expōnere

Simple honest privacy for Costa Competition

In my usual daily trawl of interesting stuff I came across a competition from Costa Coffee in the UK to win a year’s free coffee and as anyone who knows me – free coffee has got to be a good thing.

The compo, it turns out, is actually just a draw, you know the sort of thing; enter your contact details, don’t win and yet still get bombarded with masses of junk marketing from all and sundry.

Well here’s the entry page and it quite clearly says Costa aren’t going to use your details for that, and the terms and conditions are equally simple, fair and honest.  A great nod to consumer privacy and not abusing it.

Simple privacy terms from Costa Coffee

A massive WELL DONE to Costa for breaking the norm and offering to play nicely. (needless to say yes I have entered)

Screencast of Models, Ownership and Privacy

Okay here is a screencast of my presentation from the recent BEUC Forum on Consumer Privacy.  It has taken longer than hoped to get up and running (call me a luddite – I’m just not a video person and so learning new tools has been a steep old learning curve).  BTW sorry for the slightly iffy sound quality (inc the slightly monotone narration), a super snotty cold is never going to help.

Proper thanks must go to the masses of wonderful people who make their photographs available under Creative Commons (especially those good enough to allow commercial use) without whom this just would have been a non-starter with stock art websites charging way beyond my means.  That and really I needed to hammer the CC license thing home – you’ll see why.

On the subject of Creative Commons, this screencast is available for you to take away, use & redistribute (yup even for commercial stuff) at will as long as it doesn’t get edited, attribution is given and all the licenses of embedded works respected (i.e. no nicking bits of other people’s stuff).

So to all those whose works I have used, here’s credit where it is due:

For anyone needing/wanting you can also download the presentation in 3GP format (approx 7mb) for your mobile/iPod here.

Someone ALWAYS Pays – A Business Truism

Irrespective of whether a company’s business model is based on direct sales or pyramid schemes, personal value or freemium at their very core all business models are united in the simple premise that; someone always pays. I’ve understood this, as I am sure anyone in business has, for many years.  No matter how altruistic one may feel the process of doing business costs money, and unless someone pays for those costs that business very rapidly is going out of business.

Shelly Palmer, MD of Advanced Media Ventures Group LLC articulated this simplicity brilliantly in his recent blog;

There are only three business models: I pay, you pay or someone else pays. That’s it.

I pay means that I (the publisher of the content) am willing to fund the creation, production and distribution of the content for my own purposes.

You pay means that you are willing to pay me for my content.

Someone else [They pay] pays means that a third party is willing to pay me so that you can consume my content.

Simply no matter what the business model being adopted someone always pays. This works well for me; I’m quite simplistic in my view on the world, breaking things down into basic building blocks.

When talking about those business practices that have impacted upon consumer privacy, for me, once one can accept that really all business models are much the same and that emerging models really can’t be to blame one can move on and start to look for those areas more culpable.

What are those areas?  Well I think that the payment mechanisms that underpin business models leave an audit trail of their impact but that’s another story.

“Models, Privacy & Ownership” summary of my BEUC Privacy presentation

So finally after much work the beast that is my BEUC Forum of Privacy 2009  is complete (and busy sending right now).  It is a 173 slide monster but provisional timings stick that at around 14minutes.

As a teaser here’s the summary I’ve posted to the BEUC:

“Models, Privacy & Ownership”

When given people trust businesses those businesses perform better. But for people to truly trust businesses and organisations they must have confidence in their privacy being safe-guarded.

Barney Craggs examines the effect emerging payment mechanisms has had on the volume of personal information being traded and highlights how by abandoning old set notions of ownership any organisation can foster trust and thrive which ever business model they pursue.

Spotify Premium Now HALF-PRICE!

Only a couple of weeks ago I posed the question on Twitter “would Spotify double uptake if they halved the price?” To which, of course the answer was no, and it was pointed out quite clearly.

Last week we had confirmation from 3UK that they would be releasing the HTC Hero with Spotify Premium baked in next month and hey guess what I’ve just had in my inbox…

Now I am really really tempted.  Having bought 5 or 6 albums in the last month alone at £4.99 a month with offline cache the Spotify model is starting to look attractive.

UPDATE (17:50):  Having just dry run the offer it looks like it is a one-time-use discount code so it is entirely possible the offer is only being made to i) existing Spotify users and ii) even that group may be in some way limited.  Let me know if you had the offer.