Vastly Important Notes

Evernote Screencast

If any of you are wondering what I've been doing at Evernote these past few months, we're officially above the radar now!

YouTube quality is a little poor, so there's a high-rez version at www.evernote.com/video/ . The line to get into the closed beta is already pretty long, but if you write in and say that you one of the six or seven people that reads this blog, I'll see if I can bump you up a bit.

Wish us luck!

Stanford GTS 2008

I just spent two days at the 2008 Global Technology Symposium at Stanford, a worldwide investment and emerging technologies conference, with an emphasis on Russia and other developing markets. I don't think I've ever written this about a conference before: it was great.

Useful content, a chance to meet many of Silicon Valley's founders, and all around excellent coordination. What's really amazing, especially for an international event, is that every single person who got up on the stage knew how to speak and present. The audience is usually comatose ten minutes into a talk at any of these events and I came prepared to nap; it never happened. The caviar reception at the end was a nice touch.

Has anyone that knows me ever heard me gush about a conference before? Alexandra Johnson, the principal orchestrator of GTS, should be immediately put in charge of every other industry conference on the planet. She might even make CES bearable. If they have a GTS next year, I'm bringing more of the Evernote crew.

Don't try to run, Sasha.

I cancelled my Kindle order, twice.

Hemingway's six words? Mine are nonfiction.

Quick Book Review: How to Become CEO

Some of the people involved in the production of this book clearly understand that they are engaged with a work of high satire.  Emphatically not among those people is Jeffrey Fox, the author.  Tragicomedic dissonance ensues.

Empty box update

The recent unpleasantness with Dean & Deluca has ended happily.  I can now brew tea with a proper double-walled glass tea press, not the single-walled one I had been previously using, like some debased hobo.

An alternative to yelling on the phone

Jason Terk has pointed me to a nice post by Seth Godin on how to get customer service right.  It basically boils down to avoiding real-time calls in all but emergencies and using the efficiencies afforded by asymmetric processing to substantially improve the experience for companies and customers alike.

I just so happen to be in a position to try this out on the customer side first hand.  Here's an email I just sent to the support address at Dean & Deluca:

Hi,

I ducked into your 560 Broadway store in New York today and purchased (among other things) a Bodum Bora Bora Thermo Tea Press for $80.  Then I got on the train for Boston and spent the next four and a half hours thinking about how I was going to make tea with it.  Unfortunately, when I came home and opened the tea press box, it was empty.  Doh!  I guess I should have double checked before leaving the store, but I just figured that it was customary for the boxes on the shelves to be already filled with their respective products.  Luckily the hard salami package actually did contain a hard salami, so there was some solace.

Can you help me obtain my tea press?  Unfortunately, I won't be back in New York for some time.  If you need some magic numbers from my receipt, I still have it.

Thanks much,

Phil Libin

Ok, so I'm an rtard.  Let's see how it goes.

What I don't know about privacy

A post on Steve Hunt's blog has me thinking about privacy again. 

A couple of years ago, I was speaking on an international identity and security panel in Rome.  At the end of my remarks, a French journalist asked me a long question that seemed to have something to do with privacy but a lot more to do with trying to bait me to agree or disagree with his stated distaste for some aspect of Bush's foreign policy.  I say "seemed to" because neither my French nor his English were up to the task at hand.  Unfortunately, this kind of game has become routine for traveling Americans and I almost always choose not to play.  So instead of answering directly or, the horror, asking him to clarify his question, I decided to use up my time with an impromptu digression on the nature of privacy.  I wasn't sure what I was going to say and, when it was said, I wasn't sure if I actually agreed with it. I'm still not sure.  It sounded good at the time though and sent the audience a-nodding.  Here's more or less what I said, [with my simultaneous inner monologue in brackets].

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When our founding fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence [good, always start with the Founding Fathers when talking to a French reporter], they put in a curious sentence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights," [Uh oh, is that in the Declaration or the Preamble to the Constitution?  Crap!  Ok, just act confident and the audience won't know.] "...that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Now there's an interesting thing here: the three rights specified are mentioned in order of decreasing specificity and ease of measurement.  The first one, Life, is pretty easy to measure; most people will agree on whether someone is alive or dead.  Well, not right now in Washington, but most of the time. [Polite laughter, good, they've heard about the Schiavo thing over here.] The second one, Liberty, is a bit harder to define but still pretty good.  You can usually get a pretty good consensus on whether someone is free or a slave. 

