Bless you, Key Bank. I got a call from them today asking whether my charges at Walmart, Bed Bath & Beyond, and a gas station in New Jersey were legitimate. Since I’m in Christchurch, New Zealand, I tend to fill up the tank at more convenient locations, so I was able to state with confidence that I had not authorized those charges.

So is this identity theft? Not according to the Identity Theft Resource Center, which suggests that someone actually has to pose as someone else for it to be identity theft.

The four types of identity theft

• Financial Identity Theft (using another’s name and SSN to obtain goods and services)
• Criminal Identity Theft (posing as another when apprehended for a crime)
• Identity Cloning (using another’s information to assume his or her identity in daily life)
• Business/Commercial Identity Theft (using another’s business name to obtain credit)

Some other interesting facts from the IDTC:

• According to the Gartner study the 2006 victim population was at 15 million victims. That means every minute about 28 ½ people become a new victim of this crime, or a new victim in just over 2 seconds.
• The incidence of victimization increased 11-20% between 2001 and 2002 and 80% between 2002 and 2003 (Harris Interactive).
• This same study found that 91% of respondents do not see an “end to the tunnel” and expect a heavy increase in victimization.
• In a bulletin published by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an estimated 3.6 million households were affected by identity theft during a 6-month period in 2004. If an entire year was considered, that could mean that 7.2 million households were affected in a 12 month period.
• Studies on the total cost of identity theft vary. One study said that identity theft cost U.S. businesses and consumers $56.6 billion in 2005.
• Losses from phishing attacks: in 2004 was $137 million, in 2006 it was $2.8 billion

Holy moley! With so much of it floating around, it’s pretty likely that some of you reading this have had a personal experience with identity theft at some time or another. What was it? How much money was involved? Were you out of pocket at the end of the ordeal? Take the poll or tell us your story in the comments.

Imagine if we were able to find things in our ‘real’ lives the way we find them on the web. Here are some things we search for on a daily basis:

• Snooze button on alarm
• Slippers
• Glasses
• Clothing, including shoes and socks
• Breakfast
• News items, either via television, newspaper or radio
• House keys
• Car keys
• Briefcase or purse
• Shortest route to destination
• Food or coffee en route
• [Insert here: all the computer stuff we search for, either online or locally, all day]
• Physical files or artifacts
• A fresh roll of toilet paper
• Our printout amongst many
• Shortest route to client office
• Room in massive complex where client meeting is being held
• Name of client’s significant other
• Any topics that should be strenuously avoided
• Parking space
• Bottle of wine your significant other asked you to pick up
• Those olives (not the green ones, the black ones, but not the crappy black ones they serve on airplanes)
• Way to avoid construction on the way home
• That one ingredient you were sure you had
• The gravy boat
• Any topics that might actually engage your teenage children in conversation
• A TV show that you’re genuinely interested in watching
• The other half of your pajamas

Show me the search engine that can find all that—then I’ll be impressed.

Update: Marc Andreessen, who was cited in the NYT article, further elaborates his perspective in a blog post titled Serial Entrepreneurs and Today’s Silicon Valley.

Summary: Max Levchik, the founder of PayPal, will never stop creating new Internet companies. I believe it would be even more extraordinary to succeed at something completely different.

I just read this astonishing article in the New York Times that makes me realize the full extent to which Max Levchik, the founder of PayPal, earned his money.

During his PayPal days, Mr. Levchin was so committed to seeing the company succeed that he often sacked out at the office in a sleeping bag he kept under his desk. Considering that he described his apartment during some of this time as “scary,” that had a certain logic. Cardboard boxes served as his living room furniture; a discarded computer desk was his dining room table.

These days, despite the phenomenal success of PayPal, which gave him the bulk of a fortune worth around $100 million, Mr. Levchin continues to work an average of 15 to 18 hours a day.

He goes on to calculate that there are too many hours in a day to just smell the roses:

“I enjoy sitting on nice beaches and hanging out with my girlfriend and playing with my dog, but that’s three hours a day,” Mr. Levchin said. “What about the remaining 18 hours I’m awake?”

Wait a minute… 18 plus 3 is 21… there are 24 hours in a day… 24 minus 21 is 3… this guy only sleeps three hours a night? He must be like Lance Armstrong: yes, a gifted athlete, but also genetically blessed to be physically capable of pulling off stunts of which mere mortals couldn’t begin to conceive. (Lance’s heart, for example, is 30% bigger than average for someone his size.)

Back to Max. He discovered his irrepressible worker demon after he sold PayPal and found himself twiddling his thumbs:

He thought he would spend the time after the sale “exploring my inner self.” Instead, he spent the better part of 12 months “feeling worthless and stupid” and baffled by what he might do with the remainder of his life. He felt too young to retire or downshift a gear or two — and too restless to become a philanthropist.

