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Saturday, April 20, 2002 |
Future Battle: Financial Services vs. Wireless Operators
"As the wheels of my plane touch down on the runway in Denver, my cell-phone announces my arrival, signaling a message to the valet parking attendant to retrieve my car and bring it kerb-side. As I walk through the terminal, I find a Coke machine and point my phone at it. Typing in the number of the vending machine, I order a Coke, the price of which is added to my monthly statement. About that time, a slew of additional messages are also triggered, notifying my online calendar to place me back in Denver, and sending a text message to my wife that I've landed safely....
As I approach my car, my cell phone and the car agree to unlock the doors and allow me entry, recognizing who I am, it sets my seat and radio station for me, along with my desired temperature.
On the way home, I take the express lane through the toll booths; again, it’s my cell phone that allows me to pass through the fast lanes without stopping to drop $.50 in the receptacle.
The concept that my cell phone represents not just a personal communications device, but a ‘communicating’ personal identity utility, capable of helping me actually use my identity with other identities is not a far-off concept. In fact, nearly everything described above is already being done in Europe and Japan using a combination of cellular and location based wireless services.
So where does this leave the financial services industry with their non-communicating credit cards and smart cards? What if the concept of a smart-card that requires physical interaction with smart-card readers represents just enough inconvenience that consumers leap-frog them if favor of their cellular/Bluetooth enabled devices, siphoning ecommerce transactions and cash micro-payment transactions to the wireless operator?" [Digital ID World, via kuro5hin.org]
I love this kind of extrapolation, and I'm one of those that can't wait for the benefits of this kind of technology. Of course, for any of this to really work, wireless carriers are going to have to accept phone number portability, rather than fight it. Of course, by then I'll probably be an IP address anyway, so that's the number I would be more concerned about keeping.
Duck - here comes an aside!
This is the first time I've visited Digital ID World, but you can be sure I'll be back (or better yet, that'll I'll try to create a feed for my aggregator). Lots of interesting articles here, including the following:
11:08:39 PM Permanent link here
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Today we took the kids to see The Rookie. It was a great movie, although there is a definite sappiness factor. It was still good, all the more so because it's based on a true story.
We were all wondering how true-to-life the movie is to the story of Jimmy Morris, so naturally I'm looking it up on the internet. Here are some links in case this interests you. It really is an incredible story, one that Morris wrote about in an autobiography that I hadn't noticed before. I wish I had followed this story the first time around.
For families, the key line that your kids will repeat over and over is "I'm not doing it."
10:15:53 PM Permanent link here
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Cool - it was as easy I thought it would be to create a Googlebox that shows what sites Google thinks are related to my site. And what an interesting list it is, too. Not the most authoritative, but it will be interesting to watch it change over time.
Anyway, if you want to add something similar to your Radio site, here's the code I used. Just substitute your own URL for mine.
<%google.macros.box ("related:www.theshiftedlibrarian.com")%>
which produces this:
[Macro error: The server, api.google.com, returned a SOAP-ENV:Server fault: Exception from service object: Invalid authorization key:]
I plan to add it over on the right, but I don't want to until I know how to add the tableWidth parameter. Profuse gratitude to anyone that can tell me how!
9:44:03 PM Permanent link here
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For Bruce as his firm starts thinking about what they want their online presence to look like and what they want it to accomplish: Law Firms Need to Reassess Their Internet Presence
" 'In the digital age, firms that want to stay on the cutting edge must continuously reassess whether their Internet presence allows their messages to be seen, noticed, and, most important, retained...'Pushing' news out to audiences through e-mail news alerts and electronic newsletters can be another effective element of a marketing package.' [Law.com]
I agree that most law firms are behind the curve with their websites as far as providing fresh content. Denise Howell and I have talked about whether law firms will use blogs to help "push" fresh legal news out to their potential clients. RSS feeds would be good, but the clients would have to be able to receive them, and we're definitely not there yet. I really think that more effort should be focused on the Internet and less on things like mail-out newsletters." [Ernie the Attorney]
What would be cool is a news aggregator that you could either pre-configure and give to clients/customers or a set of newsfeeds that could be added in by a simple click of a button. Maybe you have to pay for the product, but you give it to your clients for free. You blow their minds as you give them a gentle introduction to aggregated news (no need for them to understand the intracicies of RSS), and leap to the head of the pack in gaining access into their daily news routine. You could even brand the screen with your logo and include a link to contact you. It's an incredible marketing opportunity just waiting for the company that can make the software easy, the interface usable, and the documentation thorough.
