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What is the Personal Data Ecosystem?

The Startup Circle

1 June 2011 By 26 Comments
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These companies are part of the first class of the PDEC Startup Circle. They are developing the tools and systems for personal control over personal data. Architecting user-managed systems to track and manage a new asset class with value in the billions: personal data. Privacy protections are just the tip of the iceberg; the industry of managing these assets wisely is in the process of creating new economic opportunities and is a magnet for talent and capital.

Members of the PDEC Startup Circle:

imageAzigo. Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts
Your data defines you. Own it.
“We’re a happy band of developers, designers and entrepreneurs dedicated to the idea that the more control you have over your own data the more compelling your online experience will be, and the more privacy you will enjoy. Although the data wallet app is new and yet to launch, it stands on a technology platform that has evolved over several years by building solutions for PayPal, Google, Mydex, IBM, Equifax, Acxiom, BBB.org, and others.” Private beta signup.
Paul Trevithick, CEO. Blog post: Why must a personal data ecosystem emerge?

Buyosphere. Montreal, QC, Canada
“Buyosphere is a tool to help you take control of your shopping history: organize it, share it and track how you influence others. Our aim is to turn around consumer culture so that customers have more control over their own data. We have a pretty good inkling that this data will become more and more valuable as time goes on. Ever see Minority Report? You know that scene where Tom Cruise’s character is walking through the passageways and being bombarded with ads? That is what is happening today with every transaction we make on our credit cards and anywhere we leave a trail of our information (aka Internet). Sure, some of the results of this will be positive (better recommendations), but imagine if we could turn some of this around? I think we could set our own parameters and have our future look a bit less invasive.” Buyosphere’s Data Portability policy.
Tara Hunt, Jerome Paradis, Cassandra Girard, co-founders. Email.  Twitter.

imageConnect.me. San Francisco, California
Get more out of your connections.
“Connect.Me is a San Francisco based company creating a personal layer for the social web. Build your reputation and gain access to respected people and communities across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Vouch for people you respect and get vouched for your skills or passions. At Connect.Me, we believe that privacy, control, and reputation are the big challenges and opportunities for the social web. We published the Respect Trust Framework as the first personal trust framework that gives individuals control over the personal data they share on the Internet or social networks.”
Joe Johnston, CEO and co-founder.
Media contact: Drummond Reed on twitter, skype. +1.206.618.8530. Blog post: Connect.Me Joins PDEC Startup Circle for quotes from Johnston, Reed.

egoArchive. Wien, Austria
egoArchive is your own personal archive. It’s a simple, smart, and powerful way to remember everything you’ve seen on your online travels. In addition to indexing all the content you’ve visited, egoArchive will take a screenshot of every page, allowing you to not only find content, but view it exactly the way it looked on the day you visited the page.
office@egoArchive.com

imageGluu. Bulverde, Texas
A New Dawn for Federated Identity
“The Gluu Identity Appliance turns a public or private cloud instance into an organizational identity provider (IDP). The primary reason an organization would want to have an IDP is for single sign-on to several websites. Gluu leverages the Shibboleth SAML platform, which was developed by universities and is deployed at hundreds of institutions. The Identity Appliance greatly reduces the complexity of deploying and managing an IDP infrastructure.”
Michael Schwartz, CEO and Founder. +1-646-558-0023. info@gluu.org..

Kynetx. Lehi, Utah
Kynetx offers the first platform for connecting personal data stores with services and websites in a contextually aware and secure way. Pioneering the Live Web, Kynetx provides developers with a way to loosely-couple multiple systems and build applications that respond to who we are, what we are doing and what we are interested in. The Live Web promises to make everything around us more responsive to our unique interests and activities, whether on the web, on your mobile device and beyond. Phil Windley, CTO. email: info@kynetx.com twitter: kynetx website: apps.kynetx.com / developer.kynetx.com

imageMydex.org. Larbert, Stirlingshire, UK
Your data, your way
“Mydex’s mission is to help individuals realise the value of their personal data. We do this by providing individuals with Personal Data Stores and related services. Personal Data Stores help individuals gather, store, manage, use and share the information they need to manage their lives better. They provide individuals with tools to control what information they share with which people and organisations, when they choose.”
William Heath, Chairman. +44 (0)7973 115 024.

