Privacy is dead

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This blog post is triggered by a start-up demonstration i saw at DEMOFall2009 some weeks ago.

The demo was about an iPhone application called “datecheck” aka “creepfinder”

You can find the video here.

Not that i am interested in on-line or real-life dating – i am happily married – but in essence the application allows me to do a check on my date. It basically crawls the internet, twitter, facebook, and  – in the US – public data such as your real-estate tax income and even criminal records.

The end-result is that i find data about criminal records about my future fiancée, full real-estate data about what house he/she lives in, family composition, real-estate tax-income etc

The US government also is getting quite open and transparent on its own data. Have a look at www.data.gov

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And these days all these data are accessible via API’s to take data OUT of these systems. Some API’s like twitter, facebook etc also allow you to INPUT data via for example Tweetdeck, Seismic, and many others. I would love to have something that not only allows me to INPUT my Tweets, but also something that allows me to input and maintain my personal profile data, across services. See also at the end of this post.

For the US government data, you see start appearing end-consumer apps that let you search through this massive amount of for example government contractor’s data with quite advanced intelligence tools in the hand of the citizen.

In stead of FBI (Federal) it’s becoming

CBI (Citizen’s Bureau of Investigation).

It says “analysis for the people, by the people”. I would add “"about the people”

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All this is sold as “transparency” and “democracy”, and those are of course very important values.

But – and I don’t know about you – I start more and more FEELING quite uncomfortable about all this. Not that i have to hide anything, or that i have a criminal record (at least not that I am aware of ;-), but I do FEEL all this is quite intrusive.

As most of you know, in my previous life i was quite close to the Belgian eID project (electronic identity card). The card also allows you to access the on-line government database, where I can look at my OWN data and check who in the government has accessed those data.

But i believe we should make a big plea for the appliance of Law #1 of Kim Cameron’s Laws of Identity:

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That’s easy said, but how do you enforce that. I took the pain to look at the privacy policy of Twitter (see http://twitter.com/privacy). In essence – as a user – i have nothing to say. I have 2 choices: to use twitter and accept the privacy policy, or not use it. But how many of the many million Twitter users have ever read the privacy policy ? How many know what sort of deep intelligence engines are crawling all these data that i released to the net WITH A DIFFERENT PURPOSE ?

This is not Twitter specific. It applies to Facebook, Friendfeed, or any other form of social network or service.

In my opinion, i would like to have something where i can control what data about myself i want to release to what service and in what context. I update my information there once, and have also guarantee that my profile information is consistent across Twitter, Facebook or even event/conference sites that these days more and more use their own social media piece of technology.

Of course you would need a highly trusted party to deal with these data. I think i would even be prepared to pay a price for my privacy.

This concept of a central digital vault comes pretty close to eMe, the winner of the Innotribe idea-contest at Sibos 2009 some weeks ago. But they started from “mydata” and information and documents related to financial services. If you start thinking privacy and putting control of data back into the user’s hands, you get a much more powerful proposition.

I would like to hear the opinion of a number of identity and privacy experts that are following this blog

UPDATE: Can’t help it, but just at the same time as i published this post, Guy Kawasaki tweeted the following URL:

 http://holykaw.alltop.com/why-you-should-think-before-you-tweet

Peter Thiel and the Singularity

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I am just back from the Singularity Summit that took place in NY during the week-end of 3-4 Oct 2009.

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I will make a separate report on the rest of the event, but i was completely blown away by the 30 min speech by Peter Thiel and following panel discussion with Venture Capitalists.

PeterThiel

Peter Thiel is president of Clarium, a global macro hedge fund. He is also the founder and chairman of Palantir Technologies, a national security software firm, and a founding investor and board member of Facebook, which serves more than 200 million active users. He helps launch many other new technology companies as a founder and partner of the Founders Fund. Previously, he was founder and CEO of PayPal, which manages more than 175 million financial accounts.

Peter Thiel has philosophy and law degrees from Stanford University, where he occasionally teaches on globalization and sovereignty and serves on the board of overseers of the Hoover Institution. He funds research in artificial intelligence and life extension technologies.

See for his other investments on the above link to Wikipedia. It also becomes very apparent what a fine crew must have been at the basis of PayPal. Many of the ex-PayPallers have created very successful companies.

