Personal, a start-up company, offers to empower each of us to manage our digital data, share at will and get compensated when companies capitalize on our data, Personal’s service is a personal data bank, that keeps your assets for you in a friendly and intuitive way, facilitates permission based sharing and may trade with them in your name.

It is an early example of user side personal data management services. This personal information vault may be seen as the equivalent of a bank vault combined with an account management and services platform. It is based on a simple assumption that personal data should be managed and shared user side, as a form of currency.

Why is it necessary? In a ubiquitous world where personal cloud services will become natural, always-on assumes accessibility to my personal digital materials. There are already file hosting cloud based services like Dropbox, that allow instant accessibility and intuitive sharing to all files saved through the service as they are  also instantly saved to all computers, phones, and the Dropbox website.

Personal takes this notion a step further to create intuitive topic/functionality based data gems, modular data  capsules that address specific information, topics and needs. This icon based personal digital filing system around personal data and functional information – such as insurance information, appliances’ specifications, pets’ regime, registrations….. over a 100 data gems filed under icon based digital files,  empower users’ intuitive access to functional data and information in a pin pointed manner, easily shared per need.

The value of these data gems starts with the user experience. Yes, we all have files and folders that we build according to our logic and personal tagging. Data gems facilitate organizing and managing users’ practical information and data by objectifying data units and wrapping them in a universal symbol capsule system. The user oriented conceptualization, functionality though an icon based  universal symbolic language, makes the experience simplified, flowing and personal.  The visual user friendly iconography frees users from individually reconstructing where the needed information resides, under what tags it was filed. This intuitive usability approach and detailed lego-like granularity, facilitates bridging digital divides by accommodating people that are not digitally intuitive to information handling, filing and sharing , and facilitates accessibility to that information if someone trusted needs to quickly find some functional data.

Icentered envisions a future of user controlled personal data management, that will replace the need to trust providers and rely on their privacy policies. This user side data management paradigm will empower Contextonomics –  a user side trading with personal contextual information, rewarding users as equal partners in the food chains for their data tracking and as means for  attention bartering.

The topic of users’ data ownership and  privacy control is controversial. I believe that once users side platforms and personal data management services like Personal will empower users to store, manage and share their personal data with other people,  advertisers and providers, user based contextonomics models will start to replace the traditional corporate based business models, an important stage towards a user centric digital economy.

Managing an attention economy and filtering out the clutter through personal relevance in the overpour of information, becomes an urgency. In the attention economy our most scarce resource is time. It’s a two headed dilemma:  Am Iwasting my limited attention capacity on things I could do without? Am I missing, in all that noise, things I would have wanted to give attention to?

The answer to both questions is context, personal relevance as a key to web interactions.

Relevant to me.

In my context.

Relevance turns the overwhelming overpour of web interactions into a humanizing selective experience. It’s the difference between searchability and findability, an avalanche of information and a manageable portion where I have my attention focused on what is really of value to me and I where I can selectively communicate.

Relevance is predictive. Based on my past interactions, my next future needs can be attended to. Companies pay a lot to try and get closer to my relevance – so that their offerings surface above the general marketing noise and get my attention. They measure it in terms of ROI (return on investment) – how much will it cost them to reach me, the individual. But once they do, how relevant is their offering to me? Again, the closest they can get through paid targeting is to what I am looking for right now, in search, siloed sites that keep my profile and based on current interactions in social platforms.

As users we want to interact with information that answers a need we have.   For that relevance is key. To date there is no holistic context of me that can capture a full relevance scale and be federated by me. My context is fragmented, dispersed all across the web. From a users’ perspective personal relevance should be viewed from a holistic point of view. There is one me, interacting all over, and not site or service  I have interacted with.

Relevant to me  is what will grab my attention the most and will turn my attention into an ROA ( return on attention) for my personal measuring scale. Once my relevant context (my data) is established, my attention can be bartered, treated  as an alternative currency – the economics of context – Contextonomics.

Contextonomics is the economic model for attention bartering. It means exchanging consumption of digital goods or services with attention.

To achieve a high ROA I will be willing to view offerings, communications and targeted ads based on their relevance to me. To achieve an effective ROI companies will be willing to invest in context based food chains that get them there.

In the vision of the semantic web, adding my context as a factor in the targeting and matching process changes the results, a transformation from searchability to findability, based on individual context. I can ask the world and the world will answer – but will it answer me in my particular colors, language and frame of mind. Providers will have to negotiate with me, or my avatars, based on my context.

 New food chains can be built around that ROA-ROI equilibrium. The traditional foundation of transactions will be reversed. Rather than a vendor negotiating with a cloud of users, it will be anchored in a pull model, where the user negotiates with a cloud of vendors for  similar offerings and a variety of  paying methods, in hard currency or attention equivalents.

