When you have a cause or when you want to affect change, how do you do that? How do you engage your local representatives (or senators etc.)? This is not a rhetorical question; I’m genuinely looking for honest and candid responses. So I guess the questions are as follows:

• Have you ever written a letter or an email to your state reps or senators?
• Have you done so more than once?
• Did you ever receive a response?
• How meaningful was the response (versus a boilerplate ‘thank you’ letter)?
• Did he/she take action based on yours?
• Have you ever gone above and beyond writing a letter (i.e., organized a protest, or a petition, or otherwise)?
• How do you keep tabs on your representatives and ensure they’re representing you well (i.e., how do you know what they vote for/against, what legislation they sponsor, where they truly stand on specific issues, how ‘in the pocket’ they are with lobbyists, unions)?

I’d truly love your thoughts, and those of your friends, family, neighbors, co-workers. Comment below and please, share this post (click here if you don’t see the comment box).

I’m looking forward to continuing this but more importantly hopefully you will too.

Listen to the broadcast here:
WGBH Innovation Hub January 2013 Gadget Review

This morning I wrote a blog post on the Litle & Co. blog to further explain my thinking on mobile payments. What do you think? Am I too sour on the prospects for mobile payments in the near term?

Is it because of pop culture, mass media? Turn on any major network television station during primetime hours and after the reality TV garbage there’s violence on nearly every channel. Cop shows, hospital shows, ESPs chasing down criminals before they act violently – all primetime fodder for our society. This is not an opinion, this is a fact. Turn on FX and watch American Horror Story, a program I confess to watching but a program that is perhaps the single most violent, gruesome, gory program I’ve ever seen on TV. The Walking Dead, a program where well-armed survivors roam a world dominated by flesh eating zombies, blasting through the zombies with everything from arrows, machetes, shotguns, pistols, revolvers, and what seems like a never ending supply of ammunition. The special effects are amazing: The shotgun slugs blast through weak and tender zombie skeleton like a baseball to a watermelon.

Or wait, is America violent because it’s part of who we are, it’s our history, our heritage? We have a right to bear arms don’t we? Don’t we have the right to take up arms against our government if we, The People, decide that’s what needs to happen? It’s revolution baby! Well-formed militias are our constitutional right. Our entire history is story after story of violence. Be it the explorers who landed on these shores, the colonists who ultimately took up arms and violently rebelled, or the north and the south waging horrific violence there’s a long heritage of firearms and violence in America. Today we use remote control airplanes to bomb anyone who is a threat to our national interests, with extreme precision, or so they tell us, and we turn a mostly blind eye to their collateral damage.

And we love it. We love the violence. We pay to watch it. But forget about television shows and movies, we love stories of World War II atrocities followed up America’s heroics, as we marched, as we drove, as we shot our way through Europe, freeing and liberating the poor people who couldn’t have done it without us. We convince ourselves that America’s heroics are solely responsible for the defeat of the Axis Powers and that Russia and the Eastern Front wasn’t a major factor. America, the heros, the honorable. And we love stories in the news of mobsters who live by their code, of gangsters who remain loyal, who because of omerta must uphold their way of life. We excuse violence if it’s honorable, or so we tell ourselves.

Or are we violent because we’re becoming, as data suggests, a more godless society?

Is it because we’re becoming, as some will inquire, void of family values? (How does one quantify this? Violence is not a direct corollary.)

Have we lost our way so much that the kind of violence we witnessed in Connecticut is, tragically, to be expected? Are we becoming even more desensitized?

Fact: Violent crime is down in America, pretty sharply too.

I was in Paris a couple weeks ago when I heard the news that New York City passed a day without a single report of a person being shot, stabbed or subject to other sorts of violent crime for the first time in recent memory. The irony being that I was an American in France, a very non-violent society.

Kieran Healy, a sociologist at Duke University, made this graph of “deaths due to assault” in the United States and other developed countries. While we are the clear outlier violence has dropped to its lowest point since what looks like roughly 1963.

As Healy writes,

The most striking features of the data are (1) how much more violent the U.S. is than other OECD countries (except possibly Estonia and Mexico, not shown here), and (2) the degree of change—and recently, decline—there has been in the U.S. time series considered by itself.

Healy tweeted an interesting thought last night,

Assault Death Rates is one of the few topics where many Americans will rush to compare the USA to South Africa, Kyrgyzstan, or El Salvador.

Meanwhile 2nd Amendment advocates are stocking up on guns and ammunition in the wake of the election fearing an Obama administration crackdown. Some worry if they don’t do it now they won’t be able to get the weapons they want, or rather, they need. Their basis for this is almost nonexistent, especially given that the first four years of Obama’s presidency saw him signing legislation that allowed loaded firearms in some national parks and Amtrak trains. With that one exception both parties, both candidates, but especially democrats, have been largely mum on gun rights, barely touching it during the debates and gun control was the most unpopular issue during the campaign. But if gun rights advocates have mostly baselessly feared Obama over the last 4 years, the recent shootings will certainly change that. Not since George W. Bush let the assault weapons ban expire in 2004 has there been any serious public policy discussion on gun control.

