Author: Guillaume Lebleu

The crisis and scaling problems to an understandable level

Very picturesque comment over here at Naked Capitalism.

Congress has Constitutional authority to resolve all the issues involved in the crisis, it just hasn’t had the political will to decide whose oxen get gored to feed the village. But if the village gets hungry enough, Congress will be pressured into deciding how people share the losses, be it directly through default, or indirectly through taxes or inflation.

I can’t judge for the validity of this statement, but it reminds me that scaling these global problems to a level that normal types can comprehend and relate to would be a great way for our government to communicate about the crisis we are facing (and ideally before we face it). How can someone figure what $700B or $10T is?

After all, this is all about confidence and the less people understand, the more they will shoot first and ask later.

Swirrl.com: collaboration tool for semantic data

Swirrl is pitched as a “data collaboration tool”. It’s essentially a wiki with support for tabular data. So people can create tables of data and collaboratively edit them. It reminds me of DabbleDB.

The wiki part is not very interesting. It has a TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor that makes it easier for users with no knowledge of traditional wiki syntax. The interesting part is the ability to create data sets of things of a certain types with properties of a certain type.

Here is an example:
Swirrl screenshot

According to this article, Swirrl’s goal is fill the void between spreadsheets of data sent around, which are very flexible but poor for collaboration, and highly structured databases and applications, which are good for collaboration but highly inflexible.

According to the same article, Swirrl is based on RDF, which should be good news for querying. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure how to build queries on my data set.

I absolutely agree with the Swirrl team that there is a big need for easy-to-use collaborative tools that allows to combine unstructured information and structured data. The approach of the Swirrl team seems to be to separate both kinds in pages and data sets, while the Semantic MediaWiki approach seems to embed structured data into unstructured documents. I think both approaches will please different audiences.

In all cases, I think that Swirrl as it it needs to be improved before it has a chance to be adopted by serious users. I think the ability to build queries and see the results is the killer app of semantic wikis and users need to be provided with a way to see the benefits of the time they spend nicely structuring their data. If querying is not available, then a collaborative spreadsheet tool will be a better solution, especially since collaborative spreadsheet tools currently provide a much better support for things like formulas (they is very limited supported for formulas in Swirrl).

Upromise: social savings for college education

Looking at the daily Google hot trends today, I noticed a social money service called Upromise.

Upromise is marketed as a way to save money for your kids’ education. It is a subsidiary of SLM Corporation (“Sallie Mae”), the U.S. largest student loans company.

You essentially save by spending.  You get “1-25% back from eligible purchases from 600 online retailers”, “8% back from participating restaurants”, “1-3% on select items at grocery/drugstore”, “10% EXTRA on select items at participating grocery/drugstore and at Upromise dining restaurants; and 1% everywhere you shop when using the Citi Upromise World MasterCard”.

For online transactions, you have to start shopping at participating shops from the Upromise.com Web site (so that they can track your purchases) and for offline transactions, you have to register your existing Credit/Debit card or grocery/drugstore store loyalty card to your UPromise account, and Upromise uses this information to track your purchases and match them up with cash rewards from participating merchants. The privacy notice mentions that some programs might require additional information like Frequent Flyers mile numbers or telephone number.

Other members can be linked to the account, which makes the contributions from family and friends possible.

Upromise screenshot

For restaurant cash rewards, Upomise use Restaurant Cashback.

Comments

The service is essentially a compromise on privacy for value. I find the promise on rewards very high (“up to 25% on select items”) and would be curious to hear from people who have used the service.

I personally find the idea of “saving by spending” a bit ironic. I would imagine that people would save much more by not going to the restaurant in the first place or not buying that brand product and instead buying the white label product. But I can see that in some cases, the system works: for instance, cash-rich retired grand parents who, for good reasons, might want to enjoy brand products or nice restaurants, while helping their kids and grand-kids out.

In short, I’m really curious to hear from real participants with real success stories of having saved a significant portion of a student loan via this program.

I see more opportunity in smart savings programs built into Web services like Wesabe or Mint.com. For instance, assuming you’ve been to a restaurant several times you would see a message that would help visualize how much this money could represent by the time your kid gets in college, if you hadn’t been to this restaurant, or at the very least, if you had chosen a cheaper alternative nearby.

Book review: Flow – The psychology of Optimal Experience

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

My review

 This book explains that true happiness is obtained by achieving an optimal state of mind called Flow.This state of mind can be best described as one where the participant’s consciousness is so involved in its activity that self-consciousness disappears, in a way similar to meditation.This state can be attained by encouraging situations where a goal that participant(s) feel skilled to achieve is set clearly, and for which constant feedback on how close participants are getting.Such Flow experiences lead to personal growth and true happiness. These very simple recommendations can be applied to one’s life, to educating children, to manage people in a corporate environment, or to define a country’s policies. 

