Speaker 1: How'd you like to listen to dot NetRocks with no ads? Easy?
Become a patron for just five dollars a month. You
get access to a private RSS feed where all the
shows have no ads. Twenty dollars a month. We'll get
you that and a special dot NetRocks patron mug. Sign
up now at Patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Hey
guess what. It's dot net rocks all over again. I'm
Carl Franklin and I'm Richard Campbell. We're gonna be talking
to our friend Richard Rukima. But first, hey, mister Campbell,
how are you?
Speaker 2: Yes, friend, I'm good. Somehow it's February, you know, time
shifting wise?
Speaker 1: Yeah, somehow?
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, this is publishing on February thirteenth, which means
my thirtieth anniversary just happened.
Speaker 1: Wow. Yeah, Are you gonna go out to this store
and buy an eight dollars head of lettuce? Just wondering?
Speaker 2: Is that the is the thirtieth Lettuce anniversary? Is that it? No?
Speaker 1: No, I just think it's when.
Speaker 2: The tariffski get.
Speaker 1: It's not even funny, you.
Speaker 2: Know, it's I don't all right, of course we're speculating
as to what's actually going to happen.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we don't know.
Speaker 2: We don't know, we don't we don't know.
Speaker 1: It makes a good joke, might even doesn't It.
Speaker 3: Might even be in US dollars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have the Canadian US saying I guess I'm
going to come up to America. Yeah, the Gulf of Canada.
Speaker 1: This is bad. I have two Canadians that are ganging
up on the American here trouble. All right, let's kick
it off with better no framework, roll the crazy music.
Speaker 2: All right, man, what do you got?
Speaker 1: Okay? Well, I went looking for, you know, GitHub repos
that are trending right now, and like the top five
are all AI things.
Speaker 2: Oh geez, no, you.
Speaker 1: Know it's no surprise, right.
Speaker 2: So yeah, no, it's all it's getting a lot of
energy and it's down two ways about it.
Speaker 1: The number one was coge kho j. I don't know
how you pronounce it. It's one of those made up
names that nobody knows how to pronounce, Codge, coge whatever.
But here's the about your AI second brain, self hostable,
get answers from the web or your docs, build custom agents,
schedule automations, do deep research, turn any online or local
LM into your personal autonomous AI supports GPT, Claude, Gemini,
Lama Quen, is it Gwen or Quinn.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's one of the local LM and.
Speaker 1: Mistral and get started for free. That's all I know
about it. But they have some videos and that kind
of stuff, and like I said, it's trending and it's
in that AI category. It's all built in Python by
the way, so you know, but they have documentation and
they have source and all that stuff. So if you're
into it and you want another, you know, another Python
project to look after, go for it. That's what I got,
all right. He was talking to us today.
Speaker 2: Richard Grady comment, I went the way back machine on
this one, okay, because I know we're going to talk
about data privacy and the like. And back in twenty fourteen,
on show nine sixty five, so almost a thousand shows ago,
we did a show with Hugh Jones talking about EU
data protection losses. This when of the GDPR was just
coming into play, right, and so it was good to
have a conversation about, you know, what does this look like,
what should we do? And so ten years ago Charles
wrote this comment and I'm going to summarize because it's
quite a long comedy talking a little about terrorism and
things like this, but I want to specifically get into
the sort of rational some of these things about, you know,
don't I don't want to prepare, prepare over cynical, But
people seem to react irrationally to terrorism, and most governments
are exploiting that. It's easy to justify anything when pretending
it will save the life of a child. This is
twenty fourteenth, just to you know. And the reality is
that we should, but we must stay irrational. Doctors irrational
when they consider applying a vaccine to an entire population.
They are certain they will kill a number of people
because of side effects, but it will save a far
larger number. Kind of on the point, isn't it. And
of course he goes on to talk about the role
of nine to eleven in extending the surveillance state massively,
and he does not believe that the NSSA and are
it's European equivalent, So are using new powers only against terrorism.
It's a lot to do with political and business intelligence.
So I'm not shocked at NSA spies on some European leaders.
It's their job. But I am a bit shocked that
they spy on everyone. This is right after the snow
did reveal right again, I think what surprised me most
about the snowed and affair is not so much to
scale the NSA spine, but the lack of reaction from
everyone else, and probably the lack of understanding of the
implications of what is going on there. Making a list
of what data is collected on us would be an
interesting geek out. Show your mobile collects and uploads all
the places you've been in a day, and a nice
little phone app with buttons to link your web browsing
if your identity as well. Your web mail provider can
get us your religion, political opinion, sexual orientation without having
to ask. They even figure out if you're pregnant or not.
And if they don't do it now, there's nothing that
will print them from doing it someday in the future.
The inner things will only make this worse. We should
be keeping this in mind as we look at one
of the most fundamental laws of nature that what can
go wrong will eventually go wrong someday. So now, there
was Charles talking about the surveillance state back in twenty
fourteen when the whole snowedent thing had blown up, and
we were all talking about at least the fact that
governments were doing it, but just a recognition that social
media was doing it as well. So thanks Charles. I
read your comment on the show, and a copy of
music to Koba is on its way to UNI. If
you'd like a copy of music Gooba. I write a
comment on the website at dot net rocks dot comma
on the facebooks. We publish every show there, and if
you comment there and are reading the show, we'll send
you copy music Koba.
Speaker 1: And you could follow us on the other social media's
We've been on ex Twitter forever. We're also on Macedon
in Blue Sky is the current hotness where there seems
to be a lot of engagement there, so some variation
of at Carl Franklin, at Rich Campbell, We'll get you there,
you'll find us, you'll find us. Let's talk about the year, right,
nineteen thirty seven, eighteen thirty seven. I'm just going to
pick a few. You know. The thing is, I can't
even get through March, yeah, because there's so many things
that happen. January first, Golden Gate Bridge opens to pedestriansyay.