 Radio already does an incredible job of achieving easy installation of both the software and RSS feeds it generates (the XML coffee cup is ingenious), but you wouldn't want to give your customers all of the extra functionality that would confuse them. Can Radio separate out the aggregator and license it to companies for such a purpose? Or is there a comparable product out there that is this easy?
9:14:06 PM Permanent link here
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"The Tragically Hip, Summerside of Life - Gordon Lightfoot cover
(note: This is not a real recomendation. This is Matt testing enclosures. Though I do recommend this song if you're into live cover done by the Hip :) )." [Best of Emergent Music]
Continuing the theme for the day, I'm having more fun with enclosures. I decided it was time to subscribe to The Best of Emergent Music Weblog in order to see the recommendations in my news aggregator. Lo and behold, I immediately got a song I'm following up on now on their web site and the above song as an enclosure. If you haven't experienced this yet, it's difficult to explain how awesome this is, but hopefully I'll find some time to write up all of my news aggregator experiences next month when things slow down a little for me.
Record companies don't have any idea what they're missing. They could be selling new music to me as I write this, but it will be quite some time before they either 1) figure this out, and 2) get past their fear of a new business model.
In the meantime, I'm going to keep enjoying music delivered right to my desktop!
8:37:58 PM Permanent link here
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Gary is tracking the Google Answers site, and he even got to talk to a spokesperson there. He's posted the answers on his site (scroll down to 4/18), but based on what I've seen so far, this isn't a fair competition with libraries because the resources you're allowed to use to answer questions are limited to "open web resources." We have oh-so-much-more available to us to answer your questions.
I still stand by my statement that your best bet for an authoritative, accurate answer is your local library (academic, public, school, or special). Oh, and it would be free.
8:25:03 PM Permanent link here
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Social Responsibility of Search Engines
"Google is great, but they are great mainly by default. Their algo is not super good, compared to what's possible, but it sure made AltaVista and others look bad. Mostly, it was Google's timing that was great.
The bigger Google gets, the more important it becomes for me to emphasize that search engines have social responsibilities. If there were a forum for people like me, my comments could be more general and not aimed at Google all the time....
Eventually, a FAST-type engine should be administered by a consortium of librarians who are protected civil servants of a world government. Or at least they ought to belong to the American Library Association, or something similar. They should have a strong public interest; even stronger than the "Chinese wall" that is supposed to separate the op-ed, news reporting, and advertising functions in the journalism business, and that expects that obvious conflicts-of-interest are disclosed.
It won't happen in our lifetimes -- the globalists who are closest to forming a global government are currently more like the directors of Enron, than they are like the librarian civil servants I have in mind. But at least we can raise the issue." [WebmasterWorld, sent in by Bruce!]
Amen and hallelujah! This is exactly why I'm always advocating librarian-based pagerank be embedded in Google. We don't have the money, staff, or resources to create our own version of Google (the Librarians' Index to the Internet is about as close as we've been able to get), as one of the comments to the above post notes:
"I wonder if it would be possible to find appropriate grants to fund a project like that? Why waste time chit chatting in a forum about it, if it could actually be done?
OK, having the project "adopted" by the UN as an official NGO or something like that may be a stretch at first, but perhaps someone like the ALA or the ACLU would hop on board with some kind of support?"
And yet another comment:
"Imagine if keeping track of and providing access to all the world's books was left entirely up to the booksellers? No public libraries anymore... it's all commercial now. Imagine what would be hidden, forgotten, lost, and unavailable due to local protest groups' picket lines... THAT is a much more dangerous idea, IMO."
This analogy goes a bit off-track from the initial discussion of search engines, but unfortunately it's a very real possibility if libraries are not granted provisions for circulating digital materials.
Here's a thought - can the Librarians' Index to the Internet provide an API the way Google now does?
