What is co-creation?

Co-creation is one of the most descriptive buzz-words currently in the business lexicon, but what does it really mean? At the highest level most people would agree it means creating something with another party. The relationship between the co-creating partners and whether one of them buys the goods or services created complicates matters.

There seems to be a spectrum of co-creations ranging from the rather simple on the one hand to complex partnerships between massive global brands on the other. Dominos let their customers custom create their own pizzas. Is this co-creation? There are two parties involved and one of them is ultimately buying the creation. If it is co-creation it is on the left-hand side of our spectrum, at the simple end. Some will define co-creation as pretty much any situation where an end-customer is involved or consulted in the product design process but, to me, this is an over-simplification.

Staying with the food service industry there are numerous examples where food brands team-up with fast-food restaurants to co-create an offering they then sell to the end-user. These are quite often specials which leverage the brand-appeal of both parties to sell something which is greater than the two halves. Examples, in the UK, include the Reggae Reggae Chicken Sub in 2008 where Levi Roots of Dragon’s Den fame co-created a Subway sandwich.  This is a more interesting example because the two parties in the co-creation are not the ultimate end-customer. In this example a new product is being created that neither party could have created alone. Essentially the two brands are combining in order to create - co-creating.

At the more complex end of the scale there are some very large strategic partnerships between global names. The IBM Apple partnership is one such example where there is more than just a single product developed. These kind of collaborations can also often be seen in the luxury goods industry where aspirational brands will join together create an uber product such as the Breitling for Bentley watches or the various Oakley Ferrari sunglasses. ​

Co-creation means all of these things right along the spectrum from examples where the end-customer is one of the parties right to the global mega-deal between brands. Personally I think the more trivial examples are a little invalid and I’d go as far as to say a co-creation needs two parties and a separate party to buy. Others though will disagree.

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​There have been a lot of high profile data leaks and hacks recently. How would you know if your data, your login credentials or something even worse was out in the public domain?

There are a few sites where you can search for your information and see if you've been unlucky, the most famous being Have I been pwned. You can also sign up for alerts at these kind of sites so you don't have to constantly visit and search. Pastebin is one of the places where sites like the one above check for leaked details. Pastebin has long been a favourite place for Ne'er-do-wells to paste log-in credentials and other leaked data in 'pastes'. Pastebin themselves seem to be aware of this and have their own alert service that lets you monitor their pastes pretty much in real time. You need a paid account to do this but they are not expensive. They simply let you create a list of keywords and if a paste appears that contains the text they send you an email. You can use your email address, your name, your address or anything else you are worried might get out there. I've done this for a while and the amount of alerts I get is a bit scary - my namesakes seem to have their passwords compromised on a regular basis. The most common type are 'dumps' of email and password pairs from compromised websites.
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Now using the built in Pastebin alerts is interesting but for those with a technical disposition there is also an API. There are a few reasons why you might want to build your own solution. Firstly the Pastebin alerts only sends you a link to the actual paste and quite often they get removed before you click on the link in your email. By building you own solution with the API you can save the whole text to look at later. You can also have more than the standard 15 keywords if you build it yourself. The DIY approach means you can customise the alert mechanism to do something other than send an email. You could send an SMS or use of the of the mobile push applications like Pushbullet or Pushover.
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The best reason for me though was this is interesting technology to play with. To this end I spend a couple of hours writing a simple monitor in Python. It's not the most elegant code I've ever written but it works and is published here on Github. 

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In the new world of clouds and everything-as-service does geography really matter? Your data is 'in the cloud'. Some as-a-service providers won't tell you or at least won't commit to where it is. This position of geography is unimportant might work in some cases but as soon as you try and do something serious it matters, and it matters a lot. Most people have spotted that cloud is just 'someone else's' computer and this means these computers physically exist somewhere outside of the virtual marketing 'cloud'. Location is important for many reasons technical, commercial and legislative.
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If you ask a 'techie'  why geography is important they'll likely say 'latency'. Fundamentally you can't change the laws of physics and it takes time for light to travel down fibres to where the computer in the cloud is physically located. Factor in the various networking and security kit between point A and B and it really matters. In Europe the various as-a-services data centres are close together from a networking latency point of view. If you start to traverse the Atlantic those milliseconds start to add up quite quickly. As we increasingly assemble solutions built from multiple as-service providers in multiple physical data centres we have to consider geography because of latency and the number of 'hops'. In the bad old days it was easy, everything was sat in the same data centre and the only time you worried about latency was to your secondary site for Disaster Recovery and maybe the odd external interface.

Ask a non-techie about geography and you might get someone pointing out that geography means jurisdiction. It is important to understand where your data is stored as well who can access and where from. Data residency is a complicated subject, there is a raft of legislation to comply with as well commercial agreements and sensitivity of end customers to where their data is. The good news here is that as-a-service providers generally tackle this one head on and are very happy to tell you that your data is or isn't in the EU or EEA, for example. For the more paranoid (including those with real reasons to be paranoid) there is also the issue of who has access to the data both officially and otherwise. Clearly geography has a role to play here as does the nationally of the provider.

Of course geography matters ...

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