Christine

Symantec Launches Norton Identity Client

Symantec's Identity Initiative believes that there are two key components to "Security 2.0" - identity and reputation. Today at DEMO 07, Symantec announced its upcoming Norton Identity Client, which enables users to personally share their own information online. (As I've blogged before, juggling multiple identities is a painfully common problem.) NIC will manage all of these while providing reputation services. Users can choose what information about themselves they want to share, and with which sites. Like e-mail protection, the client will warn the user when about to share information with a suspect site.

A number of issues come to mind:

• If a user can make purchases without providing their own name and credit card number to the merchant site, then this implies that Symantec actually owns the transaction. Presuming a transaction fee, this is brilliant economics. (Wouldn't the team love to get even a penny per Amazon sale?)
• Given all of the recent privacy issues around government subpoenas and consumer transactions, do we really want a single transaction processsor to have a complete record of every transaction that we make, no matter what payment method we use or what vendor we purchase from?
• Does Symantec's implementation translate into a complete browsing history? When a site requests information about the visitor, Norton Identity Client requires authorization - site credentials are both temporary and subject to user approval. Besides the question of usability (I wouldn't want to approve every visit to MyYahoo!), it's obvious that Symantec can then log my visits to and behaviors on every site that uses cookie-level information. That's a lot of power to sell to advertisers/content targeters, and certainly attractive to law enforcement.
  
• A number of competing identity standard efforts agreed to collaborate last year under the OpenID banner. Why isn't Symantec working with the rest of the industry? (If sxip can, Symantec can.)

Though reputation was mentioned, it was only touched upon lightly. I'm curious to see how NIC address the "reputation for what" issue . (e.g., is someone's five-star reputation valid for their payment history, or for their restaurant recommendations?)

Many vendors have struggled with single sign-on development, whether they were Microsoft Passport or a trendy open-source startup. Symantec has a leg up as a trusted brand for security - consumers will have confidence that a Norton product can protect them from identity theft. Hopefully, Symantec will both address core privacy issues and leverage its substantial street cred as it builds out a valuable set of identity services.

Oliver Starr Joins Guidewire Group

Some surprising news hit the wire this morning - my friend Oliver Starr from MobileCrunch has joined up with my 'family' over at Guidewire Group. This is likely related to Guidewire Group's recent launch of Guidewire Report, its investor newsletter. Oliver has a fanatical interest and focus upon mobile, so his joining the team will add mobile expertise to their analyst bench.

Simple Rules for Would-Be Mobile Advertisers

Continuing the theme of mobile advertising: Simon Darr of Comverse (a provider of mobile messaging, content and billing systems) helps to flesh out an important qualitative issue. Of the three entities in the mobile advertising value chain - advertisers, carriers, and subscribers - the relationship between advertiser and carrier is the least established. Would-be mobile advertisers should take these deceptively simple rules into account when considering mobile campaigns:

1. Understand the typical carrier's business priorities. To establish a win-win proposal, mobile marketing campaigns must take these carrier needs into account:

• Carriers want to not only increase their subscriber base, but also increase their averager revenue per user (ARPU).
• Carriers want to reduce churn, and worry that giving advertisers a channel into the subscriber will harm their subscriber bases.
• Carriers want to increase the ROI on their 3G networks, as they have yet to see meaningful returns on this investment.

2. Think proactively about traffic optimization. Traffic optimization is the biggest challenge to the adoption of mobile push campaigns. For example: In Europe, Christmas Day messages make up 1/4 of an entire year's messaging total. Once a carrier builds out a system capable of handling Christmas Day traffic, it must then find ways to make money back on that system during the rest of the year. Advertising push has an opportunity to add value, but it presents a new challenge for the carrier: when the system is busy, what gets prioritized - the advertiser's message, or a subscriber's birthday message to Grandma?

3 Italia Shares Test Results from Mobile Ad Targeting

Adriano Gaved from mobile media company 3 Italia recently shared the results of an internal case study on mobile content ad targeting. The big takeaways from their testing:

1. In mobile content, carriers will be disappointed to discover that the consumer's expectations around content consumption will trump his or her preexisting norms around mobile usage. e.g., free and advertising-supported is the standard content model, rather than premium payments. (Notable exceptions: users are willing to pay extra for games, adult content, and music.)
2. Each time you divide a target cluster, you will double the clickthrough rate.

