December 4th, 2006

Are we our workers' keepers?

Posted by Esther Dyson @ 9:37 am

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Last week I had dinner with Omid Moghadam [below left] and Anne Chapman of Intel.  They had just had an interesting day meeting with a variety of would-be supporters in Washington: The Wall Street Journal had just broken – a week early – the news of a new coalition of employers who plan to offer personal health records to their employees.  But the reporter – Gary McWilliams – didn’t get it all, even though what he did get was interesting and accurate.   There should be more information next week, when Moghadam speaks at the Markle Foundation-sponsored Connecting Americans to their Health Care conference  next week in Washington.

The  context is that everyone agrees that personal health records are the wave of the future.  They will help individuals manage their own health better; they will let (authorized) doctors and health professionals share information and collaborate on caring for each patient better; they can provide shared context to support better patient-doctor communication….  In short, as I propounded in my newsletter last year, they’re a modern miracle, and they can bring nothing but good to US health care. 

Yet, to everyone’s frustration, uptake has been pathetically low.  There are a number of providers on the market, but patients won’t use them (who wants to enter all that data?) and doctors rarely accept or offer them (you can print out your information from your PHR, but you will nonetheless be handed a clipboard each time you see a new doctor or visit a new clinic).   

I could go on at length about why… but what’s more interesting is that this new coalition may actually help to change things.  Individuals do care about their own health, but they lack clout and money…and discipline.  Even though PHRs are often free, individuals alone aren’t going to get them established in critical mass.   Meanwhile, most health care institutions – the ones with the money and clout – are interested either in patients getting a lot of expensive care (the providers) or in patients getting as little or at least as inexpensive care as possible.  (I’m talking about the institutions here, not about the mostly dedicated and patient-loving people who staff them.) 

The only institutions that actually care about individuals’ health are the individuals’ employers (even though, like the individuals themselves, they also want to save money).  So getting employers excited about PHRs – both as a mechanism for better health and for cost-effectiveness – is exciting. 

Getting Wal-Mart involved is brilliant – even as the company faces huge PR and fundamental challenges; see the New York Times.

If anyone can roll out a big, complex program across a large workforce, it’s Wal-Mart.  (As it happens, wal-Mart’s person on this case, Linda Dillman, is the same woman who led its RFIS roll-out – another totally sensible but courageous and leading-the-pack move that belies notions of Wal-Mart as a stodgy, stuck-in-the-mud behemoth.)  

Wal-Mart  will have to manage this program with good marketing, genuine delivery of value and some deft footwork to persuade the cynics, but like so many socially responsible programs, PHRs are a way to do good as well as to save money.  And it fits nicely with Wal-Mart’s minute-clinic initiative. 

The challenges – as Moghadam and Chapman and everyone else involved know well – are still huge.  The Journal piece said nothing about portability, but these PHRs won’t be worth much if they don’t belong to the employees themselves.  Employers’ interest in their workers’ health is time-limited; individuals care about the long term, even if they may lack the discipline to do much about it.

And, even though Wal-Mart, Intel, British Petroleum America  and a number of yet-to-be announced employers will be pushing PHRs, they’ll have to do a better job than companies such as WebMD have done so far, with effective marketing campaigns, doctor education and so forth.  That brings me to my favorite visualization  of a health record: It’s personal, aspirational, simple enough for a child to understand… You can see its purpose, and it’s for human beings. That’s the message. 

Other links:

http://clinicalit.blogspot.com/2006/10/podcast-exclusive-interview-with-intel.html

Markle Foundation

December 4th, 2006

End the heartbreak of repetitive registrations!

Posted by Esther Dyson @ 9:10 am

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I just had dinner with Dick Hardt of Sxip. He’s about to launch Sxipper, an open-source, "learning" version of those familiar adware wallet tools. This one will be a Firefox plug-in, coming out in a couple of weeks. It's free, but (natch) there's a charge for premium services.

