Could Your Facebook Friends Actually Affect Your Credit?

Traditionally, your credit score is determined by things like steady employment, paying bills on time,

outstanding loans and number of inquiries into your credit history. But one lending firm is addingFacebook friends to the list.

How can your Facebook friends affect you’re ability to get a loan? Lenddo, a microlending firm based in Hong Kong, believes that the likelihood of your friends to pay back loans or not could be indicative of your habits as well.

The New York Observer’s Beta Beat has more on what the company says is “the world’s first credit scoring service that uses your online social network to assess credit”:

The company’s algorithm is proprietary and secret, said CEO Jeff Stewart, but the primary metric is what Lenddo knows about the people you’re friends with. “We think that in the age of the internet you should be able to establish your reputation and your identity through your social graph, through your on- and offline community, and use that to get access to financial products and information,” he said.

If Lenddo sees one of your best Facebook buddies took out a loan and paid it back, there’s a good chance you will too. “Our backgrounds are in machine learning and pattern recognition,” Mr. Stewart said. “It’s some serious math.

Beta Beat tested out getting a loan and was asked for its Facebook account, as well as Gmail, Twitter,Yahoo and Windows Live. It was then given a credit score. To apply for an actual loan, it would need to have at least three friends with connections to Lenddo and a decent credit history themselves.

What’s more, Beta Beat reports that if you default on your loan, the company reserves the right to broadcast this information to your friends. After all, they could be affected by your credit score as well:

“I think Mark Zuckerberg said it best,” Mr. Stewart said. “Every industry will be in fact impacted by social.”

Banks have been curious about using social media to gauge risk for at least a year, said Matt Thomson, VP of platform at Klout, which calculates “influence” based on a user’s social media activity. Determining creditworthiness is not a core product of Klout’s, he said, but banks have approached the startup to ask about it. He wouldn’t name names. “It’s really like the who’s who of banking,” he said.

While some may consider this an extreme invasion of privacy, others like media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, Beta Beat reports, don’t consider such a thing as private anymore:

 “We’re already in the nightmare scenario,” he wrote in an email. “They already know everything about you—more than most of us realize. If anything, the addition of social networking information to this data mining will help us come to some understanding of how much more these companies know about us than we know about ourselves.”

As of right now, loans are only offered in the Philippines, but Beta Beat reports that the company recently hired an ex-Google employee to begin on in America.

fake gadget gifts

If your gift list this year includes gadget-obsessed early adopters who love snatching up the latest electronics, you’re in luck.

Why not give them an iArm — an adjustable forearm mount that will let them fiddle with their smartphone, laptop and tablet computer all at the same time?

Or for the e-geek on the go, consider the iDrive. Because, let’s be honest, we all need a steering-wheel mount to help play with our tablets and e-readers while we’re driving. (What could go wrong?)

Sound ridiculous? Well, sure. But these gag products may at least let you fool your family and friends for a few seconds.

Graphic designer Arik Nordby said he got the idea forPrank Pack when his nephew received a video-game console cruelly hidden inside a coffee-maker box.

“Being a good kid, he pretended to be excited for a little bit. There was this awkward moment,” Nordby said. “It kind of stuck in my head — why don’t we do this for adults?”

And thus was Prank Pack born. Nordby teamed up with some staffers at humor site The Onion, a handful of whom now work with him at 30 Watt, his graphics company based in Minneappolis.

The idea is to hide a real gift inside the real-looking, if remarkably silly, packaging for the fake gifts.

Some of the tech-inspired bogus products bear a resemblance to those from a certain gadget-making powerhouse (note the lowercase “i” if you’re confused). Nordby concedes that’s no accident.

“I am a sucker for anything with an ‘i’ in front of it,” he said. “After using Apple products for over 20 years, it’s safe to say they own a large section of my brain.”

In addition to the aforementioned “i” items, other Prank Packs include ToeTunes, or bedroom slippers with built-in speakers, and PetPetter, an electronic armlike contraption that will, yes, pet your dog or cat for you. The tag line on the box reads, “Never touch your pets again!”

For more options, The Onion offers its own “Decoy Gift Boxes.”Among them is the iFeast, a combination feeding bowl/iPod dock so your pet can rock out while chowing down.

