ericwilson.erics.ws

This is where all the new stuff is happening so please make a note of it.

I’ll see you there -

I feel like I’m being stalked by a single-minded salesperson who is desperately trying to close out the fiscal quarter. 

Let me explain.

I was on a site a couple of months ago looking at a cool new thermostat called Nest.  I liked the idea of it so much that I bought the product.

The problem is that the retargeting platforms don’t understand that I have other interests.  So now when I visit sites I am seeing the Nest ad.

Everywhere.

Mind you I am very happy with the Nest product but the effectiveness of the retargeting solution for many of the sites I’ve visited is just too basic.  It appears to be some kind of FIFO queue that has no perceivable analytics or machine learning behind it.

I want retargeting to get smarter.  

Better yet, I want to be able to influence how it works and what it thinks of me.  It would be great if I had a universal profile, used by ad engines, and an interface that would allow me to edit and maintain my persona. 

I could then tell the ad world that I already own the Nest and don’t need to be reminded how cool it is.  I could also edit the kinds of products that the ad world thought I had an interest in so that they could actually target me better.

I know that sounds a little masochistic but I wouldn’t mind the intrusiveness if a) I had some control over it and b) I could have some small impact on what was being sent my way.

This kind of solution would go a long way with consumers.  Maybe it could even aid Facebook with its mobile ad woes. 

I suppose that today’s fresh $100B USD will certainly give Facebook the firepower to solve this issue if they decide to take up the charge. 

Or, maybe there is a little start-up waiting to happen…

I have been using Foursquare for about two years now.  I was intrigued by the idea of location announcement and the value checking-in might proffer to me and my network of friends.

What I have found is that the very network of folks that I wanted to engage with is leaving Foursquare.  I don’t mean that they are forgetting to check-in; they are with conscious intent removing the app from their mobiles.

Why?

I have heard folks (myself included) say the following:

• It’s too much work to keep your status current
• It’s stressful - especially after I leave a place and have forgotten to check-in 
• I don’t get any meaningful value from the exercise 
• I am not “discovering” anything new 
• The offers do not reliably work across venues (e.g. the staff in many cases knows nothing about the “free parking” offer)

My Foursquare network is not the only service suffering from this abandonment, however. 

Yelp is an echo chamber.  

Viggle is a dead zone.

Perhaps this speaks more to the virtues of over simplified gamification.  It seems the desire to earn a digital prize for performing a task has waned - at least within my network. 

Earning points are no different.

Recently, Foursquare announced that they have passed the 20 million user mark.  I have to wonder if this is an all-time metric or MAU.

Given the behavior that I am seeing in my dwindling network, these kinds of services need to introduce real value and do it quickly.  Creating a new feature that allows people to search for nearby businesses on their mobile phones (or worse yet, on the web) is not exactly groundbreaking stuff.  Citysearch pioneered this kind of service back in the 90’s. 

I am curious to hear from users of [your_flavor_of_check-in service] to see if they are experiencing this same phenomenon.

Editors Note: I did verify in Real Life to make sure that my network of friends was still intact.  It is.  Whew.

As an entrepreneur deciding how to spend a few intense years of my life building a new company I’m struck by a vexing decision:

Follow the trends of companies that are getting easily funded and have seemingly quick exits

OR    

Enter a new category and try to solve some hard problems

It seems that trend spotting is the path that the broader investment / acquisition community is rewarding these days - just look at Viddy’s announcement today that their Series A round is valued at some $300MM.  This is a company who describes themselves by saying; “Yeah, we’re like these other guys that just got bought for a billion BUT we do video”. 

Here is an eye opening statement from Michael Carney:

The company’s $1.5 million seed round closed around April 2011 and, according to my sources, was priced at $16 million. That’s a 20-times multiple in just twelve months for a company that has not monetized to any significant degree.

Amazing stuff.