From the economic sense of relevance based transactions, a pull based user relevant food chain, it means that each transaction executed, can be monetized in full and paid directly or traded, fully or partially, for alternative service. Providers will have automated context based offerings and banks of advertising, ads will be pulled and the advertiser rewarded for each ad sent in a pull model to a viewer. One consumer, one movie to watch for 50% discount + 3 ads that may targeted to interests and lifestyle, or one movie to watch full price = same value, but not necessarily same interest.  Yet, choice, value and preferences are individual.

Scott Adams envisions Futureme, a future plans based personal network that sees my intended plans and wishes as currency.

 Right now, you can’t get there from here.

How much is my privacy worth?  my data? 

My data have a predictive value for providers and advertisers.

Once they know what I was interested in, they should know what to offer me next.

To me it spells relevance = attention enhancement

To them it spells personalization – matching offering with customer need= offering enhancement.

They are willing to pay to know my relevance scale. Of my past activities. So they can assess future potential.

Who owns the process?

To date, we, users, may own the conversation of what we want next, but providers own the data manipulation process.

Of our data!

We, users, fight for keeping our privacy. Our privacy has an economic value. What is it? How can it be quantified?

Today it is non tangible to us. We give parts of our privacy away for nothing, and most of the time, we don’t even know it. Other parts are captive in siloed sites of providers and although the data are ours, we can’t reach it, let alone use it elsewhere.

Our future interests also hold capital value. Sales potential.

Scott Adams describes a personal, future based social network, Futureme. He calls it a Facebook killer, and differentiates between them based on a time line – Facebook is about my past – Futureme – about my future. It will be  built around my future interests, where people I choose can become part of a specific social graph for a specific interaction. So can providers and advertisers.

That adds 2 dimensions to the value of my data. My personal data as displayed for a future intention that has value to providers and my social capital that has value, placing me as an anchor in a  social ecosystem built around my future interest.

I don’t know if secluded future based marketplaces are the answer, but that is definitely a clear example of how my context becomes a currency. That can be bartered with direct $ value, or with attention to targeted ads.. I call that  Contextonomics. 

You may argue with the spectrum of his call for open sharing, that’s very personal and should be calibrated by each and every one according to the event, social graph and elements involved.

This vision is of a user centered long tail, based on pull, rather than push. User controlled. Direct inclusion of the user in the food chain is in sync with the icentered mindset.

Buyer centered paradigms  will force providers to embrace an organizational shift, where putting the customer first becomes more than a marketing lip service and all the systems will have to be aligned to provide that shift to pull based marketing.

Once contextonomics allows a bartering system and user centered marketplaces are up, we, users, will then own the process, will be treated as a source of revenue and will get our rightful place in the food chain.

Turning our data into capital still requires a quantum leap.  If Dilbert sees it, eventually providers will too. Such grassroots of visions and ideas of user centered ecosystems seed the path that will eventually lead to the required paradigm shift.

This post is in response to Brian Solis’ A conversation about you, social currency and social capital.

 We, users, have always been considered capital for marketers. Times changed and the wiggle dance evolved – but we remained as elusive and  are still unable to define our capital value as working currency we can capitalize on.

Our place in the marketing mix evolved, our influence grew – but a quantum leap is still in need.  Once companies owned the dancing floor. They had us, but didn’t see us for who we were. They courted us. As we strengthened, they tiptoed around us. Now they see us, infiltrate our spheres, try to converse with us, touch us and create value that would attract us  – but they  can no longer own us or dictate.

The game changed. Its semantics, power balance and arenas – but we, users, do not have yet full control. That control demands a paradigm shift – only then we will be able to exercise the real core of our capital – the power of sharing and influencing at will, as equal partners negotiating and being rewarded in the food chains created around us.

In the traditional marketing era we were customers, users. Companies’ value increased in parallel to the market chunk they held –it was measured by the percentage of the market share owned and by how much of the customer share they could aspire for.

We, consumers, were targeted through mass media, data companies and sophisticated marketing and sales promotions all across. Marketers owned the scene through aggressive push paradigms aimed at getting to us wherever we are and accumulating numbers of customers as a basis for the company’s value. We were capital as components within the marketing mix to be targeted and translated into siloed captivity schemes that would make it very difficult to switch and abandon loyal customer benefits defined and calculated for us.

With the advent of the internet, new semantics described our customer capital value. It was still measured in mass value terms and we were still faceless. For internet based companies we became eyeballs, and the value of the company was measured by the number of eyeballs it owned.  The model story of that era was the story in 1998 when AOL   purchased Mirabilis, the Israeli developer of the ICQ IM platform, with a free offering, no business model and no income, for its main asset – its  millions of eyeballs.

