the last couple of days, so I thought I’d do a service to visitors and post a little update.
As of this writing (September 3, 2008) Nuevasync is apparently hosed. Hopefully temporarily. Read On.
According to the Nuevasync on September 2, 2008:
Service is Being Throttled Today
We have identified an issue with the sync service today that has been causing the server to bog down (and last night triggered a kernel crash too). At present we’re running the service in a throttled mode that reduces load on the machines so our engineers can investigate and fix the problem. Users may notice periods where their sync fails or is delayed. Do not re-sync, just wait and you should get sync eventually. Hopefully we can get the problem diagnosed and fixed soon.
Early this morning, the Nuevasync site was offline altogether. The blog sheds some light, and I assume that the David and Thomas are working feverishly to restore service. Try and remember that Nuevasync is in beta mode, and have patience. I warned readers in my previous post not to count on the service for mission critical applications yet. It seems that for the most part, Nuevasync’s beta population is understanding, supportive and is having patience. Commenters at the official Nuevasync blog have been demonstrating the best attitudes of end users I’ve seen in a while.
For the latest updates on Nuevasync status, keep an eye on the official blog!
Update @10:59 AM, 9/3/2008 – The Nuevasync site has been up and running again since I published this post, although the calendar service is still not syncing. To ease server load, I’m going to discontinue attempting to sync for the rest of the day.
Over-The-Air Google Calendar to iPhone Sync with NuevaSync
In my not-yet-ending quest for a full GTD implementation that spans all of my contexts (@home, @work and in between), I came across a little post by Matt Grommes that introduced me to a fantastic little service called NuevaSync.
NuevaSync (currently in free beta) offers a real, working two-way sync between Google Calendar and iPhone 2.0 firmware, regardless of your desktop platform!
In a perfect world, MobileMe would offer this capability “out of the box,” but alas, no. There are workarounds for Mac users to sync iCal with Google Calendar and then to MobileMe or directly to iPhone via iTunes, but that is (a) a lot of extra opportunity for breakage and (b) requires a Mac. Windows users are out of luck.
There are other solutions and I invite readers to comment with details below or link to their own solutions. I’ll also update this post as appropriate.
I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about NuevaSync “the company.” I will say that their website is pretty straightforward and to the point. Following the directions will get you up and running pretty quickly. I am really excited about my initial experience and am looking forward to watching this little startup grow and succeed.
A few things to you need to consider before setting this up though:
- Back up your calendar data FIRST. I admit that I was simultaneously configuring NuevaSync and Google Calendar Sync for the first time. The combination nearly proved deadly (to my data) when I made a small (very reasonable) error in judgement. Due to the fact that God really had my back, I came through completely unscathed and with all of my data intact. Chances are slim that you will reproduce my experience. But just in case: Back it up.Of course, you know you should maintain regular backups at all time, but let’s face it: most of us don’t get as meticulous about this as we should. However, with a relatively small, beta product such as this, there are plenty of opportunities for something to go wrong. An error at NuevaSync could theoretically drop all of your calendar events (or just one really important one!) in mid-sync. So treat this beta with a healthy dose of respect.
- Push sync is the default set up, but you don’t really need it! To save battery life, change your “sync” setting to manual. Everytime you open the iPhone’s calendar, just wait a few seconds for the latest changes to sync up. You’ll see the “network traffic” animation beside your network indicator to let you know it is working. (Apple doesn’t make this obvious, but it works on my iPhone (v 2.0.1 at the time of this post)).
- NuevaSync will only sync calendars that grant you “write” permission. I subscribe to several read-only calendar feeds (i.e. Meetup.com, US Holidays, etc), and these will not sync via NuevaSync. According to the NuevaSync blog, this ability is coming soon, but there is no definite date attached.
- NuevaSync is a beta product with a small staff. There is no 24
hour support, and their website explicitly states that if a server goes
down while everyone is asleep, they won’t know about it until they wake
up. (I don’t mind, and I appreciate that they told me this up front!)That said, this is not a service for mission-critical calendaring functions. Period.
In the FAQ, NuevaSync makes it very clear that they aren’t quite sure yet how they are going to monetize this thing (probably paid premium services). I get that, and don’t hold it against them. They need to figure it out quickly because this product is, in my opinion, ripe for a Twitter-style viral explosion.
True, they won’t see the volumes of users that Twitter sees, but iPhone isn’t the only mobile platform that NuevaSync supports. Heck, it wasn’t even the first. Over-the-air syncing is not a simple thing to do, even when dealing with one platform. Scaling for large numbers of users complicates matters, and costs lots of money, too.
I frankly hope that they do get that figured out sooner rather than later, because their initial offering, for me at least, is far more useful than Apple’s $99 per year MobileMe service, and I want to see what the future holds for NuevaSync.
In addition to calendar syncing, NuevaSync offers the ability to sync your Google contacts (I wouldn’t even risk trying this: it looks like it may add all of Google’s suggested contacts to your address book!) or your Plaxo contacts (maybe try this…with a backup) over the air.
What NuevaSync doesn’t do is connect your desktop calendar to Google calendar or anything else. You’ll still need another product, such as CalDAV or Google Calendar Sync for that. I’m using Google Calendar Sync with an Exchange-based calendar. After I’ve had another day of smooth operation, I’ll post some thoughts on that as well.
Credit where credit is due: I found NuevaSync via: Matt O’ Rama » iPhone / Google / Outlook Calendar Sync.
If you haven’t already done so, subscribe to my RSS feed, and introduce yourself in the comments below!
Mobile Blogging Evolves?
It’s here. The WordPress app for iPhone made it to the app store overnight, and at this moment, I imagine thousands of bloggers (real and wannabe, such as yours truly) are preparing their first posts using the app.
I’m going to go out in a limb here and predict that the majority of those posts will be reviews of this very app.
Of course, it has been possible, and even convenient to blog from the iPhone and other mobile devices since the beginning. But does this new application change the landscape drastically?
My guess is, just a little. I can’t see typing a long post out at 20 wpm on the iPhone. But, the clean, usable interface makes it easy to fire off quick posts while out and about, update blogs with breaking news, or even start a post to finish later.
Of course, it only works on iPhone, so there is that. But between the WordPress and Typepad apps, the iPhone is quickly becoming a powerful mobile publishing tool as well as gaming and productivity platform.
I don’t forsee posting from this platform frequently, but time will tell. It is nice to have the option, and my first impression is that the option is nice.
Technorati Tags: iPhone, WordPress, Reviews, App Store
What can one man do?
Often, we feel powerless to change the world around us. Sometimes, we feel powerless to even make it through the day.
Syd Lieberman tells the true story of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish man who did something extraordinary. I won’t spoil the story for you. I’ll only say that after listening to Syd’s amazing telling of this incredible story, you will never, and I mean NEVER be able to look in the mirror and say, “It’s only me. What can I do to change things?”
Go download it right now: It’s at the bottom of this page.
I’ve been listening to Syd Lieberman‘s storytelling podcast for several months as part of a growing enthusiasm
for the disappearing art of storytelling. Syd is a well-known storyteller who has made waves in the industry by releasing every single recording he has ever made for free on the Internet. You can download them as a podcast via iTunes or your favorite podcatcher, or you can go directly to his website and download them at your leisure.
Technorati Tags: storytelling, heroes, syd lieberman, wwii, inspiration