Now the third one is tough.  Happiness?  How can you really define it?  Or measure it?  It seems like a really personal quality that's really hard to pin down.  Some people don't even seem to want to be happy.  I mean I've seen French movies. [Better laugh line, but have I actually ever seen a French movie?  I must have.] Aren't standards of happiness based heavily on the ideas of the time? Plus what if my happiness makes you unhappy? Or vice versa?  Don't the Germans even have a word for this? Schadenschnitzel or something? [Big laugh, Europeans love the 'dumb American tries to say something important but gets comically confused with a food item' bit.  JFK knew this as well.]

That's why the Declaration doesn't give you a right to happiness, only to the pursuit of happiness.  We can't guarantee you happiness, but we can make sure that you can do whatever you think may make you happy - as long as you don't get in the way of the other two rights for others.  And this is the real genius of the document: you have a right to pursue.  You may never get there, or I may beat you to it, but you can pursue happiness if you want and we won't stand in your way.

[Now here's the part that I'm really not sure about, but it's such a smooth transition.]

So what about Privacy?  Is it like Life?  Is it like Liberty? [Yes, come to think of it, it probably is like liberty, should have thought this through better before starting.] Or is it more like Happiness?  I think privacy is a personal thing. Some people want to be very private, other people post pictures of their vasectomy on their blog.  Don't google for this! [Really, don't.] Some people want to hide every step they make on the web, others don't care at all.  And is there a corresponding right to know?  If I really want to know how much my customers earn, is it really wrong for me to try to find out?  What if I want to find out who's giving money to a politician?  Does your right to privacy trump my right to happiness?

I think maybe privacy is like happiness, and the "right to privacy" should really be "the right to the pursuit of privacy".  If you want to keep certain information private, you should have access to all the tools you need to make that happen.  If you choose not to use those tools, either because you don't care or because you agree to some kind of business or social proposition in return, then I have the right to get whatever information about you that I want.  And the default setting on your web browser shouldn't be "private" any more than the default setting on your life should be "happy".  If you want privacy or happiness, you have the absolute right to work at it, but it's not our responsibility as representatives of government or industry to hand you either one. [Big applause line from the audience, but it's a very business- and government- centric crowd.] Companies should be free to track their customers' actions and people should be free to hide whichever of those actions they want.  Each person gets to choose where they want to stand in that marketplace.

---

This got a good very good reaction at the conference, but the "privacy" guys were pretty severely outnumbered so it wasn't a balanced field.  I'm still not sure how I feel about this analogy.  The biggest danger seems to be the potential arms-race between privacy seeking individuals and information seeking businesses or governments.  For instance, is it OK for Google's default search behavior to be set to log your search history? (Nelson Minar and my brother had an interesting discussion about this a couple of weeks ago).  If so, would it be OK for Google to change the opt-out settings randomly every few months to force people to "really" care about their privacy? Would it be OK for Google to just lie to you and keep records even you've opted out, claiming that you should be using some third-party anonymizer if you really cared? (I think the answers are "yes", "no" and "no", but where do you draw the line?)  Also, are the implications significantly different for government/citizen interactions?

I'm not sure about any of this.  I told myself that I'd sort it out before posting, but my little talk was almost two years ago and I still haven't decided.  Is "privacy" like "happiness"?  Maybe it's not a very useful question.  What do you think?

Oh, the picture at the top of this post is a still from "Fireworks", the School House Rock episode on the Declaration of Independence.  It's how they chose to illustrate "pursuit of happiness".  Note that this kind of pursuit, deemed appropriate educational programming for children in the 1970s, would now land you in jail.

Split the difference

I have a suggestion for how Google can atone for their free speech sin of agreeing to censor results in their Chinese version to comply with Chinese government web rules.  Since they'll have to implement algorithms to automatically determine which results to omit in the Chinese version, they can also make a version of the search engine that displays ONLY the stuff censored in China.  Of course this version will only be accessible outside of the PRC but, meh, it's a start.

Note to my Chinese business associates: Joke!

The Pros and Cons of Biometrics

I wrote this simple article for a new publication - the ASSA ABLOY Future Lab - about biometrics.  If you want to read it for some reason, please do so.

It beats working

Jeneane Sessum has written a great article for PR Blog Week 2.0 called, "Adding Your Voice to the Conversation. Why CEOs Should Blog."  It makes me out to be much smarter than I really am!  What fun.