THE FOCUSED MIND » Mobile

Data Is Valuable, But Don’t Expect Anything For It.

Inferential Focus — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 15:45:41 +0000

Personal, a website that launched last November, encourages members to upload information (ranging from the trivial to the sensitive, including items such as student loan records, medical prescriptions and retirement accounts) into a “vault” and then grant access to other people or companies as they choose. Later this year, Personal plans to add a marketplace where people will be able to sell access to their information. An organization call the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium formed in 2010 to encourage similar efforts and now has 30 members.

We’ve written in the past that individuals are willing to give up their information, or at least look past privacy concerns, if they were getting something in return, and companies such as Personal would appear to be well positioned to take advantage of that perspective.

However, as we have discussed recently in a context we call the Data Arms Race, companies are now swimming in information, and many have successfully gained valuable consumer data without paying anything to the consumer.

Additionally, as cyber-criminals well know, something as seemingly valuable as a credit-card number now sells for only a few cents on the black market because so many have been stolen that the market for them has collapsed. That is, information is easy to get.

It would appear to us that while companies value data more than ever, they likely won’t pay the consumer much for it.

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Free Access For All

Inferential Focus — Sun, 08 Jul 2012 07:00:33 +0000

The five largest cable operators in the United States (Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cablevision Systems, Cox Communications and Bright House Networks) recently unveiled a plan to give each other’s high-speed data customers reciprocal access to metro Wi-Fi networks, totaling more than 50,000 hotspots.

In a separate announcement, Comcast said it would let Xfinity Voice customers place free calls over WiFi and other wireless data networks, using mobile devices or PCs. Additionally, as part of the Voice2go service, customers will be able to forward calls to as many as four additional phones or devices.

These announcements could have a profound effect on the revenues of mobile wireless providers. Verizon and other mobile providers are already losing revenue from one source as people have begun moving away from text message plans and towards messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook, which provide free texts, but use data. Now the mobile providers may have to deal with the threat of pervasive Wi-Fi. If other cable operators follow Comcast, mobile customers in those covered areas may not eliminate voice plans altogether, but moving down to the lowest cost-voice plans (fewest minutes) could be a reality.

There is one benefit for mobile providers, however. If individuals become more adept at switching back and forth between free Wi-Fi and cellular networks, it may relieve network congestion and alleviate the need for further cellular infrastructure buildout.

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