In the context of a one-on-one discussion with 4 passionate entrepreneurs, the common thread was definitely the question of engagement. More precisely, Liza Kindred insisted on the social media marketing strategy adopted by those promising start-ups.

• Facebook remains the number 1 channel of marketing investment for start-ups, including Fashion Tech.

According to Brian Sugar, CEO of PopSugar, Facebook remains the ideal tool to create interaction and engagement thru user-generated content. PopSugar is a fashion and entertainment website bringing together content and e-commerce. They currently peak at 140K fans on Facebook.

For all speakers, feeding their Facebook Page is essential to entertain and sustain the relationship between the brand and customers. Contests and games play a large role in the marketing strategy, as much as pictures and videos that strengthen the brand identity.

This strategy is even more necessary when talking about “Slow Fashion”. This movement advocated by Aubrie Pagano, founder of Bow&Drape, highlights sustainability and local culture in the fashion industry. Her brand is a clothing manufacturing company based in NYC where women can create online the dress of their choice. As for Bow&Drape, Facebook is the right place to express creativity and generate a community experience.

• Engage everywhere

FashionTech start-ups know how to build a strong social media strategy. They became conscious very early about the power and the benefits of each social media.

Colin Stuart, co-founder of Betabrand, an online clothing company based in San Francisco, raised the issue of especially strong competition in the emerging start-up business. One answer to cope with this vital question is to connect and engage more people into your brand. In order to do so, the use of social media tools needs to be optimized. “Betabrand’s Facebook page (35K fans) is to deliver news and pictures, whereas our Twitter account (almost 3K) is really to engage our customers in the brand’s spirit”, claimed Colin Stuart, a former actor in Los Angeles.

Youtube was mentioned just after Facebook and Twitter. The viral content is the main asset of the famous video-sharing website and a fashiontech company can only benefit from its user-generated content. BeautyArmy clearly illustrates that. Founded by Lindsey Guest in 2011, BeautyArmy is a monthly-subscription service delivering make-up and beauty samples, capitalizing on a relatively small audience (almost 20K fans). Again, competition is serious in the beauty industry and that explains why Youtube testimonials are so important to the brand. Non-promoted consumers reviewed every Beauty Army Kit they received, generating profitable content.

Based on the idea of personalization, Beauty Army and Bow&Drape both need to be tuned to customer’s opinions.

• Product is what you should focus on

As Brian Sugar was saying when talking about low PopSugar’s customer acquisition cost, the social media marketing strategy can only be seen as a support for a great product. On that point, all the Founders agreed that the social media marketing spending couldn’t dissimulate a lack of brand identity or a misguided business plan.

What we think

Although the question of conversion rate on Facebook has been raised during the event and it seems to be a key part of a good social media management strategy; the issue has not been discussed further. From Betabrand to Bow&Drape, the ratio between Facebook fans and people actually talking about the brand on the social media needs to be re-evaluated. In fact, the second category tends to get closer to the actual number of buyers for a lot of companies.

From the innovative fashiontech business, the implementation on social media is crucial. Unfortunately, while Twitter strategy still seems difficult to elaborate for young start-ups, other emerging social media platforms remain in the dark. Pheed, a youngster social media with monetized channels and Vine, the new 6 second video platform, could be very helpful tools for this industry. The recently launched social marketplace Luvocracy, based on users recommandation, can also increase the start-ups e-commerce revenue stream and contribute to their pionneer image.

The Consumer Electronics Association’s Index of Consumer Technology Expectations jumped 9.3 points in December to 97.3. The Arlington, Va.-based trade group said this is the highest level the index has reached since tracking began in January 2007.

The historic high is good news for makers of popular tech products like Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG) and Amazon.com (AMZN) . It’s a sign that sales of smartphones and tablets from the three makers may be lifted by rising consumer enthusiasm for tech products.

“Technology products are the most wanted gifts this holiday season, and we’ve seen a tremendous amount of activity, with several new product launches over the past few months,” Shawn DuBravac, the CEA’s chief economist and senior director of research, said in the group’s press release. “Consumers are increasingly dedicating a significant portion of their overall gift budgets to electronics, which has crowded out other categories for holiday gift spending.”

Consumer confidence in the overall economy also increased in December. The CEA Index of Consumer Expectations, which gauges consumer expectations about the broader economy, reached 171.1, up 8.5 points from the previous month and up 0.4 point year over year.

