Posts Tagged ‘ecommerce’

This weekend our daughter tumbled down some stairs, not a disaster but it was very dramatic. It wasn’t the first time and it certainly won’t be the last. She’s now sporting a nasty graze and a very blue lump on her head. It got me thinking about what that accident would make other parents think, and if I let myself be influenced by them what kind of a parent it might make me.

There’s an entire marketplace of products to help parents protect their children, from clips that eliminate sharp corners in your home to video cameras that watch them while they sleep. Some are more extreme than others, but all are sold to do essentially the same thing: make you feel less afraid. Here are just five of them that I found interesting for reasons explained below.

That’s it. Five products for sale that can make me feel instantly better as a parent. Just five products out of the hundreds available. Ultimatley you have to decide where to draw the line before paranoia based parenting and balanced healthy parenting. It’s totally up to you.

If you want to imagine the world your children are heading into, imagine this: imagine living in a world where everything everybody says or has ever said to you or about you is available online for anyone to find. In that world there are no secrets. At any point in time I can find out who your friends are and I can find out whatever I want to about them as well. Imagine how much I would know about you and about what you do. It’s coming because the internet wants this. Not because it’s evil, finding your every secret and making it public, but because it wants to show you more stuff you might like. It’s all about targeted, personalised and customised experiences. And by experiences I mean advertising. It’s called Social Search. Google it.

It makes sense because your social circle has things in common with you, such as your interests, your lifestyle choices and your income level. You probably have conversations right now when you see your friends and colleagues, recommending what to buy and where to shop. The internet has broadened that social circle beyond people you physically meet and has given you new ways in which to have conversations. It’s those conversations that the internet wants to make sense of, to make sure your surfing experience is more relevant to you, more personalised, more likely to get you to spend.

So is this world we’re heading into really so bad for our children? The fact is that I do have a lot in common with my friends, and a more personalised internet experience makes sense because if I’m going to have to see adverts, at least make them relevant. And it’s not like my social circle is a secret, I’m proud of my friends, proud to be associated with them. So go ahead. Link me to my friends. Profile me. Profile my family.

But it could be bad, really, really bad. We can only begin to imagine how that information will be used in the future, but I’m sure that advertising will only be one part of the story. Employers and Universities will be able to screen applicants based on their entire life history, not just the academic and professional history we provide, the resume as we think about it may even cease to exist, because as the x-files said “the truth is out there”. They will be able to work out what ‘type’ of person you are and whether that means you are likely to be a success, or not. In a similar vein insurance companies will be able to profile you based on what they uncover about you, about your family history, and not what we tell them on the forms we fill out. Whatever the end use of the information is there will certainly be companies compiling information on you, and trying to sell it, and someone will buy it to gain some form of advantage.

The first step towards this has already been taken, the information capture mechanisms (Search Engines, Email, Social Networks and Instant Messaging Applications) are in place and we’re all adding to their database of content stored against our user names every single day. The next steps are to connect it, index it and start searching it. That’s more or less happening as I write. And the internet has no delete button. It’s all their forever. That information is immortal. Everything you have written and continue to write is sat somewhere, waiting. 2 trillion people sending emails, 2 billion typed Google searches every day, 400 million people providing instant updates about themselves, 1 million blog posts every day. All stored, eternal, indexed, containing information about you.

It’s one thing to compromise your own privacy but how much of what you write contains information about your children?

I think this is an important topic for parents because we’re all on here talking about our children, and then allowing our children to talk about themselves. We act like the internet makes us anonymous, but it does not, it does exactly the opposite, and we need to make sure our children understand that. We need to be careful when we broadcast about our families. We need to think of the internet as a recording device, something that saves everything we say. We need to make sure that the information we give out will not create problems for our children in the future.

Of course not everything is damaging. There’s an obvious difference between putting a cute photo of your kids online and telling the internet that their grandparents died of cancer; one is a cute photo, the other is an indication of a genetic tendency to cancer.

I don’t have the answer. I don’t have any real tips yet. I’m thinking about it and I’m working on it but for now all I can really offer is a word of caution. When you type you are providing information forever, you don’t know who will use it or how, but be sure that before you hit submit it’s not something that could impact your children when someone Google’s their name in 20 years.

I only need 3 iPhone apps to help me with my health and fitness and they cost me nothing. If you’ve got more then you may be focussing on the tools and not the outcome; you may be thinking of the apps as a shortcut. As I have said: there are no shortcuts.

Google “best free fitness apps” and you can wade through 150 million pages. Mostly you’ll be looking at lists of apps pulled in by the sites straight from the Apple store, these are just attempts to generate traffic, a simple and easy story to get a high Google ranking, covered in ads to claw in a little revenue. The apps I’m about to recommend I use daily. They came to me through suggestion, trial and error. I’m an actual user of these apps, not a paid reviewer.

Firstly: what you don’t need
You do not need any form of workout routine or phone based personal trainer. An app cannot manage your fitness any better than a book could. Only you can do that. If you think you need an app to work out then you are unlikely to succeed because you are relying on a tool to achieve what you feel unable to do yourself.

You do not need a calorie database or calorie counter. If you’re on a diet or think you need a diet then you already know what you should eat, right? A calorie app is not going to tell you anything new, or make you thin. Buying one implies that you think information equals success. It does not, so focus on the right thing, your own motivation.

App 1: The camera
The iphone comes with one of the best tools straight out of the box. The camera. Keep a food journal by photographing everything you eat. The best advice you can get from any dietician is to keep a food journal. It forces you to see what you eat and from that you are able to take control. The iPhone camera has a camera roll, time stamping and so it can be used as the perfect food journal. If you need more information on how just email me or leave a comment.

App2: A weight tracker
You need a way of tracking your weight in a way that lets you see the trend over time. This is because the trend is more important than the daily fluctuations. Adjusting what you eat based on daily changes is not sensible. Your weight creeps up and down constantly so if you see an increase one day you may be tempted to panic and starve yourself the next day. That is one reason why diets fail. A trend line allows you to adjust your diet based on the trend over a number of weeks and so there is less of a temptation to panic. I recommend the free (lite) version of True Weight because it shows a 3 week trend line which is all I find that I need.

App3: An activity tracker
So far I’ve described a way of recording what I eat and recording what I weigh, so the final app is one that records what I do; tracking activity. Nothing beats trail guru for this as a free app in my opinion. You need to set up an account at Trail Guru and once done the app will track your movement when it’s on. The site will record that over time, and will give you reports on such things as distance covered, method, and calories burned. I would link to a review of this app but mostly those reviews are based on simple short trials, to really understand how to get the most from this tool you need to use it. You can contact me for more information or just go the Trail Guru site and explore the forums and FAQ’s.

And that’s it. Just 3 simple applications. As these are free apps it means that the developers don’t get paid for their efforts directly by you so you should consider donations and clicking through on any adverts presented to you as a way of showing your support.