January twelfth, first woman elected to the US Senate. Hattie
Wyatt Caraway of Arkansas made history by becoming the first
woman elected to the US Senate. January nineteenth, Howard Hughes
remember that crazy guy sets transcontinental air speed record. Very good.
January thirtieth, Hitler's ominous Reichstag speech. In a significant diplomatic
and rhetorical moment, Hitler addresses the Reichstag warning that the
outbreak of war would result in the complete destruction of Germany.
And he was right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: Nineteen thirty seven saw a massive destruction in massacres in
Ethiopia at the hands of the Italian forces were very bad. Also,
many events in the Spanish Civil War, too many to mention.
March third, Emelia Earhart's mysterious disappearance and you got anything, Richard.
Speaker 2: Yeah. This nineteen thirty seven is the year that Hindenberg
went down that famous video clip. You've seen it and
the oh the humanity.
Speaker 1: That's oh the humanity. Ay. Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's also the year that the first jet eng were
being tested be into development for a couple of years,
but both Ohan and Whittell did their ground testing of
turbine engines. So yeah, even before the war started, the
engines were already in development, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a lot of military technology going on.
Speaker 2: There's a lot going on. It was a spendee time.
Speaker 1: It was a spending time. Yeah, all right, so let
us bring in for the second time on dot net
Rocks the third time? Is it second or third?
Speaker 3: Second? We've met three times?
Speaker 1: Okay? Well. Richard Rukmu's expertise is in creating or integrating
software into a business value proposition. He's performed in many
roles throughout his career, but remains focused on delivering an
efficient and effective business process, blending the characteristics of a
deep technical resource, an entrepreneur mindset, and a business analyst.
Richard always begins his work by understanding the business context
for his service. There's more about that, but he really
wants to talk about his experience in Italian vineyards, right. Absolutely.
Speaker 3: The pairing of coding in a castle and wine go
very well together.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they certainly do. So, welcome back, Richard.
Speaker 2: Thank you very much. Appreciate appreciate being on the show.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and you have a lot to talk about today.
You send us a whole bunch of topic ideas well,
one big topic idea. But I'm just gonna let you
take it.
Speaker 3: Well, I've been working in this space for a while,
and I thought I had some time off, and I thought,
what can I do with my time off? And I thought,
I know what I'll do. I'll write a book. Yeah, sure,
And the book's called The book is called The Empowered
Customer dot Com. Yeah, and it takes the perspective of
a customer's viewpoint of their data and how it's used
in marketing, and how I can control and use that data.
And I document how I create what is called a
data cooperative, in which everybody owns their data into the cooperative,
but the aggregation of the data becomes more valuable and
the revenue from that data is then shared with those
that contribute.
Speaker 1: Give me an example of this I'm trying to find.
I mean, when I think about data, I think about
data being you know, usage, data being stolen from people's
phones and they're never seeing a dime for that data.
Speaker 2: But stolen's too strong a term. Right now, Natalie, give
it away.
Speaker 1: You agrieved for them to you let them steal it. Okay,
how about that?
Speaker 3: So one of my one of my posts that I've
put up often is what if Google was a cooperative right,
would may be worth billions? It's worth billions if not
more right every time, wouldn't be you know? Said m hmm, yeah,
I wouldn't. Well, the data is worth billions that are
providing it, right, But the the how does Google get
their data that they can sell and make that valuation?
Speaker 1: Like?
Speaker 3: How do they get their data? And it's very simple
in that they it's the breadcrumb of information that you
use for search terms in their search bar. So if
you say ski Calgary, that reveals a lot about you
and that gets tagged to your profile and Google immediately
then says, hey, I got a customer that wants to
go skiing and he lives in Calgary. Who wants to
know about this guy? And they sell that targeted advertising
based on just those two terms. But it's just not
those two terms, it's your entire history of search with Google,
regardless of your persona or anything else. That those tags
are a way to generate a profile of you that
they sell.
Speaker 1: And everything that you search for goes into that profile
and then can be put together to form a more
complete picture of you. Correct.
Speaker 3: Correct, And now AI agents are even taking that further
with contextual information about a discussion or anything that you have.
And that's the same model being introduced where data is
extracted from our activity involving with this information, and they
make the money on information that we gleefully give them
for free. And what I want to try to do
is set up a cooperative that is owned by people
that we willingly provide that same data but to the cooperative.
Speaker 1: And what kind of commie talk is that, Richard Rukma,
that's crazy talk.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't know, gonna send me a check, Richard.
I'll bow to your memory of what a cooperative is
because it started in the thirties where people it was
a weaving shop and they all helped each other build
sure and do weaves and then sold the product. And
then and then that was in the Saskatchewan. It started
off as for power consumption, where a bunch of people
wanted power and no corporation was going to do it,
so they all got together and built themselves a power plant.
Speaker 1: And we have food co ops all over the place
in the United States and Canada.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I think, I really think it starts with
the farmers with consolidating cereal crops that you need to
be there best stored en mass and defended on mass
and packaged in consistent formats and sold as scale. And
no farmer can do all of that themselves. So you
put together these the wheat pools, right, the cooperative pools
to do the selling part to the point where they
That's how you end up with the markets that can
literally tell the farmer, hey, I can get this much
for your wheat for next season.
Speaker 3: So I parallel that example exactly with everybody else, because
we're actually the farmers of our own words that we create,
and we contribute that into a cooperative which then aggregate.
Through aggregation, becomes extremely valuable. And we've seen, like they
think of all the social media platforms that leverage this model, Google,
Pinterest X or ex Twitter as you call it, next Twitter,
I mean blue Sky, I mean they all, all of them,
all of them rely on this business model. And all
I'm suggesting is that the data feed for this model
is suggested in the book, is for your shopping patterns
in physical retail locations or your local merchant. So if
you're going to if you want to support your local merchant,
you would engage with that local merchant using the technology
that I've outlined in the book, which is not passively collected.
