Platforms. Scamming. Privacy. Infinity. Windoze.

A great, if busy past week that saw me at UC Davis for two days, working with teams of very bright students as part of their Agricultural Innovation Entrepreneurship Academy [ File that under Passion and People ], down at The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, attending VRM Day with Doc Searls and the team that makes up The VRM Project [ Put this one under People ], engaged with My Mentor, a new start up launching in the UK [ this one goes under People and Platforms ] and got invited (and I accepted) to be a featured contributor on BizCatlyst 360 [ In case you are wondering … Passion ]

I have just requested a 3.0 version upgrade on my time module, so once that is installed I will endeavor to write individual posts about some of these topics over the next week.

Meanwhile these are the 5 things that caught my eyes and ears last week.

Platforms

If you are paying attention, you know I am watching Platforms. Closely. Carefully. And the guy that writes about them a lot, I wrote about here. In this article Sangeet Paul Choudary talks of the rise of full-stack solutions …

The fundamental mindset shift while providing a full-stack solution is to stop thinking in terms of the products and services you own today, or even in terms of the ones that you can create tomorrow, and start thinking in terms of the full stack of products and services required to guarantee user outcomes.

That’s what I like about platforms. They come from the position of ‘we the people’ - not ‘they the corporation’ Or at least they should. You can see more of my thoughts on this topic here. But there is no doubt that Sangeet and I are more aligned than not.

Now if I could only get him to stop calling us ‘users’.

Scamming Creative Professionals

Scalzi makes for a good read, but I rarely reference him. This is my first exception. I have written before about how Spotify is being scammed. In this article Scalzi is highlighting exactly the same method of scam that is happening to authors who publish to Kindle - right under Amazon’s nose. Guess what ? They are doing nothing about it. Shame On Them. But regardless of the scam, just like at Spotify, the model sucks.

Creative Professionals deserve more.

EMail Privacy

… it might just be coming your way soon. Wait - you mean I don’t have it already?

Nope …

You probably think the US government needs a warrant if they want to dig through your old emails, texts, and instant messages, right? Well, you’re wrong! That may change soon with the Email Privacy Act, which was just passed in the House by a vote of 419 to 0

This short piece from Gizmodo provides deeper insight and explains why you should care. That said, it was passed by 419 to 0. It isn’t law - yet and has been floating around since May 2013, but still - it is moving - and the support is definitely welcome.

When was the last time you saw a vote that was that clear?

Infinite Capacity

Dropbox putting the entire cloud behind your hard drive is a cool idea, though not for me - yet. It is of course an early industry salvo that will allow you to buy smaller drives - and just get what you need - when you need it. So - next time you are upgrading, maybe buy a smaller hard drive and use the savings to keep your stuff ‘up there’.

Of course - all your data somewhere else (not with you) is the cloud story. But, who do you trust - really …

They need the service to be always on - always - no exception.
You need an always on internet service. Anyone? Anyone?
You need to trust them to not run out of money and close their service down.
You need to trust them not to hand over the keys to your data when some wonk from the local Gendarmerie asks to see what you are storing.
They have to be so very very secure - after all - a truly successful data storage facility will be a target of the bad guys.

Who would you trust with all your digital assets?