Featured Post – Customer Commons

The Only Way Customers Come First

— is by proffering terms of their own. That’s what will happen when sites and services click “accept” to your terms, rather than the reverse. The role you play here is what lawyers call the first party. Sites and services that agree to your terms are second parties. As a first party, you get scale across all the sites and… Continue reading The Only Way Customers Come First

Giving Customers Scale

Customers need scale. Scale is leverage. A way to get lift. Big business gets scale by aggregating resources, production methods, delivery services — and, especially, customers: you, me and billions of others without whom business would not exist. Big business is heavy by nature. That’s why we use mass as an adjective for much of what big… Continue reading Giving Customers Scale

Privacy is an Inside Job

Start here: clothing and shelter are privacy technologies. We use them to create secluded spaces for ourselves. Spaces we control. Our ancestors have been wearing clothing for at least 170,000 years and building shelters for at least half a million years. So we’ve had some time to work out what privacy means. Yes, it differs among cultures and settings,… Continue reading Privacy is an Inside Job

Customers need scale

April 6th Customer Commons and PDEC Salon

Join us for a joint PDEC and Customer Commons salon dinner April 6th, Monday night, 6-9pm in Mountain View. This is the night before IIW’s, and at the end of the VRM day, where we will have an opportunity to talk about Banking, Credit and Personal Data with LaVonne Reimer. Sign up at Eventbrite for the… Continue reading April 6th Customer Commons and PDEC Salon

The Personal Data Eco-system

Post from 2009 reposted here to facilitate further discussion. At the VRM workshop, we discussed the need for the concept of the Personal Data Store, what it would do in practice, and what that will ultimately enable. Why we need such things – because individuals have a complex need to manage personal information over a… Continue reading The Personal Data Eco-system

Thanks for Attending the Customer Commons Salon Last Night

Thanks to everyone who attended the Customer Commons Salon last night. It was a nice night to socialize, and talk. Doc Searls gave us a quick report on Omie, the Customer Commons project that will be made for Android, and later we hope, other platrforms. Omie is meant to make the device yours, instead of… Continue reading Thanks for Attending the Customer Commons Salon Last Night

On Bringing Manners to Markets

Privacy in the physical world has been well understood and fairly non-controversial for thousands of years. We get it, for example, with clothing, doors, curtains and window shades. These each provide privacy by design, because they control visibility and access to our private places and spaces. The virtual world, however, is very young, dating roughly back to… Continue reading On Bringing Manners to Markets

We are not fish and advertising is not food

This is how the Internet looks to the online advertising business today: This is how they approach it: And this is the result: Advertising is a huge source of the “data pollution” Fred Wilson talked about at LeWeb a few weeks ago. (See here, starting at about 23 minutes in.) What’s wrong with this view,… Continue reading We are not fish and advertising is not food

Data Privacy Legal Hack-A-thon

Customer Commons is supporting, and board member, Mary Hodder, is hosting the Bay Area event. Additionally, there are NYC and London locations. Please join us if you are interested: This is an unprecedented year documenting our loss of Privacy. Never before have we needed to stand up and team up to do something about it.… Continue reading Data Privacy Legal Hack-A-thon