A fairly new carrier, 3 Italia has grown to approximately 7 million subscribers over the past three years. 4.5 million of those 7 million customers have opted in to receive daily promotional content via UMTS push, including both MMS and VMS. (Pull media, on the other hand, goes out through 3 Italia's portal.) Since UMTS is unicasting, this means that if 1 million customers want information, there will be 1 million data flows going out from your servers. DVB-H, on the other hand is a broadcast medium, and has similar efficiencies to terrestrial digital television. Inefficiency is the cost of providing more choice to the user experience, and so the carrier must develop targeting sufficient to pay for the increased costs of UMTS over DVB-H. Here's what 3 Italia found in its test results:

• Case Study A: 8 clusters of 62,500 customers each =  0.8% click-through rate (CTR)
• Case Study B: 24 clusters of 67,000 customers each = 1.8% CTR (Note: though the cluster size is relatively similar to that of A, this represents a finer comb since it parallelled overall growth of the customer base.)
• Case Study C: 48 clusters of 33,000 customers each = 3.2% CTR

These numbers show that targeting makes a huge difference in returns. It left me wondering, however, if 3 Italia stopped testing after C because that was the CTR required to turn a profit on unicasting in their content model. Or conversely, if a 'D' split fails to provide improvements along the same trajectory.

Open Call for Hackers and Crafters

As you may recall from my experiments in video blogging last year, Maker Faire is an event that "brings together science, art, craft and engineering in a fun, energized, and exciting public forum." Sponsored by the staff of Make and Craft magazines, this family-friendly event is designed to both showcase the work of incredible "makers" and to inspire all people to roll up their sleeves. And they've started recruiting for this year's makefest!

Last year's event drew out 20,000 people with a passion or interest in making. Some of my favorite exhibits from last year included breadboarding with Bunnie Huang, the guy with the giant giraffe robot, and of course the rocket club's hands-on classes in rocketmaking. And let's not forget the many things that were (intentionally) on fire...I'm psyched to see what this year's crop of makers will bring.

This year's Maker Faire Bay Area will take place May 19-20, 2007 at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. Proposals for participation are now being accepted online, and the deadline is February 27th. Alternatively, e-mail Natalie Villalobos and let her know that you'd like to come to the live auditions on Saturday, February 24th at TechShop in Menlo Park. (I am tremendously disappointed  that I'll be out of town for this. What a great reality show this would make - would someone volunteer to video blog?)

All proposals will be reviewed, and makers notified of acceptance via email, by March 19, 2007. More details for all of this online!

Note: If you're not in California, note that the Make/Craft staff is also adding Maker Faire Austin to the calendar, to be held October 20-21 at the Travis County Fairgrounds.

Soon at Starbucks: Caffeinated Doughnuts

This is so far afield from a typical post that I don't have a category for it: caffeinated doughnuts have just been patented, and the inventor is negotiating with Krispy Kreme, Starbucks, etc. to get these sugary, bright-eyed treats onto the desks of sleep-deprived startups everywhere. There's also a brief NY Times announcement. Apparently, the big deal was to get out (or mask) the bitter taste of caffeine.

Just had to share this snippet. Since I don't drink coffee and love baked goods, I'm ecstatic from the idea. I expect to see entire trays of these at the next hackathon.

Web 2.0 Goal-Setting at The New York Times

How does a established news institution transform itself into a sleek Web 2.0 business? Martin Nisenholtz, SVP of Digital for the New York Times Company, is having a great deal of fun discovering what it takes to get people to pay for content:

Develop circulation, not traffic

To start with, Nisenholtz has drawn a line between Web metrics and online circulation metrics. For example, millions of people will visit NYTimes.com to just read one article, or will quickly blink over a page in response to a search result or a blog link. This highly ephemeral Web traffic can add up to 2.5 million unique visitors per day. Online circulation, however, is measured at 570,000 TimesSelect subscribers.