I recently attended a Fast Pitch Competition here in Los Angeles given by the Tech Coast Angels.  Out of 170+ company ideas, eleven were chosen to present their concepts to a panel of savvy investors and entrepreneurs.  The panel then voted on a scale of 1-10 who they thought was most fundable.

The winner? 

A dating site. 

Humph.

Let me say that I’m very happy the investment community is making an effort in SoCal.  We have plenty of talent here and it should have local access to mentors and capital. 

I was just underwhelmed that out of all the 170+ applicants the best, most innovative idea was a small pivot in an already tapped market.

Don’t hate the player – hate the game is perhaps the mantra of the day. 

Any one of my colleagues will tell you that I am no Google fan boy.  I am weary of the data crunching capabilities it has aimed at your personal information.  A timely illustration was provided recently when Google announced that it would create a unified model of your web activities from across each of its properties (e.g. YouTube, Gmail, Google Apps).  This perceived act against consumer privacy has developed into much of a hullabaloo, especially when certain news outlets are citing that your information could be worth as much as $5,000 USD to market researchers and advertisers.

I’m keenly aware that there really isn’t any privacy on the Internet and Google’s move neither shocks nor offends me.  It makes business sense. 

Note: If you are concerned about the changes there are some actions you can take to limit Google’s ability to conjoin your information.  Google also provides some tools to help you manage your information.

That said, I need a capable platform for social media and I am finding Google+ to be an excellent solutions partner. 

I read a slew of articles last week deriding the existence of Google+.  One from WSJ and another from MG Siegler that motivated me to post a comment on Google+ last week.  Truthfully, there is a bit more to say about the value of this service so I’ll pen some additional thoughts here.

Google+ Circles

One of the most underappreciated features on Google+ is Circles. 

Circles is an elegant mechanism for organizing people by category.  I’m not highlighting just the simple relationship types (e.g. Family, Friends, Colleagues) but also more expressive types like Science.  The ability to share a Circle allows the recipient to instantly subscribe to a curated list of interesting people – granted that the source of the Circle is trusted.  Below is a screenshot of sharing a Circle within Google+.

Why is this concept so significant?  Having an instant group of folks to get quality content from provides the elixir for engagement.  Effectively, people are social when there are posts to be social about – get it?

Note to Google: Please allow me to subscribe to a plusser’s Circle versus me having to add it.  If I trust the person who is sharing the Circle enough to add the Circle I trust them enough to maintain it.

Google+ Isn’t Twitter – Yay!

I use Twitter pretty much everyday but I’m loathing the 140-character limit.  I am aware of the origins for the design decision but think that now the limit impedes dialogs more than it facilitates them.

Google+ has no such limits.  In fact, you could create an entire blog there if you so desire (ala +Robert Scoble). 

I enjoy the metaphor for threaded conversations in Google+ as it enhances readability and encourages quality interaction and commenting.  Twitter may have a firehose of Tweets but my experience has been that comments about a post arrive more timely and are better organized on Google+.  Add in Google’s ability to embed photos and videos inline and Twitter just can’t keep up. 

I also find it convenient (and necessary) to be able to edit posts after they have gone live.  Be it the occasional typo or new information that enhances the overall value of the post, editing is powerful and advantageous.

Why Not Facebook?

This is a hotly debated and somewhat religious topic.  It seems to me that both services are pretty catholic with respect to what they offer.  I will say that Google+ Hangouts are an incredible utility comparable to Skype video chat, except of course that Google+ multi user chat is free - as in beer.    

It should go without saying that of course, Google has an incredible search engine behind Google+.  This search asset will be near impossible to replicate at Facebook but with that engine comes other baggage – see the first paragraph in this post. 

Certainly both services will borrow the best ideas from each other moving forward so any meaningful incongruence should even out over time.

It appears that folks may bifurcate their activity based on a professional versus personal bent.  Google+ seems to be more professionally skewed at the moment with Facebook having the latest updates about your family and friends (although there is some chatter about teens leaving Facebook and heading over to Google+).

