Tzah 2.0

One of the group sessions that were held last week in MoMo TLV was focused about Network monitoring and “Big Brother”. The group itself talked for about 15 minutes before we switched to other groups, but it was enough to raise some intriguing points.

The demand for monitoring is triggered by two distinctively opposite sides: government and facebook-like users. Following 9-11 and local crime events, governments began to tap more and more on their citizens. Although we see many groups opposing it, I think that the fear-factor will overcome and we’ll see more monitoring on a bigger scale. Obviously, that includes mobile calls, SMS, IM and VoIP.

On the other hand, there are those who freely give away information about themselves: GPS data of current location is uploaded to the web. Blogs, pictures and twitters are common ways to share friends but also complete strangers about our personal lives. That got me thinking. Perhaps there’s a business opportunity for these open-life people? There are already companies with contextual-oriented ads platform that can be used in exchange for free or subsidize calls. This is, in fact, a nice way to say that your calls are monitored so you’ll get ads that relates to topics you talked about. Let’s say you talk about how nice Rome is. Don’t be surprise if you’ll see an ad offering you a deal for a trip to Italy.

Indeed, the concept is not new. GMail is doing this for several years now. I’m not sure people are giving a second thought about the fact that Google is going over their mails. Still, GMail demonstrates that free services in exchange for some privacy-compromise is working. This approach can be expended even further from saving money to making money. Perhaps Big brother-like shows where listeners subscribe to channels where people talk to their friends and family over the phone. This can be a phone-equivalent to web cams.