MyINFOSAFE. New Zealand
myINFOSAFE is a PC software application that helps you organize & protect your personal information.
Ross Hughson, CEO and founder, Personal Information Management Ltd.

imagePeercraft. Copenhagen, Denmark.
Peercraft is a commercial agent acting on behalf of and managed by its private users. Peercraft will help consumers discover relevant vendors and support their negotiations and transactions with vendors through value adding information processing, reputation building, and accountability.
Henrik Biering, CEO. email.

imagePersonal InfoCloud. Bethesda, Maryland.
A social interaction design and analyst firm specializing in personal data reuse and vendor relationship management.
Thomas Vander Wal, Principal. email. skype. +1 240.481.8063. blog.

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Personal Washington, D.C.
Personal is a web and mobile platform that enables individuals to own, control access to and benefit from their data by organizing and managing their information within our private data vault. We believe that people, not companies, should own their data and decide how it’s used.
Shane Green, Co-Founder and CEO. Media contact: Karen Sippel, email, +1-202-559-7318. Twitter.
Video about Personal.

Privo. Vienna, Virginia
Privacy, Permission & Trust
“Privo is the trusted third party provider of age verification for minors and parent permission management solutions, enabling our customers to provide a safe online environment for minors.”
Denise Tayloe, CEO. Media: Carol Altarescu, +1-914–523–9578, caltarescu@privo.com.

imageProject Danube. Wien, Austria.
Open-Source Sofware for Identity & Personal Data Services
“Project Danube is an open-source project offering software for identity and personal data services on the Internet. The core of this project is an XDI-based Personal Data Store – a semantic database for your personal data, which always remains under your control. Applications on top of this database include the Federated Social Web, the selective sharing of personal data with organizations, and much more.”
Markus Sabadello, CEO. twitter, +43 664 3154848.

PDEC Startup Circle Statement from Markus Sabadello on Vimeo. (2:01)

Qiy. Netherlands
Qiy is an independent and secure ‘utility’, which enables an individual to create an intelligent personal domain online, thereby giving individuals control, overview and insight into their data.
In collaboration with world-renowned technology partners Qiy develops -with a communal objective- an independent and secure platform. With this platform Qiy creates a ‘digital home’ for the online user.
Qiy users have the possibility to store their data in their Qiy domain as well as receive data from relevant organizations. In this way, individuals get a clear insight in their own situation because organizations present their data through the Qiy platform to the individuals. Organizations do not only give back the information they have to the individual, but also make available relevant applications. These applications enable individuals to get insight in their own situation.
Qiy is an answer to the ever-increasing amount of data on the Internet and prevents the wandering of personal information on the Internet. Qiy is an ideal translated into an independent initiative for everyone.
Qiy aspires to be socially relevant and considers corporate social responsibility (CSR) to be of great importance. This belief is expressed by a separate foundation that oversees the interpretation and implementation of CSR/charity projects resulting from the return of Qiy.


Reputation.com. Redwood City, California.
Take Control. Get Results.
Reputation.com is the global leader of online reputation management and privacy solutions. With customers in more than 100 countries, the company is working towards its mission to empower individuals and businesses with control of their information online.
Michael Fertik, CEO and Founder, World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer 2011.
Media contact: skype. +1-650-409-7371. twitter.

Singly. San Francisco
“Locker pulls together all of my personal data – my tweets, my photos, my contacts and all my social relationships. It holds things like my email, call logs, and purchase history. It does a bunch of complicated things for me, so that developers don’t have to. It puts me at the center of the web, and allows me to choose where, when and with whom I share copies of my data.”
Jason Cavnar, CEO.

Synergetics. Antwerp, Belgium
As an innovation company, Synergetics initiated multiple larger European, as well as Dutch and Flemish research projects (Prolix, TAS³, TenCompetence, Codrive, Kennisnet ePortfolio & IBBT projects). Their results are consistently built into the Synergetics Employability Process Platform, which supports employability related business processes such as learning (LCMS/LMS), knowledge production, & competence development, certification of acquired competences, and competency, matching and HR-process integration. Synergetics invented the concept of employabilityPortfolio as the (virtual) placeholder for all related Human Factor data and, as the HR-XML Competency chair, Synergetics is currently managing the development of a new global standard for competency profiles. Synergetics is partnering with the world’s leading technology vendors such as GiuntiLabs (LCMS-based content production facility, mobile learning), Xerceo (enterprise integration of learning and knowledge management), Intalio (BPMS/SOA) and integrates open software components where possible: Liferay, Alfresco, Fedora, Intalio, etc…
Luk Vervenne, CEO.