It's actively collected from the customer to the merchant and
is held in this data repository, which I call the
snapching iq business model. And that snapching it business model
is if you contribute, you get paid for it when
there's money and revenue generated from your data.
Speaker 1: So I'm thinking about this. I have a local grocery store.
I go to check out and I scan everything, so
there's the list of items that I bought, and then
I pay with my credit cards. So there's my identity.
What don't they already have?
Speaker 2: Well, the credit card is not your identity.
Speaker 3: In fact, the merchant has no identity from the credit
card at whatsoever, and that's protected by what we call
the bank Act. Okay, the only thing that will allow
you to see the basket which is which is what
you're talking about, the basket of at the checkout is
a loyalty card.
Speaker 1: A loyalty card, of course, that's what they're for. That's
how they do it.
Speaker 3: And the loyalty card is not for loyalty, it's for
accumulation of data that's associated with the customer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, of course, and you get a pitily little discount
to make you think you thank you, you're getting some
benefit from it.
Speaker 3: So I've been at this a while, and there's we
have this what they call a coalition program. The coalition
program that that is in Canada is called air Miles.
Speaker 2: I think you guys have it too in the States.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: So in air Miles, they had to stop giving loyalty
to gas stations. Do you know why why people were
pouring gas on the ground so that they would get
their next point Because they had to spend X number
of dollars to get their loyalty points.
Speaker 2: Oh, so they fill up their tanks, but they hadn't
gotten gone quite far enough to get their next set
of points, right, So they'll just hump all the x
dice gas.
Speaker 3: They poured it on the ground, like, oh, I'll just
pour thirty cents on the ground make sure I get
my next my next loyalty point.
Speaker 1: That's outrageous.
Speaker 3: And then what people didn't understand. What people didn't understand
is that for every point in the air Miles program,
it was worth a penny, and air Miles sold that
data worth about twenty bucks. So you know they were
giving away a penny but earning twenty.
Speaker 2: And doing it by dropping a couple of bucks with
a gas on the ground in the process.
Speaker 3: Yeah right, because you know they It's just crazy. It's crazy.
Speaker 1: What the.
Speaker 3: Calculation of loyalty points is not done because it's money.
It's because nobody can do it in their head and
understand how many points are worth.
Speaker 1: All right, So back to this whole co op thing.
Are you suggesting that these existing companies that collect data
turn into co ops or are you suggesting that we create
new services and new institutions that adopt the co op model.
Speaker 3: I think there's a great article I read by Simon Schneck.
Speaker 2: I think is es. I don't know if I say
it's spelt it right.
Speaker 3: He's a business leader, and he says the capitalism of
today is changed dramatically from the capitalism that we have
in the thirties. The capitalism we had in the thirties
was the benefit of the company to the people, was
the primary concern of the corporation. The capitalism we have
today is how much does the shareholders get? What is
the revenue potential for the shareholders? And if we have
to cut eighty percent of the staff. We'll do that
just to make sure we keep the shareholder value up
and forget about the customer. I'm just advocating for that
now that we as customers, if we empower ourselves, we
can make a change by cooperative what I call cooperative consumerism,
where we if we cooperate in our consumersm of products,
we can direct market forces to be in our favor.
Speaker 1: But how can we do that and keep our existing institutions?
So how do we do it?
Speaker 3: The one example I often cite is gas stations in Canada. Everybody,
if there's collusion at the gas stations, I'd like they
say there isn't. They They've done studies it isn't. But
when somebody goes up a penny, everybody goes up penny
at the same time.
Speaker 2: Is it collusion? It's collusion. If they all got on
the phone say I'm going to raise my price a penny,
it's not collusion. If one of them raises the price
of penny and the rest of them see that and
then follow, that's true.
Speaker 3: True, But market market forces say that that shouldn't happen.
They should.
Speaker 2: Right Like this is Adam Smith's sort of fictional idea
that this had drive that down. You mean, the corollary
should be true. If one of them reduces by a penny,
the rest of them should all reduce because their sales
would dry up.
Speaker 3: That that's true, and it does happen. That does happen.
But what happens is if you raise your price a
penny and everybody follows to raise the price of penny,
the consumer still has no choice when when somebody who
raises the price a penny should have less demand because
there's other demands. There's other suppliers that will have a
reduced price. Right, But if you collude to with each other,
and I'm using that word clude that, oh his price
went on, I'm going to take mine up. There is
no choice in the market as to wear to buy
gas because it's all the same price. So this cooperative
consumerism is let's all buy gas by company X and
exclude and exclude all the other ones, or just don't
buy from one of the gas stations forget it.
Speaker 2: Just stop it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but that's their sales go down for the week.
Speaker 1: But that's not always a choice that every consumer can make, right, true.
I mean, if I live in an inner city and
my market is right downstairs from my apartment, and somebody says, oh,
you know, to be a good CISZ and we're not
going to buy from this marketing. We're going to buy
from that market, which is, you know, ten minute walk away.
My lazy ass isn't walking ten minutes just to satisfy
some data sharing algorithm. Do you know what I'm saying.
I mean, it's very hard to convince consumers to change
their behavior.
Speaker 3: I hear you. I mean if we look at clothing
and we buy, and we have two T shirts in
front of us, one's a fifteen dollars shirt and the
other one's a five dollars shirt, Yeah, which one is
the consumer going to buy? We are so as consumers
centric on the right that we are causing demand like
even in North America and the United States especially nowadays,
or buy go, buy American, but you can't. You can't
buy American because all the pieces of the supply chain
are outside of America, right right, So we as this
whole movement is understanding that in the old days, when
you had a general store and a butcher, and a
plumber and electrician, they all helped each other to make
it sure. Yeah, sure, right, So it was only at
the advent of a conglomerate like a huge store that
we all start with C. I don't know if I
can say it, just because I don't want to get
any kind of going. Well, there's a lot of deflamminationary.
