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
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.