Also his philanthropic endeavors in the Singularity Institute, the Methuselah Mouse Prize foundation (Michael Rose himself was also at the conference) and Dr. de Grey’s work on extending human life span are some examples where Thiel’s long term vision is. I will come back later in this blog post on “time horizons”

But back to his 30 min speech at the Singularity Summit.

First his appearance. He made me immediately think about Steve Ballmer: his eyes are hypnotizing. His body language shows "withhold energy”. His jaws and mouth tense. Ready to explode. Clearly fit and in top shape. Laser sharp attention when somebody asks a question. Always listening and answering with respect.

And he delivered his speech without any supporting slide, and – as far as i could see – without any notes nor an autocue or something like that. Wow !

The title of his speech last Sunday was “Macroeconomics and Singularity”.

He started his speech with letting the crowd choose between a number of catastrophe scenarios: from bio-terrorism, to nuclear war, global warming, and a couple more like that.

His thesis was that the biggest disaster that could happen would be that the Singularity does not happen quickly. It was the start of a staggering discourse on why innovation – and especially disruptive innovation – is key to the continuation of our society. And in a grandiose move, he interweaved the financial crisis in to all of this.

Credit only works against a background of growth. But if claims of the future (singularity is a good example) don’t realize, that has a big impact on credit, on to be expected returns (which he claims are way too high for non-risk taking investments), and on the basis (growth) of our society at large. Society would still be “functioning” by fixes such as working till the age of 80, or earn less, or have low returns on capital, but that’s not what we understand with progress.

Investing in “tech” firms like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and even Google is betting that they will churn their revenues and profits in the foreseeable future. In other words, this is betting that nothing disruptive is going to happen.

A lot of this is driven by short term return horizons. We seem to fix the short term problems, but are stuck with the chronic long term problems.

Having a longer time horizon may be the biggest Chinese advantage.

Some other interesting quotes from his speech and following panel discussion:

    • The short run becomes the long run
    • All experts are biased in a positive direction, especially when presenting their start-up to VC’s
    • The risk of the return of fascism is very underestimated (this is about the emergence of a totalitarian regime trying to control AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) in a (pre)-Singularity time-frame.
    • I tend to invest in companies that will loose money for a long time, and a look for disruption
    • For every dollar that the government invests in opera, art, etc i want to see a dollar go to technology
    • We need to dramatically re-invest in technology education, even at primary school
    • I don’t like Darwinism, i prefer guaranteed survival. I could not resist a smile as right after this panel discussion there was Dr. de Grey himself on the agenda.

And about companies to invest in:

    • I am mainly looking at the team. And the potential of the people in that team to stay together for the long run, before founders start to argue and have a “farm" shoot-out”
    • And whether this team is capable to attract excellence. (I personally love this one as a measure for running a successful company)
    • He took his investment in Palantir Technologies as an example for this, where hiring seems to be organized around these themes. Co-incidentally, i had a meeting with Palantir the day before the Singularity Summit. I have mentioned them already several times in my blog and i would like to get them to Innotribe at Sibos 2010.

The effect of his speech was obvious. Where all other speakers at the event got max 2 rows of 4 people queuing for asking questions, there was immediately a row of 15 people of the auditorium eager to ask questions. You could feel the electricity in the air with each response from Peter Thiel.

This guy is sharp. Has vision. Has cred. Has Clout. Is a super-entertaining speaker. Has a story to tell to the financial industry. Peter Thiel would be an ideal keynote speaker for next year’s Sibos in Amsterdam 25-29 Oct 2010. It’s the first thing on my list today: go and see the organizing committee for Sibos 2010.

Of course, he would be great as well for the first event next year of our little Think Tank on Long Term Future (see previous blog posts).

The age of the unthinkable

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Some weeks ago, i had the opportunity to listen to a fantastic speech by Joshua Cooper Ramo, writer of the book “The Age of the Unthinkable: why the new world disorder constantly surprises us and what we can do about it”.

This is the sort of guy that when he takes the stage, you immediately know you’re in for something special.