The article makes Max out to be the victim of an extra helping of the Type A gene. I wonder, though, if perhaps he just wasn’t able to think of anything better to do than to start another company and spend 98% of his waking hours focused on it. Fortunately, I have a suggestion for him and all the other Maxes out there.

What should you do after the first $100 million? Change the metric.

Max is competing against himself in his bid for ever-greater success, as evidenced by his criteria for satisfaction with his latest venture:

Mr. Levchin acknowledges that he has already earned more money than he could ever spend. But he said he would not consider Slide.com, the photo and video sharing site he founded in 2005 that is still in its start-up phase, a success unless it is ultimately worth, in real dollars, “at least $1.54 billion”— the price eBay paid for PayPal.

“Otherwise,” he asked rhetorically, “what have I learned?”

It’s possible, though, that doing the same thing a little bit better doesn’t mean you’ve learned more; it means that you’re staying in your comfort zone. If you’ve already proven that you can succeed at one metric, try a different one. Michael Jordan knew that everyone else knew he was the greatest basketball player in the world, so he tried his hand at baseball. Granted, he wasn’t that spectacular at it, but, hey, after you’ve earned $100 million, you can afford to take a few risks.

So if you’ve just sold your technology startup and you’re wondering what to do next, I propose that you give something else a go. Try to be a massive success at something other than a Silicon Valley technology startup. Climb a mountain. Try to win an Olympic gold medal or a chess championship.

Look at Richard Branson. Music. Aviation. Cellular telephony. Nobody can accuse him of only succeeding because he’s an industry insider.

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, talks about the benefits of being in the top 25% at two or three things (via Marc Andreessen):

If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.

The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.

I always advise young people to become good public speakers (top 25%). Anyone can do it with practice. If you add that talent to any other, suddenly you’re the boss of the people who have only one skill. Or get a degree in business on top of your engineering degree, law degree, medical degree, science degree, or whatever. Suddenly you’re in charge, or maybe you’re starting your own company using your combined knowledge.

Capitalism rewards things that are both rare and valuable. You make yourself rare by combining two or more “pretty goods” until no one else has your mix. I didn’t spend much time with the script supervisor, but it was obvious that her verbal/writing skills were in the top tier as well as her people skills. I’m guessing she also has a high attention to detail, and perhaps a few other skills in the mix. Probably none of those skills are best in the world, but together they make a strong package. Apparently she’s been in high demand for decades.

At least one of the skills in your mixture should involve communication, either written or verbal. And it could be as simple as learning how to sell more effectively than 75% of the world. That’s one. Now add to that whatever your passion is, and you have two, because that’s the thing you’ll easily put enough energy into to reach the top 25%. If you have an aptitude for a third skill, perhaps business or public speaking, develop that too.

It sounds like generic advice, but you’d be hard pressed to find any successful person who didn’t have about three skills in the top 25%.

That’s great advice, but now imagine the possibilities if you could be the best, not just in the top 25%, but The Best, at two or three things. What would that feel like? How extraordinary would that be?

Would you want to? Are you driven in that way? And what would your two or three things be?

Remember a few days ago when I wrote about the ecosystem that surrounds Google? I said that Google isn’t just Google; it’s every other company, website, blog and mashup that has built a business model on the back of the search giant. And lo and behold, into my inbox appears a gift from ZDNet, tailor-made to reiterate my point:

Mozilla’s revenue, which includes Mozilla’s foundation and corporation, came in at $66.8 million in 2006…

Mitchell Baker, Chief Lizard Wrangler at Mozilla, wrote in a blog:

“As in 2005 the vast majority of this revenue is associated with the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox, and the majority of that is from Google…”

It doesn’t take a big leap to conclude Google is bankrolling Mozilla… Mozilla gets 85 percent of its revenue from Google. The latest Mozilla-Google contract expires in November 2008.

Mozilla’s financial statement really puts the browser battle into perspective. It’s not Firefox vs. IE as much as it is Google vs. Microsoft. [emphasis mine]

Google vs. Microsoft is quite different to Firefox vs. IE. So how does this affect your perception of the open-source browser, if at all?

From Microsoft’s Kim Cameron, by way of Brian Hayes, with collaborative input from a good chunk of the blogosphere, come the 7 laws that explain the successes and failures of digital identity systems. I’m including just the snippets below; there’s a lot more detail in the complete identity paper. Even though it was published in 2005 (a lifetime ago in Web terms), I think it’s still ripe for relevant discussion today.

