Outside Innovation

Will You Trust Google with Your Searching, Emails, and YouTube Viewing?

Google has a new privacy policy that’s about to go into effect on March 1^st, 2012 (unless it’s delayed by the FTC or by the EU regulators).

The changes are fairly minor. Yet, there’s been a furor surrounding the new policy. Why? Google is trying to be more forthright and explicit about what information it gathers, what information it stores, and what information it shares. Many people, myself included, have been semi-comfortable enjoying convenient tools and more targeted advertising even though we know that every move we make online is logged and analyzed by Google’s automated systems and then that information is aggregated and used to ensure that advertisers’ ads will turn up in front of people who are looking for their products and services (or to people who will be receptive to those offers).

I believe that what has made me much more uncomfortable about this quid pro quo over the past year is my reluctant awareness that, in the U.S. at least, the Patriot Act and other government programs that are ostensibly designed to protect us are empowering the U.S. government to demand warrantless access to the logs of our online behavior. Who has the most complete picture of what we do and care about? Google. What does Google do with that information? It keeps the logs linked to our profiles for 18 months before it severs the connection to our identity and makes the information non-attributable to a particular person. And, when a government agency makes a “legal request,” Google complies by handing over the logs of what it knows about our online activities for the last 18 months. While I am not a terrorist nor a pedophile, I don’t know what behavior of mine could trigger a sudden interest on the part of Big Brother.

Open Innovation: Combining World-Class Skills with Local Knowledge

One of the most seductive forms of open innovation is to recruit the best minds in the world to work on really tough problems. Often this is done in the form of competitions. And, when the goal of the competition is to make the world a better place by solving a tough social problem, they tend to attract world-class talent as well as considerable press. What’s great is when the people who are attracted to address these challenges have a lot of local knowledge, because without that local knowledge and context, the designs are often fatally flawed.

Two such competitions caught my eye this month:

* Local Motors Goes International: Still Time to Vote on Five Great Vehicle Designs

Shell is sponsoring this competition with Local Motors for the design of appropriate vehicles for five different cities in the world. Each vehicle is supposed to be able to be built from locally sourced materials, be environmentally friendly, and to address a social issue that is specific to the city. It’s really fascinating to look through the entries and to read about both the problems being addressed and the local materials being promoted. It’s also great that in each case, the competitors include designers from the local regions who are familiar with the local traffic and road conditions as well as with the local materials.

Among my favorite designs are:

What’s Your Customer Cloud Strategy?

With the looming Facebook IPO and the flap about Google’s new privacy policies on many peoples’ minds, we thought it would be a good time to step back and think about how customers want to use the cloud.

The Cloud Stores and Synchronizes Information for Us. When we think of consumer cloud offerings, we think of capabilities like Apple’s iCloud, which is useful for backing up our photographs, keeping our digital music libraries, and synchronizing all of our data across our various mobile and non-mobile i-friendly devices. If we use any of the current Apple devices and software, iCloud is available to us as a free service. If we want to use Apple’s Music Match service, or to buy additional storage in the iCloud, we can pay extra.

We Don’t Need to Know What Computers and Operating Systems Run in the Cloud. As customers, we know that the cloud is “out there” somewhere. It’s on the Internet. We don’t much care where it is. In fact, that’s the benefit to us. All of the stuff that we care about is backed up and synchronized using these ephemeral services that run “out there, somewhere.” The “cloud” that Apple offers us is actually powered by physical computers that run in one or more physical data centers in one or more regions of the world. But we don’t care where they are or what they are, as long as they keep running and backing up and synchronizing our data.