Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Wed, 11 May 2011 16:30:00 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110506/23561014193/last-call-our-privacy-dinner-salon.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110506/23561014193/last-call-our-privacy-dinner-salon.shtml Insight Dinner Salon held together with Privacy Identity Innovation 2011. The dinner will be on May 18th, in Santa Clara, California, and is shaping up to be a wonderful evening full of insightful people on the topic of privacy. We've already named some of our excellent facilitators for the evening, and wanted to add a few more great names to the list of facilitators:

• Owen Tripp: The co-founder and COO of Reputation.com, one of the foremost online "reputation management" firms out there, and someone with a ton of experience and knowledge on issues related to privacy online.
• Jim Brock: Founded and operates PrivacyChoice.org, which is a site for consumers to help make managing their online privacy easier. Obviously, he's got tons of insight into privacy issues.
• Colin O'Malley: VP of Biz Dev and Privacy for Evidon, which helps deal with behavioral advertising and privacy issues. Before that, he was VP of Strategic Partnerships at TRUSTe, and has been deeply involved in privacy issues for many years.

Combine that with the previously announced Esther Dyson, Tara Hunt and Berin Szoka, and we've got a nice well-rounded group of facilitators, who will certainly make the evening's discussions quite insightful.

Again, this is a dinner salon, so the idea isn't to have these folks as talking heads, but instead they'll help kick off the discussion, which will lead into smaller tabletop discussions on the issue of privacy in an era where your "customers" may also be your "product." So, come prepared to participate and have some interesting and enlightening discussions.

We have a very small number of spots left, and fully expect them to sell out by Friday at the latest. So if you're thinking of coming, please sign up now...

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]]> sign-up-now-or... http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110506/23561014193 Wed, 27 Apr 2011 16:18:12 PDT Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110426/02220814035/what-youll-be-missing-if-you-dont-attend-our-dinner-salon-privacy.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110426/02220814035/what-youll-be-missing-if-you-dont-attend-our-dinner-salon-privacy.shtml announced that we're hosting an Insight Dinner salon in Santa Clara, in partnership with the Privacy Identity Innovation 2011 conference (pii2011). The idea behind the dinner is to get a lot of smart people in the room and discuss some important topics in a manner that everyone can learn from each other. The specific topic for this dinner will be about how companies need to deal with privacy issues when their "customers" are also their "product." As we've seen that creates some very different and unique challenges.

We're thrilled to announce the first group of facilitators who will be part of the discussion. First up is Esther Dyson -- who you hopefully already know about. If not, she's one of the most perceptive and insightful observers, commentators and investors in modern technology. Then we have Tara Hunt, the author of The Whuffie Factor and CEO of Buyosphere, and someone well known in the internet world for her contributions to understanding marketing, social capital and business in the digital age. Next up, we've got Berin Szoka, the founder and President of TechFreedom, a recently launched tech policy think tank that is doing some really excellent work on the intersection of technology and freedom. Szoka recently put out the book the Next Digital Decade, with insightful essays on where the tech world is heading.

That's only the first batch of facilitators. We'll name the second batch as we get a little closer to the event. However, it really is going to be a great evening with tons of insightful and knowledgeable attendees. The event is doubling as the speakers dinner for pii2011, so we'll have a bunch of the speakers from that event attending and participating in the discussions as well. If privacy issues are important to you, it's an event not to be missed. While we'll certainly provide some sort of writeup/coverage of the event, the point of this is the participation and the discussion. We hope you can join us. We do have limited spaces left at this point, so don't wait too long in booking a ticket.

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]]> join-us http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110426/02220814035 Wed, 12 May 2010 20:34:37 PDT Dennis Yang http://www.techdirt.com/blog/entrepreneurs/articles/20100507/1818079346.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/blog/entrepreneurs/articles/20100507/1818079346.shtml false). That said, a restaurant is a business like any other, so experimentation with new business models is important, especially in tough economic times like we have been facing in recent years. Traditionally, restaurant reservations can be canceled at the whim of the diner without penalty, but for an industry, whose margins are continually squeezed, canceled reservations could make the difference between a profitable night and an unprofitable one. Restaurants sell a limited amount of daily perishable goods and services, which draws many parallels to both the theater and airline businesses. So, perhaps restaurateurs took note of these similarities for themselves when they started selling "tickets" for their nightly dinners instead of taking reservations. In addition to tickets to individual dinners, the restaurants also offer subscriptions to a whole season of dinners -- another tactic lifted right out of the playbook of theaters. These restaurateurs correctly recognize that dining out is not just about the food; it is a social experience just like a concert, the movies, or a sporting event.

The benefit for the restaurant is that even if the diner doesn't show up for the meal, the restaurant isn't stuck holding the bag -- the responsibility to offload an unwanted dinner ticket then shifts to the diner rather than the business. Furthermore with a guarantee of revenue for the evening, shopping for expensive perishables in preparation for an evening's dinner service is much easier. That said, pre-paying for a night's meal is a complete departure from the regular dining out experience, so at first, I can really only see this tactic working for a set of exclusive restaurants. After all, online reservation marketplace TableXchange folded last year, citing empty tables at even the most popular dining hotspots.



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