TrustFabric - Most ambitious startup ever
tylerreed.com
tylerreed.com
Is that "an new" an error or some obscure rule I don't know about.
I have seen enough CRM projects fail to consider them to be hard. For all we know consumer-side CRM might be really hard. After all, it involves human relations. Perhaps someone will come along one day and prove that creating the perfect CRM system involves solving a really hard arithmetic problem.
Given their admittedly very clear privacy policy does not rule out selling your information in aggregate or in detail nor changing the policy without explicit notification they've fallen before the first hurdle.
We desperately need a neutral provider of cryptographically secure identity, ideally that can be verified against 3rd parties such as banks or passports. The problem is I don't know what the business model for that looks like.
Other than that, I'm intrigued.
We've talked about doing something similar, but if we do, it will be a byproduct of our primary product becoming successful, so we have something to pay the bills.
My money is on "not very high".
If I understand this right - not only do you avoid having to fill out the same address forms over and over for different services, you avoid the monumental task of making sure all of your information is up to date on major life events like moving, marriage, etc.
If I could avoid typing my shipping addresses in every online order form sourced from a trusted place (browser auto-fill is shit), I'd use the service in a heartbeat. Only updating one service when I move apartments? Sign me up.
But I'm pretty sure that developing a HIPAA-compliant system, and then convincing every doctor's office in the country to switch to it won't be covered by a $20/year subscription fee.
Thawte was founded in 1995 by Mark Shuttleworth in South Africa and was originally run from Shuttleworth's parents' garage. It became the second largest public certificate authority on the Internet and sold for hundreds of millions of USD within a few years.
The reason it was so difficult to explain was because the starting premise centered around technology that still isn't in the market: Near Field Communication (NFC). As NFC becomes a physicalID<--->digitalID, and serves as a basis for payment, the companies involved in payment processing, the banks, and the merchants one patronizes become quite capable of compiling vast amounts of data that could be seen as quite personal. However, because the concept seems very convenient in many ways, those that are uncomfortable with the potential data mining will still be using cash. So, the idea was to put a buffer between the people and the businesses that had yet to earn one's trust.
Yes, I agree that from a business owner’s perspective dollars spent marketing towards prospective customers who want to hear from you are more efficient outflows than towards those who do not want to hear from you. However, one underlying concept of marketing to new prospective customers is the introduction of a novel product for which they previously were unaware existed. Therefore, how would a customer who does not know that a product produced by Seller X existed approve Seller X to begin soliciting their business? This may be a fundamental flaw in the business or maybe the YouTube video is just more customer-centric than business to make this apparent to potential business customers (for which I assume are the ones who will generate revenue). I’d like to see their pitch to business customers before deciding either way. I like the concept but I am not yet sold on some of the inherent biz model fundamentals as of yet. I’m sure that over time they will work this and other issues out.
In most cases first-to-market provides an advantage. However, in some instances of extreme novel concepts where timing isn’t yet appropriate, first-to-market simply provides paving of a runway for others to take flight from and eventually leap-frog the trailblazers whose time & resources made things easier for those before them. This concept may be a bit early (aprox 5 years) but I wish them luck as I am always pulling for the Pioneer rather than the better-timed copycat.
Losing your e-mail address currently requires hard work on the apart of the assailants to cause you actual financial harm. With this they will be able to interact with real world vendors as you.
On the plus side, exciting times ahead! This is the sort of thing that reminds me we are living in the future. Good luck launching.
Was it because of the decentralization aspect? Techies seem to be in love with 'decentralization' and 'federation' (witness the diaspora love last year), but average people aren't, and you need average people to be using a system like this in large quantities before companies who might use it have to take you seriously.
This scenario they are tackling is classic chicken and egg, and I'm not sure it's going to be solved outside of a major player like google, facebook or microsoft (or potentially LinkedIn, Apple or Yahoo, but both are longshots). The population at large is starting to grasp the concept of an online identity, as well as the benefits and challenges of controlling aspects of privacy over the web. I don't want to say it would be trivial, but certainly doable for FB or Google to give you a way to allow ID pulls from companies wanting to sync your data in to their CRM systems - they're already doing it with loads of games/apps. A bit more granularity and a nicer UI would go a long way in this space to not only owning and defining it, but preventing any serious competition from upstarts like trustfabric.
If TF can find a way of leveraging existing SN identities as a jumpstart, they may have something. But... for mass adoption, I fear the brand recognition is likely going to keep us tied to a FB/GOOG duopoly for a while.
Was not trying to be a jerk. I thought I was missing something.
Best of luck!
Food for thought.
We tracked clicks on our own (physical) servers but for impressions, you're talking a system built to serve upwards of 30bn a month. While nothing compared to industry-leaders (Google, DoubleClick, etc), that's still around 10,000 impressions a second.'
We had no problem building a system on our inhouse servers to handle that 10k/s number: A very thin PHP instance running on port 80 that does nothing but push the impression into a Gearman queue. Easy enough, even at that scale.
The problem of course is that you're not getting 10k/s. Some seconds you may get 100k, others 1k.
So we built a simple system that automatically spawned S3 instances when we began to see high loads, distributed the latest code to them, and when we no longer needed them, we downloaded the DB they held locally and moved the data to HDFS.
What we did is pretty common, I'm sure. It's all pretty straightforward software.
Facebook has gone some of the way to doing this, with me being able to remove access to apps I've previously given access to; however, I'd like to be able to upload customize custom documents, such as my passport or proof of residence, and then be able to share them with specific companies.
It seems like TrustFabric may go some of the to enabling the above?
People are strange. I think a lot of Americans especially do not really know how to categorize South Africa.
EDIT: When the NSTIC was announced, many organisations I respect, and typically agree with, game out against it[1]:
"Shortly after the draft's release, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, in conjunction with a number of other consumer-rights and civil liberties organizations[5], sent the Committee a statement in response to the draft NSTIC policy, requesting that the White House provide a clearer and more complete plan to create and safeguard Internet users' rights and privacy."
"TrustFabric is a startup based in Cape Town, South Africa, writing Vendor Relationship Management software. VRM gives customers a platform to represent their side of the VRM+CRM relationship. TrustFabric gives individuals control over their information.
The TrustFabric platform allows individuals to keep their personal information up-to-date in one place and then selectively and securely share that information with the organisations they have relationships with."