SXSW - A plea for f#%king relevant communications.

Vote for this talk: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/19775
A modest proposal for f#%king relevant
communications online
Trevor Linton
trevor.linton@mrmmccann.com
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/trevor-linton/28/619/a4a/
@trevorlinton

DISCLAIMER
This presentation has not been condoned, approved, or sanctioned
by IPG, its subsidiaries (MRM, McCann Erickson, etc.) or its clients.
The opinions and ideas (and especially my language) in this
presentation do not represent or reﬂect the views of IPG, MRM,
McCann Erickson or its management.
In-fact, I’m curious how my co-workers may respond.

This proposal has no other purpose than to try and
convince you to vote for me to speak at SXSW in 2014.
So if you like it, please, make sure to vote at:
http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/19775

As an individual, when it comes to privacy and
personalized advertising, you could say I’m not a big fan.
While writing this the NSA was accused of spying on its
citizens, Apple faced a “nuclear” scale hack, and NBC
reported the largest breach in history that resulted in
160 million credit cards and customers data stolen.

With new technology, comes new data. With new data
comes new concerns. It’s reasonable to wonder whether
new technology is even worth the risks.
Even if you don’t mind annoying ads, spying, and privacy
leaks you should know these stem from a much larger
systematic problem.

It’s actually a pretty fundamental problem.
Digital communications hasn’t seen any new
features in over a decade. Seriously, when was
the last time you saw a new feature to email?

I admit, throwing email under the bus is a bit harsh.
What I mean is for the past decade we’ve relied and have
come to expect that if we want more sophisticated ways
of communicating we have to use centralized services
(such as Facebook).

But centralized services have some problems. They are
expensive to maintain. Start-ups are crushed by their
costs. Developers spend too much of their time working
on server systems, with on no visible features. And
businesses spend billions each year on compromises.
And users end up with no privacy, limited features, lost
opportunities, higher costs, and little control over their
identity. But the worst part?
Ten million passwords to remember.

And even with hundreds of thousands of centralized
services that allow you to communicate in more
eﬀective ways we still ﬁnd ourselves using a decade old
standard as our main method of communicating online.

Email’s usefulness is really in its ability to
control information and in its transparency.
People trust it.
It also may help explain why people can be
very hesitant to adopt new technologies.

This even aﬀects marketing. Marketers use data
collected in these centralized services to target or
personalize ads. Unfortunately, more often than not they
end up being more creepy than convenient.
Bad digital marketing is like trying to ﬁgure out what
food you eat by watching what restaurants you go to and
smelling your burps afterwards.
It’s awkward and unpleasant for everyone.

Privacy blunders, annoying ads, pop-ups, banner ads,
identity theft and data leaks won’t go away without a
better decentralized method for communicating digitally.
And with new decentralized communication technologies
we can do some really amazing things.

I could spend the rest of this presentation complaining,
but I’ll stop and and propose a solution.
This would be a pretty terrible SXSW proposal if all I do
is b#%ch and moan.

INTRODUCING:
Couriering!

Couriering is a set of standards that let you, or an
application, pull and push messages to people,
applications or devices across a decentralized network.
Sounds familiar? It should. That’s sort of what email
does. Couriering just takes email a bit further.

You can almost think of Couriering as a latter-day
version of email with a few kicks and twists. Calling it a
new version of email is a bit of an oversimpliﬁcation. So
lets reframe from using any words like email 2.0.
Lets look at some beneﬁts.

#1 People, applications and devices can be addressed
using couriers. So applications can send messages to
other apps, on a speciﬁc device, instead of just an inbox.
#2 There’s more functionality with pull messages. You
can address large audiences. Literally, *@*.com is a valid
courier address. Pull messages are picked up instead of
delivered. So people can “follow” you.
#3 All communications are encrypted. The validity of the
recipient, and protecting your data is done using public-
key cryptography, signing and trust chains (“vouching”).

#4 Messages don’t necessarily need to end up in your
email box. The message can delivered to an application
with information on how to use the message.
#5 Messages can be very large, in-fact up to 4GB, so it’s
possible to share all those home movies with your
family without the need for YouTube.
#6 It’s decentralized, transparent and backwards
compatible with email. You pick your provider and who
you trust. By opening your sent box you can see exactly
what’s been done with your data.

Couriers believe in standards.
They don’t require new servers and are compatible with
existing email (IMAP/SMTP) systems. They add features
without having to add infrastructure, augmenting
systems, confusing software or new security policies.
No new nightmare IT setups.

Couriers believe in being independent.
Servers are unnecessary with pull and push messages,
interactions between you and your social network are
just that. Messages between you and your contacts.
Information goes only to where you say it should.

Couriers believe in being anonymous.
Messages can be placed online anonymously with
routing methods to reply back to the origin without
disclosing the actual person behind the mask. Want to
sign up for a coupon online for $10 oﬀ chocolate fudge
cookies? You don’t have to give away your email address
anymore.

Couriers believe in security.
Couriers validate identity and its trust level for every
message that arrives. In addition they protect messages
with public-key cryptography. Trust is established by
certiﬁcate chains that allow you to vouch for people and
control how they can communicate with you.

Couriers believe in simplicity.
Couriers allow people, their devices and their
applications to seamlessly talk to one another, even if
they’re not on the same network. Any device associated
with your identity can find all your other devices.
This simplifies development. Developers can use
functional messages to find all the devices associated
with your identity, discover their capabilities and send
and receive messages.