So is Facebook the competitor that should fear the most from Google+?

My money is on the Google+ vs. Twitter angle. 

Why tweet when you can plost?™

I Give A Damn

The arguments about the ghost town of Google+ may hold water when the numbers of service users are compared to those of Facebook.  I must say emphatically however that the folks I have been reading (most notably in my Science Circle) are generating and sharing incredible articles, original research and genuine insight that are beyond just entertainment – they are educational.  My hope is that enough people are exposed to these good works so that I can selfishly continue to enjoy and participate with Google’s elegant social medium.

The chance that you or someone you know has a tablet or smartphone is growing. The chance that those same people are using one or both devices while they watch traditional programmed television is growing even faster.

The Second Screen, as it is being called, is a new and compelling avenue for content providers, community builders and advertisers to come together.

Why is the second screen driving this change? Three reasons:

Flexibility.

Connectivity.

Data.

That’s So 1980

The old guard Set Top Box (STB), which is what the majority of households have installed, is difficult if not impossible to upgrade once it has left the factory. This is chiefly because the ability to perform meaningful over-the-air (OTA) upgrades or changes (i.e. how applications found on your smartphone are updated with the latest release) just doesn’t exist. Without OTA, the ability to change and adapt to new customer feedback is anemic at best.

Connectivity for the STB device - downstream to the home – is good. Bandwidth is constrained, however, on the upstream channel. This constraint limits the size and frequency that user data can be fed back to the operator. If the operator doesn’t know what is happening in the ecosystem, moment to moment, how can they create a compelling experience to the user? Social networks might as well not exist either, as there is no way to connect into them.

Lastly, user data is the super fuel that is required to transform the viewing model from ‘push’ to ‘interactive’. STBs dearth of data necessarily creates a disconnect between service provider and service consumer. They don’t know you and therefore can’t tailor an experience for you.

New And Improved Formula – Meet Social TV

There are now more than a few social TV companies vying for space on your mobile device or tablet. Because these fledgling enterprises are creating dynamic applications on powerful, connected devices they have the grand opportunity to deliver a personal media experience never before imaginable.

Given this new freedom of interaction and deployment, a few strategies are emerging that aim to create that winning user experience.

Companion Services

Got cable? These companies provide cool new ways to interact with the programming, share the experience with friends, buy related items and even earn points for being a loyal watcher. Nice.

Zeebox

This is a clever app for your iPad that seems to be focused heavily on social interaction. Find out what your friends are watching, invite a friend to watch a show with you or buy the games, music or other merchandise related to the show. Check out this video for a comprehensive overview.

Viggle

This iPhone app is all about checking in to a show – and they have some powerful tech to help you do this automagically. After checking in, users earn reward points for the length of time they spend watching (points are redeemable for physical goods – cool), can find out about which shows are being talked about, post updates to Facebook and more. While not connected to the social graph yet, it is surely in the works.

Cable Cutting

Frequency

If you want to go completely outside the bounds of connected television, then Frequency offers up a compelling product. The iPad app can connect into your social graph, pull in and organize video and social conversation while providing an elegant navigation metaphor. More can be seen in this review below.

What’s In It For Me?

As I’ve mentioned before on my blog, doing something smart with the user generated data will go a long way to create differentiated experiences. I’m looking forward to the possibilities.

I’ve been involved with two things these past few years that, in my mind, have very similar execution success characteristics: creating a startup company (SC) and a recommender system based on Supervised Learning (ML).

Looking at how to implement each from scratch reveals interesting parallels.

The Cold Start

ML

The challenge that is faced when first implementing a recommender system (recsys) in a new environment is that the ML engine is not very smart about what items to recommend.  This makes some sense in that without rich historical data about how an item has performed (e.g. purchases, shares, ratings) there can be no concrete statistic on an items success probability.  Historical data can be analyzed and used to help train the engine but that data’s usefulness is quickly obviated as new information is gathered from the live system.