But you know, we're fixated on the price, but we
don't understand revenue diversification. So now these companies are leveraging
us away from these models by saying, okay, our prices
are three four five percent above operating, but we'll make
our profit elsewhere. And that's on membership.
Speaker 1: All right. Let's take a town. Let's just start small here.
Take a small town, maybe population twenty thousand, right, very
small town, and there's a whole bunch of local shops.
You know that everyone who lives in that town would
prefer to buy local. They would prefer to visit the
local coffee shop rather than go to Starbucks. They would
prefer to, you know, go to their local restaurants rather
than go to chain restaurants. And so you know, there's
an opportunity to do something. I see because you've already
got this sort of infrastructure in place. But if but
if by another token, you live in a big city
and you live where there's only big box stores and
there's only chains and all of these things, and you're
buying most of your stuff from Amazon. Anyway, you know,
how how does that change?
Speaker 3: Well, I think I think the onus. I'm just proposing
that we.
Speaker 2: Look upon ourselves to change.
Speaker 3: Okay, Like we can't if we don't blame if we
blame the government from doing something wrong, that's a pointless argument.
You got to look at yourself and who you voted for.
Speaker 1: You Well, there you go, right, Like good, point right.
Speaker 3: So your dollars are your voting mechanism for businesses that
surround in your community and well, and governments are trailing indicators.
It's not just who you voted for, it's what you
told them you wanted in the process. You know, they're
supposed to be. It's a representative government. So it's up
to us to represent the ideas that we want to them,
hopefully to get manifest in some way.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: But this, you know, the cooperative model banking is a
great example of that, because we do have cooperative banks
we call them credit union might and they try to
be more regional and deliver services specifically to their communities
and products so forth. They're still you know, regulated to
a degree, so they there's limits on what they can do,
But it's just a question of do you get as
much value from that? You know, the upside of the
larger cocommerate often is more bying powersore prices tend to
be lower, and larger diversity of product offering, whether you're
talking about banking or grocer.
Speaker 3: So the only thing I'm trying to arrange is the net.
So if that's the thought of having a data cooperative
and we clumulate data, the question then becomes, and I
think you pointed out, Carls, how do we gather this data?
Speaker 2: How do we get this data?
Speaker 3: Because if you start a war against Google, you're going
to lose. Sure, you start a war against Microsoft, you're
going to lose, right right, So where is the source
of data that we can have that streams in for
this cooperative? And I'm proposing that we do it with
QR codes that consumers can scan either at the door
of the merchant or within the context of whatever that
QR code represents. And now it's it's an opt in process.
I'm not watching your WiFi, I'm not taking your bluetooth.
I'm not scanning, but I'm scanning a QR code that
this merchant is part of the customer ecosystem or the
snapching iq business system.
Speaker 1: What is the benefit to the merchant to enroll in
a co op where they have to pay out for
data rather than just take it the way they are
doing now?
Speaker 3: Participation? If I have a merchant that drives a loyalty
program and I ask for everybody's email address, I'm going
to get about three three to four percent participation in
the loyalty program.
Speaker 1: But what if you give out cards though, loyalty cards?
Speaker 3: No, but that's the loyalty card has an identity to
it that identifies you to that merchant.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but everybody has them. I mean, it's what I'm saying.
So if all their shoppers have identity cards loyalty cards,
what is the benefit for them to move over to
a model where they actually have to pay for that
to the consumer.
Speaker 3: A larger broader audience of customers. So if I not
everybody gets a loyalty card, yeah, and not everybody gets
a wealthy card too, But think about just the data.
If I take a loyalty card with Starbucks, I know
how many times I go visit Starbucks, but I don't.
I don't know how many times I went to the
luck to the that my profile doesn't at Starbucks doesn't
show that I like bread, So it's an incomplete profile
of the customer.
Speaker 1: So I'm sorry, I just have these questions. Getting back
to the grocery store. You scan your loyalty card, you
scan your food. They know you like bread.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's true, but whose benefit is that? Is it
to the customer that they like bread or is it
to the merchant?
Speaker 1: That definitely, it's definitely a merchant, and they reward you
by giving you discounts. That's how they reward you. And
I'm sure somebody did the math to say how much
do we have to give them so they keep using
the card? Right, So that's an economic measurement.
Speaker 3: There's one thing here that you have to understand. Okay,
when you scan the QR code, the data doesn't go
to the merchant. It goes to the snapching iq business model.
So now if everybody that participates in the snapchain iq
business model, all that data streaming in from all the
QR codes goes to the centralized repository of the data
mart that represents that activity across all kinds of merchants,
and that value that data becomes as valuable as Google's
databases now okay, right, And because it's a cooperative, when
that data is sold and used, you get a cutback
for that data.
Speaker 1: So instead of you know, shopright getting selling their data
as a global company or whatever, just the data that
they have about you and your you know, your your
bread choices, now they would become part of a bigger
co op that has to do with you know, the
kind of cars you buy and the kind of tires
that you get, and where you go get your lunches
and dinners and and all the all of the things. Right,
So the data sets more valuable.
Speaker 3: And it's a much more complete. The data set's extremely
valuable because not only is it not fake, because you
can't fake going shopping at your local merchants, right, you
can't let hire a click team in India to actually
do that for you anymore, right, But the activity of
a customer in that environment is shared with all the
other customers in that environment to make the value. But
what's more interesting about this is that if the interface
of the snapching iq business model says I'm a concustomer
and I want to start looking for TV. What if
I just raise the flag that I'm looking for a
TV so that all the merchants can see that I'm
looking for a TV. And now we've got targeted advertising
on intent as opposed to reaction like activity.
