Opening talk at the Social Media for Insurances Symposium

I was invited to Leipzig to talk about social networks and in the context of insurance companies (http://www.versicherungsforen.net/social-media). The main focus of the talk was to show what people currently do in social networks and to speculate why they do it (and  I used a picture of the seven deadly sins as an illustrations…) Additionally I discussed some prototypes of activity recognition and their potential once integrated into social media.

My talk was entitled “500 Freunde (auf Facebook): Wozu noch eine Versicherung?“ – „500 friends (on Facebook) – Is there still need for insurance?“ and discussed how ubiquitous capture and social media may shape the next community [1]. The slides in are in German.

The event was very interesting and I would expect that there is a great potential out there for insurance companies to tap into. Looking back at the original idea of insurance (e.g. old fire insurance communities) or sharing the risk of hail in farming communities can give interesting inspiration for peer-2-peer insurance models. It will be exciting to see if there a new products and services that come out of the “big players” or if new players will come to the game. To me the central issue to address is how to make insurance products more visible – and I think a user centered design approach could be very interesting…

In the future I would expect that finding the right value mix (privacy, price, safety, etc.) will be essential as we argued for other services in [2]. Some years back we wrote in an article about RFID [3] “privacy is sacred but cheap” and the more services we see the more I am convinced that this is more than a slogan. If you can create a service that is of immediate value to the user I would I expect that privacy will be a lesser concern to most? On the other hand if you reduce privacy without any value in exchange there is always an outcry…

[1] “500 Freunde (auf Facebook): Wozu noch eine Versicherung?“ – Ermöglichen allgegenwärtige Aufzeichnungs-technologien und digitale soziale Netze die nächste Solidargemeinschaft? Slides as PDF (in German)
[2] Albrecht Schmidt, Marc Langheinrich, Kristian Kersting, „Perception beyond the Here and Now,“ Computer, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 86-88, Feb. 2011, doi:10.1109/MC.2011.54 (final version at IEEE, free draft version)
[3] Schmidt, A.; Spiekermann, S.; Gershman, A.; Michahelles, F., „Real-World Challenges of Pervasive Computing„, Pervasive Computing, IEEE , vol.5, no.3pp. 91- 93, c3, July-Sept. 2006. 10.1109/MPRV.2006.57

GPS monitoring for car insurance

In my talk at ISUVR2008 I referred to an example where an insurance is monitor driving behavior and makes a tariff according to this. Some people asked me for more details and
references, here they are…

My example was based on the pilot announced from the German insurance WGV. They planned to run a pilot with 1500 people using a GPS based monitoring devices. The box is mounted in the car and compares the current speed with the allowed speed limit and warns to reduce speed (if over the limit). If the driver is more than 12 times per year over the speed limit (basically ignoring the warning) he does not get the reduced rate. (see http://www.wgv-online.de/docs/youngandsafe.pdf – in German only). In the announcement it said they will run the pilot to 2009…

There are different ideas how to take GPS driving monitoring beyond the lab, e.g. in 2007 Royal & SunAlliance announced a GPS-based eco car insurance and the AIG a Teen GPS Program – targeted at parents.

Looking at different comments (on news pages and in blogs) it seems that people’s opinions are very split…