As web 2.0 evolved, we were no longer faceless. Web 2.0 was our web. We had voices, opinions, conversations. Marketers no longer owned the scene. We could independently comment, recommend, warn against, express our dissatisfaction and our peers would listen and be influenced. Marketing campaigns happened in parallel, detached from our conversations or at best responding.

Marketers had to be more careful about us. They had to become more credible to earn our trust, less intrusive in their attempts to reach us and less aggressive in their means to do so. They had to heavily invest to individually learn about each of us, hire 3^rd party companies to monitor us, get to us where we went and develop product lines and personalization schemes that would suit us as individuals. That was the beginning of the long tail economy.  Once selection is unlimited, storage is no issue and retailers no longer have to carry only the items their customers demand, each individual customer and each individual product have the same value. A real 1:1 with the hegemony and focal point totally shifted to the customer.

This pull based economic model for digital entertainment offerings meant individualized relations where customers own the scene and pull from providers what suits them best. This shift brought about a new phase of economic value – the value of recommendations. Amazon’s recommendation engine lay the foundations for a passive collaborative thread that allowed me, the individual, to be influenced by the interests of people like me. My choices and interests became of value as recommendations by the mere fact that they were mine and thus made me of value to my peers. The process was still faceless. I influenced and was influenced and marketers passively rode that wagon to enhance the personal suitability of their offerings to me.  

The next phase of the web acknowledged individual identity and built on that as user capital.  The individuality of each one of us can now be established on the web as a  micro universe of one –the long tail recognizes my individuality and singularity. Once the personal targeting phase became personified, my personal capital and value to marketers, got a new twist. I had a face. Marketers wanted to know all about me, in order to target me best, wherever I am.

Relevance to what I am looking at and real time accessibility to the message  was the name of the game, targeted ads that match ads to content I interconnect with, was the method.  My capital was translated to clicks and the currency was pay per click, first in search engines and later through sites and social platforms as well. But that again spelled as  currency to marketers alone.

 Once the social web evolved, my value as an asset and my capital exceeded the individual level, to express my significance in my social graph. I could acquire a multifaceted marketing value. My capital was measured by the place I have in my social sphere.  If once I was a distinct individual in a social surrounding and had to be individually targeted, now my social dimension entered the game. My whole social graph became of value because marketers saw in me an evangelism potential as a trusted source of recommendation.

Now I already had social capital, as Brian Solis calls it. Not only am I of value for marketers as me, a potential customer, not only is my value defined as a potential influencer to my social sphere, but my expanded social landscape makes me an anchor point to be valued on its social merit – how much do I tweet, comment, converse, participate, how many friends I have, how many, who and on how much do others respond to me. I am being targeted now for completely different reasons and invested in accordingly. Up to this point, my capital is objective and quantifiable for marketers.

But the next phase of the game – the one that will transfer the power of translating this customer capital into a currency that I can trade with – has not begun yet.

Two main components are still missing. Context and control.

contextonomics – the economics of my context – My personal context is the glue to establish my value as capital. My holistic context, that reflects who I am all across.

Companies still pay a lot to try and get closer to relevance – so that their offerings surface above the general marketing noise and get my attention. They measure it in terms of ROI (return on investment) – how much will it cost them to reach me, the individual. But once they reach me, how relevant is their offering to me? Again, the closest they can get through paid targeting is to what I am looking for right now, in search and some sites and social platform. To date my context is fragmented, dispersed all across the web.  They don’t have my whole context.

And that’s my real capital.

 My holistic context is a subjective scale that places the marketing message or offer at a personal relevance value to me individually. This is what will grab my attention the most and will turn my attention into an ROA ( return on attention) for marketers’ measuring scale.

In the same token, my social relevance to the targeted offer increases or decreases my value as a source of influence to my social sphere for that specific targeting. My being an ardent traveler and social influencer place my capital at still a higher level when I allude to a travelling related offer.

To date this subjective information about me cannot be objectified or turned into a tradable currency that I, the user, can benefit from and capitalize on.  

The other missing component in my ability to utilize my social capital is the dominance of a providers’ based top down paradigm.

Contextonomics  cannot become part of the loop as long as  I don’t have control over my data and my privacy and sharing settings,  as I am in no position to turn that data into an alternative currency I can trade with.

Only when paradigms will shift  , user centered paradigms will enter the game and ecommerce will become fully pull based, the whole marketing discourse will not ignore me as a natural component in the food chain created around me and will no longer exclude me from it. Providers share their profits with targeting companies, advertising agencies – but do not approach me directly for my relevant data and do not directly trade with over my attention. How about a marketplace where I can choose between  a free downloadable movie with 3 targeted ads or 4$ fee?