Speaker 1: Right right right, instead of getting ads for things that
you just bought, which is my favorite thing in the world.
So let's stay with the supermarket thing. So you're basically
saying to shop, right, Hey, give up this your your
own little world of you know, QR code or barcode
scanning thing for your own data set tap into this
bigger co op. You can still you know, just replace
the barcode, right, you can still offer people a discount,
you know, on their groceries or whatever the gas points
they do it stop and shop here in New England.
But then would they get money from the data that's
sold to I mean if you're if is everybody that's
part of the co op getting a check?
Speaker 3: So I outlined one other party in the data model,
and that's called influencers. Right, I'm going to touch on influencers,
but I want to go back to your barcode. We
wouldn't replace the barcode because the barcode's tied into their
pos and that's already very in pricing and everything else,
so you can't. You're not going to displace that. But
I'll get give you an example of what some markets
did in Spain that caused a tremendous amount of traffic
to grocery stores in Spain.
Speaker 2: Okay, are you familiar with this story?
Speaker 1: No, but I can't wait to hear it. That's why
I'm smiling.
Speaker 3: So somebody thought, you know what if you're single and
you want a date, go shop groceries on Thursday night
at Spain. Wow, and everybody was single that went out
and they shopped groceries. They went and bought groceries in
Spain on Thursday night. They showed pictures of these grocery
stores so jam packed with guys and girls running their
carts into each other. Oh, that's great as introductions to.
Speaker 2: Do it, that's great, But.
Speaker 3: That wasn't because the market thought it was a great
idea to do. That's because consumers came up and said,
you know, we're not having this virtualized stuff. We want
to have real face to face visits and through the
cooperation of the of all the customers.
Speaker 2: They did that.
Speaker 3: So that's interesting in this model, we are joining a
cooperative group. And why does the merchant want to do that? Well,
it increases participation because people want to scan those barcodes
because it represents pennies on the dollar for their activity.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 2: I mean the part I don't think you've emphasized here
is participating in that cooperative for one store means that
they also get access to the customers of all the
other stores.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now so yeah, yeah, you know the customer that signed
up in that got into the cooperative because they went
and got tires, now also is in the cooperative for grocery.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And the important charact that is that there's no
outbound activity for marketing out of Snapchin. It's always inbound.
So in snapchain, there's an inbox.
Speaker 1: Now, snapchain is something that you've mentioned a couple of
times without really defining it. What is that?
Speaker 3: So in the book I talk about the snapchaing IQ,
which is the business model, and then I did an
MVP of the model in a product called Snapching. Oh okay,
And you can go to snapchin dot com and there's
it's a full site where merchants can enroll, generate QR
codes and hang.
Speaker 2: Them up in their merchant locations.
Speaker 3: Okay, right, as part of the See this is how
it would work in terms of one hundred percent privacy compliant,
ethical data management of customer data. Because merchants can participate
in this and get huge participation in the program. Merchants,
the customers enjoy it because they're actually getting benefit from
participating in the model. And I talk about how we're
going to build this so that it's a worldwide movement,
and it's like, you know, think big, but build small.
So I live in Kolona, BC, So why not just
have five or six merchants in COLONABC that are participating
in the model and see it grow. Calgary, Evans and Vancouver.
Those are all regional areas that we can see this
kind of movement grow. But all the data goes in. Now, remember,
no merchant sees personal identifying information.
Speaker 2: They don't get that.
Speaker 3: They only get statistical information. If they say, hey, I
want to do an ad for cauliflower, we can use
that definition against the database to see who's interest in cauliflower,
So they would know how many emails they're going to
send now I say emails, but it's actual really a
message to a consumer that wants cauliflower through the app
in the app, but that's charged to the merchant. So
therefore the efficiency of the marketing in the in the
whole business model is dramatically improved. So instead of saying
hundreds of million dollars are marketing that fails, merchants can
now pay exactly for how much that message is going
to return to them.
Speaker 1: So, by signing up and sharing your data, you mentioned
you know, ethics and privacy and all of that stuff.
The data is obviously scrubbed, but you also said that
the data would be sold, and the sale of that
data would precipitate payments to the people that participate in
the co op. So in order to in order to
join this, you really have to sign the agreement. Read
it really closely that you are going to be sharing
your data. Big surprise, you're already doing it, but at
least you have a say in it.
Speaker 3: Remember that the data that's being shared with the merchant
is statistical and aggregated information. It's not personal. They don't
get email editors, so they don't get phone number.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: Because the model, the business model sits in between and
protects the customer from all the forces that want to
understand that information.
Speaker 1: It's interesting. All right, let's take a little break. We'll
come right back with Richard Rukima. And you're listening to
dot net rocks and stay tuned. Did you know you
can easily migrate asp net web apps to Windows containers
on Aws. Use the app to Container tool to containerize
your iis websites and deploy to AWS managed container services
with or without Kubernetes. Find out more about app to
contain at aws, dot Amazon dot Com, slash, dot net,
slash Modernize. All right, we're back. It's dotting at rocks.
I'm Carl Franklin, that's Richard Campbell, hey, and that's Richard Rukman.
We're having a really interesting conversation that sort of borders
marketing and big data and and these economic forces. It's
I love.
Speaker 3: These ethical data management, ethical data manage.
Speaker 1: Ethical data management. Yeah, it's really cool. So my next
question is how can you know when we come up
with these great ideas. Sometimes we don't think, oh, I
forgot people are evil? How are they going to take
advantage of this system? So how do you see the
protections in place, and what are the places that somebody
could gain the system.
Speaker 3: Well, we're already seeing it in some areas where the
QR codes are being like are being other QR codes
are being stuck on top of the QR codes and
then you don't see the scanning and where that takes you. Right,
The important difference in the technology of snapchain the business
model is that when you scan a QR code, it
doesn't take you anywhere because it generates a text message.