Keeping this distinction in mind, Nisenholtz has set these goals across all digital properties:

• Attract more users, period.
• Keep users coming back, and staying longer. Increase not only the average number of visits per reader, but also the average number of page views per visit.  
• Convert casual visitors into serious readers. Even if only a fraction of the site's 20 million casual visitors each month joined the pool of 1.5 million loyal readers, it would make a significant impact on the business model.
  

The rising importance of 'circulation' numbers has driven a major shift in online advertising. Unlike a typical Web company, the Times and other news publishers don't have restrictions on the number of ad impressions per visitor. While most Web advertisers restrict the number of paid daily ad impressions to 3 or 4 per visitor, Times advertisers actually seek higher frequencies.

Transform the established culture

I visited Martin in the New York Times offices last week, and it felt like being backstage at Phantom. The New York Times has always been the real newspaper, and its impressive archive dates back to 1851. Like a tourist, I greedily enjoyed the view whenever the elevator paused to open its doors, and wondered what dastardly plans had been exposed by the innocuous-looking journalists passing by. Behind this bustling news scene, however, the organization is changing. Cross-platform sales training has become the norm, as the digital business scales. The sales team is challenged to get digital salespeople working with the advertising department, while the print staff must educate itself to become more Web-savvy.

Cultural transformation also takes place via acquisition and investment. The Times organization acquired About.com 18 months ago, and local search is being rolled out and tested in the Boston area via Boston.com. They've also made investments into Web 2.0 companies such as indeed, Federated Media Publishing, and daylife. (Disclosure note: Omidyar Network is an investor in Federated Media.)

I suspect that core Times content will always follow an authoritative model, where information is both edited and vetted for accuracy, and there are twice as many editors as reporters. At About.com, however, each editor supports an entire classroom of guides. The publisher's next challenge is a big one: How can it leverage user-generated content? How can it become more distributed and less edited? If the Times can figure out how to edit both the 100th and the 10,000th guide profitably - or how to achieve consistent quality without editing - then the business will be well-placed to become an established institution online as well as in print.

Tag, I'm It: Five Personal Tidbits

The latest meme making the rounds is Blog Tag. Once tagged, you are supposed reveal five tidbits about yourself - especially those unrelated to your blog persona - and then tag five others. After a double-tag by Oliver Starr and Derek Scruggs, I'm it. Here are five lesser-known snippets about me, and a photo that I'll undoubtedly regret sharing later:

1. I was an All-Ivy college cheerleader. At Columbia, being a cheerleader was not popular, which of course is one reason it was worth doing. Bonus info for trivia hounds: I was cheering during The Streak, and was not only at the football game that put Columbia in the record books in 1987 with 35 consecutive losses, but also at the game that broke The Streak in 1988 (Columbia-Princeton, 16-13) after 44 consecutive losses. Deep in the CBS Early Show archives, there is some very cheesy footage of 17-year-old Christine cheering and being interviewed.
2. Automatic car washes make me laugh uncontrollably. I still remember the first time I went through one, since it was only ten years ago: First, there was a short giggle as the Hand of the Car Wash God took over our forward motion. As soon as the giant rubber noodles started undulating and smacking the car around, I lost it. And what about those giant soapy rollers and whirligigs? The hair dryer tornado? Who wouldn't laugh?
   
3. I don't drink coffee or beer. Double yuck.
4. One of my first hires when I started Mercury2 was my mother, Josie Herron - otherwise known as "M" on the team. Mom is a genius at both data architectures and requirements development. Since we were building complex database applications, and I knew she'd work tirelessly for me, Wheat Thins, and Diet Pepsi, moving her out was a no-brainer. "M" was our naming compromise - I didn't want to call her Mom at work, she refused to have me call her Josie, and frankly, the James Bond reference is a good fit for her.
5. I learned to read when I was two years old (ask Mom), and so I think of books as friends. All of my books are alphabetized by author, then title. Except in the case of trilogies and such, which are organized chronologically within the set. Reference books shelved separately.

Now, the fun part where I get to tag: Rob Hayes, David Hornik, Kaliya Hamlin, Dave McClure, and Charlie Crystle. (I also wanted to tag Lisa Stone and Ross Mayfield, but they've already been hit.)