“Overall economic sentiment increased slightly in December but remains subdued,” DuBravac said. “Concerns remain over the immediacy of the fiscal cliff, and the impact it will have on U.S. households and the broader U.S. economy.”

Read More At IBD: http://news.investors.com/technology/121812-637501-cea-confidence-index-hitsnew-high.htm#ixzz2Fj5zkipr

The event lived up to its expectations. Despite an understandably reduced crowd (thanks to the Hurricane), we all gathered at the Kabuki Sundance Theater in San Francisco as branding gurus, designers, architects, educators and entrepreneurs all took the stage to share groundbreaking new ideas on the future of business and culture. In a few weeks, all the video from the event will be available online, but in the meantime – here’s a short recap of some of the most profound ideas that I took away from the day of speakers:

1. NEVER SHORT CHANGE RELATIONSHIPS. (SCOTT BEDBURY, BRANDSTREAM)

Scott Bedbury, the branding legend behind both Nike and Starbucks offered a quick glimpse behind the scenes at building both brands. We were treated to an image of the whiteboard where he and his team first laid out the principle and insight behind the “third place” strategy for Starbucks, and some basic principles on doing branding right. One thread throughout was his positive relationship with his agencies and his advice: don’t short change your creative team, otherwise the work they produce for you will suffer.

2. CREATIVITY IS THE NEW LITERACY. (CHASE JARVIS, PHOTOGRAPHER)

Creator and photographer Chase Jarvis is used to giving away great thinking for free – but now he’s on a mission to do that at a much larger scale. His recently funded startup creativeLIVE brings together visionary thinkers to offer online education on how to be more creative and improve your life. As many schools focus on science and math, teaching creativity has never been more important, and as Chase noted in his talk: “everyone deserves access to the top 1% of teachers in the world.” I’m already thinking about how I can create my own course to offer there.

3. GOOD GAME DESIGN IS ABOUT CHANGING BEHAVIOUR. (JASON OBERFEST, MANGO HEALTH)

You may not realize this, but 4 out of 5 Americans take some combination of medication and dietary supplements. And keeping all this straight is an impossible task. Jason Oberfest wants to help, and his startup Mango Health has an app that reimagines how game design can help each of us to become healthier by tracking our own habits and getting rewarded for it. As health costs soar and awareness of healthy (and unhealthy) behaviour rises, tools like this have the potential to actually change behaviour for the positive – and that’s good news for all of us.

4. THE STORY OF THE MAKER CAN REINVENT RETAIL. (DANA CHO & BEAU TRINCIA, IDEO)

Over time, each of us have become more disconnected from the products that we consume on a daily basis. But social media is helping to close that gap, as new apps promise to take us behind the scenes to look at everything from overseas labor practices to carbon footprints. The opportunity, as Dana Cho and Beau Trincia from IDEO shared in their presentation, is for brands to embrace and proactively share their “story of the maker.” In a world where people long for that human connection, taking them behind the scenes (as brands like Rawley Denim and Etsy are doing) can create die-hard fans and inspire coveted brand loyalty … not to mention sell more stuff at retail.

5. THE FUTURE OF MARKETING IS ABOUT SHARING VALUE, NOT MONEY. (DAVID DEAL, ICROSSING & JERMAINE DUPRI, GLOBAL14)

People connect with one another because of shared passion … and they click a button to become “friends” for far more trivial reasons. In this interview style presentation, Jermaine Dupri shared the motivation behind creating his own social network Global14 based on shared passions for music, culture, life and women. The build in motivation for participation is because people love to share their interests more than anything else.

6. SITTING ON A COUCH NEXT TO ONE ANOTHER IS THE ULTIMATE ENGAGEMENT. (JOE GEBBIA, AIRBNB)

The story of AirBNB is one of random unexpected connections, and everytime you see a founding member talk about the site … they tell these stories. People unite through this deeply personal moment of opening their homes to strangers, and an idea that any critic might have easily found reasons not to do is slowly turning into a movement that is not only reshaping people’s lives … but based on the kindness of strangers to open their homes to those stranded by the recent hurricane, it is providing a much needed way to scale kindness in the face of natural disasters.

7. AMBIGUITY CREATES ENGAGEMENT. (STEPHANIE HORSTMANSHOF AND KRISTIN DEAN, BING)

When Microsoft launched their ambitious new search engine, it has an interesting feature that distinguished it from nearly every other search engine in the market … the homepage featured a single large image that rotated each day. On a rare appearance on stage, the curators of that image Stephanie Horstmanshof and Kristin Dean offered a look at how they select new images each day, and offered many tips for picking great imagery. Chief among them was to build in a sense of ambiguity. People should see and image and want to know more – that is the ultimate goal.

