Mobile moolah

Om Malik reports another example of the convergence of "real" and "virtual" currencies:

Necessity, they say is the mother of invention. It couldn’t be more true in case of Africa, where pre-paid airtime is fast becoming the ‘virtual’ currency for Pan-African trade, overcoming conventional currency exchange and lack of banking infrastructure. It started out as phone users in Nigeria, especially in the rural areas trading minutes, but then the transactions took a mercantile trend.

Instead of paying cash, people started paying in airtime. Minutes became moolah and since the trend has caught on, and is being used for cross border trade as well.

Networked technology enables us to codify and transact information in a systematic way. It stands to reason that people will find more and more ways to tie the ephemeral values of that information to tangibly valuable things and services. And they don't need banks or governments to mediate the process (although the taxman is bound to take an interest soon enough!).

Real and virtual currencies converging

Another sign that real and virtual currencies are converging:

A UK panel is urging governments to start treating virtual currencies in the same manner as real life money to help combat fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion.

Value is value, whatever its manifestation. And where there is value there will be people trying to filch it.

A virtual identity custody battle

Dave Birch writes:

Who cares about custody of the quids [sic] when there's virtual assets at stake! A divorcing couple in China are fighting for the custody of virtual identities in the Zhengtu Online virtual world. The couple met each other through the game in September 2006 and got married in November. The two jointly own more than 10 Zhengtu Online accounts (each of which is, in essence, a different virtual identity) that are each above level 100. This, incidentally, makes them a liquid asset as they can be sold for 10,000 Yuan each online. The husband wants all the game accounts and in return is willing to give their newly purchased and renovated apartment to his wife: in other words, he wants the virtual stuff and she can keep the real stuff. As they say in Yorkshire -- or they did in the era when my mother was born in Catterick -- there's nowt as strange a folk. The dispute? The wife wants to split the real and virtual stuff equally... how old fashioned.

Which is all further proof that "real" and "virtual" aspects of value are becoming practically indistinguishable—if someone cares about something, it has value, whether that something is a game-world avatar or an apartment.

Reflections on Identity Mashup

I enjoyed being on the panel at the Identity Mashup event at the BT Centre, London the other night. Pursuant is a summary of some of the key points that arose and my further thoughts (mostly towards the end).

Tom Ilube spoke about his company Garlik, which aims to help people track information others hold about them. I find this interesting in that it chimes nicely with my musings on supersurveillance (watching what the watchers are watching about us).

Richard Baker talked about the enterprise in general and BT in particular, and the challenge of providing identity-enabled services to a relatively non tech-savvy mass market. He touched on the strategic model of risk, value and convenience that my friend and white paper co-author John Madelin has developed at BT.

Simon Willison told us about OpenID, a technology protocol that obviates the need to remember lots of passwords (or risk using just one) for all the different web services you use by allowing you to authenticate ("sign in") in one place, then have other web services recognise that you have already signed in, rather than you having to sign in separately for each one. (Wow, that concept is really hard to communicate succinctly without visual examples!)

Edgar Whitley of the London School of Economics' Information Systems Group was sceptical about OpenID's accessibility to the masses, expressing concern that technology like the UK government's ID Card will have to be simpler to use than OpenID is if it is to be used at all (there was some disagreement amongst the panel over OpenID's relative ease of use or otherwise—personally, I suspect ongoing innovation will make it progressively even more approachable by non-geeks).

Tony Fish, the discussion moderator, wanted to know where the beef was: where is the value in identity, and who can leverage it? I opined that advertisers found value in being able to build the richest possible picture of a person in order to target adverts at them optimally—which is why Google is making so much money. Conversely, Tom pointed to identity phraudsters who can extract several thousand pounds of value from a target individual (mostly by getting credit) by obtaining just a handful of key data about them.

There were many other interesting points and observations that came up, but there was also a familiar sense in the room of "how the heck does all this fit together in a single, intelligible picture?" I suggested that looking at identity in terms of value could be a way of pulling the many threads together: corporations, government and individuals alike want to realise for themselves the tangible value of identity, and individual people value—to varying degrees according to person and context—privacy, convenience, service personalisation, transparency and pretty much any other attribute of identity-enabled information services you care to name. In other words, we each place particular values on information and the ways it flows or does not flow.

In the summing up, I lobbed a provocative thought into the room: "privacy is dead; long live privacy". Things would be so simple if we didn't try so desperately to hang on to our little sense of bounded self and melted quietly into the identity soup of this webbed world. That is a scary, scary process—but surely an inevitable one, carried as we little people are on the rip tide of C21st cultural evolution?

That said, money is only a particular kind of information, so the massive imbalances of wealth could not be sustained should we collectively allow information to truly flow freely (as in, in an extreme example, the information that allows me to log into my bank account, although of course I am talking about a far broader spectrum of information value here, most of it only indirectly related to cash!).

It's hard to see the rich letting the poor at their lucre willingly (scary!), and indeed the current trend is massively in the other direction, with megabrands (Tesco, Google, Virgin and so on) increasingly acting as massive re-aggregators of value created by others. So we're left with a huge conundrum—information needs to flow freely to create value, but collectively we're not willing to let it do so beyond specific, highly circumscribed contexts. Indeed, if we did so all at once, our whole ecopolitical system would surely collapse.