The basic idea is that you keep your own personal data locally, stored in your browser (by the plug-in extension, actually). Meanwhile, Sxipper reads most Web fill-in-the-blanks forms and maps their fields onto your data. (Yes, you can have multiple personas for work/home addresses, etc.) But – as anyone who has used these tools knows – they often mess up, entering your address where your name should be, and so forth. Sxipper is extensible; it lets users "map" new forms – by filling in their data, which implicitly identifies the fields – and then it stores the mapping on the Sxipper server. When user B comes to the same site, Sxipper fetches the mapping from the Sxipper server. So rather than do a lot of semantic tagging itself, Sxipper relies on user-generated metadata to parse each new form once only, and then shares the results among its users. Pretty cool.

November 8th, 2006

Seriosly interesting

Posted by Esther Dyson @ 7:49 am

Categories: Start-up, Uncategorized

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Helen Cheng of Seriosity spoke at PC Forum last March, but she said very little about her own company  and talked mostly about her experiences as a level-60 World of Warcraft warrior.  She fascinated the audience,  especially with her persuasive assertion that “everything is so transparent; you can know people deeply by their behavior.” 

But I think what her company Seriosity is up to is even more fascinating.  It now has a brand-new CEO - Ken Ross, formerly of Extricity, Pillar and Ross Systems - and 20-plus employees and offshore developers.  And its website gives a little hint of what it is up to. 

Last March, the pitch was: We learn from games to enhance productivity in the corporate environment.  The obvious conclusion was:  Dragons and dwarves competing to produce a payroll, or 10 cold calls puts you in a nicer virtual office. 

But no; that would be too shallow.  Instead, it’s using the kinds of reward systems used in games – its own in-world currency, in a word – to encourage whatever behavior a corporate customer wants to encourage.  But – and this is key

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October 18th, 2006

Trip report: Kazakhstan

Posted by Esther Dyson @ 7:22 am

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Kazakhstan has probably had more Google hits in the last month than ever before in its short existence as a republic independent of the Soviet Union - since 1992 barely older than Google itself. That’s due to three things: the recent visit of Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan’s autocratic ruler, who has been in charge since he became a leader of the then Soviet Republic in the 1980s; Kazakhstan’s controversial attempt to lead the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, for which many parties consider it unqualified by virtue of its own internal opacity and autocratic government; and the satire of Jewish comedian Sasha Ali G. Cohen, stage name Borat, which have gained great publicity through the Kazakh government’s ham-handed attempts to shut him up (by lodging a protest with the USG).

Countering all these deficiencies are the country’s huge oil reserves, which allow it to mingle in polite geopolitical society, and also indirectly to buy off a population that might otherwise be more restive. I spent a weekend there a week ago. It has taken me that long to digest things, and there have also been some subsequent events.

I was there mostly because it was a convenient stop between Athens and Bangalore (if you like traveling!), and because I’m the board member of the National Endowment for Democracy responsible for the region. (I speak Russian and have great familiarity with the former Soviet Union, but I had been in Kazakhstan only once before.)

Miriam Lanskoy, NED program officer for Eurasia, happened to be there that weekend too, and she let me come along with her as she rode her circuit. Our first meeting (after a brief excursion to buy a genuine Speedo bathing cap for $5 in a local sporting goods emporium) was lunch with the “party institutes,” the National Democratic Institute, chaired by Madeleine Albright, and the International Republican Institute, chaired by John McCain. They are arms of the NED, whose overall mission is to support the spread of democracy (but not of specific parties) wherever it may be springing to life. It does that mostly through grants to in-region NGOs. The Institutes, by contrast, run programs of their own: Mostly, they train any aspiring political organizers who are interested in the mechanics of party activism: direct mail, message development, media training and the like.

To be candid, this notion had left me a little uneasy until now. How can you non-partisanly train people in partisanship? But after meeting the players - Josh Bergin of the IRI and Mary Cummins and Sameera Ali of the NDI - and hearing them describe their work, I felt a lot better about the whole thing. They are indeed mostly going around teaching people how to run a mail-merge program, how to craft a clear message, how to measure public opinion, and so forth. There are certainly ways you could mis-apply the learning, but in this world where 1490 of 1500 newspapers are government-owned or aligned, teaching people the nuts and bolts of bottom-up communications seems pretty one-sidedly good.