A specific lack of information means that out of the gate there are some postulates guesstimated and models built which are based on the best information available.  It is well understood that these models will change, features will be dropped or added and a next generation model should be in the works as soon as possible. 

SC

The same issue typically faces a new startup.  Not much is really known about the best plan for success.  Which products will win users over or land clients with eager, open checkbooks?  Forecasting revenues for a brand new venture seems nearly an exercise in mental masturbation.  New products envisioned by the ambitious team have no proof points.

Much like the ML implementation, understanding that the initial products and business models are literally a jumping off point is important.  Not betting it all on an unproven theory will save time, energy and money.

Learning And Adapting

ML

The ML engine learns how to provide more accurate recommendations over time by getting feedback from the ecosystem.  The engine will suggest a variety of items, based on statistical analysis, that it believes will match a users interest at a particular time and for a specific context.  The results of this endeavor are collected as log data and are returned to the ML system.  This data set represents the success and failure of the previous set of predictions.  As real time passes, the ML engine consumes the latest available data sets and (if properly designed) the accuracy of the engine’s future predictions becomes more acute. 

Likewise the model through which these data sets pass may need to be updated to reflect new learning.  Testing a new model against the previous model to reveal its efficacy (A/B testing) is an absolute prerequisite.  Only after a rigorous testing will you know if the new direction you have chosen will provide better quality or if you should stick with the status quo.

SC

Building a company on a hunch or in a complete vacuum is a recipe for failure.  As one of my favorite startup bloggers Steve Blank said in no uncertain terms, “Get out of the building”.  It is imperative to canvas the market you are trying to address to see if the widget you want to produce has value. 

Getting feedback about the direction you are taking the venture toward or the features that you want to add to the product will be worth more than any blue-sky session at a whiteboard.  Being agile, testing and iterating quickly over product ideas and features as data comes in from the field will produce dividends and should help steer you toward a successful path.  

Measuring 

ML

It is important to the success of the ML project to establish KPIs before coding begins.  These metrics should be meaningful and not academic or esoteric.  Typically measuring the users reaction to the recommendations is the best metric; e.g. is your revenue per user or page view going up?

Based on clear, measureable success criteria the model can be refined and tuned to best perform.

SC

Peter Drucker said it best, “What gets measured, gets managed”.  Without measurable success metrics for your fledgling business how will you know if you are succeeding?  You should create KPIs that have actionable meaning for your business.  These KPIs should necessarily cover more than just your product or service.  Internal KPIs for marketing, IT, business development etc. can be captured and presented in a company dashboard.  Clear goals and metrics align the people getting the work done and provide the impetus for acceleration or course correction.

Rinse And Repeat

For both ML and SC, relevance is determined by maintaining a contemporary view of the ecosystem that it serves.  Hence: 

Learn->Adapt->Measure->Learn->Adapt->Measure…

Although Apple has released an update to iOS that may address some of the issues, I wondered if I couldn’t also help out my good friend the iPhone by doing some basic housekeeping.

I’ve been in and around mobile development going on eleven years now (yipe!) and there are some common reoccurring memes with respect to getting the most out of mobile device battery life.  Mostly they center around making your device do fewer things.  Simple enough.

Turn Off WiFi

Unless you are cruising at some well-known available network it’s best to turn WiFi off.  Your device will be looking for networks to join, generally sniffing around, all with convenience in mind for its owner.  Turning WiFi off when you’re not in range of a well-known network (e.g. home, work, Boingo) should conserve energy.

This behavior is similar to the no_wireless_signal battery drain issue of years past.  Essentially, when consumers entered a building where the wireless carrier signal was lost, the mobile device would continuously scan for a connection.  The result either being a carrier signal was found or the battery was drained to empty. 

More often than not it was the latter.

Shut Down Background Apps

The iPhone is good at multitasking quite a few apps by allowing them to run in the background.  The question I had for myself though was; how many of these apps are actually still running and do they really need to be?

