Topic: Digital Identity

Dr. Moira Gunn talks with author and entrepreneur, Linda Bernardi about the her new book Provoke, where she discusses new insights on female entrepreneurs and the steps to forgetting the past.

"Right now we are in a shooting war between users and the analytics people, except the users aren't armed." Cory Doctorow argues that users and Internet companies are performing a transaction. A transaction where users give personal information in return for use of products or services. The transaction right now is lop-sided and unfair. To balance the transaction, Cory offers some suggestions.

In the future consumers may have lower costs for services they demand but at the cost of their privacy and attention, while private enterprise will benefit from a wide variety of customers and more expansive relationships with those customers. Martin Geddes imagines the public will soon be ready to receive billing and customer service notices via pay-per-moment options added to Twitter or other social media instead of through today's minute-based telephony.

Imagine the earliest days of society where oral communication served as the foundation of describing, preserving, and sharing human experience. Johanna Kollmann, User Experience Manager at Vodafone, studies how technology serves essentially the same function today as then, helping move the interaction of people from communication, to conversation, then to collaboration.

Everyone on the web is participating in a great "data exhaust." Therefore, good internet companies do not ambush their users, Reid Hoffman says. Known as the most connected person in Silicon Valley, and a newly-made billionaire since the May IPO of LinkedIn, Hoffman predicts what Web 3.0 will be like.

Our "flat" world is also hyper-local. Location is becoming simultaneously more and less relevant. Julia Grace discusses why we buy some things from across the globe and others at our corner shop. Could our experience at the stores could be improved by using all the data that we generate every day paying with credit cards, checking in at Foursquare or using customer-linked cards? Could super-computers be used to sort through all the data we are generating and personalize our shopping experiences? This is an ethnographic look at shoppers today.

Dave Fetterman calls it a "match made in absolute heaven." The best social content is in the mobile world where things are actually happening. Social networks and mobile media are not just for users anymore, but are becoming channels for developers as well. Hear what is enabling this perfect storm of "mobile content" that is driving the way people interact with the web and each other.

Dr. Moira Gunn talks with Steve Rosenbaum about how the data aggregator's new role on the Internet from the pages of his new book, Curation Nation: Why the Future of Content is Context.

Commerce enters a new phase which brings back "local and personal", Google's Osama Bedier explains. But the innovation won't come without its challenges. These trends require payments to become completely digital, inventories to move to the cloud and platforms that determine user identity to become interoperable. After hurdling these barriers, technology can bring commerce back to the intimacy of 50 years ago. Sellers hope to see the return of traditional consumer loyalty as well.

Given that amount of digital data available about people and businesses, users are discovering that they have no way to control and correct information about themselves. The Personal Data Ecosystem is a project meant to help create ways for better digital management. Three members of the PDE community, Paul Trevethick, Kaliya Hamlin, and Drummond Reed discuss the status of their activities, emphasizing some of the technical aspects of how to assist businesses and individuals manage their digital lives.