That text message is a one eight hundred number that
you can see clear as day that Okay, I'm sending
a text message to the service from my phone to
this number to be able to get the understanding of
what the benefit is behind the QR code, and I
think it's a two step, two factor method authentication. It's
just not a UR code that you're getting brought sent to.
You are asked to scan the code, take a look
at what it's there on your phone from a message,
and then pressent And that's the opt in process to
make this absolutely hundred percent privacy compliant. Because you are
the one that's activating the requiry.
Speaker 1: You have MFA jeez, can somebody set up a phone
farm and you know, create hundreds of thousands of accounts
to to get money, to steal money out of the
out of the co op. I mean, are there other
potential pitfalls there? Well?
Speaker 3: Never, there's there's I don't know who set up, but
somebody said, never underestimate the creativity of a criminal mind.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Right, But remember the activity of a bot as opposed
to activity of a human is vastly different.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: If you're in two different shops within ten seconds and
the shops are five klomters apart, yeah, somber. I. I
chose local merchants for a reason because I want to
support my local merchant in the business that they do.
Because ninety five percent of all employment is local merchants,
it's hard.
Speaker 1: To argue against it, against buying local, right.
Speaker 3: It's it's hard because we all have to support each other, right, right.
But the whole model of this was I didn't want
a mobile application. I didn't want to have a registration process.
I just wanted somebody to see a QR code and
think that's a good idea. I've heard about this snapchin
business model. I want to participate. All you got to
do is scan the QR code with your camera, it
generates the text message and you're registered. You're in the program.
I don't know your name and I don't really address,
but I have your phone number.
Speaker 1: Oh, so it's all through Smster. There's no apps.
Speaker 3: There's no app as of this right now, there's no app,
and I don't want there to be an app because
I don't want the friction of saying, oh, to participate,
you got to download this application and register.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Also, you know, if you're going to be on iOS,
which is probably where you want to be, you're going
to have to you know, share revenue with Apple and
all that stuff. Nobody wants to do that.
Speaker 3: Well, but it makes sense to me not to have
the app because it's more of a friction to register.
Anybody today that sees a snapchain QR code can scan
the code and immediately be very participating in the model.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, I get it.
Speaker 2: You need a particular kind of customer for this, right
that this is someone who cares about how their data
is uses. Because the non trivial number of people who
just don't care, right, it's an overwhelming problem people talk
about all the time. Lots of will say, yeah, I
care about my privacy, but won't lift a finger to
actually do anything about it. I totally agree.
Speaker 3: The only difference here that I think is different, and
it really talks to the millennials and even anybody under forty,
is the fact that if you participate, you're going to
get paid.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I don't know how much of an incentive
that really is not going to be that much money.
I'm more con I think most people would be interested
in just my data not being abused.
Speaker 3: Well, that's fair. There's a new model out called customer
Data platforms, and we're seeing everybody gather this data in
the customer data platforms. There is another company that I
just found, in fact, I saw it yesterday. It's called Rupt,
who does this thing called pods, which allows companies to
store their data, your personal data into a repository called
a pod.
Speaker 2: You know this is this is tim Berner's Lee's solid technology.
Speaker 3: You're guid that into that Internet that introduced internet, right,
that created the Internet.
Speaker 2: That made the world Wide Web world.
Speaker 3: The The problem that I see about that, though, is
your identity is still attached to the data in the pod.
So therefore it becomes an incentive to break into the
pod because once you break into the pod, you gather
all kinds of information about a person with identity.
Speaker 2: That's not how Solid works. Solid they would have a
token to the data, which they may or may not
have rights to, like it's not actually in the pod,
just the token identifier. The whole point of Solid is
your data stays with you, and you only assigned tokens
out for utilization.
Speaker 3: Well, like I said, I found it yesterday, and my
interterpretation of that was different where because I looked for
that specifically and they said the identity and the data
were stored and that in snapchain, I want to use
distributed identity and verifiable credentials to separate identity from the data.
So the data that's in the database doesn't have identity
right in Snapchain's model to eliminate that. To have a
take on but yeah.
Speaker 2: You're only you only want to deal with the aggregates
where I mean Solid's real mission there and on include
a link to the Solid project was about how do
I say, how do I give a company my information
to deliver a product to me but not have them
be on their mainly list for forever. So it's literally
like for the duration of this transaction, you have my
address at the end of that transaction, you don't.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And in that regard, snapchain is identical because the
customer is in charge of how much information they allow
the merchant to find them.
Speaker 2: I mean, I would argue just realistically, like giving the
customer a sense of what their data is being used
for would be a hell of an improvement. But I
got one other angle for you, Richard to consider, which
is that personality that kind of customer is also the
one who just wants to remain hilt. Yeah, it's just
going to block their don't block their cookies, use VPN
like disguise themselves. That people that the active members in
this problem space, their primary goal seems to be just
leave me out.
Speaker 1: You know, both of you guys are assuming that people
are a lot more intelligent than they actually are.
Speaker 2: Now, the whole preamble of this, Carl, was that the
customer here is a small segment of folks. Most people
don't care.
Speaker 1: Most people don't care. Yeah, yeah, you're right, okay.
Speaker 3: And most people don't care about their data. Absolutely I
agree with it, because there's no value to them all.
The value for them to putching my terms into Google
is I get the Google product for free.
Speaker 1: All right? So what is the elevator pitch to your
brother in law who you want to sign up and
scan the QR code? What are you going to tell them?
The benefit to them.
Speaker 3: Is save your money, protect your data is the tagline.
Speaker 1: Yeah that's not enough? How much? Well, how much am
I going to get back?
Speaker 3: It all depends on all the various revenue streams that
can be dred from the.
Speaker 1: Dam you lost me. I want to I want a
dollar amount, right, I'm an American consumer over here, and
I want a dollar amount.
Speaker 3: One million as I stick my thinking and I know
I'm not I'm just not that small.