Some personal notes on this great speech:

Our world has now more actors, more groupings. The unpredictability is part of the system. It will be a given part of our future. He talks about:

SHAPESHIFT

Our world offers more options. We have a spectrum choice between no options –> limited options –> unlimited options. You can’t predict what people are going to do with these unlimited options.

YOU CAN’T PREDICT

Our world is more networked. It also means it is easier to share and spread risk

So far the analysis. How can we manage this unpredictability ?

One eye-opener was a visual showing how differently western and eastern people look at a picture: western people mainly look at the object, eastern people mainly at the surrounding environment of that object. So, understanding of unpredictability has a lot to do with understanding the environment.

It will also require resilience. But not resilience as we know it from messaging networks like SWIFT. More a resilience deeply integrated in the ecosystem, a bit like Hezbollah integrates resilience in every little piece of its organization.

Periods of change are not the exception but the rule.

You have to surf the wave, not try to predict the wave, but

look at how the wave can help you.

It will be ever easier to disrupt. The question is how to empower people to disrupt for the good. This is really about innovation driven by a set of values. Oh boy, how close is all this to the ideas of our Think Tank on Long Term Future.

Innovation in big companies can NOT take the lead. They have NOT been instrumental in the shifts from magazines to online, from Microsoft desktops to web2.0 cloud, from Financial Institutions to… un-banked payment and financial solutions.

The speech was delivered as part of an Oracle conference. So, i found it a bit “cheap” to say that Oracle was innovative and Microsoft not. The rationale being that Oracle “buys and integrates” and Microsoft buys “tons” of innovation but does nothing with it, does not integrate. Was a bit too close to the Oracle conference message of acquire and integrate.

He then went further on the theme of personal responsibility (i am free to smoke) and the balance with a certain set of basic rights (for ex healthcare). And that in the USA, everything is about rights (and maintaining that state) not about personal responsibility and that that has to change.

About maintaining states: Twitter is all about maintaining state in a constant changing environment.

And that there is hope.

And that

FEAR is an easy commodity to sell when

people are confused

during disruptive change. And that in these circumstances simple answers are usually dangerous answers.

Or the closing topic: never invest in people older than 25 years, as they are not used to live in constant change.

The speech was great. The book reads “like a train”.


Just a pen and a camera

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After all these weeks of technology extravaganza, time for some relaxation with a piece of music: “Doorways” by Dan Bull.

For those who like visualizations or have a role as Chief Executive Officer of Happiness, this will make your day 🙂

“Using a single sheet of paper and a bolex camera, Michel drew images a line at a time and photographed the progression so that when played back, the images looked like they were drawing themselves.”

Found via http://www.midasoracle.org/2009/09/28/dan-bull-safe/

Enjoy. Inspires to dream…

How Bill Gates destroyed the universe

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The Singularity Summit is coming on 3-4 Oct 2009 in NYC. See the impressive list of speakers here.

One of the speakers is Ben Goertzel, who will speak about “Pathways to Beneficial Artificial General Intelligence: Virtual Pets, Robot Children, Artificial Bioscientists, and Beyond”.

BenGoertzel

When talking about Robot Children, i would not be surprised if he used the following video made by his 12 year old daughter. Found it via Accelerating Future.

Is this what a 12 year old is thinking about ?

  • Grand Pa’s dying, and let’s upload his brain onto the computer ?
  • It’s uploaded on a Windows computer… do kids care ?
  • Is Grand Pa dead together with all the files on my computer ?
  • A universe with Windows does not deserve to exist ?

If you can believe the credits at the end of the video, at least 12-year old Scheherazade Goertzel does.

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In this case  – among many other things – Scheherazada’s father is the originator of the OpenCog open-source AGI framework, as well as the proprietary Novamente Cognition Engine AGI system.

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is an emerging field aiming at the building of "thinking machines", that is, general-purpose systems with intelligence comparable to the human mind. Good starting point to learn more about AGI is http://agi-network.org/

You see what happens when kids get this sort of ideas served with the mothermilk 😉 We recently presented another mothermilk example when we spoke about Aza Raskin, now Head of User Experience at Mozillla Labs. His father was Jeff Rasking, one of the big minds behind the Apple user interface.

Very curious to see what how this Generation-M will move up the ladders, and one day be our leaders. Any other wizkids you are aware of ?