Only when these two elements that combine the economics of my context can be safely objectified under my control and user centered controlled systems will ensure my data’s privacy on my behalf – we will be able to translate our capital as customers and our social capital as influencers  into workable and tradable currency and become equal partners  in the marketing mix.    

.

 In an icentered digital world I want to experience the web from a holistic point of view that dynamically revolves around me.

In the current paradigm there are still barriers that prevent such an evolution.

1. Providers want to continue and cultivate a siloed digital landscape through proprietary applications that aim to keep me captive in their sites. It is in their interest to keep a strong hold on my accumulated data and not allow its portability. I have an elaborate profile at Amazon and greatly enjoy the refined Amazon recommendation engine. It is based on collaborative filtering that matches my affinities, as expressed in my past purchases and interests> Yet,  Amazon will make sure that, although my data are mine, I will not enjoy any of that, once I choose to shop at Barnes and Nobles.  My interest is to transcend the golden cage of user stickiness and expand to open ended contextification.
2. I still have disjoint profiles and identities. Current profile fragmentation is due to the fact that there is no global contextification architecture that can serve as a universal reference base.
3.  In various social networks and applications, different tools, choices and varied points of interest   create complex interactions. Infrastructures, applications and partial harmonization tools for user side interactions are emerging; interactions are becoming more complex and turned within the sites into interactive activity and conversation points. As a result, in many sites I can express my views and affinities through like, follow, comment, recommend and share with friends buttons, research on-site through comparative shopping links …. But all that does not yield an inclusive harmonious prism that I can capitalize on elsewhere.

3.      Blurring of boundaries – where the ecommerce world infiltrates  into our social platforms , our social spheres are used as social graphs for marketing purposes, and up to the unilateral attitude of transporting commercial arenas to new social platforms– as is the case with social marketing.  Even when social businesses attempt to take a human touch, as Brian Solis points, not all marketers are necessarily intent on a real dialog – where they listen and accommodate as part of a genuine customer service – to which social platforms naturally lend themselves, but rather see us as social consumers targetable in a one way marketing push channel.  

 Another  example of blurring of boundaries,  when  social spheres become social sales and marketing broadcast platforms, is Facebook marketing, where a social communication platform set for individuals becomes a home and sales arena for retail brands.  When Facebook expands  from its original  social communication and social identity hub and aspires to become my home page that’s one thing, but when it  also becomes a marketing and sales arena,  its original mission statement Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected no longer  reflects that user side affinity. As its business model  does not derive directly from its users, Facebook’s loyalty, doubtful to begin with, becomes all the more problematic, due to the nature of such a model. So, while  I want portability that will serve me wherever I go, Facebook wants to have it all through its portal. While  to me it does not have to spell that Facebook will turn into my department store, to Facebook, on the other hand, it is yet another building block on the way to attempting and “owning” me on the web.

In fact the movements made in this direction transfer the hegemony power struggles to yet another frontier –the anchor for web based interactions –  it generates a new war between the Facebooks and Googles around owning the biggest chunk of my digital sum total through their platforms. They woo me to  embrace them as my major interaction portal, by adding an integrated intuitive  communication platform  ( Facebook) or social ingredients to search (Google)  Their alterior motive is to facilitate collecting, storing and using my data, as profit making mechanisms.  None are trully committed to protect my privacy and would love to come with more creative ways to manipulate my data for their benefit.

So whoever wins – I still stand to lose.   

Such  solutions do not satisfy my holistic aspiration of an icentered web experience, because although the business models of these companies stem directly from me, they depend on 3^rd parties and therefore do not necessarily cater for my needs as a prime consideration. Hence I have every reason to apprehend that I may be manipulated as a tool in the profit making mechanisms -my privacy is breached, my data  may be shared without my knowledge and certainly without my consent.

As I aspire for a harmonious, inclusive and dynamic experience, I wish to have the following:

• I want that my future relations with providers be based on liberal and open ended attitudes that foster a free flow and relinquish control. A different culture does not spell loss – it challenges existing paradigms but cultivates free choices based on satisfying connectedness instead of provider based authority.
• Portability – I wish to be able to experience portability of my personal identity, profile and my social sphere between the various providers and social networks that I visit. Too few companies develop or offer open social plug -ins that empower that.
• I want sites to interconnect so my opted portability is made seamless and intuitive
• I want my experiences, choices and awarding options to my friends to share or give, at the tip of my finger, from wherever I am, with whoever I want and around relevant issues.
• I want to have the tools and means to do that and personally calibrate what suits me best.
• I want my data to reside at my side and manage my sharing with providers and friends
• I want companies to empower me, not dictate to me or exploit my data without considering me as direct partners in the food chains created around me.

Harmonization is on its way – but the buttered side of the bread is still reversed.

