Atul Patel’s Ideas Everywhere

I still do not know what to think of the Do-Not-Track list concept presented by nine privacy organizations to the FTC today. As we browse the Internet, HTTP cookies are placed in our computers to track our actions — where we are now (current site), where were we before (sites visited), and what do we do (terms searched, articles read, ads clicked). These cookies are then read by advertising systems, such as DoubleClick and Advertising.com, to identify the best ad to show. I’ve provided detailed of this process in my previous post.

Essentially, we are all being followed, however the key difference is that this is less about security or identity theft and more about privacy — the marketing kind. The reason for this practice is to better identify which advertisements to show to us as we browse the Internet. I don’t exactly feel that this hurts. In a previous post, I’ve written about how ad serving, in general, slows my Internet experience, but I’m not against the advertising, just how long they take to load. Internet sites need to be paid for providing us content and services — bottom line.

Although this is worth a longer post than I am ready to write at the moment, but regarding this whole issue, I’ve recently been thinking about how the ads that I see aren’t relevant enough! For example, disregarding where I’ve been, you would think that a portal would know that in the area in which I live, there are fewer Spanish speaking individuals (from my observation). Yet, on occasion, I will see an ad for Terra Lycos, and if I click on it, it takes me to a Spanish landing page. This makes me appreciate behavioral targeting and even ask for more intelligence to go into the advertising engine on the Internet.

Back to the Do Not Track List. The idea behind this new DNT, follows the same evolution of the other do-not’s: Do Not Call, Do Not Solicit, and Do Not Mail (last one has been talked about, but not initiated, I think). However, I find that these are a bit more intrusive than seeing advertising on an Internet site. In fact, all these interrelated, because once my credit data is automatically mined by a computer (the Solicit part), I receive calls and mail! In any case, I find it hard to believe that

This initiative may be a far cry, especially because it involves browsers to incorporate new technologies and for consumers to be aware of them. It’ll be interesting to watch how this turns out, but I also see some interesting opportunities.

My next post will be regarding the new concepts around the Do Not Track list. To help some make sense of the meaning behind Internet tracking and behavioral targeting, I help explain it below. For a lot of people, this stuff is common knowledge. For the others, if you want to see it n action, follow these steps:

1) Clear your browser’s cookies. In Internet Explorer, go to Tools > Delete Browsing History… > Delete Cookies. Once I did this I had no cookies stored in my folder.

2) For this example, we’ll visit a mobile company’s site. Go to T-Mobile’s site at www.tmobile.com.

3) Now go to your Cookies folder. In Windows, this is found in your personal folder (XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<you>, Vista C:\Users\<you>). You’ll notice that there are a bunch of new cookies in your folder, from many ad networks. In this case, they were: YieldManager, TrafficMP, T-Mobile, RealMedia, AdRevolver, FastClick, Edge.ru4, DoubleClick, Atdmt, Advertising, SpecificClick, YieldManager.

4) Take a look inside one of those cookies (click-twice). What you see will have no meaning to you, but it’s worth a look. The AdRevolver cookie had the following in it. AdRevolver is an engine of BlueLithium.

freq
1193877518778+0-0+0
media.adrevolver.com/adrevolver/
2147484672
2741635456
29965039
2276626960
29891615
*
uid
9481629314759516
*

5) Now, the fun part. I know that MingleNow uses BlueLithium, a premier behavioral targeting ad network recently acquired by Yahoo, to show me the most appropriate ad. So let’s visit www.minglenow.com. Scroll to the bottom of the home page, and look on the left. You’ll most likely see a T-Mobile ad!

Also, check your cookie folder, and you’ll see three new cookies: MingleNow, QuestionMarket, and AdRevolver again.

This explains how cookies are placed onto your computer and later read to track your online activity.

After listening to John Doerr’s TED presentation, my mind started to think “green” thoughts. Along with the lights on at the local corporate building and the amount of plastic bags used to pack your groceries, it’s time to look inside the home. CNN published a story on the amount of power used by devices in “standby mode”, adapters that are in the outlet but not connected to a device, even microwaves with their tiny, fairly useless, digital clocks. The article states that “about 40 percent of the electricity being used to power your home electronics is consumed while they are in that standby mode.”

The article is worth some attention. I’m going to evaluate my home as well. As the article states, “If one in 10 American homes used only appliances endorsed through the program, the Energy Department estimates, it would reduce U.S. carbon emissions by the same amount as planting 1.7 million acres of trees.“

I was chatting with my father today and he’s been watching the news about Microsoft’s $240M (1.6%) stake in Facebook. My father has taught me a lot, and he is well in-tuned with the big businesses he invests in, among them Costco, Best Buy, Boeing, and, important to this news, Microsoft. He’s had a taste of social networking. My brother had worked at eUniverse where MySpace was initially incubated. A few weeks ago, he saw my LinkedIn blog badge and asked, if he should create a profile — which would read: Arun Patel, Boeing and Rockwell, 20 years. I figured, there’s probably no point.

The discussion is a perfect example of how things are moving at such a rapid pace, and I’ll admit that even at my age I’m loosing track. We see the hype in our little world, while others don’t even know what it is! There is a good article to read on the effects of Moore’s Law, The Law of Accelerating Returns.