Social Volume Knob

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Also all hyped up by “The Wisdom of Crowds” and “We are smarter than Me” ?

wisdom-of-crowds

Time for some anti-dose 😉

Two articles about some recent studies done on this subject. One from ReadWriteWeb and one from MIT Technology Review. It’s again from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). The author professor Vassilis Kostakos pokes a big hole in the prevailing wisdom that the "wisdom of crowds" is a trustworthy force on today’s web.

The articles speak for themselves, but what’s also interesting are the comments on the MIT article.

Some quotes:

I think that crowds are not wise and what we call Wisdom of Crowds is nothing else and not more than the Power of Diversity. This paper shows that it can be the Weakness of Diversity too.

OR

The true critic is NOT motivated by money or the subjective personal biases of the non-critic. A true critic is motivated by the objective enhancement of the human experience through careful and educated examination of the subject at hand.  We need more well-honed critical voices and less of the braying of the crowd. Crowd wisdom is built on a logical fallacy: just because a lot of people say it is so, doesn’t make it so.

Democractic Intelligence = FAIL.

OR this one is even better:

The conversation needs to be different when we are talking about social networks within an organization’s firewall. In that instance, it’s not about trusting the crowd’s wisdom. Rather, it’s about managing the community by knowing whose input should be trusted, along with managing and moderating the community. This must all be done in the context of how the community relates to business initiatives and the information assets of the organization. At our company, Inmagic, we call this the

"social volume knob."

As organizations roll out social technologies, they might want to start with the volume knob set "low" for certain classes of users. For example, some users might be allowed to tag one type of content, or other certain users can blog or comment.

Controversy ? Sure. What do you think ? Still 100% convinced of the Wisdom of Crowds ?

State of the Web Sep 2009

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Over the last month there was an interesting series of articles on Read Write Web about the Top-5 trends on the web.

They now come all together here.

There is also a presentation on slideshare and you can download the whole thing also in PowerPoint.

ReadWriteWeb’s Top 5 Web Trends in 2009

The author covers the following 5 trends:

  1. Structured data
  2. Real-time web
  3. Personalisation
  4. Mobile Web / Augmented reality
  5. Internet of things

The sections on Real-Time web and Internet of things are a bit poor. I would definitely add a 6th trend: reputation and clout. Also semantic web could have some more meat around the bones. Not much left, huh ?

Coincidently, i found another one on slideshare addressing that same topic. It takes Boris about 30 slides to get up to speed, but he is bringing some interesting concepts such as “Robot Food”, Open Source licensing of data (our lawyers will go bananas), economic incentive to influence search, and community building.

Open Data Semantic Web Community Barn Raising

View more presentations from Boris Mann.

However, i am not convinced by this deck either. Is there any better material around that would allow me to explain in layman’s terms why this is so important (you preach to the convinced).

In my opinion, there is a great role for standards organizations such a SWIFT to leverage and redefine their role as semantic ontology sources for vertical segments such as the financial industry. They must be able to leverage their standardization expertise into other domains than just standard “messages”. Now they could take the lead in standardizing ALL data: structured and non-structured. That would allow us to create powerful mash-up driven solutions that get us into intelligent pattern recognitions engines for the industry.

The Whuffie Bank: values and reputation

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Now that Innotribe @ Sibos is over, back to the real purpose of this blog: “Inspire others to dream”. For a recap, see the very first post of this blog, back in April 2009.

There is something fascinating and very profound that is going on with on-line reputation. This post is  about values in the on-line world. It is very much related to the upcoming Think Tank on Long Term Future, where we want to deeply thing about the value kit needed in a transhumanistic and singularity type of world. It also relates to our on-line identity and its evolution, a theme that i often have addresses on this blog.

As Chief Executive Mixer of ideas, i would like to mix the following memes:

  1. The Whuffie Bank presentation at last week’s Techcrunch50
  2. Seth Gondin’s blog on “ClouT” (yes with a “t” and not a “d”) of a couple of weeks ago
  3. The Trust-Score idea presented by the crowdsourcing team at last week’s Sibos and Innotribe
  4. Matteo’s idea for Mindtagger

First, The Whuffie Bank. Nothing better than watching yourself the TC50 Video and comments here. Also the second part of the video is interesting: the debate and feedback session: the most important comments was that reputation is contextual. I maybe interested in the ideas of a couple of on-line friends only. My own tribe so to speak. But even in my own tribe, i may appreciate the techie knowledge of Nick for example, but not at all be interested in his political ideas or preferences.