Yet, as it happens, the activities of NDI and IRI have been in suspension in Kazakhstan since last spring, courtesy of the Kazakh government. This issue was raised in DC during Nazarbayev’s visit, we hear, but there has been little news since. This report, in Governo-Kazakh, does little to clarify things.

Next we went to Club Polyton, a lively discussion club held in a largish room off a warren of offices, run by Nurbulat Massanov, a political scientist and scholar of Kazakh history and national identity. He had devoted his life to fostering political discussion and was able to get visiting dignitaries of all kinds to stop by his club to speak to and with local activists. The audience that Saturday probably skewed a little techy because of my presence: it comprised the leaders of the leading political Websites, kub.kz and zona.kz, and the Website of Respublika, the leading independent newspaper (which just that morning had carried a statement by local NGOs advising against Kazakhstan’s chairmanship of the OSCE). We had a lively discussion.

Nurbulat Massanov and his wife

This community is active and engaged among themselves, but they don’t reach much of the broader public. A typical home/small business Internet account at 512k - but hardly affordable by a typical home - costs $300/month, so Internet users number about half a million of Kazakhstan’s 15 million people (3 percent). Censorship is active, but it’s not like in China (where you often know your censor and can negotiate, and the blocking often applies to search queries rather than to the sites themselves): In Kazakhstan, sites are simply blocked. There’s certainly a correlation between political edginess and blocking, but it’s not precise or predictable. This is a country, remember, where two opposition leaders, (Zamanbek Nurkadilov andAltynbek Sarsenbayev) were murdered in the last year, so no one wants to test things too far.

One person mentioned that the government had recently disclosed the salary of the president of the monopoly telecom provider, 51-percent-owned by the government and 49-percent-owned by private, not very transparent interests. He makes $365,000 per month, plus a $2-million annual bonus. That aroused predictable outrage, but the real question people were interested in was who had caused the news to be released and why?

I suggested that one way the group could be active without pushing things too far would be to launch a campaign for cheaper internet access. Even with a monopoly still in place, lower prices would likely mean more revenues, with price elasticity turning a 50 percent drop in prices into more than double the number of accounts over time. (It was a challenge to explain that in Russian, where both the words and the concepts are unfamiliar.)

But, Massanov told me, in paraphrase, “Don’t be naive. This isn’t just about money; it’s about control. They don’t want us to have access….”

Perhaps, I countered, but you could get quite a large part of the business community - and perhaps some of the trade and commercial people in the government - on your side.

City arrest

After Polyton, we went to see Galymzhan Zhakiyanov, perhaps the smoothest, most appealing politician of the (as-yet unformalized) opposition. He was a favorite of Nazarbayev and had risen under him became the youngest Kazakh governor at the age of 31. But, as Zhakiyanov tells it, Nazarbayev refused to follow a true reform course and became increasingly authoritarian. . Eventually, Zhakiyanov departed to become a businessman…and form an opposition political party Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan (DVK). Soon after that he was indicted for tax fraud. (Shades of Mikhail Khodorkovsky in Russia, a businessman who challenged Putin’s authority and is now languishing in jail in Siberia). Zhakiyanov spent four years (of a seven year sentence) in jail; now he is out on a sort of “city arrest”: He can’t leave Almaty, Kazakhstan’s second-largest city and its commercial center. He’s now developing a civil-society program that will probably sponsor a variety of initiatives aimed at developing internet media resources and youth programs. He’s lucid and appealing - more so than anyone else I met, and that very fact makes him suspect in many quarters. He was a political insider and a businessman; is it possible for him to be clean?

I put the same case for cheaper Internet access to Zhakiyanov, and he considered it more enthusiastically, but I don’t think it will be a priority. (He also asked if I could give him technical advice on his website; I demurred. But I do think some kind of general back-end infrastructure service, provided by the NED or some other organization, would be tremendously useful for and popular among NGOs in the countries the NED serves.)