8. I CAN’T CHANGE YOUR MIND – ONLY YOU CAN CHANGE YOUR MIND. (ERIC COREY REED)

This relatively quick point was part of a fast and furious presentation on the benefits and folly of green building as it stands today by Eric Corey Reed. The presentation introduced the idea of what Eric called “Dodo Sapiens” – a funny way of describing the self destructive behaviour that only humans seem able to produce. Bringing in new ideas like biomimicry and futuristic buildings inspired by nature – his vision was forward reaching and inspirational. Now the only challenge is to try and inspire more people in the industry to change their staid thinking for new innovative approaches. It’s an uphill battle.

9. DESIGN CAN REINVENT MASS TRANSIT. (MICHAEL MCDANIEL, FROG DESIGN)

In what was easily one of my favourite presentations of the day, Michael McDaniel went through a stunning case study of what it might be like if we could actually reinvent the way that we do modern mass transit. If you watch any one presentation from PSFK online when they come out, this one should be it. The scope of the challenge he and his team at Austin based Frog Design took one was vast … but the solution they offered, and the way they thought through every aspect from the building to the marketing was, in a word, brilliant. Their idea could do more than reinvent mass transit, it might just change they way you approach describing and pitching your own big ideas as well.

10. INSPIRING STUDENTS TO BE BETTER WRITERS CHANGES EVERYTHING. (GERALD RICHARDS, 826NATIONAL.ORG)

One thing I have told my students for years is that there is no skill that they will use more every day than writing. The problem is, most of the ways we use writing in schools suck the fun out of it. So many students grow up hating to write, and never discover a love for it. 826national is devoted to changing this through their broad mission of changing how students learn. With real physical locations in more than ten cities across the US, their mission is affecting kids across the United States. Their venue in DC – The Museum of Unnatural History – was intriguing enough that I already promised to volunteer there when I get home.

11. THE BIGGER WE GET, THE SMALLER WE [NEED TO] GET. (ERIC RYAN, METHOD)

With their justified reputation as one of the quirkiest and most creative companies in the world, Method has been reinventing the soap and detergent product categories for years now. But this past year they were acquired and are in the process of merging with a European partner … all of which creates real challenges to maintain that personality and what made them a great company in the first place. In this short presentation, Eric Ryan shared some of the ways that the ethos of the company has been to stay small even in the face of growing products, people and profits. Only companies that make this a cultural priority manage to stay great, and Method is clearly determined to be among them.

12. GREAT SPECTACLE CAN CREATE PRECIOUSNESS IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD. (JAMES TICHENOR, ROCKWELL GROUP)

A great choice for the final presentation of the day, James Tichenor shared several case studies of projects that the Rockwell group recently worked on to reinvent everything from a Vegas Casino’s lobby to an outdoor space in Silicon Valley. The design philosophy of “choreographing environments” was a perfect way of describing how the Rockwell Group creates precious moments for any of us to experience. Life is not lived in a virtual bubble – and when you bring the digital and the real together, you can create the most powerful spectacles that any of us are likely to experience in our lives. And if you think about it, that is probably the coolest purpose for work that any of us could have.

Read the article: http://socialmediatoday.com/rohitbhargava/971481/12-powerful-ideas-creativity-business-psfk-conference

Dana Cho and Beau Trincia, Ideo: Rethinking Retail from Piers Fawkes on Vimeo.

Cho and Trincia identified several trends that define this new type of consumer. First, shoppers are demanding a closer connection with the source of their purchases. Through connecting with the process by which a product is made, people feel closer to their purchases. Some brands are responding to this demand, for example a company that produces hand made jeans, and includes the signature of the craftsperson who made that pair on each and every pair produced.

Another example is the rise of micro-communities, which come together based on shared tastes. These groups are usually formed in tight knit groups, and they share their opinions on products. The opinions of others in the group have a great effect on overall shopping habits. Therefore, retailers must look for ways to persuasively appeal to these groups.

Finally, the importance of owner reviews should not be underestimated. Since over 85% of customers trust the reviews of strangers in regards to a product, they have a great impact on overall sales. Owners are the most influential demographic to retailers, and sellers must continually come up with creative new ways to satisfy this group.

