Finance Geek

Google’s daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.

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Cisco — the world’s largest networking hardware company — is eliminating about 1,300 jobs as it continues to cut costs.

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This week on the Gadget Lab Podcast: Reviews Editor Michael Calore and Staff Writer Nathan Olivarez-Giles take a look at the Motorola Atrix HD Android smartphone and the Sonos Sub wireless subwoofer.

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The Yellow Jacket iPhone Stun Gun case is exactly as its name implies. It’s a case for your iPhone that has a built in stun gun feature. With a 650K volt stun gun built in, this is not a case to be taken lightly by its user. Currently just an Indiegogo project, the Yellow Jacket has already made its minimum goal to start production.

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Between constantly checking my e-mail, sending out information via twitter, helping out with the Florida Garrison’s Facebook page and my son’s love of Angry Birds, my iPhone battery doesn’t last a full day. I loved the reviews on the Mophie Juice Pack Plus for the iPhone and I really wanted to try it out. My only issue with the case was the lack of protection the case gave the screen. As soon as I learned they had a rugged version in the making, I jumped at the chance to check it out.

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This much we know: Apple?s Eyes Free feature will be implemented into the vehicles of nine different automakers, allowing drivers to access the Siri ?voice assistant? on a connected iPhone by pressing a button on the steering wheel. Apple revealed the news at its Worldwide Developers Conference in early June, which caught some representatives at the nine automakers somewhat off guard.

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! The percentage of Americans living in poverty is about to hit its highest level since the 1960s, according to a new survey by the Associated Press. The latest Census numbers won’t be released until the fall, but economists surveyed by the AP project that the poverty rate will climb [...]

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Marissa Mayer invented something called the Associate Product Manager program at Google, for the best and brightest new recruits. It was a key part of her tenure at Google. And now she may reap some benefits as she takes over Yahoo.

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! Global markets continue their decline Monday morning on worries over the ongoing European debt crisis. The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended last Friday’s session down 121 points. Fears about Spain needing a full-scale sovereign debt bailout have increased in the past week. The yield on the benchmark Spanish 10-Year [...]

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! Could outsourcing of U.S. jobs actually be good for Americans? The number of U.S. jobs lost to low-wage countries has never been officially calculated — U.S. companies are not legally mandated to report such statistics. Boston-based global research and advisory firm Forrester predicts that more than 400,000 service jobs [...]

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Steve Jobs was a Buddhist and a tyrant, a genius and a jerk. What is your interpretation of his thorny life story?

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Follow The Daily Ticker on Facebook! Much has been made in about China’s huge investments in resource-rich Africa in recent years and Chinese President Hu Jintao pledged another $20 billion in loans during his visit last week. But it’s not just Africa where China is looking to secure access to commodities, notes international economist Dambisa [...]

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Most businesses figured out a long time ago that delivering good customer service is a pre-requisite for long term financial success. If you’re like me you will have noticed that more and more often issues can be sorted out with a single email or phone call (although some providers remain frustratingly awful at looking after their customers – particularly banks and telecoms companies). A quick history of the phrase ‘the customer is always right’ is illustrative here. Use of the phrase dates back to the early 20th century when the concept was championed by a few visionary firms (including Selfridges here in the UK), then by the beginning of this century management were pushing the idea so hard that comedians derided it as a cliche, and now it has become so widely accepted that people don’t really joke about it.

However, all of this progress hasn’t really made its way into the world of advertising yet.

Back in 2008-09 I wrote a few posts about Vendor Relationship Management (VRM), a conceptual framework for improving the customer experience of being advertised to which turns the traditional advertising model on its head by putting the customer in control of the adverts they see. In theory this should be better for everyone – the customer only sees ads that are relevant to things they want to buy or do, and the advertiser can avoids the waste of advertising to people who aren’t interested in their product.

Doc Searls and the other proponents of VRM have sketched out a technical architecture for the services that are required to make this vision a reality, the most important element of which is a personal datastore for each consumer which tells advertisers which products and services they are allowed to advertise. The datastore contains rich profile information which is valuable for advertisers, but the contents and access to the datastore are controlled by the consumer, who may choose to see no ads at all.

I stopped writing about VRM in 2009 when it became clear that the practical challenges to implementing VRM were such that we were unlikely to see any successful startups in this area in the short term. I think the biggest challenge is getting consumers to engage with the concept, both by contributing to a personal datastore and then by updating their preferences so advertisers know what they might want to buy. For a service to work the data needs to be captured and the preferences inferred without any effort from the consumer, and to my knowledge nobody has found a way to do that.

I still believe in this vision of the future though. It is much more efficient than today’s advertising which, despite much improved targeting, is still mostly irrelevant to the consumer and increasingly simply not seen.

I’m writing about this now because I just read an interview with Doc Searls about his new book, The Intention Economy. The interview is a good reminder of the problems with the existing advertising system and how things will look different in the future. As I say, I still believe in the vision of VRM, but equally the path that gets us there still isn’t clear. I think developments in smartphones and intelligent agents are bringing us closer to the point when that clarity will arrive though, and I’d be happy to hear from any startups working in this area.

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