Only when the bread around my data will be buttered on my side and be shared by me with providers, marketers and advertisers in food chains that see me as a partner to the process – I will truly become the real customer for new platforms that are built for me – and not my data as their anchor point.

@facebook.com – Messages – my unified messaging portal- I can now talk to my friends via all real time communication means from email and up to  SMS, chat  or Messages- all through a single entry point at Facebook.

A single social integrated Inbox for all social communication is  truly a  wonderful offer.Streamlined social communications with my chosen circle of friends.  Simple, intuitive, fluid.

Spam and noise out. A white list of selected friends’  circle in.

All courtesy of Facebook.

How efficient.

How comforting.

How tempting.

How frightening!

No doubt a unified messaging system with all my friends is the future. User side harmonization is good – it’s efficient, inclusive, friendly, streaming. Takes a holistic view of me as a user and attempts to fully and intuitively accommodate me, simplify my interactions and allows me to see a comprehensive picture of my communications with a specific friend via all instant means.

What does it require of me? To reveal a lot more.

Once I register to this new system, I give Facebook my cellular number,  and access to my IM and external e-mail systems. Facebook already has a list of all my friends and can rate their value to me based on my interactions.

The good news – I don’t need to expose my shoes and bra size.

What a bear hug!

Can we afford it? Is it worth the price?

There ’s no free meal.

Beware.

Facebook wants to be there every moment of the day in all our interactions, documentation of activities, social sphere.

There’s only one question – is it really an honest to God user side service?

In a corporate driven hegemony race, can what to us users is blessed harmonization be reconciled with giants’ interests for increasing customer share and captivity through consolidation? Are we being played into the giant war between Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft…

A war over enlarging user based virtual territories.

This integrated offer will tempt me to migrate from several walled gardens  of email, IM providers  and spend more time and communications in another walled garden – Facebook.

Will we wake up one morning to find contextual text ads on the sides of our IM and chats based on what and with whom we communicated?

Can we innocently trust Zuckerberg’s soothing privacy keeping promises or, given FaceBook’s history, is it just a  lip service? Are the technologies to ensure that really there?

Where will it evolve?

How long before a cellular @facebook messaging application is up – and then we’ll be under Facebook’s hug through all media, systems and devices?

Shall we gradually stop using other mail systems, and slip into @facebooks’ comfort zone?

Will the other companies gracefully surrender or will they have to integrate Facebook’s messages to their mail systems?

And the biggest question of all – what about our privacy, ownership of our data, visibility to what we talk about and with whom?

If we feared Google’s search monitoring – that’s nothing compared to the exposure level of Facebook’s aggregated messaging platform.

Day in and day out we are prey to business social platforms. Will advertisers lurk around our walls on Facebook, hunting for indicative communications  from this single inbox?

Facebook is the natural communication platform of youngsters who intuitively share all with Facebook friends. Many of them are unaware of the distinctions, privacy implications and the data preying industry that just looks for easier ways to get it all.

Do we really want all our interactions harmonized under the auspices of a commercial entity whose business model depends on 3^rd party interests and is not directly tied to us?

In order to gain our trust Facebook will have to give us full control over our privacy settings and full visibility of their data collection, storage and usability.  

And still it is not enough.

A true user centered  web is where services are built around me, the individual, and for me, opening up the soiled gardens of providers that aim to keep me captive in a comforting bear hug.

The future lies in real user side services. A user centered approach that treats my data as my asset to keep.

When we pay a bank to keep and manage our money – its revenue streams, obligations and commitment are directly to us. Reulations to that end protect us.

Our personal data is a valuable currency and should be managed by user side data base banks that are directly just as committed to us and regulated in the same manner.

In a ubiquitous world, who needs siloed fences?

Cloud computing begins to emerge as the infrastructure of choice not just for crunching very complex computation challenges, scaling up storage or managing distributed financial transactions. Commercial cloud services, social cloud based networks, open public clouds will evolve to serve in real time any business or data process, not just for big data centers, but as a direct  infrastructure for web applications aimed for the end user market. It is the best suited infrastructure on which the vision of a contextualized icentered web paradigm can materialize.

The real value of the cloud exceeds by far the financial benefits of not having to invest huge sums in IT infrastructure or scaling up. It lies in the array of on demand based applications that can revolutionize many businesses through Saas offerings. When computation and connectivity are pervasive, commoditized, perceived as a basic utility like electricity or water,  when terms like ubiquitous, always-on, real-time, dynamic, instantaneous, pervasive will be at the heart of all  information services, it would become natural to develop an open ended approach to data retrieval.