Fortunately there is a facility that allows you to check to see what’s running and more importantly stop an app when you aren’t using it.

Double click on the home button.  Doing this will present a taskbar which contains all running apps.  This is a cool facility for switching between running apps (just tap the app you want to switch to).  Swipe left or right on the taskbar to see more apps – trust me there will be more.  

Now what?  Look for apps that you aren’t using regularly and shut them down.

To shut down running apps, touch and hold one of the app icons and you’ll see a red circle with a minus sign appear.  If you tap an icon the app will be stopped.  Neat.

Manage Push Notifications

This is a useful feature when managed conservatively. 

However, it seems that every app has something to say.  All this chatter makes your mobile device perform network related activity and will be, of course, yet another source of battery drain. 

Turn off unnecessary notifications.

Location, Location, Location

Location based activity makes your device perform a lot of work - your iPhone has to carry on an intense data conversation with cell towers or GPS satellites (in the case of turn by turn directions the location requests are constantly happening).  Limit the frequency with which you perform location based activity.  Be especially mindful of those apps that perform regular location updates to / from the network.

Feed The Need

If you just can’t stop doing what you are doing then maybe you need to get some extra juice to help out until you can get next to a power outlet.

I’ve been using a combination case protector / external rechargeable battery from mophie.  So far it’s been working quite well.  It’s smart enough to either use it’s own power first before using the iPhone’s or can be used to charge the iPhone’s battery.

Klout is really a MMORPG

It struck me today, as I witnessed colleagues scrambling around to find out how they could repair their damaged Klout scores, that Klout has created the largest MMORPG on the planet. 

What do I mean by that?

Let’s take a look at some excerpts about MMORPG’s from Wikipedia to see the parallels:

“Although modern MMORPGs sometimes differ dramatically from their antecedents, many of them share some basic characteristics. These include several common themes: some form of progression, social interaction within the game, in-game culture…”

Now let’s apply these some of these feature definitions to KloutVille:

THEMES

“Often these elements are developed using similar tasks and scenarios involving quests… and loot.”

There are daily quests that all players in KloutVille can partake in: CombatRecommend, CombatShare and CombatCreate (RSC).  RSCing is how a player progresses to ever increasingly higher levels of Wealth in KloutVille.

Loot is a bounty that can be granted if the Game Master deems worthy the level of RSC activity and the total number of connections a player maintains.

PROGRESSION

“In nearly all MMORPGs, the development of the player’s character is a primary goal. Nearly all MMORPGs feature a character progression system in which players earn experience points for their actions and use those points to reach character “levels”, which makes them better at whatever they do.”

The goal in KloutVille is fundamentally to develop your online character.  As such, you’ll want to develop a plan around RSCing and you’re going to need a kingdom to elevate the impact of your efforts.  You’ll want to connect your character in KloutVille with as many other ‘worlds’ that you dwell in (Planet Facebook, Twittersphere, GooglePlusLand) thus enlarging your kingdom and your Wealth.  You may also be rewarded with combat-useful items such as the Influencer Potion.

“The accumulation of wealth (including combat-useful items) is also a way to progress in many MMORPGs, and again, this is traditionally best accomplished via combat. The cycle produced by these conditions, combat leading to new items allowing for more combat with no change in gameplay, is sometimes pejoratively referred to as the level treadmill, or ‘grinding’.”

Productive, daily RSCing can prove itself to be an extraordinarily difficult task.  A player needs to maintain a pace and velocity such that a one’s Wealth is not diminished due to atrophy.  This cycle has revealingly lead many players down the path of grinding.  Some of the more popular grinding RSCs: 

• Weather
• Airline Updates
• Song Lyrics
• Coffee quality
• #FF
• I can’t believe they arrested me for this again – check out this pic (Okay, used more infrequently but still grinding – no?)

“This sometimes forces players to change their real-world schedules in order to “keep up” within the game-world.”