This all raises many more questions than it provides answers. One thing's for sure: the dual imperatives of information fluidity and information control look set for some spectacular showdowns over the coming years!

After the main session, I got to chat with a number of interesting people. I felt right at home immersed in a crowd of identity nuts! ; )

For another angle on the Identity Mashup event, check out this thoughtful post by Graham Sadd.

The identity of money

Michael Williams asks what the difference really is between "real" and "virtual" money:

The line between "virtual" money and "real" money is very fuzzy, especially in an age where even real money is earned and spent mostly electronically. I get my paycheck directly deposited to my bank account, I manage that account through a website, I spend the money with a credit card, and I pay off the credit card through another website. I rarely handle cash, even for very small transactions. So what's the difference between a Chinese yuan and a QQ coin?

HONG KONG -- China's fastest-rising currency isn't the yuan. It's the QQ coin -- online play money created by marketers to sell such things as virtual flowers for instant-message buddies, cellphone ringtones and magical swords for online games. ...

Then last year something happened that Tencent hadn't originally planned. Online game sites beyond Tencent started accepting QQ coins as payment. The coins appeal as a safer, more practical way to conduct small online purchases, because credit cards aren't yet commonplace in China.

At informal online currency marketplaces, thousands of users helped turn the QQ coins back into cash by selling them at a discount that varies based on the laws of supply and demand. Traders began jumping into the QQ coin market as an opportunity to make a quick yuan off of currency speculation.

State-run media reported that some online shoppers began using QQ coins to buy real-world items such as CDs and makeup. So-called QQ Girls started accepting the coins as payment for intimate private chats online. Gamblers caught wind, too, and started using the currency to get around China's anti-gambling laws, converting wins in online mahjong and card games back into cash. Dozens of third-party trading posts sprouted up to ease transactions, turning the QQ coin into a kind of parallel currency.

The only thing that separates QQ coins from yuans is that the former isn't issued by a government... but then that's never been a requirement in the definition of "money".

Michael goes on to explore Wikipedia's definition of money, and there's an interesting post comment on the same topic by Francis Porretto. One thing's for sure, though: when the tax man comes knocking on your virtual door, you'll know that your Linden Dollars or QQ coins are the real money deal.

Wikipedia on "Value"

I just looked up Wikipedia's definition of "value" and found an intriguing collection of articles:

• Value (mathematics) -- the value of a variable in mathematics.
• Value (personal and cultural) -- the principles, standards, or quality which guides human actions
• Value (economics) -- the market worth or estimated worth of commodities, services, assets, or work.
• Value theory -- in ethics, aesthetics and other evaluative matters
• Value (marketing)
  
• Value (computer science)
• Value (law)
• Value (semiotics)
• Value (colorimetry) -- a measure of white or black in color

I think I'll take a good look at these and anything else interesting on the subject I can find—I'm thinking of writing a blog post series constellated around value as a central concept. It feels like that's the direction my thinking about identity is inexorably leading me, so I figured I might as well roll up my sleeves!

Value and identity

I increasingly feel that understanding value is key to understanding identity. Value is a concept that faces into our psychological and economic worlds. We value things and people emotionally; but things and people can also be of value to us in a concrete, material sense. And in "identifying" something or someone, are we not effectively assigning a complex set of values to them, whereby, for example, {entity type = human}, {eye colour = green} {relationship status with me = colleague} {name = Andrew}? Moreover, this kind of variable/value pairing is something that every geek understands—suggesting the possibility of a seamless extension of the values in our head to those in our computers if we could only understand how the heck our brain, and beyond it our consciousness, ticks.

My brilliant friend and white paper ("Towards the Identity Society"—pdf) co-author John Madelin talks about a three-dimensional business context of value, risk and convenience for information transactions; recasting this concept purely in terms of value, we might understand the dimensions of John's model as positive value potential ("value"), negative value potential ("risk") and the friction involved in realising the positive or negative potential value. An example: I buy a coffee grinder on eBay. The positive potential value for me is making a good-value purchase; the negative potential value (risk) is that I will be ripped off; the friction (convenience level) is how easy or hard my computer's software, eBay's web service, my bank and the seller make the whole process for me. And, of course, I value convenience highly.

Zoom out a little and look at the blue-green jewel of our planet from space. Value that? And the little creatures scuttling around on it? Thought so.

Value. It's a valuable concept.

Moolah

Grant McCracken writes: "Eventually, the internet mediators are going to have to pay the content provider just as surely as the old mediators now do."

Doesn't this statement rather gloss over the way value is increasingly expressed online in terms of attention and virtual currencies rather than cash?

The Attention Economy is becoming ever more fluid and less granular, making it hard for individuals or small communities to trap enough value in their online presence to monetize it significantly. Even leading blogger (and, effectively, community gatekeeper) Guy Kawasaki disclosed recently that his AdSense revenue was really rather modest (2,436,117 yearly page views yielding a princely $3,350).

It seems to me that the balance of financial benefit from online content creation may yet shift even further away from the creators and towards the big content re-aggregators.

The value accruing to individuals and even communities is huge, when measured in terms of personal and shared brand, knowledge and network. Just don't expect a steady flow of cash unless you happen to create the next Chad Vader.

A good job, then, that most of us blog etc. for the love of it!

[also left as a comment on Grant's post]