These trends reflect a shift in emphasis from big to small. In this way, the most important connections are not being built on the macro level, but rather are taking place at the individual level. Looking forward, retailers must be looking for new and interesting ways to connect individuals on a one-to-one basis in their stores.

Read the article here: http://www.psfk.com/2012/12/retail-changes-ideo-psfk-sf-2012.html

Highlights of the 2012 GRDI include:

• Brazil is the top country in the GRDI for the second straight year, leading the way for Latin America, which has 7 countries among the top 30. Chile is second once again, and Uruguay is fourth.
• China climbs to third place in the GRDI, as double-digit sales growth is expected. However, rents and labor costs are rising, so the market still has many challenges.
• Some of the smaller countries with attractive retail markets include Georgia, Oman, and Mongolia, all of which were unranked in the 2011 GRDI but are in the top 10 this year.
• With retail talent a critical differentiator in developing markets, finding and retaining talented workers is a core component to success. The Retail Talent Index, reintroduced this year, is led by Malaysia, whose low-cost labor and favorable regulations, and a well-educated population support the operations of international retailers that enter and expand in the market.

]]> http://rebellionlab.com/global-retail-expansion-keeps-on-moving/feed/ 0 http://rebellionlab.com/prediction-for-2013-keep-an-eye-on-identity/ http://rebellionlab.com/prediction-for-2013-keep-an-eye-on-identity/#comments Fri, 21 Dec 2012 21:42:33 +0000 admin http://rebellionlab.com/?p=2197

BackChannel an ongoing series of guest posts from practitioners and close observers at the intersection of technology and politics that, taken in aggregate, form a running conversation about the future of campaigns and government.

Gadi Ben-Yehuda is Director of Innovation and Social Media for IBM The Center for the Business of Government.

In 2013, I’ll be keeping my eye on Identity; it’s going to be a big story.

Identity management is so intrinsically uninteresting that in the time it takes to say “identity management,” people may fall asleep—even though they are directly affected by it. And it’s a pretty safe bet to say that, because anyone who uses multiple computers (or a computer, a tablet, and their smartphone), online banking, a cloud-based email account, a credit card site, online retailers like Amazon, and/or a social networking site relies on some kind of identity management system. And right now, those systems are a mess.

The identity management system that most people encounter on most of the sites they visit is a straight-forward login/password page. Some organizations require strong passwords—some so strong they were spoofed in this McSweeney’s article from 2007. The problem is that people are not always so good at remembering strong passwords, so they end up either writing them down or constantly forgetting them. And I wouldn’t be the first person (or the second or the third) to argue that passwordsare not enough.

Further, identity isn’t just something that should be getting us into our email accounts. There is so much more that a robust identity management system could streamline. How many times—at a doctor’s or dentist’s office, when registering for a new school, or buying a plane ticket—are we asked for information that is a part of our identity? Where we live, how old we are, primary email address, company name and our role?

Though many browsers now come with AutoFill functions, how many of us feel comfortable sharing our social security numbers, credit card details, or other sensitive information with a browser? And for those of us using multiple computers—one at work, one at home, a tablet, and a smartphone—do we fill out the same information on each system? The promise of persistent computing was that we could work seamlessly across many types of computers, but poor identity management thwarts that goal.

This is where we are: bad identity management can lead to catastrophic damage (think, losinghundreds of thousands of dollars, digital pictures and correspondence, and/or credit rating), while good identity management can reap huge rewards in recovered productivity (because time recovered from filling out forms can be rerouted into getting actual work done!).

The good news is that there are two fronts open in the battle for better identity management. The first is an offensive against the wasted time of filling out information over and over again. Companies likeLastPass, Personal, and RoboForm offer applications that users can install on multiple machines and will store login and password information as well as all types of other identifying information—home address, credit card numbers, etc.

Offerings from these companies are helping here and now, and it’s safe to say that more people will be using these services, or ones like them, in 2013 and beyond.

But the more important action has been on a slow burn for at least a decade, has heated up in the last four years, and is going to begin to boil in 2013: the activities of the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, or “NSTIC,” and its constituent organizations to create a standard for identity management across platforms.

When I spoke with Dan Chenok, who has been involved with NSTIC since its inception and serves as the Interim Chair of its Policy Coordinating Committee, he used this metaphor to explain why a standards-based identity management system was the best approach. (Full disclosure: Dan is also the Executive Director of the IBM Center for The Business of Government, where I work.)