The fragmentation and distribution of information and interaction sources in siloed sites of distinct providers is counterproductive to our interests as users, namely facilitation through simple, intuitive, adaptive modes of interaction and the ability to reorganize data flows in personal or topical strings, according to individual needs or interests. Imagine being able to organize ad-hoc strings across sites or social networks, a social graph around an event, a prismatic view of a news item, comparative and informative shopping queries, personalized search related results, open ended work information queries  – all individually rearranged, according to the personal context, relevance, history or predictive forecasting for each of us.

The cloud as an on-demand service infrastructure is robust more than any siloed data center of an individual company. It empowers mashing up the infrastructure and the applications that run on it and the creation of data strings across distributed sites. It will allow the creation of new kinds of user bound services that will exceed siloed sites, and empower more sophisticated mobile applications.

 From an icentered point of view – where will my data reside? In the cloud, dispersed in all the sites I interact with and harmonized under the umbrella of my inclusive profile. The ubiquitous nature of the cloud will allow accessibility through all media and sites, agnostic to the origin of the data’s residence. When I can access everything from everywhere, storing materials, retrieving them, collaborating, sharing and creating food chains around them, will become a non-issue. Localization loses its meaning for both data retrieval and the whereabouts of the user or device storage and computation limitations.

 The big shift from push to pull mode, as analyzed  by David Siegel, automatically shifts the wheel from content providers  who put their offerings out there, to the users who actively pull, agnostic to where what they pull resides.  Once companies adjust their businesses to the pull mode, empower account and profile portability, harmonized contextualization can start to take place.

Once data referencing schemes and tagging systems enable to pull any data and contextualize that around a personalized scheme, there is very little difference between pull of services, content and products and pulling of personal data, creation of new food chains and building companies that pull, reorganize and capitalize on the pulled data on our behalf. Data stream services will extract relevance based context strings for a specific query/service/offering. Contextualization processes, delivered by business process software through a cloud based delivery mechanism need contextualization platforms and applications – but all these cannot develop without a ubiquitous, open ended, flowing infrastructure that empowers portability and accessibility through any smart device everywhere.

Once my data and interactions reside in the cloud, I, the user, become free to access my personal files, connectivity and content, consuming files from any point – fully materializing John Gage’s vision of “the network is the computer”. New kinds of providers will emerge, giants wars over hegemony of the clouds infrastructure and providers of new food chains and services. It will truly facilitate an Itom  based new long tail models based on data aggregated from different dispersed sources, and facilitate new personalized services.

It will empower an icentered culture, since the ubiquitous infrastructure available through clouds is bound to enhance new generations of web services, using pay-per-use models that will empower individuals to do things that previously only corporates could offer, due to high costs of storage, retrieval and data manipulation. More people will be equipped with more tools, a larger portion of our life will become digital, unique individual needs, personalized eco systems will ”float” in clouds.

At the same time, cloud computing brings with it privacy apprehensions that need to be addressed.  The fact that everything is always-on, available and accessible does not mean that it is automatically exposable as well. Pervasiveness and total publicy do not automatically go hand in hand. Total availability and manipulation of data from wherever, whenever and however still must leave me, the user, in control over what to expose to whom, when, in what context and in return for what.  The non tangible conceptualization of an ether like cloud out there does not provide the mental security of a sealed data center whose owners are accountable for retrieval breaches from their data storage facilities.  

Therefore cloud service providers should be accountable for their protection levels of data stored in their clouds in the same way that banks are accountable for the security and safety of assets put in their trust.

Google TV, the new Google, Sony and Intel initiative  has a potential to dramatically change the way we view TV today. Google has partnered with Sony and Intel to create a Google TV, made by Sony and powered by Intel chips that would enable a big-screen living-room web experience.

Such a set top box will become a central home portal for managing content and connectivity interactions for the whole household, through personalized handling mechanisms and will enhance new value chains, business models and consumption patterns. It will empower a TV anytime environment and will revolutionize the way TV content is consumed, to resemble web 2.0 seamless culture.

Today there are inherent gaps between passive TV viewership and interactive web navigation. Introducing Google search capabilities will make viewership intuitive when changing from a lean back TV mode into the lean forward web based interactivity.

TV viewership is passive by nature. You watch programs within channels, in a push mode, have no ability to interact with content, family or friends in real time around the viewed content items.

 More advanced set top boxes allow for limitedpull capabilities, services and VOD (view on demand) that are based on pull and active selection of what to view and when.

A web based, Google empowered TV will enable dimensions that do not exist today. It will turn the passive TV experience into a connected and shared experience and will bring connectivity to an audience that had no accessibility to the digital empowerment of the web. It will empower interactions with content in various interactive ways, web based services and new food chains around content consumption, targeted ads and up to commercialization of items and social media connectivity through the living room screen, by facilitating communicating with family members and friends in real time around a viewed program.