Some quotes I found interesting

If we assume, however, that the desire to achieve optimal experience is the foremost goal of every human being, the difficulties of interpretation raised by cultural relativism become less severe. Each social system can then be evaluated in terms of how much psychic entropy it causes, measuring that disorder not with reference to the ideal order of one or another belief system, but with reference to the goals of the members of that society. A starting point would be to say that one society is “better” than another if a greater number of its people have access to experiences that are in line with their goals. A second essential criterion would specify that these experiences should lead to the growth of the self on an individual level, by allowing as many people as possible to develop increasingly complex skills.

The Isé Shrine [south of Kyoto, Japan:] was built about fifteen hundred years ago on one of a pair of adjacent fields. Every twenty years or os it has been taken down from the field it was standing on and rebuilt on the next one. By 1973, it had been reerected for the sixtieth time. The strategy adopted by the monks of Isé resembles one that several statesmen have only dreamed about accomplishing. For example, both Thomas Jefferson and Chairman Mao Ze-dong believed that each generation needed to make its own revolution for its members to stay actively involved in the political system ruling their lives

Things that go against Flow:

  • “Anomy: the norms of society have become muddled”
  • “Alienation: people are constrained by the social system to act in ways that go against their goals.”

Family context promoting optimal experience could be described as having five characteristics. The first one is clarity: teenagers feel that they know what their parents expect from them – goal and feedback in the family interaction are unambiguous. The second is centering, or the children’s perception that their parents are interested in what they are doing in the present, in their concrete feelings and experiences, rather than preoccupied with whether they will be getting into a good college or obtaining a well-paying job. Next is the issue of choice: children feel that they have a variety of possibilities from which to choose, including that of breaking parental rules – as long as they are prepared to face the consequences. The fourth differentiating characteristic is commitment, or the trust that allows the child to feel comfortable enough to set aside the shield of his defenses and become unselfconsciously involved in whatever he is interested in. And finally there is challenge, or the parents’ dedication to provide increasingly complex opportunities for action to their children

View all my reviews.

Creating valued content people buy in a world of free

A few days ago, I bought The Future of Reputation book from Daniel Solove. I had already downloaded it for free in PDF on my computer but bought it nonetheless for $9.99 on Amazon.com

The reason, according to Kevin Kelly most excellent article Better than Free: embodiment. Embodying the book in the form of a lightweight, low-power long-lasting reading device is something I value more than the content itself.

Kevin lists 8 other qualities that makes something better than its free counterpart, and although I list them below I encourage you to read the entire article:

  • Immediacy
  • Personalization
  • Interpretation
  • Authenticity
  • Accessibility
  • Embodiment
  • Patronage
  • Findability

In-store digital music sales

I was at an InMotion store at SFO international airport earlier today looking for a fabulous device called InFlight Power. There was a wonderful piaono/violoncel music piece playing. I didn’t think of using Shazam to figure out what is was. Instead I asked the sales guy what is was. He told me it was Melos by Anja Lechner & Vassilis Tsabropoulos. I memorized it (well… part of), then tried to pull it out from iTunes (not available there, but available at Amazon.com).

This got me wondering: shouldn’t InMotion get a share of that purchase? after all, they pay the rent, CD inventory and the salary of the store manager.

Why not providing a free Wi-Fi service at InMotion that would allow a user to get the playlist, say in the format of an OpenTape, then purchase it from iTunes or Amazon on the spot. I guess 5% of $.99 from iTunes is not enough. Amazon MP3 10% affiliate commission makes more sense but does not seem like it would be enough either.

I wonder what it would take for such a service to be profitable for InMotion. Maybe forcing the full album purchase with a convenience fee for the download service, roughly an average $15 price that would get the DJ/musician a $3 commission. Next an extension to iTunes that would publish automatically the playlist in OpenTape format with the download link would be a great way for DJs and musicians to promote their music in public spaces. 

The Color of Money

From cymbolism: 

a dedicated website that aims to quantify the association between colors & words, making it simple for designers to choose the “best” colors for the desired emotional effect. Cymbolism allows visitors to associate one color for a given word, in order to to track these relationships over time in form of frequency strips.

The color of money is definitely mostly green and a bit gold (paper versus hard asset). The other colors are probably from non-US residents.

Color associated with the word

Defining and relating reputation, whuffie, attention, social capital and privacy

Reputation

I define having reputation as having reputable third parties willing to confirm one’s claims as true.

These claims include:

  • personal information such as one’s date of birth or first name, 
  • transaction information such as timely re-payment of debt following a credit card purchase, 
  • opinions expressed that are shared by others such as a blog post or 
  • actions done or not that are approved by others
  • artifacts produced that are appreciated by others

Whuffie 

Verifying someone’s claims used to be expensive and limited to a few players, such as credit bureaus in partnership with credit card networks. The recent computerization of communications has reduced the authentication cost by increasing the amount of authenticatable information (in the form of published opinion/thought pieces) and the potential number of authenticating parties, leading to my understanding of the concept of whuffie. 

