Intention Economy

Beyond Data Ownership to Information Sharing

Beyond Data Ownership to Information Sharing

The question of who owns our data on the Internet is a challenging problem. It can also be a  red herring, distracting us from building the next generation of online services.
The term “ownership” simply brings too much baggage from the physical world, suggesting a win-lose, us-verses-them mentality that retards the development of rich, powerful services [...]

User Driven Services: 1. Impulse from the User

User Driven Services: 1. Impulse from the User

1. Impulse from the User
User Driven Services start with the user.
People engage the world to satisfy needs and fulfill desires. That engagement marks our intent as we try to bend the universe to our will. User Driven Services begin with that essential act, responding to each user’s expressed intent to initiate and drive every [...]

Introducing User Driven Services

Introducing User Driven Services

Our world is continually becoming more and more user driven.
From cable TV to YouTube, from newspapers to blogs, from Wal-Mart to eBay, from Ma Bell to the Internet, the shift from centralized, structured systems of authority to emergent, collaborations between individuals has been reshaping our political, social, and economic world for generations. This is a [...]

One Night Stand worth $300 Million

In the ProjectVRM Standards Committee discussions, we’ve talked quite a bit about a “One Night Stand” use case, where a personal datastore is used with an online retailer and all personal data is erased–as much as possible–after the transaction.

Teleconference 2008 06 18
Teleconference 2008 07 02
Teleconference 2008 08 13
Teleconference 2008 09 24
Teleconference 2008 [...]

Kynetx takes on Structured Browsing

Doc Searls recently brought my attention to a White Paper by Phil Windley, about his company, Kynetx. It does a good job explaining the thinking behind their architecture, and raises some questions that, for me, challenge some underlying assumptions and business choices.
Problem Domain
The distributed nature of the web is a big part of its [...]

Welcoming 2009

Happy New Year!
I am looking forward to 2009. There has been lots of change, both professionally and personally, this year, putting me (and SwitchBook) on a trajectory for amazing things in the year ahead.
One of my New Year’s resolutions is to create–and help to create–the world’s first VRM applications in 2009. There are more than [...]