After that, we went to a reception for the opening of the Eurasia Foundation’s new EF Central Asia, which has just opened, run by longtime EFer Andrew Wilson. It is an independent but affiliated NGO, with its own management and some of its own funding, including from corporations such as Philip Morris, AES Corporation, Microsoft Kazakhstan, TengizChevroil and PetroKazakhstan. The mother EF, like the NED, began as a government-funded institution, but it has diversified its revenue sources and is more focused on civil-society projects in general rather than democracy and governance in particular.

Sunday - site visits

On Sunday, we went to see some of the people whom all this activity is supposed to empower. Sergei Solyanik took us there; he works for Green Salvation, an environmental NGO, First, a family - mother and daughter, the father was ill - whose house is overshadowed by a high-voltage power line built a couple of years ago. An underground cable broke, and the local government decided to save money - against community wishes - by replacing it with a kilometer-long open-air power line of the sort you sometimes see out in wild country, but rarely near human settlements. For starters, the line itself is an electrical and fire hazard; this one was especially scary since it was no more than 20 meters away from an above-ground gas pipe in many places. Second, the community believes that it is causing numerous health problems among the people who live near it. That’s harder to determine, but it certainly contributes to the community’s almost unanimous but still ignored desire to see the things buried underground. As usual, there’s a lack of clarity as to how this happened, where the money went, and whether the cable will or will not be buried shortly. Green Salvation has filed a suit on behalf of the community, and won its case in international court under Aarhus Convention, but the local government has not implemented the decision of the international convention body.

Next we went out to the town of Shanirak [photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/edyson/271562995/in/photostream/], , which used to be outside city limits but is now under the rule of the ever-expanding Almaty municipality. Again, a brief version of a murky story: There’s a settlement of about 1500 people who came here from all parts of Kazakhstan and built their own homes. They have documents from the old government officials certifying that they have paid for the right to live on this land. Now the new government says those old documents are invalid…and besides, the water table there is too low and so on. They have cut off electricity and water.

The new municipal government of Almaty doesn’t recognize rights or deeds granted under the previous government, and is trying to move her and her neighbors out by means fair or foul.

There’s some question whether the old government had the right to sell the land to the settlers, or where the money went to, but certainly the settlers relied on those representations. Meanwhile, there are settlements nearby - one of retired policemen - that just don’t have the same problems under the new Almaty government. The spot the settlers occupy is slated to be used for a new shopping mall.

As we stood out in the sunshine, we could see destroyed houses, amidst standing houses that also looked fairly decrepit. There were outhouses, and one shack with a plastic bucket atop, which passed for a shower. Various people came up and joined the conversation: they could all remember the time in July when city authorities, along with security police and bulldozers, showed up to raze the buildings. The villagers protested, standing in front of their homes. The most voluble o the women told us how she had doused herself and her children with gasoline, and threatened to strike a match. The forces stood down, but not without wrecking part of her house. More alterations ensued, and some rocks were thrown. The police claimed that the settlers had stockpiled rocks as weapons; the settlers said they were just construction materials lying around. At the end of the day, one of the policemen had been burned to death in a gasoline fire. The police attributed it to the settlers; the settlers attributed it to a provocateur.

Later, we visited a similar place elsewhere around the city - a similar story, but with more destruction, called Bakai. In this case, about 400 houses were destroyed even though the city had cases against only 35. People were still living there amidst the ruins. Again, the story was murky, and some people, who had either paid off officials or paid for legitimate approvals (the difference wasn’t clear) were spared

. Another view, but not entirely

Over dinner, it was my turn to show Miriam and her colleague Rebekah Boone another side of Kazakhstan - dinner with the owner (from Russia) and the manager of a small local business with about 10 employees. They provide software and support to local customers. They are not “connected” to anyone in power, and they are doing reasonably well. Yet they prefer not to be named, which probably says as much as anything about the state of things in Kazakhsta

n.