Or have a look at The Whuffie Bank website.

The Whuffie Bank from The Whuffie Bank on Vimeo.

It is very profound what these guys are saying:

The Whuffie Bank is a nonprofit organization dedicated to building a new currency based on reputation that could be redeemed for real and virtual products and services.

The higher your reputation, the wealthier you are.

It’s in the same spirit of Creative Commons, an organization that’s changing the contract between our ideas and us; we want to build an open organization that aims to measure and enable the exchange of online reputation.

The Whuffie bank also has some crazy ideas on how they could you beyond the web into the brick & mortar world, by for ex printing money or having credit cards with whuffies on it.

I tried myself. I do NOT tweet or RT very much, but do have a Whuffie balance:

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More interesting is to see where my “Whuffies” come from, and what triggers reputation changes and endorsement ranking.

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It’s all in the same spirit Creative Commons, where fundamental re-thinking was done on the relationship we have with ideas and the copyright contract.

Now we are re-thinking the relationship we have between our values and the money contract.

The Whuffie bank is based on 4 principles

  1. Endorses public endorsement
  2. Based on degree of influence on other people: if you retweet often your influence on others will be greater
  3. Considers existing reputation of each member: it’s different to get an endorsement from the president of the USA, than from me for  example
  4. The message content is analyzed. If a tweet has a link, the link is more important than the couple of words before it.

Second, one of Seth Godin’s latest posts. Seth is the author of “Tribes” and the name Innotribe was based on the title of his book.

The web knows something, but it’s not telling us, at least not yet.

The web knows how many followers you have on Twitter, how many friends you have on Facebook, how many people read your blog.

It also knows how often those people retweet, amplify and spread your ideas.

It also knows how many followers your followers have…

So, what if, Google-style, someone took all this data and figured out who has clout.

Which of your readers is the one capable of making an idea break through the noise and spread? Bloggers don’t have impact because they have a lot of readers, they have a lot of impact because of who their readers are (my readers, of course, are the most sophisticated and cloutful on the entire web).

If you knew which of your followers had clout, you could invest more time and energy in personal attention. If we knew where big ideas were starting, that would be neat, and even more useful would be understanding who the key people were in bringing those new ideas to the rest of the world.

Back in the old days, we had no idea, so we defaulted to big newspapers, or magazines or the TV networks. But now we know. We just need to surface the data in a way that is useful.

So, it is really about how impactful your

followers

are.

That’s pretty profound.

Thirdly, at last week’s Innotribe @ Sibos, the crowdsourcing team pitched the idea of “Trust-Score”. What a pity this one did not get a better pitch :-/ Because it’s also really about trust-reputation. But then in the real-world of money. And how one could spot patterns in somebody’s online money behavior and how deviations from the measured average could lead to fraud detection algorithms and alike.

Or, fourth, what would happen if we mix all the above with my colleague Matteo Rizzi’s “Mindtagger”. At this stage “just” a searchable repository of people as mind-skills, but what if we throw reputation on top of it ? And Whuffies, based on how much good somebody does for the community. And Clout to see who is helping spread our ideas ?

Maybe at next year’s Innotribe @ Sibos2010, we should have a theme on “Clout” in stead of “Cloud”. Wouldn’t it be great to tribe together smart people to brainstorm on ideas that could add value through reputation mechanism to the SWIFT eco-system. As a matter of fact,

why wait till next year ?

Who is interested ? Please comment to this posting. We’ll feed it into the Think Tank for the value bit and into Innotribe for the project bit.

Innotribe @ Sibos: preparing for next year

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Oh boy, what a fantastic week this was !

More than 40 speakers, 7 keynotes, 15 R&D sessions, 3 face to face discussions, and a great opening and closing session.

