Tom Tom sells Customer driving data to cops, apologizes

I get the feeling that we are only in the beginning stages of this change.

Both customers (in this case law enforcement but I'm sure there will be others) and vendors (like Tom Tom) are under economic pressure and willing to try alternatives outside the 'usual practices.'

That creates a sort of 'invention energy' (I know, a pretty squishy term) which enables disruption.

For a while I've noticed that sheer inertia keeps a lot of things in place. Back at Sun I designed a replacement for the YP service called NIS+, and because it was more secure and could do more things, as a young engineer I figured "Folks will dump YP faster and jump on!" But customer after customer I talked to would say "Well we haven't had exactly those problems with YP, it works for us how does this new system connect with that system?"

The answer was it connected poorly, I really had a hard time believing anyone would want to continue using YP and so didn't spend a lot of time on thinking about backward compatibility (beyond moving data over).

What I had learned was that system administrators (my customers) were a cautious group. They don't change if they don't have to, and while they may sample new things if they can do so without disruption, their high order bit was 'hold the course.'

Later as networks got bigger and some of the features that NIS+ provided were impossible to do any other way, adoption began to rise. Eventually lots of networks were run using it (this was after I had left Sun, the product that was widely adopted was the work of the NIS+ team, not me)

I had discovered for myself a way to internalize what a lot of people call the 'Value Proposition', which is the value the customer will experience by adopting the product. This is a pair of terms, one is pain and one is features. So you 'win' by reducing pain-points (sometimes you can have the exact same feature set and less pain to win), and you can 'win' by adding new features. These are the fundamental components of 'invention energy.'

As various things develop technological capabilities, those capabilities can be combined into a wide range of possible 'features'. As various customers develop pain (either through economic changes, or requirement changes, or environment changes) their willingness to step away from doing things the same way they always have also increases.

Today we have organizations that are charged with maintaining the safety of large populations of individuals, which are constrained by budgets which constrains their manpower and other assets. We also have a huge explosion in personal connectivity, social graphing, and location based services. A lot of pain, and a lot of possible technologic feature combinations. That creates a lot of invention energy around using this data in marketable ways. Tom Tom finds someone willing to buy their data about who is driving around when (which no doubt they collected so they could better predict traffic patterns). The customer in this case wants to know where folks are speeding so they can install enforcement devices to mitigate that. Apple collects data so that they can provide faster location fixes, but also develops an asset which can tell competitive phone companies where customers congregate.

Bottom line is I think we will see a lot of more of this kind of thing as the whole privacy issue plays out.