The digital divide is especially prominent in regard to TV, Internet and IPTV. Older generations, who are more technophobes, tend to choose the passive, coach potato like TV viewership. It’s a medium which is familiar to them, with which they feel safe. At the same time, many boomers are used to the basic Google interfaces, as search is one of the basic functions they know how to make on the web. Google should take an inclusive approach and introduce a simplified intuitive interactive TV interface that will bridge the digital divide  and provide a gateway to the connected interactive web world through simplified user friendly usability and interaction patterns.

TV viewers will change from passive spectators to active designers of their available or tailored options.  The borderline between traditional television and Internet will become obsolete, to be replaced by full media convergence. The origin of the content – TV or web based, will become immaterial; the only factor will be the relevance to viewers’ affinities and choices.

A new era of TV viewership that will integrate social media with traditional broadcast media, will empower a whole social interaction infrastructure around programs. From the simple connectivity with family and friends, sharing views and feelings  around a viewed program and up to creating ad hoc social communities of interest, encompassing the TV equivalent to location awareness – like who is watching this and that program now – from within my social sphere and up to real time communities created around a broadcasted program.

Challenges that lie ahead for achieving a flowing Google TV experience include issues such as:

• Privacy considerations
• Personalization – profiling users and monitoring their viewership to create a predictive user context and recommendation offerings
• Harmonizing offerings around users – from viewership, connectivity and up to commercialization
• DRM (digital rights management) issues – taking care of the rights of all participants in the new food chains created around pull based TV viewership 
• Audio-Visual content indexing to enhance  searchability
• Harmonized  tagging and referencing schemes  from various broadcasters
• Simple navigation and selection in the converged multimedia and TV content offerings enabled through a search engine
• Creation   of personalized accessibility in a TV Google web based portal that can be intuitively adapted to personal choices, habits and connectivity patterns.
• Harmonization of TV and web based business models and food chains to create new long tail TV based economic opportunities.
• New ad based personalization and targeting models
• Translating elements from the participatory web to be enhanced around  TV  programs, communities of interest and social web aspects.

 Personalizing TV viewership and translating it into a web like searchable experience is a very significant step in adapting   the web to larger audiences and turning the living room into a TV web based personal portal.  

Google is in a perfect position to lead the home TV revolution. Google has reorganized the distributed content on the web to make it searchable for its users, and capitalize on it as its ad based revenue making platform for the digital world.  Google sells its online advertising through a unique online model, where every Google search is analysed to determine which advertisers are best matched to get exposure through the “sponsored links” on every results page.

Imagine Google reorganizing the TV and web based multimedia distributed content to make it searchable, build new on demand, pull based food chains and activate its analysis tools to retarget the repository of TV ads, the engine at the heart of commercial TV economics. Such a disruptive TV ad based system will replace the traditional TV ad spot buying with fully automated digital marketplace systems, by best matching relevance to individual spectators, in a web like manner. The same data mining methods at the heart of content searchability, users’ data collection, ad placement and their respective matching mechanisms can create an increasing return cycle for all the food chains, business models and for all the participants in the new TV based environment, with Google’s engines at its heart.

 Let’s only hope that in the process Google will manifest the due respect, transparency and sensitivity to its users’ trust, privacy, choices and affinities.    

 Disclaimer:  I have a traditional commercial  TV background. Also, already in 2000 I was involved in the global TV anytime forum  and over the years I was involved in additional digital TV initiatives.

Barter = exchange of goods or services for other goods or services.

 The internet facilitates the creation of context based marketplaces that are economically driven and have built in reward motivations and incentives for collaboration. Digital bartering through internet based platforms is a great bartering platforms facilitator, due to the ease of use, immediate accessibility and the transactional capability of connecting people with needs to other individuals or providers, capable of satisfying these needs.

 The simplest form of digital bartering was at the hardware level – bartering idle computing resources.

Goggle is a kind of a digital barter enabler. Google reorganizes information to make it accessible through a specific individual search prism based on users’ queries. To users, it provides search results and thus empowers free access to content. In return it uses its search platform to enable advertisers accessibility to users and derives from that its ad based revenue streams.

In the era of direct conversations, link back from content, blogs and texting is also a way of bartering, although a more fluid one. Still it creates an increasing returns cycle of introductions to relevant content and all participants benefit.

Attention bartering means exchanging consumption of digital goods or services with attention – a more sophisticated form of digital bartering. Attention bartering  is a new manifestation of the long tail economy.

 Historically, in traditional media, ad related and content bartering was done mainly between corporates. Web based, context oriented bartering can be between direct individuals, through peer to peer mechanisms, or through providers or 3^rd parties.

Digital content consumption platforms empower the ability to select personalized commercial targeting for the same content item by incorporating a variety of aggregation and distribution channels with different value adding chains and financial reconciliation mechanisms.