Speaker 1: You're right.
Speaker 3: I mean, this is a theoretical exercise. People got all
as communism, but it's you know, your fire department is
a socialist movement.
Speaker 1: Well that was a department, all right.
Speaker 3: I know, I know, I know it's a joke, but
it's true. But people will take this down because it's
like I'll never work. Okay, I'll never work, but what
a job?
Speaker 1: Say? Once?
Speaker 3: You know it takes the crazy people to change to
make crazy happen.
Speaker 1: I think it's a great idea. I just think that
in order to get you know, cousin Joe to to
to to enlist or whatever, you have to give him
a hard benefit.
Speaker 3: Right, Okay, so let's do let's take this one angle.
Let's go to the influencers.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 3: I wrote a whole book on this about influencers, right,
and how do influencers monetize their audience? And right now
they do it with advertising and branding, which is what
I call a negative feedback loop. But if I am,
and I'm particularly interested in your guys product your perspective,
because you guys are both influencers. Right, So if you
say product X is the greatest product I know of,
go get it. But while you're shopping and picking it
up at the local merchant, like somebody like your bars
and new kid like, how many people do you drive
to your your your gigs?
Speaker 2: Carl do?
Speaker 1: How many people do I drive? Oh?
Speaker 2: You're driving people to I know what you mean?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean you're driving traffic to that company.
Speaker 1: So if you're advertising to drive people to the gigs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, So this is called outcome fees.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: So if I stuck a QR code on your stage
and people came up and scanned it to say, this
is for the benefit of Carl. Now the merchant understands
what Carl's activity was and how how much influence you
had to drive customers into activity.
Speaker 1: Right, But what's the benefit to them? Right?
Speaker 3: The benefit to them is they have got a customer
in their store. They got a customer in the bar.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about somebody who I'm talking about, somebody who
comes up and is at one of my gigs. Incentive
to scan the QR code can't just be because it
will benefit Carl.
Speaker 3: Sure it will. They love you, Yeah, but they'd rather
daily to go see you.
Speaker 1: They'd rather take out a ten dollars bill and throw
out my guitar case.
Speaker 3: Well, that may be true, just easier what.
Speaker 1: A q QR code. I don't even know what that does,
onlygo are you gonna send me some virus something?
Speaker 3: That may be true.
Speaker 2: This is the idea.
Speaker 3: If they go to that bar continuously after your shoal
and they see Carl's QR code and they scan it
every time, they're contributing to your influence because it's your
influence that got them to go to that merchant location.
Yeah okay, And it's a way to track influence without
taking advertising or branding dollars.
Speaker 1: As long as you can give them something in return, right,
I mean, yeah, a CD, a free MP three file,
something like that. I don't know.
Speaker 3: And they say like that, when you scan a QR code,
there has to be some value to the customer.
Speaker 1: Yeah for scanning, scan the QR code and we'll send
you links to all of our music. That kind of stuff. Sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Can I just talk about influencers for a while, because
Richard and I lived through the golden age of podcasting
and maybe some people would argue that it's happening now,
but no, I don't think so, at least for us.
We were literally one of the first podcasts ever and
certainly the longest monetized podcast and when there was no competition,
life was really good advertising wise, and then you know,
it's sort of just dwindled down, and now it's I mean,
we barely make enough. I don't mind saying this. We
barely make enough to pay the editor, right, I mean
we don't. We're not really making money here. We do
this because we love to do it. Furthermore, we're we're
not pushing products that we don't believe in in our ads.
Uh Okay, I can't say that we're not We're not
doing that. I can say that, but we also have
been on a platform that requires us to put ads in.
If you probably heard the show later, you've heard those.
But what I'm saying is, you know, we don't do
the show so that we can make ad revenue, you know,
to line our pockets and make a lot of money.
Like and I think that as I see celebrities now,
you know, aging into more infomercial roles and you know,
trying to push products and stuff like that, it's just
kind of sad.
Speaker 2: You know, well, you missed the best influencer revenue generator
them all. Scam coins. Okay, educate me exactly what you
think it is. You create a crypto coin that you
pump up with hypes that everybody buys in, and then
you sell all the ords before it dumps. Yes, it's
a classic pump and dump. Its multi level marketing, right. Yeah,
you tell two friends, and you tell two friends in
the first place, I think.
Speaker 1: At the top end of the of the scale, like
the people who have you know, YouTube shows that are
have you know, bazillions of views and they sell a lot.
They get a lot of advertising revenue from YouTube typically
they're like into shock value. Then you know they're they're
they're saying outrageous things, they're doing outrageous things, and it's
not at all beneficial to humanity, not at all. It's
not even beneficial to the social good. It's beneficial to
them and the people watch it because they slow down
in an accident for the same reason. Do you know
what I mean?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I totally get it.
Speaker 1: But and it's really freaking sad.
Speaker 2: And it is.
Speaker 3: Sad, which is why I want to do something about it.
I want to do something.
Speaker 1: Waves with this stuff so you can't find the really
good stuff when you go looking for it.
Speaker 3: I want to be able to form people into communities
that benefit from each other. Yeah, not just some person
that's you know, screaming at their houses on fire and
whaling because her ten million dollar house. Can she's suddenly
lost her ten million house, which I feel for sure great,
like anybody you lose any house, it's bad. But put
her on social media and like, it's sad, it's sad
that we have to pay attention to this without and
they contribute. They get so much from that that endeavor,
Like any influencer will they get addicted to that, right.
Speaker 1: Did you read the book Influencer? And I don't remember
who wrote it, but I read it twenty years ago.
It was actually Eileen Crane who sent it to us
Richard as regional directors back in the day. Yeah, And
it was stories of people who made a difference. And
it wasn't that they had economic success making a difference,
but they were really influential and changed the world. And
believe it or not, one of them was Jimmy Carter.
