Right, wrong or otherwise, online technology innovations were – and are – sometimes driven by pornography, (See PORN: The Hidden Engine That Drives Innovation In Tech), gambling (See VR is a smart bet for the future of gambling), and crime in general.

Leaving aside moral judgements on those industries, they’re generally considered on the seedier side of business in general even if they’ve become more mainstream. I recall early in the digital business, (around mid 1990s), there were some companies that just didn’t want business from such industries more due to a higher incidence of fraud and such more so than any other reasons. Over time, of course, ad fraud has become more prevalent everywhere. It seems everyday there’s something about ad fraud in at least on of my industry news feeds. I’m starting to wonder what – if any – spinoff benefits there might be from AdWars. Pick a study, any study, and you’ll find ad fraud to be in the billions of dollars. Here’s just a small sample…

• SlideShare – State of digital ad fraud 2017 by Augustine Fou
• Businesses could lose $16.4 billion to online advertising fraud in 2017: Report
• The Bot Baseline: Fraud in Digital Advertising 2017 Report
• Adweek’s Ad Fraud Section
• ‘Biggest Ad Fraud Ever’: Hackers Make $5M A Day By Faking 300M Video Views

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So if you’re a Digital Product Manager and you’re looking at that Amazon purchase of Whole Foods, are you asking some questions? Such as…

• “What’s Amazon’s strategic imperative here?”
• “How might this affect my business and do I need to do anything differently?”
• “Even if this move doesn’t appear to directly impact my business, will there be cascade effects through the marketplace that will eventually change something to which I’ll need to respond?

I’ve seen a lot of digital ink spilled on the whys of the Amazon/Whole Foods deal. It makes sense for anyone working in digital to be looking at this and considering the strategic implications. And while we don’t know exactly what’s on Jeff Bezos’ mind, this article Amazon’s Whole Foods Strategy: It’s Not What You Think from Forbe’s Jason Bloomberg is the best survey of possible strategic imperatives I’ve seen yet.

There just a couple items Jason doesn’t cover that I’d add: [Read more…]

In a prior post, I poked a bit of fun at some IoT fails. Some might not be so funny. And so far, I’m not aware of anything resulting in a great deal of personal injury or death. So far. But here’s the thing… we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. The rush to market and possibly the industry mantra of Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is going to dump some more bad products on the market. Unfortunately, security is still very poor across the IoT marketplace. There’s a lot of reasons for this. Not the least of which is there’s not a lot of value to building it in; just costs. The sad reality is that security costs are often a so-called “negative externality.” That is, any impact is suffered by a third party. This will likely change once some more lawsuit hungry lawyers get more deeply involved.

So what can you do for now? That very much matters whether you’re a Consumer or a Maker of such items. As a Consumer, I’ve got a bunch of this stuff rattling about. As a Product Manager, I’ve only worked briefly on one effort, so hardly an expert. But here you go… [Read more…]

Things. And the Relationships Among Them

Many years ago I’d read a discussion about a few early science fiction writers. One thing that particularly struck me was thoughts about how it was one thing to imagine a few potential possibilities for technology or products, but quite another to brainstorm all of the side impacts of such things, both obvious and non-obvious. Those writers who thought of flying cars well before their time may have been prescient. But the ones who thought about how that might require new air traffic patterns, accident management, skyborne fast food pickup windows and more, they were even more visionary. They thought through what a lot of the cascade side effects might be; both for adjacent technologies and systems, and sociologically.

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Internet Of Things, (IoT), can run from a sensor to keep track of watering your lawn to your car to who knows what. Pressing a button or just giving a voice command to have your vehicle pull up in front of the restaurant sounds like a great idea. So does having your car call for help if you hit something with it and you’re non-responsive.

Still, we’re not quite there in terms of all the smarts with smart devices just yet. It’s called the Internet of Stupid. Here’s a fun summary of some idiot savant servants, (perhaps one day our masters), have been up to over the past few years!

[Read more…]