Author Archives: Elia Freedman

Once We Have Attention Then We Only Have Trust

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All of this discussion about trust really started with me thinking about the role of trust in building a business. Building Infinity Softworks has been all about building a relationship with my customer. At the center of that relationship is trust. Trust, then, is the only true currency we each have. That’s the bottom line, isn’t it? And when the trust is gone, so is the relationship.

That’s where SOPA and PIPA failed. The entertainment industry lost our trust. The government lost our trust. This is the fundamental problem facing Google, where it has bastardized search results to ensure that Google+ is at the top. This is why no one really trusts Facebook. The company builds itself on privacy but every time money is at stake Facebook is more than willing to throw privacy out the door.

In the early days of building a company we have a choice: we can ask for money today or ask for money tomorrow. If you ask for money today then we are each attempting to make money before we have built a trusting relationship with the customer. If we wait and make money tomorrow then we have built a relationship with the customer before asking her to pay. Once we have trust, the relationship between the company and customer is much stronger and worth a lot more money.

Unless I am referred [1], I have no knowledge of who you are and no interaction to trust you.

In the old days there was little choice. We walked into retail stores and asked a clerk or shelled out $50-200 because we had no options. But now the App Store has 500,000 titles and the Internet has 450 million web sites. We have option overload. Now we need different methods of building trust: free versions, freemium business models, trials. Without those we drop the price to $.99 and hope it is too low for anyone to care, even though they do. Funding, too, has become a currency of trust. If I have it then someone must have decided this was a good product and worth trying.

This mentality isn’t just invading the tech world, though, it is invading everywhere. Companies that don’t make the transition, from automatic trust to earning trust, are all going to die.

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[1] In this case the trust is inferred and built off of the relationship between the referee and referrer. This is why my dad trusts my opinion about technology but doesn’t trust my opinion about coffee, since I don’t drink it.

Breaking Our Oaths Of Office

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I want to point out a couple of passages that I think are worth mentioning (emphasis mine). The Preamble of the US Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The Congressional oath of office:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

The Presidential oath of office:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

The Constitution of these United States is only as strong as those defending it. And when money can buy off the Constitution our trust in this government ends. SOPA and PIPA are full scale assaults aimed at purchasing the Preamble to the Constitution and Chris Dodd’s blatant bribe money is an indication that we are no longer afraid to even have the perception of bastardizing the Constitution for our own personal gain.

On the heals of Chris Dodd’s, the MPAA’s and RIAA’s blatant destruction of the Constitution, the Administration was rebuffed by the Supreme Court, denied the ability to place a GPS tracking system on a vehicle without a warrant. The Obama Administration defended this action, which was clearly a direct assault on the Fourth Amendment.

At what point do we recognize that our government — Presidents, Senators and Congressman — is no longer upholding their oaths of office, the sworn statement to defend this nation from threats and uphold the Constitution? The oaths don’t say uphold the Constitution from threats but only if they don’t pay well. It says all threats, foreign and domestic.

We have lost our trust in our government to do what is right. This is a very precarious position. And if We The People don’t take back government by exercising our Constitutional right of voting this trash out of office and fixing the Constitution so money can’t own our government, then we are as complicit as they are.

SOPA: A Fundamental Question Of Trust

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[My apologies to anyone who read the oddly posted version yesterday. It’s gone now. Some weird WordPress hiccup. Below is the actually completed version I meant to publish.]

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Here’s the question that is going to screw Chris Dodd: who do you trust more, the tech industry or Hollywood?

Once upon a time, Americans spent all of our free time in movie theaters and in front of television, reading newspapers and paging through magazines. Once upon a time we believed in the folks who ran those businesses and starred on those screens. When Ed Sullivan said smoke Kent cigarettes and use Wisk laundry detergent, America did. When Walter Cronkite said the Vietnam War was bad, America agreed. We had faith in Cary Grant and James Stewart and John Wayne. We believed that the newspapers and magazines were telling us the news we needed to know, straight up.

But in the 1970s and 1980s, that faith began to falter and by the 1990s and into the new millennium, that faith was gone. When a starlet promoted a brand we asked how much is she getting paid? When the Times wrote a story we asked where’s the bias? We became cynical, we stopped believing what we were told, believing that the person or entity telling us had an agenda.

If time is an indicator, clearly the tech industry is trusted more. Now we don’t read papers, we read Twitter, we watch YouTube, we follow our friends on Facebook, and we search for opinions we care about on Google. Somewhere between 1970 and 2010, we stopped trusting old media and started trusted tech.

So jack-ass Chris Dodd, head of the Motion Picture Association, can say on Fox News that he’s going to take his bribe money and go home if the Congress he bought doesn’t get in line. But Chris Dodd doesn’t understand that the MPAA isn’t trusted enough anymore to make those claims.

What Chris Dodd doesn’t understand is that PIPA and SOPA just woke the lumbering giant, the tech industry he just tried to screw. And if that lumbering giant decided it will take center stage in guiding this country politically in the 21st Century, Chris Dodd and the rest of his old world media politicians better watch out.

Because America doesn’t trust you anymore.

SOPA/PIPA Backers Still Don’t Get It

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Dodd Calls for Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Meet

I really hope Chris Dodd does what he says and sits down with the tech industry. And I really hope that this statement does not indicate that Chris Dodd and the rest of those backing PIPA and SOPA think that they would have been more successful if they just would have moved quicker.

But the startlingly speedy collapse of the antipiracy campaign by some of Washington’s savviest players — not just the motion picture association, but also the United States Chamber of Commerce and the Recording Industry Association of America — signaled deep changes in antipiracy lobbying in the future. By Mr. Dodd’s account, no Washington player can safely assume that a well-wired, heavily financed legislative program is safe from a sudden burst of Web-driven populism.

What Dodd, the MPAA, RIAA and everyone else backing these bills needs to understand is that this isn’t about money, it isn’t even about piracy. This is about government being able to run rough-shod over what services people use. If SOPA/PIPA backers brought a reasonable bill to the tech industry that was actually aimed at cutting down on piracy and not shutting down web sites without a judges review (you know, innocent before proven guilty), my guess is we’d back it.

The biggest problem, though, that those backers don’t understand (and don’t seem to want to) is that the power to slow piracy is already in their hands. I’m going to say this in capital letters so hopefully someone over there hears it:

THIS IS ABOUT GIVING US REASONABLY PRICED CONTENT WHEREVER WE WANT IT.

This isn’t rocket science.

The Thing I Can’t Stop Thinking About From Yesterday’s Apple Announcement

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How in the world is Apple going to keep textbooks up-to-date and not lose your highlighting and note positions?

Did Apple come up with some magical new way of marking the beginning and end of the highlight area? The obvious way is to store the start character position and length (or end character position). But what happens if a word changes before that section? Do they, in essence, track changes and figure out how many characters to adjust the highlight position? What if a word changes in the middle? Do they know where it is and can adjust the highlight length? What happens if the entire passage you highlighted is deleted by the author?

Or do they do what Amazon did: throw away your notes and make your start over? (Bad. Very bad.)