 It empowers new mechanism of exchange, new kinds of aggregators. A converged unified TVIP based, social media 2.0 environment allows for diversified food chains around the same content items. To name a few:

• A pay-per-view viewership of a sports match with additional prior matches of the player who scored highest or the winning team for different bundling with targeted ads and related commercial offerings for diferent price options.
• A choice of a pay per view movie, leading to additional movie offerings with the same actors/director, combined with all sorts of monitory or context + ad or merchandising bundling.
• Aggregators and providers will have banks of advertising, ads will be pulled and the advertiser rewarded for each ad sent in a pull model to a viewer.
• Users can allow companies use their profiles or data for market research, targeting and get rewarded directly as part of the food chain created around them by content offerings, digital coupons, merit points…..

From the economic sense of the web service provider  this means that each transaction executed by any of its consumers, can be monetized in full and paid directly or traded, fully or partially, for alternative service. One consumer, one movie to watch for 50% discount + 3 targeted ads or one movie to watch full price – same value.

Icentricity calls for a reversal in the foundation of transactions, anchoring it on the user negotiating with a cloud of vendors of similar offering through an array of alternative paying methods rather than a vendor negotiating with a cloud of users.

From an Icentered point of view, there is a large inventory of providers and an array of bartering options from which to choose. For the user one movie + 3 targeted ads that spell 50% discount on actual payment  + attention allocation to ads that may targeted to relevant  interests and lifestyle, or one movie full price no ads (assuming same cost) is not necessarily the same. Yet, choice, value and preferences are individual.

Edelman published last week its 2010 trust barometer. It was encouraging to see that trust in businesses and in governments  is rising. At the same time trust in media is significantly declining. The number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information regarding an offering or a provider dropped since 2008 from 45% to 25%. Incredible number.

The increasing trust in business can be connected to the rising transparency and social responsibility that organizations embraced as part of their corporate identity.

In media, on the other hand, rise of social media as a targeting platform for marketers is shaking the inherent trust we have in our social sphere.  We trust our friends and peers because they are supposed to be devoid of personal gain in their recommendations – clean, transparent p2p natural flow, reciprocal in value.

I tend to share the doubts about the accuracy of the numbers in this trust barometer, and also believe that the level of trust from friends and peers depends on more complex  factors  than reflected in the ways the questions were built. At the same time there is no doubt that the rise of the value of the social web for marketers, the growing share of social marketing in the marketing mix of companies and the open revenue based  facilitation of the social platforms to allow marketing, targeting and advertising activity, shake our automatic trust.  

Once marketers tap into our social spheres, aiming to build profits and reputation for their brands, and take on a cloak of authenticity to capture our attention, we feel manipulated and recoil. When the major social networks compete on becoming targetable communication platforms, we users, lose our town square and become more suspicious.  

So, basically, although in the attention economy recommendations from friends are much more than just attention grabbers, surfing above the noise, even people from our social sphere can’t be automatically classified as trust agents in today’s reality where:

A. My social sphere (to me a trusted more intimate personal circle) is being targeted by marketers as social media to manipulate for their profits, sometimes even with explicit incentives, and other times through technological means that are not transparent to me.

B. In an era where you may have hundreds of acquaintances, formerly known as friends, in your social network (or several of them), without any distinction of the level of proximity, intimate acquaintance, or at least the framework or context of acquaintance – being on someone’s social graph doesn’t automatically turn this person into a trust agent.

Therefore I believe that the keys are context and relevance. Trust is amorphic, subjective, non tangible. It stems from a whole subjective set of attributes, values, connotations and beliefs regarding a person, a situation, a recommendation. It establishes a level of credibility to the recommending personal friends that external sources cannot assess.

The 2 folded context/relevance around an interaction is a very strong determinant for a level of trust. The context of the recommending person to me within my social graph, levels of proximity, common interaction grounds. With it comes an attitude to the relevance of the person in my social sphere to the recommendation, the product/service and how that offering might be good for me. The personal context in which these elements are related to me and the offering, enhance my trust.

Context empowers  trust, enhances it by creating a relevance based degree of connectedness that exterior marketers cannot be aware of. 

The economics of the social web enable marketers to exploit our social sphere for their marketing purposes. Transparency is doubtful, the social platforms we use empower it and these food chains woven around us leave us outside the reward circle.

Contextonomics, the economics of context, on the other hand, cannot be easily manipulated in that way. This currency of the attention economy has a very strong subjective element inherently woven into it. It calls for explicit cooperation.

The value of the personal context around an informative transaction is something that only the parties involved can assess, as a measure of value and trust. Marketers depend on us and our explicit participation. It demands a higher level of transparency, of willing participation – and therefore entitled to a reward – a transparent food chain, between willing participants, for the benefit and reward of all parties involved.