At $8 each or three for $20, Nordby said he’s seen sales roughly double every year for seven years. The packs are sold at Bed Bath & Beyond and numerous online retailers, including Think Geek.

He’s no economist, but Nordby said his growing success has to say something about the retail climate this holiday season.

“We like to say it’s a good economic indicator when people are willing to pay for empty boxes,” he said.

Related articles

• Prank your friends this Xmas with dummy gift box (news.cnet.com)

How Obama’s data-crunching prowess may get him re-elected

Image via Wikipedia

Alone among the major candidates running for president, the Obama campaign not only has a Facebook page with 23 million “likes” (roughly 10 times the total of all the Republicans running), it has a Facebook app that is scooping up all kinds of juicy facts about his supporters.

Users of the Obama 2012 – Are You In? app are not only giving the campaign personal data like their name, gender, birthday, current city, religion and political views, they are sharing their list of friends and information those friends share, like their birthday, current city, religion and political views. As Facebook is now offering the geo-targeting of ads down to ZIP code, this kind of fine-grained information is invaluable.

Inside the Obama operation, his staff members are using a powerful social networking tool called NationalField, which enables everyone to share what they are working on. Modeled on Facebook, the tool connects all levels of staff to the information they are gathering as they work on tasks like signing up volunteers, knocking on doors, identifying likely voters and dealing with problems. Managers can set goals for field organizers — number of calls made, number of doors knocked — and see, in real time, how people are doing against all kinds of metrics.

In additional to all the hard data, users can share qualitative information: what points or themes worked for them in a one-on-one conversation with voters, for example. “Ups,” “Downs” and “Solutions” are color-coded, so people can see where successes are happening or challenges brewing.

And unlike an open social network, where everyone is equal, NationalField runs on a hierarchical social graph: Higher-level staff get a broader view of the state and local work below them.

For a campaign that tapped the volunteer energies of millions of people in 2008 and appears to need all the help it can get in 2012, these kinds of fine-grained technologies could make a key difference. While the Republican field (and bloggers and the press) has been focused on how their candidates are doing with social networking, Obama’s campaign operatives are devising a new kind of social intelligence that will help drive campaign resources where they are most needed.

‘Data harmonization’

It all sounds like common sense, but actually, connecting and synchronizing the data a campaign collects from its field operation, fundraising operation and Web operation isn’t a trivial task.

“The holy grail of data analysis is data harmonization, or master data management,” Lundry said. “To have political talking to finance and finance talking to field, and data is flowing back and forth and informing the actions of each other — it sounds easy, but it’s incredibly hard to implement.”

Most political campaigns tend to rely on consultants to carry out part or all of these functions, resulting in even greater obstacles to sharing information.

Like Lundry, Republican technology consultant Martin Avila is worried. His firm, Terra Eclipse, built Ron Paul‘s 2008 Web operation and works closely with the tea party movement. This year, it did some work on Tim Pawlenty‘s website until that campaign folded.

Avila’s flagship project is a conservative social-networking hub called Freedom Connector, which has grown to 150,000 members in a matter of months by giving right-wing activists tools to organize local meetings and discussions. Avila doesn’t think any of the Republican presidential campaigns fully understand the power of data today.

“They have to stop seeing a website as a piece of direct mail that people will receive,” he said. “They have to see a website as the equivalent of a campaign office in Iowa, one that is open 24/7.” And campaigns need to know how to take quick and well-targeted action to respond to every expression of interest they may get online, he argues, because voter interest in politicians is fickle. Simply sending a generic e-mail reply isn’t enough.

“If you can make that initial response a phone call from someone in their town or a neighbor, asking them to come to a county fair tomorrow, that’s much more powerful.”

Power of personal connections

Without good data management, the different legs of a national campaign can trip over each other.

“One hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing quite often in campaigns,” Lundry said. “With master data management across a campaign, you can see how often you’re talking to a person” and thus not bombard them with untimely or poorly targeted requests.

But, according to Avila, “Not many on the Republican side know how to technically accomplish that.” Their approach to the Web, he adds, is still too much shaped by pre-Internet politicking using broadcast advertising. “The ability to connect to people on a one-to-one basis, and encourage them to connect with one another, is way more powerful than that.”

