Spruce Advisers

The Promise of the Personal Cloud

JenniferCobb — Thu, 17 May 2012 21:31:46 +0000

The term “personal cloud” is only about a year old and has a wildly disparate set of meanings. For some, services such as Facebook, Dropbox, and SugarSynch are personal clouds. For others the gold standard is iCloud, which stores data and media and manages your apps from all your devices – as long as they [...]

Smart Disclosure: Innovation in Personal Data

JenniferCobb — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 16:09:07 +0000

It is no secret that the fitful economic recovery that continues to plague us could really use some spurs to innovation. But good ideas seem to fall by the wayside as Washington remains in an intractable political deadlock. Into this mess comes a simple idea with big potential – Smart Disclosure. Spearheaded by Cass Sunstein, [...]

Monetizing Privacy

JenniferCobb — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 19:29:39 +0000

One of the first empirical studies about what we are willing to pay for privacy was released last week. The study was conducted in Germany by the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) and included 443 subjects in both the field and a laboratory setting. The study focused only on monetary transactions — not [...]

Has the Web Turned Into a Popularity Contest?

JenniferCobb — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 23:04:04 +0000

The Internet and the WWW are in their relative infancy. 20 years is just not a lot of time for anything to reach maturity. I think it is safe to say that the web has grown from a wild, unfettered space full of creative and yet fairly unkempt growth to a place dominated by apps [...]

Navigating Information Online: Islands or Tribes?

JenniferCobb — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 23:16:59 +0000

In a few short decades, too much information has become a fact of life. We are all drowning in it. How we sift, filter and navigate the massive sea of information has emerged as a profound personal, political and cultural issue. This past year, Eli Pariser, in his book The Filter Bubble, picked up on [...]

On-Line Censorship: Controlled by the Fuzzy Line

JenniferCobb — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 00:45:52 +0000

Online censorship in repressive countries is a complex and often dangerous cat and mouse game, played in the context of a new digital co-dependence. Most countries, even repressive ones, depend increasingly on the Internet as an engine of economic growth and have a vested interest in building a thriving online space. At the same time, [...]

#OWS and the Paradox of Empowered Networks

JenniferCobb — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 02:10:32 +0000

The leaderless, amorphous Occupy movement is the latest embodiment of the bottom-up, decentralized ideals of open source. Any yet the path from open source to #OWS is a little more circuitous than it might appear. Tracing the story offers some interesting insights on the way forward. Open source, also called commons-based peer production (CMPP) is [...]

Designing Social Media for Creative Outcomes

JenniferCobb — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 05:29:30 +0000

As I have discussed in earlier posts, Facebook and Google+ have set the global standard of using “real names” in the context of social media. These companies argue, with some validity, that environments where people use their real names tend to be more polite and cleave to accepted social norms. This, they assert, creates more [...]