Fact: gun stocks are sharply up

Fact: gun ownership is up

Fact: violent crime is down

This issue is already very complicated, and it stokes the passions of everyone. The roots of our society’s violent tendencies, people often argue, span a broad range of issues often starting with mental illness, a lack of social services, to a national identification system, to nuanced legislation on what kinds of guns people can buy, to family values, to a morally vapid America that’s increasing consumed with itself, with social media, with its own narcissism and self-importance, to an increasingly godless culture where fewer and fewer people go to their church, their synagogue, or their mosques. The public dialogue also includes opinions about immigration, about drug policy, about prisons overflowing with non-violent criminals while violent repeat offenders are parolled and allowed to walk the streets, yet pot dealers do twenty years hard time. The discussion includes zero-sum solutions ranging from arming everyone to arming no one.

One day after the senseless tragedy in Newtown Connecticut the conversation is already heating up, and one thing is certain, America is about to have the most intense and prolonged discussion on gun control that she’s ever seen.

;

Related articles

• Nine facts about guns and mass shootings in the United States
• There Are 88.8 Guns per 100 People in This Country
• What Obama Must Do About Guns
• What science says about gun control and violent crime
• Why the NRA Is Still Winning the War on Guns
• America’s Culture of Violence

The company I work for, Litle & Co., has been honored with three Stevie Awards in years past. This year The Stevies (as they’re more casually known) asked me to chair the final judging committee for Best New Product or Service. Nearly 50 Finalists made the cut in this one category, spanning a broad range of industries.

One of my duties in chairing this committee has been to recruit other judges. I aimed for a well-rounded, diverse group of judges who’d bring a variety of perspectives and expertise to the committee. I’m very proud to have brought together the following friends and associates, and am truly grateful for their participation. The judges for the 2012 Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service Best New Product and Service category are as follows:

• David Beisel, Partner at NextView Ventures
• Matt Douglas, Founder & CEO at Punchbowl.com
• Melissa Dowler, Co-Founder at Long Haul Films
• Michael Dunn, CTO at Hearst Interactive Media
• Andrew J. “Flip” Filipowski, Executive Chairman & CEO at SilkRoad Technology
• Jane Henry, Owner at LOOMLAB
• Tara Hunt, CEO & Co-founder at Buyosphere
• Aaron Irizarry, Experience Designer at Hewlett Packard
• Michael LeBarron, Senior UX Engineer at Rue La La
• Kaitlin Maud, Co-Founder at Rain or Shine Studio
• John McCurdy, VP Business Development at Invest Northern Ireland 
• Kevin Mitchell, Senior Director of Programming at National Amusements
• Beth Monaghan, Principal at InkHouse Media + Marketing
• Randy Parker, President at SMBapps
• Jen Reddy, Vice President of Global Marketing at Communispace
• Evan I. Schwartz, Director of Storytelling at INNOSIGHT
• Rusty Williams, Co-Founder at Troopla

The gala dinner and awards will be held at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas on February 27th. I’ll be there and can’t wait to meet the finalists and the winners as well as other judges. See you there!

*Disclaimer: Litle & Co. is a customer of a couple of the Finalists, two of which I personally use in my day-to-day job, so I’ve recused myself from judging those specific companies or subcategories.

My first attempt at astrophotography last night yielded only one post-worthy photo, this one of a waxing crescent moon. This was taken with a Canon EOS 7D mounted to a Meade LX90.

They are centered on the power of the web, the Internet, to create bonds of unity that surpass echelons of establishment. For those attending the Web 2.0 Expo (#w2e), there’s nothing extraordinary about anything that’s going on around us. Over the last decade, we’ve been drivers of dialogue focused on the increasing “power” of the individual, of the disintermediation of traditional approaches and avenues to accomplishing things in less time and with thinking and resources that move faster.

In my presentation, “From Intent to Expression”, I spoke about how the payments landscape in the Web 2.0 world is changing, rapidly. What started more than a decade ago with e-commerce and then with the advent of solutions such as PayPal is now a systemic advance disabling traditional purveyors of payments and commerce. The web has, to a large extent, democratized the human voice across the political and the economic condition.

Today’s headlines are complete with rising discussions of indifference toward the norm. This comes at a time when the convergence of human commercial and media consumption has been fueled by digital enablement, giving further rise to innovations that strip away the skins of convention. Convergence is being met equally by disruption never experienced before in commercial enterprise. The time, and importance of, knowing one’s consumer has never been so great. And, at a time when dissatisfaction with the traditional firmaments of finance is overwhelmingly profound, the spoils stand to go with those bridge builders who have both the empathy and the energy to create consumer solutions that match, even exceed, the needs of their lives—emotionally, socially, commercially and financially.

The crux of my discussion is this: those spoils will go most to those who know their digital consumers best (despite having never seen their face, except by way of avatar). To those who know their consumers’ preferences and payments the best. To those, ultimately, who leverage the richness of the digital age to surround their customers through payments—the actual expressions of consumption, need and want. All of this is rooted in data. Data that I and my colleagues believe is the root of a new era we are calling payments intelligence. The cause and meaning of payments intelligence will become increasingly pronounced in the months and the years to come.

Here is a link to my presentation. I invite anyone to share feedback and observations.