How powerful? The 2008 Obama campaign offered an early glimpse of the potential of data-driven politics. By the end of the election, it had amassed 13 million supporter e-mail addresses, collected nearly 4 million individual donations and tallied about 2 million registered users on my.BarackObama.com, the campaign’s social networking platform. Seventy thousand myBO members had used the site to conduct their own personalized fundraising campaigns.

Since 2008, enthusiasm for Obama has waned, but his online presence hasn’t. His base on Facebook has soared nearly six times from the 4 million he had on Election Day, and his following on Twitter now stands at 10 million, dwarfing the Republican field.

So even if Obama isn’t drawing millions of people off their sofas to rally to his side on their own in 2012, his team has a huge amount of raw data to work with as they build his re-election machine.

If the 2012 election comes down to a battle of inches, where a few percentage points change in turnout in a few key states making all the difference, we may come to see Obama’s investment in predictive modelers and data scientists as the key to victory.

Alone among the major candidates running for president, the Obama campaign not only has a Facebook page with 23 million “likes” (roughly 10 times the total of all the Republicans running), it has a Facebook app that is scooping up all kinds of juicy facts about his supporters.

Users of the Obama 2012 – Are You In? app are not only giving the campaign personal data like their name, gender, birthday, current city, religion and political views, they are sharing their list of friends and information those friends share, like their birthday, current city, religion and political views. As Facebook is now offering the geo-targeting of ads down to ZIP code, this kind of fine-grained information is invaluable.

Inside the Obama operation, his staff members are using a powerful social networking tool called NationalField, which enables everyone to share what they are working on. Modeled on Facebook, the tool connects all levels of staff to the information they are gathering as they work on tasks like signing up volunteers, knocking on doors, identifying likely voters and dealing with problems. Managers can set goals for field organizers — number of calls made, number of doors knocked — and see, in real time, how people are doing against all kinds of metrics.

In additional to all the hard data, users can share qualitative information: what points or themes worked for them in a one-on-one conversation with voters, for example. “Ups,” “Downs” and “Solutions” are color-coded, so people can see where successes are happening or challenges brewing.

And unlike an open social network, where everyone is equal, NationalField runs on a hierarchical social graph: Higher-level staff get a broader view of the state and local work below them.

For a campaign that tapped the volunteer energies of millions of people in 2008 and appears to need all the help it can get in 2012, these kinds of fine-grained technologies could make a key difference. While the Republican field (and bloggers and the press) has been focused on how their candidates are doing with social networking, Obama’s campaign operatives are devising a new kind of social intelligence that will help drive campaign resources where they are most needed.

‘Data harmonization’

It all sounds like common sense, but actually, connecting and synchronizing the data a campaign collects from its field operation, fundraising operation and Web operation isn’t a trivial task.

“The holy grail of data analysis is data harmonization, or master data management,” Lundry said. “To have political talking to finance and finance talking to field, and data is flowing back and forth and informing the actions of each other — it sounds easy, but it’s incredibly hard to implement.”

Most political campaigns tend to rely on consultants to carry out part or all of these functions, resulting in even greater obstacles to sharing information.

Like Lundry, Republican technology consultant Martin Avila is worried. His firm, Terra Eclipse, built Ron Paul’s 2008 Web operation and works closely with the tea party movement. This year, it did some work on Tim Pawlenty’s website until that campaign folded.

Avila’s flagship project is a conservative social-networking hub called Freedom Connector, which has grown to 150,000 members in a matter of months by giving right-wing activists tools to organize local meetings and discussions. Avila doesn’t think any of the Republican presidential campaigns fully understand the power of data today.

“They have to stop seeing a website as a piece of direct mail that people will receive,” he said. “They have to see a website as the equivalent of a campaign office in Iowa, one that is open 24/7.” And campaigns need to know how to take quick and well-targeted action to respond to every expression of interest they may get online, he argues, because voter interest in politicians is fickle. Simply sending a generic e-mail reply isn’t enough.

“If you can make that initial response a phone call from someone in their town or a neighbor, asking them to come to a county fair tomorrow, that’s much more powerful.”