Linking with attention 

I say “potential” because 3rd parties will not authenticate content unless one has their attention in the first place. Attention is limited the nature of people’s cognitive capabilities and is ideally dependent on their goals, but also a function of one’s reputation, which leads us to…

Social capital 

The self-reinforcing aspect of reputation together with each person’s limited attention and exploding amount of authenticable information is what explains social capitalism: the authenticable information created by some is republished by others and through this process fully/partly appropriated because of their reputation. This is similar to Marx’ capital where part of the value-add of workers’ labour is appropriated by employers because of their ownership of the productive asset.

Examples include bloggers or journalists who are given exclusive information before it is published because of their established trademark. They don’t need anymore to find a good story, only to filter it out from what they receive.

Attention is the new capitalistic asset to own, maybe the new money considering that people’s attention is limited and that it is dispensable by those with social capital.

(Side note: assuming attention is driven by goals (see Flow), owning attention is done by getting others to align their goals on one’s goals).

Privacy 

What is interesting about reputation is that it does not necessarily require information to be published. It only requires someone reputable to confirm it as true. I don’t need to tell you that I’m over 21 years old, but just need to point you to someone reputable that can confirm my claim.

In other words, privacy may not be dead, but it has to be dead with one or a few highly reputable parties.

The relation to OpenId and OAuth

It derives from the above that an OpenId or OAuth provider’s relevancy is proportional to its reputation. Its value is proportional to its ability to actually verify the information it hosts.

The future of the BofA iPhone app: besides better iPhone support, personalization?

I recently went through the 350 or so reviews of the BofA iPhone app. Here are my conclusions.

First of all, BofA should have called this app “ATM locator” instead of “Mobile Banking”, as the ATM locator capability is praised by most as a way to save on fees when traveling out-of-town or when in unfamiliar neighborhood, but the overwhelming majority comment on the fact that the application provides a very poor mobile banking experience on the iPhone.

What is meant by iPhone-specific experience?

iPhone-specific experience is the single most requested feature. I’m careful not to talk about implementation details here (native app versus iPhone-optimized Web app) as I still don’t have a strong opinion about which approach would ultimately bring the best user experience (native app developed in-house would require a learning curve that would certainly impact the quality of the app, while a Web app would have to be provided with JavaScript API wrappers of some of the SDK APIs like CoreLocation to provide an interesting user experience).

For most what iPhone-specific experience means is:

  • More finger-friendly (avoid pinching, which is a sign that the app is not optimized for the iPhone)
  • iPhone-specific styling like buttons instead of tiny text-based links
  • Consistency across the whole app (not a mix of a native for ATM locator and Web for mobile banking that does not instill confidence)
  • More condensed information per page using table views

Other interesting requested features

Here are the other interesting features requested:

  • Add support for customers in Washington and Idaho states.
  • Faster login (one suggested using a PIN instead of a long password)
  • Transaction reconciliation via mobile banking
  • Background download of information such as balance for quick one-click look
  • Better support for credit card accounts (currenly only balance is available, not transaction list)
  • Support for My Portfolio feature
  • “Something like E-Trade on the BlackBerry”.

Further thoughts: personalizing the mobile banking experience

The one thought that came out of this analysis was that mobile users have fundamentally different needs in terms of the information they want to see after clicking the BofA logo on the iPhone homescreen.While most expect to be able to do everything they can do with online banking, all expect to do much faster the things they do most commonly in online banking. And that’s where the design problem of shrinking online banking into a mobile app is in my opinion. On one hand, what everyone does most commonly is very different from customer to customer. On the other hand, an intuitive interface design principle is “Human interface cognitive load is proportional to the number of clicks/keystrokes/gestures“, which means that people won’t like the user experience unless they get to do what they want to do in the least number of clicks and keystrokes. This includes login in, selecting a transaction, entering amounts, etc.

To give a few examples from the reviews: those who travel don’t care about the ATM locator. Those who travel love it. Some only have a Credit Card account with Bofand don’t care about Checking/Savings.

Which leads me to think that the future of the BofA iPhone app or any mobile banking app for that matter will be in the ability for the user to personalize their experience by providing to BofA the shortcuts to the transactions they do most.

This may include just a transaction identifier and an account identifier (ex. “view balance” “checking-1234″) or more complex shortcuts that borders on programming/querying: for instance “view transactions” “CC-8456″ “Last 10 posted transaction” or “transfer” “$100″ “to John”.

Online banking will most likely be the place where these personalizations will be programmed. Until then, getting that 5 star rating on iTunes app store and getting everyone happy might be difficult.