And you probably heard if you've been watching the news
and the funeral and people doing speeches, you've probably heard
about what he did with guinea worm, which was a
disease that was caused by people, mostly in Africa, going
and getting water from a pond which had these guinea
worm larvae in it and then either drinking it or
bathing in it or putting it on wounds or whatever.
And it was perpetuating this guinea worm. And he basically
taught them, you know, he takes some pantyhose and strain
the water through it and then you can drink it
and then you can do what you want with it.
But guinea worm tunnels itself out through your skin and
it's absolutely horrible and painful. And what people would do
is they would have these outbreaks and then they would
go to the pond and then they would you know,
cool it off with the water, thus adding more guinea
worm larvae to the water and perpetuating the cycle. And
he basically saw this and just started an education campaign
and he eradicated guinea worm. He did. Wow, Jimmy Carter. Yeah,
so the next time you, you know, you think about
having to you know, stay in line and every other
day in the gas line in the seventies, Yeah, that sucked.
And not sure what he could have done about it,
but maybe he could have. But but he did a
lot of stuff like he was a true influencer in
the very biggest sense of the word. So I appreciate
the lofty goals of your of your endeavor here, Richard.
I just I want to know how you know you
can you can get it through the veil of selfishness
that the American consumer has wrapped themselves in. Yeah.
Speaker 3: I totally agree. I am an idealistic person and I
think I try to think out of the box. Yeah,
So I do know that today it's not working. It
doesn't work for anybody except for the corporate giants and
the tech giants. You know, they take our data and
they use it and they do whatever they want to
do with it.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 3: And we have to have more quality in terms of
that revenue generation, I agree, in our society or we're
gonna you know, we're gonna the feudal lords of medieval
times died because the pitchworks came out. And there's somebody
that talks about the pitch When the pitchforks come out, yep,
you know, we're all going to be in trouble. And
trust me that pitchforks are coming right.
Speaker 1: By the way they have come out.
Speaker 2: They have literally Hey, before we wrap up to I
want to d d besmirched pooral Jimmy Carter because he
wasn't president ntil nineteen seventy seven and the oil embargo
was nineteen seventy three. That was Nixon and then Ford. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like most presidents, they they take the blame for
what happened before they took office. Yeah, yeah, too bad.
It's too bad.
Speaker 3: Well, I really appreciate you guys taking on the show.
It's not quite a technical shot. I was going for
the more ethical data management.
Speaker 2: It's definitely but there's definitely a technology here in a
data privacy issue here, Like these are all topics on
the show, absolutely, and you are trying to you know,
we've got a problem with the way data is being
you know, this all really started because we wouldn't pay
for stuff on the internet the first place, right, And
so they came, they came up with strategy. They they
eventually discovered the strategy, Hey, your telemetry, your digital effluent
is valuable. So yeah, what if we never did charge
for you for this product, so you'll just keep using it? Right,
Like there was a time when they wanted you to
pay for search, just people wouldn't pay for search.
Speaker 1: And we have a phrase that we always say, which is, hey,
if the product's free, you are the product product.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so this is my little attempt to kind of
flip the tables on that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's great and say, you know.
Speaker 3: We we can do it together, right, We can and
certainly can take the customer perspective on capitalism, not the
merchant's perspective. And we're here to help the customer get
a better experience, not the shareholders, which is the alumni ILLUMINII.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 3: Of where the pitchworks are aimed.
Speaker 1: Right well, and it also in the end helps the
merchants too, so.
Speaker 3: It does it you know that revenue is diversified across
a whole wide range of merchants, each providing a service
that is local to your environment, near your community.
Speaker 1: Very good, well, I wish you good luck with that.
And what's the website again?
Speaker 3: The Empowered Customer dot Com is the landing page and
from there that you can go all kinds of links.
There's a whole bunch of social media posts on there.
I'm trying to I'm trying to be the most social influencer,
right kad alick guy, So you know I'm doing my best.
Speaker 1: Good And I still haven't heard from Larry Lestig if
we're going to do a code in the castle next year,
but if we do have any suggestions, go back to
the same place or the same castle, or you have
any other where he was thinking about the South of France.
Speaker 3: Maybe yeah, I would say the South of France is
a great place. But I would also say that he
can reduce the pricing of the of the experience by
driving traffic to those merchants that we attended to in Italy, right,
like it wasn't just us going to the Colden Castle.
It was us as a group of consumers driving to
all those different merchants. And my advice to his model is,
and I've talked to him about this, get these merchants
involved so that they can see how much traffic you're
generating to them, because it's just not coding the castle.
If people who hear it on Colden Castle tell their friends,
and they tell to friends, then all those people are
going to be going to those merchants.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, very good. And we know that those those
customers have money because they can afford to go to
code in the.
Speaker 2: Castle, had mondy had Bundy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they had money. Right, they're going to spend some
ching in your wine store.
Speaker 2: Well that's where the then actually that's one last point.
Speaker 3: Snapchin came from the snap of a camera and the
ching of a cash register. Oh, snap ching, snapching.
Speaker 1: Very good, Richard. It's been a pleasure talking to you,
and I hope to see as soon.
Speaker 3: Ye Take care, guys, appreciate your time, all right, and.
Speaker 1: We'll talk to you next time on dot net rocks.
Dot net Rocks is brought to you by Franklin's Net
and produced by Pop Studios. A full service audio, video
and post production facility located physically in New London, Connecticut,
and of course in the cloud online at pwop dot com.
Visit our website at d O T N E t
R O c k S dot com for RSS feeds, downloads,
mobile apps, comments, and access to the full archives going
back to show number one, recorded in September two thousand
and two. And make sure you check out our sponsors.
They keep us in business. Now go write some code.
See you next time. You got tread middle vans now
the summer time that means home.
Speaker 3: Then my Texas a lie Reddit b