While the history of computing and communications often appears to be one led by big entities in business and government, the biggest revolution has actually been a personal one. Each of us, as individuals, have acquired abilities that were once those of organizations alone — and have done far more with those abilities than the… Continue reading The Personal Revolution
Category: Developments
Cataracts for Customers
Let’s say you have an iPhone, and your carrier is AT&T.* That puts you deep inside what Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) calls a confusopoly (and illustrates here). His text explanation: A confusopoly is a situation in which companies pretend to compete on price, service, and features but in fact they are just trying to confuse customers… Continue reading Cataracts for Customers
Personal vs. Personalized
In Worth The Deal? Groceries Get A Personalized Price, Ashley Gross on NPR says, Heather Kulper is one of those people who really wants to get a good deal. She’s a mom in a suburb north of Seattle who writes a blog about coupon clipping and saving money. On a recent shopping trip to Safeway, Kulper… Continue reading Personal vs. Personalized
Free vs. Followed
The fight between the free market and the followed market is about to begin. And the way to bet is on the free market, because it’s what we know works best. Also because the followed market is nuts. It only persists because it’s normative at the moment, and an enormous sum of investment is going… Continue reading Free vs. Followed
The Promise of the Personal Cloud
The term “personal cloud” is only about a year old and has a wildly disparate set of meanings. For some, services such as Facebook, Dropbox, and SugarSynch are personal clouds. For others the gold standard is iCloud, which stores data and media and manages your apps from all your devices – as long as they… Continue reading The Promise of the Personal Cloud
Privacy is personal
In the physical world, we govern privacy with clothes and walls, buttons, zippers, windows and doors. (See Clothing as a privacy system.) We also see privacy as a thing that can be possessed. That’s the framing for statements like, “Give me some privacy, and “Don’t take away my privacy.” On another hand (there can be… Continue reading Privacy is personal