(16:26:26) arunpatel: Microsoft to take $240 million stake in Facebook
(16:26:37) Atul Patel: yup
(16:26:40) Atul Patel: $15B valuation
(16:26:47) Atul Patel: 4-year-old company
(16:26:51) Atul Patel: 23-year-old CEO
(16:27:00) arunpatel: was that eUniverse
(16:27:15) Atul Patel: no, eUniverse was myspace
(16:27:43) arunpatel: what is Facebook?

This is very telling about Facebook’s (over)valuation of $15B.

It’s about time that helping our planet has become fun. Jonny Hal has launched a web series that tracks his attempts to be removed from marketer’s mailing list. This is pretty funny stuff! The preview is below. And check out his first episode on Verizon.

GreenDimes provides an easy way to get you off the list and is worth the $3/month. They even plant trees on your behalf. GreenDimes was founded by Pankaj Shah, who had previously founded 4INFO among other companies.

ProQuo is another company that can reduce your junk -snail- mail, and is backed by Draper Fisher Jurvetson. On that same note, who said you can’t launch a company that does exactly what the other does. If there’s a big enough market, it’s fair game. I’ll signup for ProQuo because it’s free.

UPDATE 10/25/2007: Just found another provider of junk mail elimination: 41pounds

I live in Irvine, California, which has been experiencing the fire frenzy of late (President Bush FINALLY declared a State of Emergency). Outside of my patio, I saw Portola Hills light up in a massive fire. It has been two days since I’ve seen the fire because it has moved north east. Walking outside of the apartment is a bit gloomy and eerie, and it reminded me of the atmosphere in the movie, Fifth Element (picture below).

And so I took a picture of the sky where I could contrast a clear blue section of the sky with one that was filled with smoke, and I thought, this could be how 2040 is if we don’t take action. I’m no scientist that knows how the sky would be if global warming continues, but this was just a thought. It came to mind, partially, because I recently watched a great presentation at TED made by John Doerr, the legendary venture capitalist.

Here’s a picture of the Irvine sky right now. I’ve hypothesized how part of it might be how things are in 2040. A picture follows of the hellish scene out here.

I’ve seen it at places like Panda Express and parking garages. The sign reads, “your purchase is free if you do not receive a receipt.” I’m confused!

So here’s a scenario:

• I order a product or service
• I receive the product or service in exchange for money
• I do not receive a receipt
• I alert the cashier that I did not receive a receipt and that my money should be refunded
• Instead of going back into the cash register system and printing a receipt, the cashier gives me my money back!

WHAT!? I haven’t yet had the situation where the receipt has been forgotten. But, if I do, and tell the cashier that I didn’t receive a receipt, I’ll bet that she will just print one out for me.

Take a look at this picture from a local park. “Your parking is free if you do not receive a ticket.” To even have a chance to receive a ticket I have to pay. Should I have simply drove in past the attendant and refused to “receive a ticket”? Wouldn’t my parking be free? What a confusing idea.

This reminds me of the blog inspired by Seth Godin called This Is Broken.

I was digging around for videos from the Zeitgeist (I wish I had a login to that site), and finally found some new ones a few days ago. The founders of Google don’t often show up in presentations, but since the Zeitgeist is a Google event, it was fitting.

Sergey and Larry talk about some interesting things about Google and where they see its and the Internet’s future. An audience member had asked what content creators can do to better align with the vision of Google’s. Sergey said, “I think one of the things that tends to really decrease, perhaps, the utility of sites is when they go overboard with the fanciness; really fancy Javascript and Flash flying around. It has two negative effects: (1) harder for users: it might slow down your computer or…mobile device, (2) make it somewhat harder for search engines to parse through the stuff; what’s the real information on the site.”

Thank you for that! I wrote about how “Loading pages should not take this long” last week, and as I said, it wasn’t because I didn’t like advertising and the “fancy [stuff] flying around”, but it just makes the Internet slower.

Food fighting has come a long way, and its quite intriguing to see how history repeats itself, and concepts continually evolve while maintaining an undercurrent of themes, values, rules, and such. Some are keen enough to identify those opportunities, quickly. Business 2.0 published an article, called “The man who started the foodfight“, highlighting Seth Goldstein’s new company, SocialMedia. Seth has an interesting way of becoming his surroundings, his ideas, his vision. I know Seth through his previous company that acquired the software company I co-founded.

What is quite interesting about the underlying concepts of SocialMedia is that it creates a true application of the social graph. The term application in Seth’s case is not just the concept of utility, but rather applying real -life social concepts into our online interactions. Granted, we can’t throw food, or shit in this case, at each other in real-life, it surely would be fun.

The key here is that foodfighting is not new. This online social interaction existed over ten years ago! If you remember BBS’ing (logging into Bulletin Board Systems), you remember everything from FidoNet to the text-based role playing games. That was about the same time I was playing Wolfenstein 3D and Hero’s Quest.

Surprise, surprise…one of the most popular games was Food Fight! I recall playing it in third grade (it’s too far back to keep track). Food fight was one of many games that ran on the BBS door “platform”, we can call it. Here’s the Food Fight logo — yes in ANSI!

You can still play the original version at this site or install the app in Facebook. From the early 90s, foodfight has made it into the new century and it’s hot as ever.

If I start whining about how I didn’t see this coming or act on it, I might as well do the same for email, chat, portals, search, and everything else. But this continues to encourage me that there are new undiscovered territories to apply learnings from history.