Imagine that you go to a market and you’re at the cash register. You can pay with cash, or with any number of credit cards; MasterCard, Visa, Discover, AmEx, or a debit card. You might have half a dozen different kinds of payment options in your wallet, or you could have only one, but it’s up to you. All of these payment methods are based on the same set of standards, and each can add to the basic requirement of paying for your purchase with different incentives at different costs. But the bottom line is, each one can be used to buy a pack of gum or a steak dinner.

The same thing should be true with identity. Whether you’re logging into your online banking or your social network or the DMV for your state, there should be a set of requirements that checks your identity while at the same time preserving your privacy. This is one of the seven requirements that NSTIC set for a standard identity management scheme. In total, those seven requirements are that the standards must be:

• Privacy-enhancing: users relinquish as little privacy as possible when they opt into the system
• Voluntary: users must not be required to opt into the system to manage their identity
• Secure: identity administrators must fortify the system against breaches
• Resilient: in the event of a breach, administrators must be able to recover quickly
• Easy to use: users should not have to have a password like this: J8JΒΝzγΨfΛδ@6%vΤfShr57w/
• Interoperable: the system should work on a tablet, a phone, or a computer running any major operating system and should work for any online tool that requires a login
• Cost-effective: the system must not impose undue financial strain on businesses or consumers that use it

Mr. Chenok is quick to point out, however, that though the benefits of a standards-based identity management system are easy to grasp, there are still three major impediments to its adoption. The first is, ironically, convenience. Most people know how to navigate their current identity schemes, even if it is ungainly; switching would be a chore, at least initially. Second, is culture. Every company and organization has its own way of dealing with identity and most institutions would have to change their methods, at least a little. And riding on that is third, and perhaps strongest barrier: cost. Mr. Chenok estimates that the cost of switching to a new identity management scheme will be significant, though the accrued benefits would likely far outweigh those initial costs.

Ultimately, though, both he and I are bullish that NSTIC will succeed in drafting standards that meet the committee’s requirements and overcome these three barriers. The first to fall will likely be convenience as the current system begins to fail more often—meaning more breaches and greater hassle for users. The second, then, will be culture, as people become more accustomed to new ways to manage their identity. And the last to be surmounted will be cost, as it will become more expensive for companies not to comply than it will for them to adopt a new system.

There may not be an end-state in identity management, even as there is no “end-state” in developing an operating system for computers. We may simply experience upgrades throughout our entire lives. But I believe that we are on the cusp of a significant transformation in how we manage our identity both online and off, and I think that by this time next year, we will see the contours of the next version of identity management, and perhaps will have even begun to implement and benefit from some of the changes.

Read the original article: http://techpresident.com/news/23274/backchannel-prediction-2013-keep-eye-identity

Odds are, a huge chunk of them are staring down into a glowing mobile device — passing time by checking on friends, catching up on texts or e-mail or playing a video game that would have required a PC or home console just a few years ago.

“That’s me,” said Jeromie Williams, a 36-year-old social media manager and blogger from Montreal. “If I’m on the bus. If I’m waiting in line somewhere … .

“The other day I was at a restaurant with a friend. He got up two times — once to smoke a cigarette and once to go to the bathroom. As soon as his ass was off the seat, ‘Boom!’ iPhone in hand.”

Opinion: Going a day without my cell phone

Thanks to technology, there’s been a recent sea change in how people today kill time. Those dog-eared magazines in your doctor’s office are going unread. Your fellow customers in line at the deli counter are being ignored. And simply gazing around at one’s surroundings? Forget about it.

Between smartphones, tablets and e-readers, we’re becoming a society that’s ready to kill even a few seconds of boredom with a tap on a touchscreen.

Smartphone ownership in the United States, and elsewhere, hit a tipping point in 2012. More people now own a smartphone in the United States — 45% of adults — than own a traditional cellphone, according to a survey from the Pew Internet & American Life project.

And 42% of all mobile phone users say they expressly use their phone for entertainment when they’re bored. (Presumably, non-entertainment uses like texting and e-mail would jack that number up even higher).

“I do everything with my phone,” said Alexandra Reed, 39, a self-employed single mom from Charlotte, North Carolina.

“I have five e-mail accounts for different things. I have two phones, one for business and one personal. I use apps — Mapquest, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google Plus, CNN, ESPN … .”

Is it a boredom killer? Absolutely, she said.