I’ve seen players enter into a full-blown panic when they realize that they haven’t RSC’d for a day or two.  All real-world work efforts comes to a halt whilst they logon and care for their KloutVille character.  Take care to manage your time here wisely.

SOCIAL INTERACTION

“MMORPGs almost always have tools to facilitate communication between players. Many MMORPGs offer support for in-game guilds or clans (though these will usually form whether the game supports them or not).”

A foundational element of the KloutVille experience is the harnessing of social interaction from within the player worlds: replying or retweeting in Twittersphere, sharing in the magic Circles of GooglePlusLand and ascending the Walls on Planet Facebook.  Bring your clans together and gain strength.

ROLEPLAYING

“Most MMORPGs provide different types of classes that players can choose. Among those classes, players are encouraged to roleplay their characters, providing rules, functionality and content to this end.”

If you want to be able to roleplay as a particular Meme Magician, you are going to want to invoke the magic hashtag.  Given a particular success or frequency rate of your hashtag casting, the Game Master may decide that you have earned the right and will grant you the Influencer Potion for the Meme you seek.

CULTURE

“Since MMORPGs have so many elements in common, and those elements are experienced by so many people, this has led players of many games to expect “buffing” or “nerfing”, which describe the strengthening or weakening, respectively, of particular game elements. (“Buffing” also refers to in-game effects that temporarily enhance performance; both usages come from a core meaning of increasing power levels.)”

This week saw both buffing and nerfing take place.  It was kingdom wide. 

Those that were buffed, bonded together in song and jubilance.  They were the chosen ones. 

Those that were nerfed experienced the full wrath and might of the Game Master.  True it was that a portion of the nerfed were merely wounded, while others were cut cleanly in half.  They were now the downtrodden, the forgotten. 

Avoid the nerfing at all costs.

What’s In A Number

Ultimately I am looking for tools and information that can better instruct me on tangible efforts that I can undertake in order to improve my reach and better understand my audience.  Tools like HootSuite and bitly track the reach of the links I provide – knowing reach helps gauge the overall popularity of a particular message or blog post.  Understanding what’s popular can be prescriptive when approaching the next topic or post issued.

Crowdbooster provides some clever metrics including times of the day that you may want to post (as determined by the success of previous posts during that same time period).  If I not only understand what makes for a successful post but also when I should release it, I can be assured that I’m making the best effort for my audience to actually see it.

Google+ has Ripples which visually represents how a post spread and to whom.  This is really more for my entertainment purposes but seeing that something I posted made it to many groups of people that I don’t even know is, well, kinda cool.

The bottom line is that the measurements presented from the companies I mention above are very clear.  How they arrived at such results is not up for debate.  Why this data can be directive for future posts is self-evident.

I don’t get these kinds of practical questions answered by Klout, so until that day arrives Klout will be a fun game of strategy and intrigue where the goal is to outsmart the machine. 

But perhaps the kind of insight I describe above is not the end goal for Klout.  Perhaps what is being established is an enormous pool of opt-in users who can be micro-targeted by advertisers.  Interestingly, this same group of users can concomitantly market and propagate brand messages by means of social trust to their own personal circles.  Hmm.

It’s all speculation.  But I do know one thing; my KloutVille character needs help getting a KloutBFG to…

The announcement of Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg that he characterized as “frictionless experiences” got me thinking:  Does the notion of “privacy” exist in today’s digital world?  A world where your unique self and its interesting voyage through life are now fully recorded, analyzed and monetized.  In truth, we are all individually one giant step closer to starring in our own Truman Show.

Really?

Yes – and to support this notion let’s take a quick look at a few example services we use in our daily lives.

SOCIAL WEBSITES

As a logged in Facebook user, websites (who integrate with the Facebook platform) already have the ability to know who you are when you visit.  Before the latest enhancement to the Facebook platform, you could ‘like’ a page and if your friends visited the same page they would come to know that you liked it.