Some real life examples: Streaming.
You and your brother want to watch a home movie. He
lives in New York. You live in Salt Lake City.
You have two options: A) ﬁgure out a way to send a large
ﬁle, most likely that won’t be supported. B) upload it to a
video sharing site, but if it happens to be a video of the
birth of your daughter, you may not want the world to
see it.

Some real life examples: Streaming.
With couriers an application can easily stream videos to
your brother. The application takes the video and asks
the courier to deliver it to a media player associated
with the identity yourbrother@newyork.com.
This doesn’t go to his inbox, but goes to every device he
owns. The devices negotiate who should handle the
request and how. Ultimately it may ask your brother if
the TV is the best option to start streaming.

Bull. Prove it.
Couriers are services installed on your devices (phones,
laptops, televisions, desktops, etc.) then associated with
your identity (email address).
Courier That crazy internet.Your devices and apps.

Bull. Prove it.
Speciﬁcally, they sit in-between your email and devices.
They can send or receive messages hidden in email
meta data and a few other things. When the couriers
receive a message it’s ﬁltered, so you never notice them.
Since it’s based on email and other open standards, we
already have a lot built.
Courier
That crazy internet & email.
Yourdevicesandapps.

Couriers can send and receive to an app, person, or
device. Messages come in diﬀerent ﬂavors:
•  Short messages
•  App-to-app messages
•  Pull messages
•  Large-data messages
•  Time-to-live messages
•  Anonymous messages
•  Urgent messages
•  Functional message
•  Identity messages
•  Discover messages

You have questions…
“Yes, many.”

“Some other real life uses?” Telephone Calls.
Their Courier
Their
Phone
App
Your friend makes a call.
Their phone app tells the
courier who, how, when, why and
what it wants to do.
The courier on their device prepares
the request into a “courier message”
Your Courier
The courier on the receiving device
sees the message, checks preferences,
security and requests and decided to
inform its devices.
Your
Phone
App
Your phone app negotiates with
the requester for a Voice connection
depending on the network and notiﬁes
you of an incoming phone call.
You answer. Or not.
VOIP telephone calls are nothing new,
but simple to implement with couriers.
By adding meta data the process,
couriers can make some intelligent
decisions about whether to accept calls.
Your phone app rings on any devices
you have a phone app installed on and
associated with that identity.
Only you and your friend have any logs
of It happening. In addition messages
sent from any device goes through one
source that you choose, your email
provider.

“So what’s some real life uses?” Telephone Calls.
So this is new.
A lot of information can be stored
in the meta data. Telemarketers
can provide information such as
the oﬀering, intent, brand, etc.
A user can specify what types of
marketing they want to receive.
They can even set the courier to
auto reply with alternative contact
methods or better times to reach
them if they’re interested but don’t
wish to be bothered right now.
provider.

“So what’s some real life uses?” Telephone Calls.
This is a crucial part.
Couriers are reliant on one server,
your email provider. This means
only you, the receiver and your
email provider have any record of
anything happening.
No one holds your personal data
on their servers.
Don’t like your email providers
policies? You can easily switch
to one that you like.
provider.

“What happens when someone doesn’t have a courier?”
You would sit for a bit until your courier decided it
couldn’t get a hold of their courier.
It would inform the phone app that it failed and the
phone app could backup to the regular ole’ telephone
network system. In addition, an optional message can be
sent as a backup that goes directly to their email inbox.

“Hm, another example please.” Ok.
Making an instant message or text message application
is easy. Couriers can send urgent, time-to-live or short
messages to one or many identities that will be
delivered to their favorite IM app on their phone.

“One more example please.”, OK.
Couriers can send messages not only to people, but
groups of people for a speciﬁc application. And with both
push and pull capabilities. This reproduces the vast
majority of the functionality and features of LinkedIn,
Facebook and Twitter without anyone having to register
for anything or investing in servers.

“This, does not seem safe. How can I control my data?”
Since it’s based on public-key cryptography all your
messages can only be decrypted by the intended
recipients, and no one can send a message pretending to
be you without knowing both your private key and your
email password. If your email is hacked, your messages
are still secured.
(Sorry NSA)

“This, does not seem safe. How can I trust couriers?”
Validating that a message actually came from a trusted
place is done with public-key cryptography and ensures
that a message received can be trusted.
You can also browse through your sent folder to ﬁnd
what messages applications have been.

“Why hasn’t someone already done this?”
There’s no proﬁt in establishing a cooperative standard.
So don’t expect large companies to embrace it any time
soon. It also makes some websites unnecessary and
irrelevant.
Most of this is knitting together existing standards to do
a lot more than what people would expect. I think no one
has done it because we haven’t had the need for it yet.

“What other features do couriers have?”
A lot more than I have time to go over in this proposal.

“So. What’s in your SXSW presentation?”
1.  Overview of couriers, messages and digital communications
2.  How messages work, their capabilities and challenges
3.  How developers can program them (JavaScript/C++/C examples)
4.  How to provide better User Experiences with messages
5.  How to integrate them into existing apps
6.  How marketers can use them as a new channel
7.  Security, privacy and policy implications
8.  Sub-standards for a proposed standard
9.  Business possibilities and opportunities
10.  Implications to existing IT and systems
11.  How to contribute (RFC)
12.  Demo of applications using it
13.  How to start using couriers
14.  Cookies. I’ll bring some cookies.

Thank you!
If you want to learn more, contact me. And remember
to vote for me at SXSW’s Panel Picker website.
Otherwise this may not see the light of day.
Vote: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/19775

SXSW - A plea for f#%king relevant communications.

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