We did some cool “order from chaos” things: Peter Hinssen has an AHA ! moment on his flight to Hong-Kong, and produced a brand new mind blowing presentation on the limits of the web. This was the start of Innotribe @ Sibos and set the scene for the quality level we were aiming for the rest of the week.

We also re-designed the workshops as the hours and days passed.

Russ Daniels – Vice President and CTO of EDS/HP decided on the spot not to deliver his planned PowerPoint, and instead gave a whiteboard session on cloud. It was like getting a private lecture by your most favorite professor at university. Awesome !

Below a short interview with Russ after that whiteboard session:

We improvised a debate with Aza Rasking from Mozilla Labs and Greg Skibiski of SenseNetworks on the Innotribe stand.

Here is an interview with Aza:

We had our Chief Executive Officer of Happiness – Mariela Atanassova – who was our super-sweet host on the Innotribe stand. All speakers felt immediately at home by the attention and care of Mariela. Mariela did awesome things in the background and produced very nice visualisations: are your going to post them somewhere, Mariela ?

What was really exciting were the Innotribe Sibos Labs where more than 50 folks took more than 10 hours out of their normal agenda to brainstorm and work on new ideas during workshops facilitated by Philippe Coullomb from The Value Web. Thank you very much to each of the 50 individuals who participated in the Innotribe labs.

The teams were lead by our 6 “Innotribe leaders”: Peter Hinssen from A-Cross, Nick Davies from Lombard Risk Management, Casper van Amelsvoort – Rabobank, Mary Knox – Gartner Research, Chris Skinner – Balatro Ltd – but more knows as active blogger on The Financial Services Club Blog, and Tim Collins from Wells Fargo. Leaders: you did a fantastic job !

In addition the teams were coached by 2 great guys from the venture capitalist community: Mattheus Krzykowsky from Venturebeat, and Eghosa D. Omoigui, Director Strategic Investments for Intel Capital. Your contribution was beyond any expectation !

We got a lot of coverage. Of course there is our own Innotribe at www.innotribe.com: Jeroen was our flying reporter during the week. And we has a lot of tweets #innotribe.

There is also a great article on Finestra about Innotribe – detailing the different pitches – and we made the cover page of friday’s Sibos Issues publication. You can download that publication here. See also Chris Skinner’s reports on Innotribe. Good example is here. Of course also Jeroen’s coverage on Innotribe.com

In the end, there was a winner. The eMe project of the Cloud team, lead by Peter Hinssen & Nick Davies. What a pitch ! As reported by Finestra, Guy Kawasaki loved it:

Kawasaki was impressed with the pitch, and said it sounded to him something like "Mint on steroids meets Open ID". He was also clearly impressed with the presentation skills of group leader Peter Hinssen, managing director of A-Cross Technology. "You’re just full of sh*t enough to be really attractive to a VC," he said.

Or also:

This presentation is better than 98% of the VC-pitched i see every day in Silicon Valley

Matteo Rizzi was great when he opened the “Grand Finale” with a “wake up and smell the coffee sunshine” type of call to the public. It was clear that he spoke straight from the heart and wanted to shake up the fully packed room. “look at what we have realized in the course of just 4 days at Innotribe” Create the right atmosphere, provide coaching and a sounding board, challenge the ideas and you end up with 3 executable ideas! “But this must not be a one-off thing” he warned. Innovation has to become a continuous and sustainable process and everybody in the banking industry must understand that this is critical for our survival.

Was Innotribe @ Sibos 2009 a one-off ? Certainly not. We are designing Innotribe as an ongoing innovation engine for the SWIFT community. We will be present a quite a number of regional events. We are preparing an on-line collaboration and idea generation tool. And last but not least, we are starting to scout and recruit speakers for next year. Where do we set the bar ? High, very high ! I would like that next year that all speakers match this year’s quality levels of speakers such as Peter Hinssen, Aza Raskin from Mozilla Labs (interview here), Russ Daniels from HP (interview here), and Joe Weinman from AT&T.  With that, you now also know my personal top-4 for this edition of Innotribe @ Sibos 2009.

Probably the biggest outcome of this Innotribe @ Sibos is that we have build a network of great smart people that we can call at any time if we need help for Innotribe or the next edition of Sibos.

Thanks to everybody who has contributed to this edition of Innotribe @ Sibos.