Alsop's Small Thoughts

United We Sheila

Thank you to Sheila in the first class cabin on United 353 to San Francisco yesterday afternoon. (I upgraded!). A flight attendant with a sense of humor and a real personality, unbowed by the troubles of her airline. I told her that, since I couldn't marry her, I wanted to know her work schedule so I can be on more of her flights. (Not to mention that the flight was on time, the overhead bin was empty, the TSA agents were pleasant; one might start to think that travel wasn't hell.)

Old Media Spam

Strategic Research Institute. Sounds a lot like Stanford Research Institute, doesn't it. SRI is a well-respected, even legendary research institution, originally spun out from Stanford. It's where the mouse was originally developed and a number of other technologies in computing. That's who I thought I was dealing with when I signed up to make a presentation at one of their conferences. I didn't think a lot about it, though. And Strategic Research Institute is not SRI. It is, in fact, a scummy old-media company that thinks it owns my data to help it make money. And I feel like I am being haunted by my own past as I get 3-7 emails a week from this company, sometimes two in a day, advertising their conferences, most of which are completely irrelevant to my business and my interests.

I didn't think about all this when I agreed to present. (I did wonder briefly why SRI was doing a conference on the video game industry.) I even persuaded my partner to do a joint presentation at one of their conferences earlier this year. The conference itself was unimpressive, with maybe 60-70 attendees. But the presentation was a hit, generating lots of coverage and plenty of discussion in the industry. (We can't complain, since we got to see pretty much every investment opportunity in the video game business and got on a lot of people's radar, a good thing for a new venture capital firm.)

But I am complaining because Strategic Research Institute is actually a conference producer and one, it turns out, that uses email in the scummiest and most spammish way possible. Indeed, you might imagine that this company named itself to create confusion with a respected institution but itself maintains such lousy policies that you will get spammed if you merely look at them sideways. And I actually put the effort into creating a real presentation, for free, for one of their conferences!

Get on this company's email list, and there's no way off it.

Strategic Research Institute is privately held. It has a privacy policy from a different era. I can't resist quoting the entire relevant section: "Sharing Information with Third Parties: We may enter into alliances, partnerships or other business arrangements with third parties who may be given access to personal information including your name, address, telephone number and email for the purpose of providing you information regarding products and services that we think will be of interest to you. In connection with alliances, partnerships or arrangements, we may also provide certain information to third parties if we have determined that the information will be used in a responsible manner by a responsible third party. For example, some of our partners are sponsors of / exhibitors at the conferences you attend as a registered delegate. We also use third parties to facilitate our business, including, but not limited to, sending email and processing credit card payments. In connection with these offerings and business operations, our partners and other third parties may have access to your personal information for use in connection with business activities. As we develop our business, we may buy or sell assets or business offerings. Customer, email, and visitor information is generally one of the transferred business assets in these types of transactions. We may also transfer such information in the course of corporate divestitures, mergers, or any dissolution."

You may not have wanted to read that whole thing, but here's the kicker: "By using srinstitute.com you consent to our collection and use of your personal information as described in this Privacy Policy."

Translation: The company can do anything it wants with your data, spam you, rent it to other people to spam you, publish it, whatever. And all you have to do to earn this treatment is to visit their web site! They do provide a link to a form that in theory allows you to opt out, but would you actually provide accurate information to a company whose official policy is that they own any information you send them?

It turns out that one company, ALM (which I think used to stand for American Lawyer Media) bought Strategic Research Institute recently in a transaction brokered by JEGI, a private equity firm run by Wilma Jordan, a person of note in the media industry. JEGI used to stand for Jordan Edmiston Group Inc. Every one of these companies are old-media companies with old-media attitudes (which I know well, because that's where I came from) toward the use of email and address information to generate business.

I sent an email to three executives, the CEO of ALM, the CEO of SRI, and the managing partner of JEGI. Not one bothered to respond. So meanwhile I continue to get emails, sometime as many as two a day, on such fascinating topics as "Strategic Research Institute's Film Financing and Distribution Summit", the "13th Annual Aircraft Financing Forum", and the ever popular "2nd Annual European Distressed Debt Summit". I wish the real SRI would sue the fake one for trademark infringement and clear up the confusion which is obviously welcomed by the fake one.

Whatever it is, it does shame me that I used to be in this old-media business and I used to treat customer information in exactly the same way. I didn't know any better. But I did learn.

What time is your area code?

My girlfriend complained about New Yorkers (which she loves doing since she grew up there) in an email this morning: "Some things never change, New Yorkers don't consider area codes to relate to time zones." My first thought was that New Yorkers might be ahead of the rest of us, a role Californians usually play.

My only phone number now is my cell phone. But I acquired that number when I was living in the 650 area code. I've since moved into the 415 area code. That's only a difference of 30 miles or so. I know other people with the 917 area code, a NY code, who have moved across the country or to other parts of the world. (I think Manhattan residents started getting cell phones with non-212 area codes before anyone else, because they had run out of 212 exchanges with wired phones.)

Two things have happened to virtualize phone numbers to such a degree that you will no longer be able to rely on knowing where someone is by looking at their phone number: 1) Local number portability. 2) Voice over IP. In the first instance, the rules changed to force operators to allow customers to keep their phone number regardless of where they get their service. This change was to allow for greater competition, since operators used to think THEY owned your phone number. In the second instance, the idea that phone calls travel over the internet means that location no longer matters. In fact, it is much more significant than that because it means the whole reason for having different phone numbers doesn't matter anymore. We used to have a phone number for work, a phone number for home, a phone number for our hotel, a phone number for our portable phone -- in other words, a phone number was a way to call a device, not a person.

Going forward, the technology and the social custom is going to shift so that a phone number is a way to reach a person. It's not far enough along yet that I'm willing to publish my phone number in this blog. But eventually I will, because the technology of the phones, the software in them and the software in the system will allow me to manage how I want to use that phone, including whether I want to answer it or have a call routed somewhere else, without having to be a programmer.

But that will be a few years off yet. And then my girlfriend will have to find another way to complain about New Yorkers.

Bragging rights

I'm just doing this post as a way to brag publicly about the fish that really was This Big. See the picture. I got the chance to go to New Zealand in early August; the government paid my way in return for giving a speech and hanging for a couple of days with Kiwi entrepreneurs. New Zealand is a great place to do business if you don't mind being Really Far Away from everyone else doing business; there are a few outstanding entrepreneurs doing that. So the hanging out part was fun in itself. But then I took a weekend to go fishing. My guide, Mark Aspinall, who has been guiding around the Taupo area his whole adult life, took me to the Tongariro River for both days. I caught this monster on the first day....

Mac2Mac

I bought a new Mac, a 15-inch MacBook Pro based on the Intel DualCore chips. I've just got to say that the experience has been a real pleasure. The guy in the Apple store was direct and efficient; it took about 15 minutes to conduct the transaction, including getting two extra power supplies because I always like one each in the office, at home and my briefcase. This morning, I started up the new machine and it asked me if I wanted to transfer stuff from an old machine. I said yes, hooked the two machines up by FireWire cable and about three hours later, my new machine had sucked everything off the old one. Wow! Pretty smart business to make it THAT easy to upgrade to a new computer.