Christopher Herot's Weblog

Gaming the Algorithms

In a brilliant two page article that illustrates why we need investigative reporting, New York Times writer David Segal details how Internet merchant Vitaly Borker (aliases Tony Russo and Stanley Bolds) discovered that complaints from his customers could be good for his business. As complaints about his DecorMyEyes eyeglass business poured in to sites such as Get Satisfaction, ComplaintsBoard.com and ConsumerAffairs.com, his Google page rank actually increased. While Googling "DecorMyEyes" by itself returned numerous complaints, Googling the name of an eyeglass designer such as "Lafont" prominently features Vitaly's own website, sans complaints. Apparently the links from the negative listings increased his Google Juice.

One could argue that the fault lay less with Google than with the complaint sites not using the "nofollow" attribute or consumers not being more thorough checking out a new merchant, but according to the article, just about every other institution that would be expected to help also shirked their responsibility. In a two page description of one consumer's experience, Segal tells how Citibank fell for a fake phone call, MasterCard and eBay cut off Borker only to have him re-register, and the New York Police were slow to act even after the consumer received threatening emails and harassing phone calls. It wasn't until the New York Times started nosing around that any of these places took definitive action.

While it's tempting to blame laziness or bureaucratic incompetence, I think there is something more insidious at work. All the institutions we count on to protect the consumer have replaced human judgement with algorithms, and the people who answer the phones at these places (when you can find a human at all) are just reading scripts and pressing the few limited buttons at their disposal. The Citibank representative actually told the consumer "Listen, this isn’t our problem. This has nothing to do with us." It is arguably true that removing humans from the process delivers better results overall, but a few sociopaths have figured out how to game the algorithms such as by keeping the volume of credit card chargebacks just under the threshold that would get them bounced from the system. In those cases, one wonders what would have happened if Segal, who also writes the Haggler series for the Times, hadn't gotten involved.

In this particular case Borker was arrested, MasterCard and eBay promised to keep him off their systems but the DecorMyEyes site is still promising "new and guaranteed authentic designer eyewear."

 

Smartphones as Building Blocks

At yesterday's Future Forward retreat, Reed Sturtevant and Katie Rae organized a lunch table discussion on Smartphones as Building Blocks, i.e. what kinds of applications transcend the boundaries of an individual phone and become something large of which the phone is a part. When he was at Sun, John Gage famously said "the network is the computer." Now in the mobile world the computer, or more properly what we do with computers, may involve multiple devices of various sizes.

When Reed brought up this topic, my first thought was the way doctors want to use the IPhones and iPads they are already carrying to retrieve patient records, lab results and even real-time vital signs from wherever they happen to be. Other people brought up using the mobile phone as a controller for other systems, from games to TVs. After some more discussion, I proposed the following taxonomy of roles that a mobile device could play:

• User Interface - bringing the screen to the app. Rather than putting a screen and keyboard on everything, why not use the ones that are already in your pocket. An early examples were "universal remotes" for your TV, such as L5, Flipr, Bobby and Sonos, but the phone can also be used to control toys and games, or to interact with a fixed object such as a kiosk or billboard.
• Identity - A mobile phone can supply two factor identification: something you have (the phone) and something you know (a password you type into the phone.) This can be used to make purchases or unlock a door. OpenWays and Assa Abloy provide this capability to hotels, and Apple recently applied for a patent on Peer-to-peer transaction devices and methods. 
• Storage - this was the original use of the iPod - to store music
• Connectivity - the phone is the obvious place to establish connectivity to the outside world, since it already contains a radio to connect to the cellular network, but many phones also include WiFi, Bluetooth, and Near Field Communications.
• Docking Station - In addition to radio links, the phone usually includes a USB or proprietary connector that can be used to hook up anything from a headphone to a blood glucose meter.

Many interesting applications combine multiple roles, such as accepting data from something plugged into the USB port and passing that up along the wireless link. We are just at the beginning of seeing what's possible.