Power of personal connections

Without good data management, the different legs of a national campaign can trip over each other.

“One hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing quite often in campaigns,” Lundry said. “With master data management across a campaign, you can see how often you’re talking to a person” and thus not bombard them with untimely or poorly targeted requests.

But, according to Avila, “Not many on the Republican side know how to technically accomplish that.” Their approach to the Web, he adds, is still too much shaped by pre-Internet politicking using broadcast advertising. “The ability to connect to people on a one-to-one basis, and encourage them to connect with one another, is way more powerful than that.”

How powerful? The 2008 Obama campaign offered an early glimpse of the potential of data-driven politics. By the end of the election, it had amassed 13 million supporter e-mail addresses, collected nearly 4 million individual donations and tallied about 2 million registered users on my.BarackObama.com, the campaign’s social networking platform. Seventy thousand myBO members had used the site to conduct their own personalized fundraising campaigns.

Since 2008, enthusiasm for Obama has waned, but his online presence hasn’t. His base on Facebook has soared nearly six times from the 4 million he had on Election Day, and his following on Twitter now stands at 10 million, dwarfing the Republican field.

So even if Obama isn’t drawing millions of people off their sofas to rally to his side on their own in 2012, his team has a huge amount of raw data to work with as they build his re-election machine.

If the 2012 election comes down to a battle of inches, where a few percentage points change in turnout in a few key states making all the difference, we may come to see Obama’s investment in predictive modelers and data scientists as the key to victory.

What a Startup Company Founder’s Priority List Looks Like

Leading a startup company is nothing like leading a big, established company. Startups are focused foremost on survival, while big companies direct their efforts toward growth or in the worst case, slowing decline.

It’s natural that many entrepreneurs start companies with a task list that looks a lot like it did at their old job. After all, they’re likely coming from an established career in a big company. Big companies (usually) have the critical infrastructure in place and as inefficient as they may be, workers are free to look much farther down the road.

Startup Founders don’t get the luxury of looking too far down the road. They don’t get to spend inordinate amounts of time on product development or internal policy making. For this reason, a startup Founder’s priority list looks a whole lot different.

Job #1: Get Money in the Door

A Founder’s most important question is “do we have enough money to make it past our next milestone?” If the Founder can’t answer “yes,” then solving customer problems, addressing HR issues, and planning for the long term just won’t matter.

An underfunded company doesn’t have to worry about these issues. That’s because without additional capital, they will soon be out of business altogether! Therefore a startup needs to focus on keeping the lights on before it can even worry about solving day-to-day issues.

It’s not uncommon for a startup to spend far more time selling to investors than it does to customers. While this may feel like a distraction (which it is) it’s a necessary evil that supersedes all other activities.

#2: Sell More Stuff

Aside from raising capital to get started, sales are by far the most important activity any company can spend its time on. A simple way to consider this priority is – if you have sales and a crappy product, you can afford to improve your product. If you have a great product and no sales, you’re dead.

It’s a widely held belief that a great product will sell itself. Sure, great products sell better, but perfection can’t be pursued at the expense of a massive sales effort. Very few products are just so great that they sell themselves and become profitable.

What drives a company forward is its ability to focus its time on actually selling the product in the market, not refining the product in the lab.

#3: Hire Brilliant Staff

Staffing brilliant people sounds like an obvious thing to do, but in practice few people make it a true priority. It consumes more time and energy to hire brilliant people which is why most settle for “good enough.”

A startup’s ability to succeed in the market has everything to do with the key staff members it finds early on. If you’re rushing through your staffing process, pulling the trigger on the first resumes that float through your inbox, you’re doing the company a huge disservice.

Instead, make hiring brilliant staff a priority even if it takes substantial time away from other activities (that don’t involve sales or capital raising!) The time spent finding a better-qualified candidate will be repaid by their more competent execution of important startup tasks.

#4: Everything Else

After raising capital, increasing sales, and hiring brilliant people comes everything else. The trouble is that most entrepreneurs start with everything else and only plan to address the more critical items.

At some point you need to buy post-it notes, answer customer calls, address product problems, and take a shower. But if you put those activities first, you won’t be in business long enough to continue doing them.

