Doc Searls: The Internet frees customers & helps companies improve service

Internet visionary Doc Searls says that while companies have always thought of customers as captive, they've suddenly awoken to the fact that customers are now willing and able to dictate their own specific product preferences. Instead of the 'guesswork' by which companies attempted to ascertain what customers wanted, a more open system of 'free range' customers will bring better intelligence into the marketplace.

In this video interview, Doc Searls talks about how the Internet frees customers & helps companies serve them with Ideas Project, a new website brought to you by Nokia. Ideas Project is an online space that provides a new way to interact with thought leaders and their big ideas about the future of connected communications. For more on this idea from Searls, visit http://www.ideasproject.com.

Doc Searls is well known as a visionary, a blogger, an open-source software advocate, and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, which in 1999 articulated the impact of the Internet in 95 theses. At the Berkman Center, Doc has pioneered the development of VRM (Vendor Relationship Management Systems) to liberate customers and improve markets by creating a productive balance of power in relationships between supply and demand. A featured speaker at countless events and trade shows, his writings have appeared in OMNI, Wired, PC Magazine, The Standard, and Release 1.0, among others, and he has consulted, on behalf of his company, The Searls Group, for clients such as Hitachi, Sun, Apple, Nortel, Borland, British Telecom, and Motorola. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman calls Doc 'one of the most respected technology writers in America.' In 2005, he won the Google O'Reilly Open Source Award for Best Communicator and in 2007 he was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in IT by eWeek.

Ideas Project, a project of Nokia, brings together the most visionary and influential big thinkers to contemplate the big ideas that matter most to the future of communications. It is also a new kind of conversation platform aimed at uncovering the connections between these big thinkers and their disruptive ideas.

Explore the Ideas Project website at http://www.ideasproject.com, subscribe to its RSS feed, join its Twitter feed, and come back often to learn about great new big ideas as they break.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Nokia
• Ideas Project
• Thought leaders
• Big ideas
• New website
• Big thinkers
• Information space
• Video interview
• Connections
• Disruptive technology
• Doc Searls
• Cluetrain Manifesto
• Berkman Center
• Linux Journal