September 2010

After years of helping to craft technology and telecommunications polices, former FCC official and Capitol Hill veteran Colin Crowell will soon find himself assisting companies, nonprofits and others as they work to navigate those issues.

Crowell opened the doors this week on his own consulting firm, Crowell Strategies LLC, that will focus on tech and telecom issues. "I like the intersection where cutting edge innovation intersects with public policy," he said in an interview, mentioning such issues as online privacy, competition policy, consumer protection online, wireless broadband and green technology. Crowell said he had several offers to work for others after leaving the FCC in June. "In the end, I decided I would like the flexibility of starting my own gig and the excitement of starting a business as an entrepreneur," he said.

It has taken 50 years for the power of television to begin the shift from a few large media companies to empowered individuals throughout the world. Now that transition has begun. It will surely be marked with fits and starts, as old media companies fight to hold onto the past while a new generation takes control of the future.

The time is rapidly coming when television producers will sell their programs directly to individual viewers online. With the middlemen diminished, the consumer wins: The price for programming will drop dramatically. Viewers will pay for only the shows they choose to watch. Pay providers will finally lose their immense power as bundlers and aggregators of programming. In an equally dramatic shift, ordinary people and businesses will make their own video for use on the Internet.

Of course, it's already happening to some extent. However, higher-quality video made by individuals will arrive as the skill sets are acquired to do professional productions. Already, YouTube and streaming media sites offer a free distribution system for video. This video interconnects with blogs and Web sites. All that's holding most enterprises back today is the lack of skill and expertise in producing and distributing professional-quality video. With the roadblocks mostly gone and the democratization of video nearly complete, the future rests with the skill and talent of empowered individuals and small groups to make compelling programming. As always, most of this video from the masses will be pure drek. Unfortunately, that's a price we pay for ending the era of tight corporate control.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have found that the appearance of website has a big effect on how honestly people answer personal questions put to them by the site. But paradoxically, it turns out we're more likely to spill our secrets on websites that appear less reputable.

The way a website phrases questions also affects our willingness to disclose revealing information, the researchers found. The findings could have implications for privacy online--affecting how marketers approach consumers, and how policymakers try to protect consumers from privacy abuses. Companies are constantly collecting information about people online: Google stores billions of search queries every day, and Facebook tracks the interests and social habits of millions of users. Much of the information collected online comes from tracking how people behave, but some is volunteered willingly.

Four years ago, the streets of São Paulo, South America's biggest city, were strewn with advertising. Messages on the surfaces of buildings, buses, shops, taxis and even private homes competed with billboards to create a chaotic and dizzying corporate assault on the senses. So, Gilberto Kassab, the center-right mayor of the city with the continent's biggest consumer market, came up with a radical solution: a blanket ban on outdoor advertising. In late 2006, in spite of legal wrangles and business lobbying, he announced that, almost without exception, outdoor advertising would have to be removed within months. Three years after the new law came in, it is extremely difficult to find outdoor advertising in the city - no billboards, no ads on buses or taxis or in shop windows. But equally remarkable is how quickly big advertisers and the industry itself have adapted and, in fact, thrived. Today, it is hard to find anyone - including among advertising and marketing professionals - who still has big complaints about the Lei Cidade Limpa, or "Clean City Law". The city feels cleaner, they say, and the law forced creative innovations into other, newer, advertising methods that have often been more effective.