The Priority Filter

A good way to help manage your activities is to create a “priority filter”. If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you manage you work through a daily task list that changes all the time. More often than not, you get easily swept into the mundane activities that are calling your attention.

Simply putting your top three tasks – raising capital, driving sales, and finding brilliant people, to the top of the stack can serve as a constant reminder of your priorities.

Unlike simple tasks like “buying office supplies” that have a defined start and end period, your ongoing priorities may seem hard to handle if you just lump them under one big “to do”. The best way to handle this is to create smaller sub-tasks under each, like “call three new customers today” or “create a draft of the pitch deck” that can be accomplished definitively.

When you’re still a startup, every moment you devote to your priorities comes at the cost of getting other stuff done. It’s a zero sum game. Yet the benefit of putting your time and effort into your priorities will provide a much greater return on your time investment than running errands and getting distracted.

You’ve got 80 hours per week to work on stuff – stick to the big items and you’ll be in great shape!

Sell the Potential, not the Present

Image via Wikipedia

So there you are on day one of your new venture. You’ve thought long and hard about your new idea and you’re ready to build a great company that is going to change the world. Now it’s time to attract customers, employees, and investors. No problem, right?

Except for the fact that you have absolutely nothing to offer anyone because your company does not have an office, a product, or a single employee! So how do you get started with this world-changing vision if you have few assets to leverage?

The simple answer – sell the dream, baby, sell the dream!

The Vision is the Asset

A startup company has only one asset – the vision of what the company might be someday. Today it’s just some poor guy burning through his life savings hoping all his hard work will pay off. No one wants to quit their job to go work for that vision!

Yet employees will jump out of bed to work for a vision they believe in, even if the paycheck isn’t there just yet. Investors get excited about the idea of making an enormous return on a single investment. And customers are always interested in the next best product from the next best company. You need to become all of these.

While you cannot completely ignore where you are today, you should not let that define the prospective opportunity your company offers. From a practical perspective, most startup companies evolve so quickly that they’re not even worth describing in current terms. Your focus should be on getting the company to where it will be, not dwelling on its position today.

What you are is what you Intend to be

Apple Computer has been long honored for having one of the most cult-like followings among employees, investors and customers. Apple founder Steve Jobs created a vision that the company would develop “insanely great” products and the people surrounding him believed it as much as he did. As a consequence, they do create these amazing products (we love you, iPod, iPhone, iPad) because they believe so passionately in the vision of what they intend to become.

Think of yourself as an author telling the story of what your company will become. The author is the visionary and the messenger — seeing the vision and sharing it with others. You can envision what your office will look like, what your product will sell for, and how happy customers will be when they purchase the product. Give that vision color and detail. Have fun with it. The more those around you can see the vision as clearly as you, the more likely they will be to accept it as their own.

Keep in mind who you are selling the dream to and how your dream affects their well being, not yours. Don’t try to impress potential investors by telling them how rich this new idea is going to make you, tell them how rich you are going to make them! Paint the picture in a prospective employees mind by telling them how great their job is going to be day-to-day, not just how great the company will be in the future. You’re asking these people to take on a considerable risk so you need to make the prospect of a big return as tangible and visible as possible.

It’s true if you Believe it

Even more important than selling the vision is believing that you can execute on it. Anyone you are talking to will need to be convinced that your vision will actually become a reality, and that comes with bit of planning and a whole lot of optimism. If it weren’t for the wild-eyed optimism and belief that a crazy vision could become a reality, companies like eBay, Amazon and now Google would never have succeeded.

Consider the fact that Google had a vision to become the leading search company at a time when competitors like Yahoo and Excite had already dominated the search engine space and many thought there was no room to compete. Within just over five years they went from a simple vision to an IPO reality based on selling a dream that most thought could not possibly come to fruition.

Make the Vision Huge

Don’t be shy about making your vision huge. The great thing about being a startup is that anything is possible – so let it be! It’s OK to dream a little bit. Amazon.com wasn’t built on the prospect that they might sell a few books. They dreamed of being the world’s largest on-line book store from the beginning and that’s exactly what they became.

If you’re going to dream, dream big.