Yet2com Blog

It starts with privacy.

Kids are not as worried about it as we are.  Today kids have no issue sharing private details on Facebook or with companies if they get some benefit. Want 100,000 Social Security numbers?  Easy, just offer kids a chance to win a fee ipod.   Want to know how much walking people do?  Easy, create a free iPhone App that lets you monitor your friends real time and collect the data.  Want to know just about anything, from any demographic.  Just offer them some free benefit for recording it and sharing it.

The next generation does not care much about privacy.    HIPPA does not matter to them, neither will purchase history or location or any of the other things that those of us in our 40′s to worry about.  I think the line will be drawn at theft of $ or IP. Everything else?  Fairgame.

A lot of data is being gathered, but it wont end there.   The cable company knows what we watch.  The credit card company knows what we purchase, what medicines we take.  The GPS in our phone knows how far we drive and how much we walk.  Google knows just about everything, and can even predict when we are likely to visit the hospital.  So reams of  data is gathered on each of us, but it is segmented in a variety of databases.  I think governments will allow the data to be shared and mined, anonymized, if it’s for the public good – or if people dont opt out – for commercial benefit.

So, bear with me for one more step.  Governments have recently made some progress on food labeling.  What if that continued through the food supply chain, and there was true transparency.  You could eat a hamburger and know where the meat came from, what growth hormones might have been used, and know what farm the wheat and yeast came from for the role, or where the seeds came from, etc.

To summarize, 1) Concerns about privacy reduce and reams of data are shared, 2) Transparency in our food supply chain are added and 3) Enterprising companies or universities start mining the data looking for patterns or trends – What could this mean?

It ends with a seismic shift in the volume of data that will be collected and shared – and more importantly WHAT we can learn and WHO learns it first.

1) It means we will learn alot about the correlation between disease and lifestyles.   Today, medical studies are conducted with relatively small samples sizes. Imagine if we learned that no one got prostate cancer who ate tomatoes from one specific farm, or that there was a strong coorelation between heart disease and watching horror movies. The winners will be all of us who want to live longer and healthier.

2) It means we’ll learn a lot about the relationships between; demographics, behavior, consumer preferences and even voting trends. The winners will be companies that listen and react quickly.

3) It means technology and patents in these areas will valuable.  I think the winners will be companies that have some unique access to data; like Google and the credit card companies.  The winners will also be firms that develop some proprietary mining technique or algorithm.   Seen any interesting data gathering or mining IP recently?  What companies are learning unusual things about us?

I think I’m only capturing 10% of the ramifications of this trend.  What is the 90% that I’m missing?  What is your view on this?

This entry was posted on Friday, January 1st, 2010 at 12:52 pm and is filed under commentary, future trends, open innovation, yet2.com. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.