“Even when I’m driving, I might have Facebook open,” she said. “At a red light the first thing I (do is) just look at my phone. I get a little anxious if I see a notification and don’t read it.”

Researchers say this all makes sense. Fiddling with our phones, they say, addresses a basic human need to cure boredom by any means necessary.

Five user complaints about iPhone 5

Christopher Lynn, an anthropology professor at the University of Alabama, compares tapping at smartphones to smoking a cigarette. Both can be “pivots,” he says — things that quickly transfer us from the monotony of everyday life into a world of “unscheduled play.”

“Smartphones are like cigarettes are like junk food are like chewing your nails or doodling …,” Lynn wrote in a May essay for the Evolutionary Studies Consortium. “Does the naked space of your own mind and the world around you send you screaming into oblivion when you walk across campus, across a street even? Pull out your smartphone and check your email again — that car will swerve around you.”

With their games, music, videos, social media and texting, smartphones “superstimulate” a desire humans have to play when things get dull, Lynn told CNN in an interview. And he believes that modern society may be making that desire even stronger.

“When you’re habituated to constant stimulation, when you lack it, you sort of don’t know what to do with yourself …,” he said. “When we aren’t used to having down time, it results in anxiety. ‘Oh my god, I should be doing something.’ And we reach for the smartphone. It’s our omnipresent relief from that.”

So, our phones are brutally efficient at addressing an ancient desire. But is that always a good thing?

At Oxford, England’s Social Issues Research Centre, researchers fear it is not. In their view, by filling almost every second of down time by peering at our phones we are missing out on the creative and potentially rewarding ways we’ve dealt with boredom in days past.

“Informational overload from all quarters means that there can often be very little time for personal thought, reflection, or even just ‘zoning out,’ “ researchers there wrote. “With a mobile (phone) that is constantly switched on and a plethora of entertainments available to distract the naked eye, it is understandable that some people find it difficult to actually get bored in that particular fidgety, introspective kind of way.”

Williams, the Montreal blogger, admits as much.

“One thing that unfortunately I do miss out on is that sort of quiet time where I can think about something I want to write … where, if I’m bored, I’m flipping open Word and punching something out,” he said. “Instead, out comes ‘Infinity Blade II’ and I’m killing titans.

“Before smartphones came out, you had that down time where you sit on the bus and your mind just kind of wanders and you think of these amazing things. You get out that old thing called pen and paper and you jot it down.”

Watch: Dramatic iPhone 5 arrival

But Joel Marx, a 25-year-old research assistant in Baltimore, Maryland, disagrees. Marx juggles two jobs and sees his phone as a way to be productive, and keep up with the news, during gaps in his hectic workdays. He relies on it for fun, but also for research and scheduling.

“I feel like it gives me a break from what’s at hand,” he said. “I even find it helps to keep me going through the day as I can get in touch with things in the outside world. Most of the time, I would have done nothing during those times anyhow.”

Reed, the Charlotte mom, admits her phone use sometimes distracts her from work or even watching a movie. But compared to other time-killers, she thinks the phone is a good option.

“I actually feel more productive reading things online and on social media like Twitter and Facebook than if I was just sitting and watching a TV show,” she said. “I follow people who are mostly sports and news anchors, people like that — interesting people I know I can learn something from.”

Read the original article here: http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/25/tech/mobile/oms-smartphones-boredom

I quit Instagram today. Not only that, I nuked my account. It’s gone; deleted. Can’t get it back. No more.

I signed up for Instagram a month after it launched, in November of 2010. I was hooked from the giddy-up. My first photo? A pretty boring beach scene: gone now, but you can still see it above. Photos of food and beer and nights out on the town followed – banalities and burritos and bad photography, through Valencia hues.

But Instagram also caught a lot of meaningful moments. The first photo I ever shared of my daughter? On Instagram. Likewise, I loved that it’s given me a window into my friends’ lives these past two years. I’ve seen triumphs and failures, and, sure, photos of food. Instagram is more than just a photo-sharing site – more than a social network, even. It has turned into a robust media platform, a place where we can turn to peek in at events across the globe — from the 2012 London Olympics to Egypt’s Tahrir Square.

By now you’ve likely heard Instagram changed its terms of service. There is a lot not to like, but I didn’t quit because of any single change in particular.

Why did I quit Instagram? It’s the thoughtlessness, stupid.