2:59:16 PM Permanent link here
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Song: New York  Artist: Bari Koral
From the CD: Cloud Walking
Another mind bomb going off in my head. Today I magically received my first enclosure, and it's a great song courtesy of Adam Curry. He's started a Fresh Free Music channel through which he pipes new songs through an RSS feed. I subscribed to it, and you can, too!
Too damn cool, and an excellent use of this technology to turn me on to a new artist. That's due in part to the fact that I trust Adam, but it's just one more way I can consolidate my online experience into one efficent page, namely my news aggregator. It's too bad I can't download the song for a small fee from the artist's web site, because I would.
My online life gets better and better by the day!
1:09:25 PM Permanent link here
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Ken Rawlings is a busy guy!
"While on the subject of newsfeeds, here are a couple more i'm generating with RSSDistiller:
I've also got prototype feeds for several of the web deals forums (FatWallet, TechBargains, etc.) but they're not very useful in their current form since Radio's algorithm for detecting duplicate posts is more fragile than expected, and seeing the same post over and over (and over) again gets rather old."
I've been waiting to get Cam's site in my aggregator, so mucho thanks to Ken!
12:49:11 AM Permanent link here
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"Christina Aguilera and The Strokes are probably the least likely collaborators you could find in today's music world. Christina dishes out the shiny bubblegum pop, while the Strokes mine rock's past to create tunes that sound like they were recorded 20 years ago. But while Aguilera and The Strokes will probably never share a stage or a studio, you can hear them perform together, thanks to the heady mix of the Internet, computers, and clever pranksters with too much time on their hands. In fact, Christina and The Strokes play together perfectly, in total sync--she's singing "Genie in the Bottle" while they back her with "Hard to Explain"--on a bootleg remix by an entity who calls himself The Freelance Hellraiser. Just search for Aguilera Strokes on KaZaa or Google, and you'll see what I mean (or enter A Stroke of Genius, the absolutely perfect title). If the labels need further proof of who now holds the reins of the music industry, this should probably seal the deal: The Artists Formerly Known As Fans....
These downloadable bootleg remixes are a manifestation of that same development, taken online and to the extreme. People are pairing Eminem with AC/DC for weird results and coming up with clever titles such as "Smells Like Missy Elliott," which matches Nirvana with Ms. Elliott (who, incidentally, spells her name wrong--see the byline above).
Of course, the entire enterprise makes a mockery of sample clearance, copyright law, and the fleeting notion that artists have any measure of control over their own work. So what? The Internet is filled with data, and some of that information is music that can be manipulated by anyone with a computer and some imagination. I'm sure the record companies are going ballistic about this development but only because their blinkered view prevents them from seeing this trend for what it really is: a twisted form of tribute....
Let's get you hooked up with some of these bootleg remixes, so that you can add to your collection if you're already a fan or see what all the fuss is about if you're new to the scene. Sometimes you just have to stumble across them--try searching file-sharing programs for bootleg remix or other such terms--but you'll find some good places to start below. Remember, you're likely to encounter a decent dose of irreverence or (in some cases) obscenity on these sites, so if you're easily offended, give it a pass and check out the MP3 Insider archive for more serious fare." [MP3 Insider]
At the bottom of the page is a link to MP3PopUp, a free download that scans your hard drive for MP3s and then organizes them in a directory. For your musical enjoyment.
12:32:44 AM Permanent link here
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Paul Holbrook notes:
"I heard something this morning that sounded odd, but in the years to come will be so familiar that we'll all forget when we first heard it. It was a story on NPR about trying to reverse the 'sunset' on the new tax rates that will occur in 2011. The odd part the way the politician and the reporter said 2011 out loud: they said "twenty-eleven."
Up to now, that's not what people say: for 2002 and 2000, we say "two-thousand-and-two" and "two-thousand". Even for years further out, that's the way I've heard it up until now: "The social security trust fund will run out of money in two-thousand and twenty-three." But over time the shorter way will win, and chances are people in the future will reverse the way we talk about the decade we're in now: "The World Trade Center attack occurred in twenty-oh-one"."
12:24:43 AM Permanent link here
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© Copyright 2004 Jenny Levine.
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