Mydata And Consumer Empowerment

On Thursday, work began in earnest on the 'mydata' project featured in the government's "Consumer Empowerment" strategy (see Better Choices: Better Deals, on which I posted earlier).

As with the overall consumer empowerment policy, the primary goal of the ‘mydata’ project is “to put consumers in charge so that they are better able to get the best deals for themselves, individually and collectively.” Achieving that involves enabling consumers to access information about their purchases, analyse it according to their own preferences and use that information to make better purchasing decisions.

As a long-time critic of the European Commission approach to facilitating e-commerce, I'm overjoyed the government is convinced that new legislation is not the best way to achieve consumer empowerment. Instead, it's relying on "a wide range of new programmes that have been developed in partnership with businesses, consumer groups and regulators" against a background of normal regulatory enforcement.

The mydata development work is being fostered through a series of 'boards', chaired by Professor Nigel Shadbolt. There's a Strategy board made up of private sector retail businesses, consumer bodies and government representatives; four Sector boards comprising representatives of suppliers in the energy, financial services, telecoms and retail sectors; and an Interoperability board of private and public sector representatives. The focus of the Interoperability board is on maximising synergies among the sector groups' work; addressing barriers common to all groups; maintaining a balance amongst key issues of practical utility, privacy, security and data portability; and offering suggestions on where ideas and solutions in one sector might link up (or mashup) with others to better reflect consumers' day-to-day activities.

I know what you're thinking, but these boards are not designed to be exclusive talking shops or symbolic meetings of 'the great and the good'. The idea is to be as pragmatic as possible, using the boards to draw in as many interested parties, ideas and resources as possible to achieve rapid progress. It's a fascinating challenge, and I'm thrilled to be helping out on the interoperability front.

There'll be plenty of project communications, of course, which I'll be doing my best to retweet etc, and send to people I know who may be interested or able to help. I also plan to share material that I happen across outside the project. For starters, I've included below the links to Sir Tim Berners-Lee's TED talk on the semantic web (or Linked Data) and a few of the items he mentions. I'm very interested to receive any comments, referrals, ideas etc you may have.

Sir Tim cites some key examples of Linked Data and its uses. DBpedia is the fascinating "community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and to make this information available on the Web." And here is the TED talk by Hans Rosling to which he refers:

Image from 1Million1Shot.

Enable Best Customers to Create Financial Services

All vendors and platform operators feel an obligation to look after their best customers. But to what extent are those customers really allowed to influence product development?

In the course of researching a presentation on the long tail of payments services for GikIII (a two day workshop on the intersections between law, technology and popular culture), I've been struck by how these observations combine to emphasise the same point:

• There is value in marketing "long tail" products if adding selection is cheap (as it is online): Anderson;
• Compared with heavy users of online retail services, light users much prefer better selling products; both prefer “hit” products more than those in the tail; but it is the heavy users who venture into the tail: Elberse;
• Successful Web 2.0 businesses are those that facilitate an 'architecture of participation': O’Reilly;
• "Lead-user product development can be a far more effective means of innovation than conventional product development in a closed system": Sheahan (citing von Hippel, of course) and giving various illustrations of the same concept in Threadless, Jones Soda, LEGO's Mindstorms Users Panel, and of course Linux.

Suggestions that even "excellent retailers" have run out of ways to improve the online shopping experience, and the only scope for real innovation is on the buy-side, are way overdone. But it must be true that improved tools for buyers as well as, e.g. 'power sellers', are an important set of features in the overall consumer experience mix. And it should also follow that enabling your prolific buyers to add to the range of products available for all buyers is a powerful step to take. Some of those products might even prove to be popular enough to work their way up the 'tail'.

In the payments context, it's interesting that recent research by Datamonitor suggests financial institutions are too mired in last century's anxieties to let their online customers loose with a bunch of web-based tools.

Seems my 2008 predictions for the SCL are still holding up nicely!

Too Early to Call Time on Web 2.0

It's fascinating to see the mainstream business press calling time on "Web 2.0". Presupposing that the Web 2.0 tag constitutes a definitive cohort of businesses who must be earning substantial revenues today, if they are ever to be successful...

This as just another consequence of the credit crunch, rather than evidence that it's suddenly crazy to start a web business dedicated to enabling users to take control of their retail, entertainment, financial and other personal affairs. It's a sign that the institutional herd is headed for safe havens and wants a slow summer at the beach, free of write-offs and any doubt that it might be missing key opportunities through its inability to invest in the current tidal wave of innovation.

But the curtain is barely up on Web 2.0, and at this rate the FT's core readership will miss the whole show.

There is plenty of non-institutional money to be had - and you don't need much of it - to help start a Web 2.0 business. The angel world is also still awash with pre-Crunch bonus money and the likes of ex-Googlers cashing in their options to do help Facebook or do their own thang. Seedcamp is happening again, and (the ironically named) Techcrunch is alive with plenty of news, even from Europe. Remember, too, that venture funding is not required to build any of the infrastructure necessary for Web 2.0 businesses to flourish. The big corporates in the internet game have taken on that job, and are still investing heavily to create the bandwidth and computing capacity on which low cost, web development start-ups like Ooyala are feeding greedily.

Seems to me that September is going to see a whole new tidal wave of innovative business launches - so it's gonna be a pretty intense summer for some!

The Price of "Free" Software

The recent Open Source Summit, alerted me to the fact that perhaps relatively few business people realise the commercial implications of relying on open source software.

A glance at the excellent programme shows why this should come as no surprise: there's an awful lot to get your head around just to understand what open source software is in the first place.

But, let’s not lose sight of the wood for all the trees (the history and philosophical debate between the Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation, the vast array of licences and nor the complexities of GPL2 vs GPL3 and AGPL3).

The fact is that software developers can easily import any computer code via the Internet without fully understanding the licence obligations. What seems "free" code can actually come with an obligation to licence the source code for you proprietary product to the world, free of charge.

So, as Kat McCabe of Black Duck explained, sophisticated buyers of businesses are now requiring an audit of the source code for the target's IT systems and products in an attempt to exploit the target's inadvertent use of open source software, and reduce the price for acquiring the business. Overseeing that due diligence is Jim Markwith's legal role at Microsoft. And it explains the incredible degree of licensing rigour imposed on Nokia's open source programme by Dietmar Tallroth.

This is not an argument against using open source software. But anyone with an eye on the value of their business ought to get a handle on how their developers are operating and consider regular audits of their source code.