Instagram was built not by a team of ten in San Francisco’s South Park – but by tens of millions and then hundreds of millions of people all over the world. With all due respect to the work that Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger put into building a wonderful app that scaled to meet unprecedented growth, Instagram succeeded because of network effects.

Which makes it remarkable that the company has shown such utter disrespect for that very network of people.

Here’s the part of their new terms of service that has so many people up in arms:

To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.

What does that mean? The bottom line is that Instagram is reserving the right to use your photos as it sees fit, without permission or even notification, in advertisements and promotions. It hasn’t said itowns them, or that it will do that – it just can.

Naturally, that’s caused a lot of consternation, and subsequent backlash against that consternation. There are a thousand polemics on the web today about Instagram. Some make the case that it’s evil and awful and, oh, no, Facebook! That’s overblown. Others prop up half-hearted strawmen with hand-wavy dismissals of anyone’s concern alongside the notion that of course Instagram should make money.

I think there’s a reasonable middle position. I believe Instagram should be able to make money. Facebook telegraphed that something like this was coming just last week, and my reaction at the time was “good.” I was happy that Instagram had a revenue model. It isn’t a charity. And companies that don’t make money are doomed to fail. Facebook paid a lot of damn money to buy Instagram, and it’s natural to want some return on that.

Yet I also believe it’s wrong to take people’s photos – out of context – for use in advertisements. With no way to opt out.

The issue is about more than using photos of my baby daughter, or deceased grandmother, in ads. The greater concern should be that the company would forge ahead with such a plan without offering any other option to the very users and data that built it.

There are a lot of other ways to make money. Sell an ad in the stream. Sell an ad on individual users’ pages. Sell an ad against search results, and another for tags that relate to upcoming events. Offer “pro” features — like special filters or promoted profiles. I’m no expert here, but I don’t have to be – clearly Systrom and Krieger know how to make a buck.

Sure, my photos aren’t the greatest or the prettiest or the most original. But they’re mine. And if you want to do something with them, just ask me, okay? I’m not even saying no. I’m just saying: Have enough respect to ask me and give me options. By putting terms in place that offered no way to opt out, short of deleting your account, Instagram delivered an ultimatum.

And so I quit Instagram on principle. Because I’m tired of contributing to the commodification of my own existence. I’m not a pork belly, or a barrel of oil. I’m tired of clicking on agree, when I vehemently oppose. I’m tired of saying yes, when I want to say no.

I hope Instagram rethinks its stance. One of its strongest features is how easy it is to build a network there. And so if it does walk its terms back significantly and permanently, I’ll gladly rejoin.

Anyone who says there’s going to be a mass exodus of Instagram users is naive. It will continue to grow. But the internet is whatever we make it. And sometimes, when you believe in something, you have to stand up for it.

Hukkster, whichwas founded by former J. Crew buyers Katie Finnegan and Erica Bell as a shopper-driven deal service, allows users to install a bookmarklet similar to that of Pinterest, in their web browser, that online shoppers then use to flag or “hukk” items they want to buy from stores including Nordstrom, J.Crew, Shopbop, Zappos, GAP, Bloomingdales and Anthropologie. The site will then send a notification when the item price changes and when it goes on sale.

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Tyler named Hukkster as part of new wave of non-social Web sites—a trend that defies one he helped usher in nearly a decade ago. “Every other deal site out there, you sign up and they push things to you, and one out of every hundred you act on,” he told WWD. “Hukkster really empowers the shopper to pull exactly what they want.”

Cameron elaborated during a Huffington Post live chat, saying, “Online deals are being pushed to people today in a very untargeted method. Anybody who’s shopped online has probably had their inbox cluttered with a lot of these emails. What Hukkster is basically doing is empowering the retailer to pull those deals, and it just made perfect sense to us.” In that way, the site is different from Gilt or Groupon in that it only sends alerts about products a user has expressed interest in. Hukkster, which has over 10,000 users so far, makes a profit by collecting a small fee for each sale it drives to retailers.

It also differentiates itself from sites like Shop it To Me through its integrated approach. “Hukkster not only notifies users when their Hukks (products) go on sale, we also incorporate coupon codes and site-wide promotions like friends and family discounts,” Bell told Racked in an email. “No one else in the marketplace is providing real-time access to this product specific information.”

Read more: http://style.time.com/2012/12/18/winklevoss-twins-enter-fashion-tech-world-with-hukkster-investment/#ixzz2FdE9sQZ1