All this explicit user action information was of course also sent back to Facebook.

The new changes in the Open Graph API may now allow websites to automatically post an update stating what article you’ve just read – even if you didn’t explicitly ‘like’ it.

This concept of automatically posting your personal event data will be extended as Facebook integrates video and music services, streaming all the things you watch, listen to and buy.  And you may not be able to opt out even if you log out.

Now how are you going to approach your web browsing experience?  I’m sure that you won’t mind if folks know about your Discovery Channel or Economist browsing habits.  But say you’re planning a vacation trip as a surprise; you go to a vacation site and that information gets posted to your Wall.  That automatic Wall post could potentially spoil your gift. 

You get the idea.

FREE EMAIL

Google has been famous for its bold statement of never having to delete an email - yet another cool, free service from the data giant.  Of course you have to be comfortable with Google data mining all of your email.  Every single message is parsed and analyzed in the name of understanding you better. 

Every. Single. Message. 

The mining is done to provide you with better services of course [read better advertising].

SEARCH ENGINES

Since December of 2009 Google has been keeping track of all of your searches and has been building a profile on you.  This is not data in the aggregate – it’s specifically about you.  Google uses your profile to tailor your query results to what Google thinks is a best match for you as an individual.  This means theoretically no two users search results are the same.  It’s also means that Google can control the resulting data that you are presented with; both inclusive and, more importantly, exclusive.

Bing even goes so far as to fuse your Facebook friends with your Bing search results.

SMARTPHONE DEVICE MAKERS

Earlier this year Apple and Google got into privacy trouble when it became known that both companies were collecting and storing location data on their customers; sometimes even when the location feature had been ‘turned off’ by the phone owner.

WIRELESS CARRIERS

Here is an except from the latest Verizon Wireless contract agreement:

What kind of data is used to prepare business and marketing reports?

Verizon Wireless will use the following categories of information:

Mobile Usage Information:

• Addresses of websites you visit when using our wireless service.  These data strings (or URLs) may include search terms you have used.
• Location of your device
• App and device feature usage

Consumer Information:

• Information about your use of Verizon products and services (such as data and calling features, device type, and amount of use)
• Demographic and interest categories provided to us by other companies (such as gender, age range, sports fan, or pet owner)

We use this Information in a manner that does not identify you personally to prepare these reports for our own and third party purposes.  Verizon Wireless may also share location information with other companies in a way that does not personally identify you so that they can produce limited business and marketing reports.

All of your activites are tracked and ‘aggregated’.  There is some variability with respect to opt-out but pretty much your information is collected and that’s that.

ONSTAR

Concierge services and navigation company, OnStar, made an announcement that it will continue to keep track of an OnStar equipped vehicle’s speed and location information – even after the consumer discontinues the service. 

That’s what I call frictionless.

CREDIT CARDS

Law enforcement agencies can and do seek real-time surveillance of credit card transactions.  Fourth Amendment be damned, as it takes merely a subpoena to gain access to your account.  Although cash may be ‘inconvenient’ it’s one of the last ways to try to avoid prying eyes.  Something to think about next time you and a friend use Square to even up the bar tab.

Hiding in Plain Sight

It seems that Millennials are far less concerned than previous generations when it comes to privacy.  The amount of personal information freely shared is unprecedented and to date it seems that Zuckerberg’s Law is proving to be true. 

Users actively participate with physical check-in services like Foursquare and Yelp that publish the time, date and location of the establishment they are sitting at. 

Then there are virtual check-in services with the likes of Miso and IntoNow where you broadcast to the world what you are watching on TV.

The ACLU will do its best to try and protect your rights but as personal information becomes more available and readily accessible most likely theirs will become a Sisyphean task.

The digital age isn’t something you can hide from, but perhaps it is a place that you can negotiate with more prudence; unless of course you subscribe to former Sun CEO Scott McNealy’s proposition. 

His solution?  “Get over it.”