The manager, call him Nur-Nur (which means Nice-Nice), had read about the events in Shanirak and Bakai ; as far as he knew, they concerned a bunch of criminal elements who had attempted to steal government land and were terrorizing their neighborhoods. But…the story wasn’t so simple. It turns out Nur-Nur’s own house is under threat: The government also plans to build some more modern buildings in his neighborhood, and they will demolish his house. He will get compensation; however, he doubts it will reflect the true value of the property. “Why don’t you get together with the neighbors to protest?” I asked, waiting to espouse the virtues of collective action. But he didn’t think that would work. His neighbors already think he’s suspect, since his house (built by his father) is considerably nicer than theirs. So he plans to go it alone, and has hired a lawyer.

As for the rest, there was agreement that the climate for small business - as long as it doesn’t tangle with anyone - is more favorable in Kazakhstan than in Russia. Big business may mostly have ties to the Nazarbayev family, but there is not quite as much of the petty corruption you find in Russia. Nazarbayev has tighter control than Putin; it’s a small country after all.

Subsequent events

On my flight out of Kazakhstan I ended up sitting next to the Foreign Minister, Kassymzhomart Tokaev. We chatted, and I didn’t mention either Borat or Shanirak. I didn’t think there was much point, and I was more interested in inserting good ideas into the national discussion than scoring points. So we did talk about telecom, and I stressed once again that lower prices would do nothing but good for the country. Of course he’s not the minister of either telecom or economics, but ideas do get through. Just as Google is good for China, so, I think, would the Internet be good for Kazakhstan.

Later in the week, I heard from Miriam that Nurbulat Massanov had suddenly died - not under suspicious circumstances - of a known food allergy last Tuesday. He’d had lunch with a friend at a restaurant and got ill several hours later a medical emergency team showed up, but they couldn’t save him. It was truly an accident - and also a terrible tragedy, both for his friends and family, and for Kazakhstan. People of such commitment and courage are rare, and Kazakhstan needs more of them.

October 15th, 2006

What I really said at Office 2.0

Posted by Esther Dyson @ 5:38 pm

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I just did an interview with Dan Farber at the Office 2.0 Conference, and surprised myself with what came out.  What is Office 2.0?  It's not shared spreadsheets; it's spreadsheets for processes.

To be honest, I haven't been focusing much on Office 2.0… sounded pretty corporate and boring.  So I hustled to find out about this phenomenon, and it mostly seemed like Salesforce.com 2.0–adding personal-productivity apps to the range of software offered online. But I don't really see that changing the world. And, for what it's worth, I have been spending too much time lately in parts of the world where the notion of working online persistently is a joke.

I think Office 2.0 is something entirely different. Yes, it's online, and it's about the way the platform allows the sharing of information, but the trick is managing the processes, not managing the content.

That is, we need tools that will help us keep track of the workflow. For example, I send a blog post out to three people to make sure I quoted them correctly. Now I want a way automatically to ping the ones who haven't responded. That's a minor problem. But I have 20 or 30 of them a way….so I want a process spreadsheet, a tool that lets me set up little processes, copy and modify and re-use them. I want to be able to share them with other people. And, perhaps my company wants a way to create them and distribute them.

But in general, as we think about Office 2.0, we need to avoid the trap of thinking that work rules are centralized and hierarchical.  Rules can be peer-to-peer too–if we have tools to create and share them in a bottom-up way.

What's missing is tools that can add this awareness and functionality to our existing tools and data, not a seamless, closed environment. We need to be able to track our e-mails and bring outsiders into the stream. The ideal tool doesn't simply let you synch calendars and share work; it tracks commitments, requests, fulfillment of requests–in a word, work transactions.

The closest thing to all this is the suite of "activity management" tools from IBM (nee Lotus), which are–surprise!–becoming increasingly open. But the really interesting development is the availability of this kind of functionality at retail… just as Google et al. made the Web-as-library universally available (and affordable).