1. User Control and Consent
   Technical identity systems must only reveal information identifying a user with the user’s consent.
2. Minimal Disclosure for a Constrained Use
   The solution which discloses the least amount of identifying information and best limits its use is the most stable long term solution.
3. Justifiable Parties
   Digital identity systems must be designed so the disclosure of identifying information is limited to parties having a necessary and justifiable place in a given identity relationship.
4. Directed Identity
   A universal identity system must support both “omni-directional” identifiers for use by public entities and “unidirectional” identifiers for use by private entities, thus facilitating discovery while preventing unnecessary release of correlation handles.
5. Pluralism of Operators and Technologies
   A universal identity system must channel and enable the inter-working of multiple identity technologies run by multiple identity providers.
6. Human Integration
   The universal identity metasystem must define the human user to be a component of the distributed system integrated through
   unambiguous human-machine communication mechanisms offering protection against identity attacks.
7. Consistent Experience Across Contexts
   The unifying identity metasystem must guarantee its users a simple, consistent experience while enabling separation of contexts through multiple operators and technologies.

Do you think these are still relevant? Overkill? Underkill?

What would you add and what would you take away?

Summary: In this post, I imagine a world where companies want customers to make the best choice even if it means buying from someone else. A marketplace based on this model would have some distinctly positive characteristics.

Do you want people to buy your product because it will really benefit them, or because it will be good for your bottom line?

Yes, yes, I know the ideal answer is ‘Both!’ Which would you prioritize?

If you knew that a product wasn’t right for someone, would you try to sell it to them? Should you try to sell it to them? And how can we define whether a product is ‘right’ for someone, anyway?

The present state of the market is one in which advertisers tend to bring a ‘win-at-all-costs’ attitude to their work. Just look at Gord Hotchkiss’ Search Insider column last week, Infomediating a Broken Marketplace:

A terribly inefficient marketplace has evolved in the past century, with some very wobbly power structures. The communication disconnect is almost laughable in its dysfunction. Advertisers spend more and more, hoping to penetrate a barricade set up by increasingly militant consumers. It’s literally a war, with strategies to match. The only hint of concession to the increasing power of the consumer has been search, and that has been done reluctantly. Remember Einstein’s definition of insanity? “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Gord’s column is about infomediaries, people or companies that step between the vulnerable consumer who just wants a decent product and the predatory companies that are only looking to suck dollars from wallets. But what if the companies themselves approached things differently?

Imagine for a moment what would happen if your company’s primary goal was to make sure that customers received the product that was most suited to their individual needs, even if that product wasn’t yours.

Progressive Insurance does this, by allowing people to compare rates from competitors on their website. They’ve been doing this for a number of years, and, amazingly, they’re still in business! It seems that transparency and profitability aren’t mutually exclusive.

Now imagine a world in which every company followed that same strategy and adopted an attitude of, “Hey, if this product works for you, that’s terrific. If not, that’s fine too. We just want you to be happy.” What would happen?

1. A bunch of companies would go out of business
   Okay, so Progressive is still around. The lesson from them is that you don’t have to be afraid of what your competitors are doing, if your offering is strong enough. A good percentage of companies in the market wouldn’t stand up to that kind of scrutiny.
2. Value propositions would become a lot clearer.
   Right now, there are a fair number of companies out there that aren’t clearly distinguished from their competitors. In our imaginary world, a bunch of them would have to take a hard look at what they have to offer—and ask themselves whether they really provide anything of value.
3. Companies would become a lot more efficient.
   A clear mandate of “Do right by the customer” can provide a simple litmus test for company activities. Under the current system, a lot of time and energy is spent to convince consumers that the offering is right, no matter what the offering is. In our imaginary world, companies wouldn’t even offer a product or service unless they already believed it was the absolute best thing at the best price.

This is, of course, a silly and imaginary world for a number of reasons. First of all, there’s no way to be totally objective or accurate about what customers want or need. Second, people like advertising. Not all of it, granted, but consumers certainly to positive brand associations wherever they’re created. Third, the graph of consumer desires and interests is continually shifting—what may be appropriate for a customer today will change tomorrow. Fourth, products and services grow, change and improve. Fifth, the value of a product or service frequently resides in intangible, apples-to-oranges characteristics that can’t be neatly compared. And so on.

So we’re unlikely to achieve any sort of advertising-free world, or a market in which companies don’t try to ‘convince’. Take another look at the three characteristics of our imaginary world, though. Companies that don’t deserve to be in business go out of business, while those that remain have clearer value propositions and become more efficient. Those are good things, right?

What do you think? Think for a moment about your or your company’s product or service. Would you let somebody buy it if you didn’t think they needed it?