Tag: attention

attention, Food for Thought

Attention: Move to a more cooperative model and increased situational awareness

I have been thinking about the Attention economy and what it means for businesses. I find the idea of a more cooperative value model eludes most traditional businesses. I have had to explain multiple times that the value of an interaction includes more than just the product and the cash payment. There exists around all interactions meta data that in some cases exceeds the value of the obvious portion of a traditional transaction. I think that many companies take meta data for granted. There tends to be an assumption that only one party is capturing meta data. In non-online interactions that assumption maybe correct, but in the online world what is good for the goose is good for the gander. Businesses will wake up real quick when customers realize that they can monetize their book purchasing or reviewing habits on amazon by sharing their meta data with Borders.

No longer is the customers meta data a private source of insight or value. As new companies move to free customer meta data and its stored value, traditional businesses will have to move to a more cooperative model. I expect some companies will fight this effort by trying to institute draconian terms of use and invoking copyright protections. Those companies will be fighting a hopeless battle, and if they are successful it will only create a black economy of customer meta data and that is never good. A transparent and open meta data trade is best for all parties involved.

The cooperative model will force companies to work to provide more value for the meta data in the form of better financial terms, increased services, and a broader continuity of experience. Cooperative companies will enable customer creation of a rich situational awareness. That situational awareness will drive productivity and create additional business opportunities.

Thomas W. Malone gave a presentation on the Future of Work at the Accelerating Change 2005 Conference, which focused on the impact of the declining cost of communication. This declining cost of communication is enabling both customers and companies alike to utilize a broader spectrum of the information in our everyday lives. In the future we will all need and have personal situation awareness systems. This will make the information management tools of today look like a Motorola Bravo pager in the age of smart phones.

attention, Food for Thought

Attention and the illicit meta-data trade

It’s a funny world, serendipity strikes. I was listening to the Gillmor Gang SearchSIG Gang podcast which could have been named the AttentionSIG Gang. The conversation about Gesture Bank and the value of meta-data was very interesting. The idea of Gesture bank as a counterweight to the walled meta-data gardens made me think about all the meta-data I have seen traded. I have seen traditional demand data being traded for improved supply chain performance and purchasing behavior being traded for cash. I guess enterprising people have always been able to find a way to monetize an ever increasing percentage of the information generated everyday.

Serendipity strikes, I had recently listened to a speech by Kim Popovits Founder & President of Genomic Health as part of the Stanford DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture series. Genomic basically was able to monetize the value of wax block biopsy samples that are stored after a cancer surgery. I know Genomic is doing great things for people with cancer but I wonder if those patients whose wax block samples allowed Genomic to prove their product, ever imagined they would be helping Genomic achieve a market cap of $270 million. There was (and most likely still remains) no way for cancer patients to monetize their wax block samples and now Genomic has created a walled garden around the data gathered from those wax block samples. Brilliant.

As industries (Financial, Medical, Mobile Communications ect…) create information the players eventually figure out how to use the whole cow even the moo. For some period of time many information assets sit undervalued and untapped. Eventually, an enterprising and innovative individual finds the long neglected assets and creates a way to make money with them. In most cases the resulting monetization occurs, at best, in a walled garden, most commonly thought, it occurs behind the ramparts of a castle where no one speaks of the trading of those long overlooked information assets.

The promise of Gesture bank (As I think of it) is it’s potential to become a market maker for attention meta-data, a creator of attention meta-data liquidity (think Fannie Mae). As Steve Gillmor said, (I paraphrase) during the podcast, most pools of meta-data are not open and available for purchase. What goes unspoken is the meta-data is used to serve the purposes of the collector and those purposes may not benefit the contributing parties. It is rare that a source of information as rich as the web/internet would have at it’s infancy an opportunity for the unwashed masses to realize the value of their participation beyond simply viewing web pages and receiving email.

At least that’s how I think about it.