Putting these kinds of capabilities online does not just let users collaborate. In the long run, it will be another important step towards what the Internet does in so many places–empower the little guy, and in this case, empower lots of little guys working on their own or for little-guy companies to collaborate effectively with other little guys.

Itensil has a workflow tool that I saw just glimpse of. It's heading in the right direction, but it doesn't yet integrate well enough with users' existing software.  Other candidates include Zoho, which includes some project-management tools in an extensive suite, and Near-Time, which has roles and permissions but not (as far as I can tell) full-fledged activity transactions.

If there's something out there that I am missing, please let me know…and let me know if I can share!

October 2nd, 2006

Google - beyond the interview

Posted by Esther Dyson @ 11:01 am

Categories: Long-tail, Uncategorized

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I recently interviewed Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, for a video series sponsored by British Telecom. You can see it either at BT.com (registration required) or at interview iTunes. Or you can read on for my unapproved speculations about Google's future. I think it's clear Google needs to move more aggressively into personalization and also into more structured ways of looking at data/metadata. Note that Eric did not necessarily agree…

Personalized search

On personalization: It's inevitable, even though Google is reluctant to get caught up in the privacy issues around user data, especially after AOL's recent fiasco with user data…for which, not surprisingly, it is now getting sued.

Yet it seems clear to me that in order to make its search better, there's little that Google can do other than to understand what each user is looking for. The fat front of search is has been fairly well covered; the long tail needs knowledge about the searcher. Of course, it does no good simply not to collect personally identifiable information. As AOL demonstrated, people give away a lot by their searches. Better, I think, to take the opposite route, and to work with the users: Tell them that you're trying to make their searches better, and ask them to help you. One way to keep management lean is to give managers too much to do, says Schmidt. Make it easy – really easy – for them to turn tracking on and off, and then rely on their common sense to figure out what they want to reveal and what to hide. By trying to be unobtrusive, services end up feeling sneaky. Imagine a service that said: "This is what we know about you, and how." And that then invited you to edit the metadata. In the end, social engineering will be as least as important as technical engineering to do this right. Some early examples include mSpoke and RootMarket, all of which let the user participate.

But once the users want to play, then the system needs to be good at matching behavior and demographics

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September 18th, 2006

Just for the record

Posted by Esther Dyson @ 7:45 am

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This was a flattering piece in Crain’s New York (subscription only) about the New York Angels, including me, but it said that I had been an early investor in Google.  In fact, I had early stock, but through Kleiner Perkins and Angel Investors.  I  wish I had been that smart, but I’d prefer to correct the record.  Here’s what I wrote to the reporter:

"Thanks for the wonderful story! 

"However, as I made clear [in an e-mail to which you replied],  I did not invest in Google directly.  It was probably an editor’s attempt to make things short and punchy, but it ended up being inaccurate.  

"It’s not a big deal, but I would very much appreciate a brief correction of the facts,  making it clear that I did not mislead you. Thank you!" 
 

September 16th, 2006

Don't write my obit just yet!

Posted by Esther Dyson @ 2:41 pm

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Word has slowly gotten out that the PC Forum last March was the last ever.  So let me interview myself:

 
What happened? 

 Well, with very few exceptions, each PC Forum would be better than the previous  year’s.  Yet, even though everyone was happy and the compliments mostly flowed in, I would spend the first couple of days after each Forum in a post-partum depression, thinking through the bits that had not been perfect, eager to do it again and do it better.  

But last March, amazingly, I was satisfied. I t was still not perfect, but I didn’t think I could do it better.  The whole thing flowed smoothly from start to finish, with questions raised by the early speakers resonating through the later discussions. (For the transcripts, see here.) We had finally reached Release 1.0 of PC Forum; it was ready to ship and declare complete.

 But what about the business decision?

 Daphne Kis and I sold EDventure Holdings (including PC Forum) to CNET almost three years ago.  From my perspective, one goal was to put PC Forum into other hands so I could do other things.  That has finally happened, though CNET has elected not to continue it with someone else at the helm.

