Google has handled its privacy debate by being disarmingly clear with a little note left on the fridge the other week.

We’re tidying up and love data too much to not want to connect it better.

Like it or lump it.

Love Google.

It’s their right - they are after all a private company and not the public service we somehow feel them to be. Google wants to “create a beautifully simple, intuitive user experience” and its data consolidation is what will help it do this. Facebook makes one product called Facebook while Google up until now has chosen to run many nom de plumes, betas, and side initiatives. I’d like to see a more capable ‘joined up’ Google sparring with Apple and Facebook on who can do the coolest and most useful things for people using data. In truth, the Google engineering team must be relieved to ditch the sticking plasters and chewing gum connecting the hitherto disparate data sets they manage.

The recent furore about SOPA and PIPA has set me thinking afresh about my position on copyright ownership legislation. I myself suffer, albeit in a very small way, from the kind of pirates being targeted by the bills and regularly find my Indian classical arrangement of Silent Night being illegally sold by pirate sites in China and elsewhere.  It’s frustrating but my views on the topic are not simply to create the biggest hammer possible to crush the activity.

What really stunts growth and adoption of the Digital Economy?

There is something wider at work here beyond simply piracy. The short term view, adopted by SOPA, is to instigate moderately Draconian measures impacting the architecture of the internet. My colleague Ari Osur has written an excellent post that clearly outlines how this might affect the world of the Marketer should SOPA/PIPA transpire in its current form. 

A longer term view to the solution is that this piracy is mostly happening in emerging digital economies and that it is informally permissible until they mature.  Joe Karaganis published a seminal report on Media Piracy in 2011 which took a fresh look at the topic with many case studies taken from emerging economies. One quote which sticks out is :

I'm delighted to be starting with Forrester as a Senior Analyst serving Interactive Marketers. I am based in our London office and will cover Global and EMEA specific topics. 

A little bit about me . . .

I studied computer science in Edinburgh, Scotland over 20+ years ago when it was mostly a mathematical topic — heavy on algebra, programming, and other dry subject matter. While some of these topics remained in academia for many years I have seen how they have come to be nurtured under a more commercial light with recommendation systems and rich analytics solutions proliferating in the marketing technology landscape. These tools live alongside bleeding-edge techniques including neuroscience tools to measure pre-cognitive responses to media, messages, and experiences. It’s clear that the mad scientists and M(ad) Men are working side by side. Of course, marketing will always have a strong and essential dollop of artistic flair in the elixir but without doubt it is moving inexorably toward a science helped, in part, from the massive data sets now available through the web and social paradigm.

My experience in the industry has seen me work with many telecommunications companies, media publishers, startups, and hardware manufacturers on a wide gamut of products, marketing strategies and solutions to problems. Most recently I supported the BBC with short- and long-term CRM/sCRM strategies (across all channels) as well as implementing prototypes in the marketing resource management (MRM) and media planning space. In the mobile domain I recently completed some work with Vodafone Global on a system that wove its own mobile content together with third-party content using recommendation engine technologies and HTML5.