So do you have a non-compete? Would you like to start over?

 Yes, I have a non-compete, but it’s not even necessary. I have no interest in doing another PC Forum.  I will be continuing to run Flight School, with Aspen Institute (save the dates: June 21-22). And I’ll be doing other events, as moderator, speaker  or panelist rather than organizer.  But I keep telling people they should change and take on new challenges, so that’s what I’m doing. It just took a while!

 I still don’t get it. Won’t you miss it?

 Let me tell you a true story from yesterday:   I was in an old gymnasium on Governor’s Island. There was a basketball lying on the floor, and a basket on a stand. I suppose I must have played basketball in high school, but certainly never since.  So I started trying to get the ball into the basket. It took about ten tries, and when I succeeded I quit.  It took almost 25 years for me to make the goal with PC Forum…

 What will you do instead?

 Well, I’m still an active employee of CNET Networks as editor at large and as the writer of this blog.  I also do a fair amount of private investing, speaking and general Internet troublemaking on the side.  None of that will change.

September 12th, 2006

A quick tour of marketing magic

Posted by Esther Dyson @ 6:02 pm

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A client of CNET’s recently asked me to do a presentation on “important events in marketing,” and I got to thinking about it in the pool this morning.  Good marketing sings; it resonates with something that’s already in the recipient’s mind.  And that’s why I love it: A good message  expands when it hits its target. 

Here’s Release 0.9 of what I will say:

Note that this will be a somewhat personal tour, since I’ve been lucky enough to be associated with some of the great examples. 

The two campaigns that I like the most are brilliantly local and clever, in the best sense of the word…

The first was Federal Express.  I was a 20-something security analyst, and Federal Express was trying to get traction with a broad public for its revolutionary overnight delivery service. It did what good marketers did, and considered what made it different.   The first couple of years it focused on “absolutely, positively…overnight,” which was a new and seemingly impossible promise in those days, in messages delivered by an impossibly fast-talking man (produced by Ally & Gargano).

Then the company’s marketing whiz, the late Vince Fagan (one of FedEx’s terminals in Memphis is named after him), realized it needed to reach a broader market; call it the long tail of the overnight-shipping business.  FedEx started a flight of ads assuring “little guys” that it would talk to them too: One featured a single little guy in a small office surrounding himself with noise (radios, bells and the like) so that he could sound important enough when he picked up the phone to call Federal Express. The tagline, “Hello, Federal?” became famous…and so, ultimately, did Federal Express.

Some years later, in the early 80s, I spent a weekend at a company retreat with Michael Dell. Dell did not have particularly memorable ads, but it had a memorable positioning, which is what underlies

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September 10th, 2006

Worth your attention

Posted by Esther Dyson @ 5:18 pm

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Michael Goldhaber is the real thinker behind the attention economy concept.  Ironically, he hasn’t really gotten the attention he deserves. He wrote an issue of Release 1.0 (my newsletter) way back in the early 90s, and he gave a stunning but mostly ignored talk at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference last year.  (There was just too much going on, and you have to think to get what Goldhaber is saying.)

In  essence, he’s saying no, the attention economy is not just about how to get attention for things so that people will buy them.  Attention itself has value, and people will work hard to earn it… and will pass it out sparingly (if only because they have only so much time to pay attention to things).

I’ve always wanted to create a calculus of attention: One Henry Kissinger can get attention from 20 statesmen or from an audience of 2000 regular people. One of those statesmen can get 100 people each…  

But attention also depends on context:  Why do (would-be) important people  travel with a retinue? It’s not just to handle the money; it’s also to make sure there’s someone around to pay them attention. Take a high-level diplomat and put him in the wrong country, or take a high-powered financier and put him in a hamburger joint in some little town, and he’ll be ignored…

But  there’s a lot more, and it’s pretty radical.  It’s not trading money for attention, he asserts. It’s a really new economy, just as different as our industrial economy was from the feudal economy. (Personally, I think they are cumulative.)  

But pay attention! You can read Michael himself here.