SwitchBook. Santa Barbara, California
Complex Searches Made Simple
“SwitchBook helps manage user-driven searches across multiple search providers and websites, creating a powerful new way to explicitly express search intent anywhere on the Internet.”
Joe Andrieu, CEO. email. +1 (805) 705-8651

imageThe Customer’s Voice. London, UK.
You at the centre of your online buying
The Customer’s Voice helps individuals better manage their supply relationships, and in doing so provides organisations with the reasons and means to engage with VRM-enabled individuals, to the benefit of both parties. Our service will launch as an application on the Mydex platform in late 2011.
Iain Henderson, CEO. email. twitter. Blogged remarks on joining the PDEC Startup circle.

We currently have two classes of new startups that join the circle each January and June. To Learn more about joining the Startup Circle please contact Executive Director Kaliya Hamlin – @identitywoman.

You can download a One Pager about the Startup Circle and our Executive Summary:
 

PDEC Programs

28 February 2011 By

Standards Engagement and Development

Community Participation:

To succeed, an effective personal data ecosystem needs to use open standards to allow many different services to interoperate.    Many of these already exist, or are under development however it is not possible for all companies to engage with all the various standards efforts or to track all the emerging proposals that could affect the ecosystem. PDEC is already proactively engaged in a number of standards technical committees and presenting at workshops of ISO’s that touch on this area including:

  • Information Sharing Working Group, Kantara
  • Activity Streams, Independent (under the Open Web Foundation Agreements)
  • Federated Social Web, W3C
  • XRI/XDI, OASIS
  • User Managed Access, Kantara
  • IDTrust Member section, OASIS
  • Do Not Track, W3C Workshop
  • Identity in the Browser, W3C Workshop

Other areas of technical community engagement include Augmented Reality, Geolocation and Privacy, the Internet of Subjects in Europe, InCommon the Higher Education Federation in the US, ePortfolio standards, Open Identity Exchange for Trust Frameworks, Data Portability Project, and Quantified Self Movement.

Industry Outreach

Technologies don’t develop in isolation; they have neighboring technology and business communities who need to know about and understand emerging efforts and trends. The Leaders of PDEC leadership leverage relationships with other communities, fostering open communication with them including attending and speaking at their events. Communities include:

The Privacy Community, Security Industry, Children Online, Nonprofit Technology, Big Data, Semantic Web, Green and Sustainable Business, Open Source Communities, Online Communities, Federated Social Web, Finance and Banking, Health, Public Engagement, Web 2.0 Startups, Cloud, Geolocation, Cloud Services,  Advertising Industry and Publishing Industry.

 

Development of the Ecosystem Vision & Evangelism

Our vision for the ecosystem is inclusive of a wide range of potential services and business models, while holding true to the core non-negotiable that people are ultimately in control of the sum of their data. We envision a future where people proactively control the integration, analysis, value extraction, and social collaborative opportunities arising from the digital exhaust from their own lives.  We believe its possible to re-wire the existing data ecosystem where individuals are tracked without their consent or awareness is possible, and that there is the potential for more money to be made. To build the vision, PDEC will iterate a cycle of collaborating, producing, and sharing.

Observation Activities:

  • PDEC catalogs all books, articles, videos, podcasts, and events touching on the industry on our wiki.
  • PDEC follows blogs and social media streams of the individual thought leaders developing the ecosystem, to share in an aggregated form on our blog, and for summarizing the latest developments.
  • PDEC tracks mainstream media coverage of the ecosystem.

Production:

  • PDEC facilitates the emergence of a common vocabulary and developing a glossary of terms for the ecosystem.
  • Educational materials including diagrams, network maps, videos and podcasts reflective of the vision and emerging industry.

Sharing the Vision

  • PDEC is a resource for technology and business analysts.
  • PDEC Responds to requests to share the vision, with institutions including the US Department of Commerce, the US Federal Trade Commission, the G8 e-Forum, the World Economic Forum Rethinking Personal Data Project, W3C workshops, and from representatives from the Brookings Institute, and the Ashoka Foundation.
  • PDEC cultivates relationships with press covering personal data, and is available to comment.

 

 

Industry Collaborative

1 January 2011 By 2 Comments
PDEC-IndCollab

PDEC was founded in 2010 to educate industry, facilitate cooperation, and inspire the development of an ecosystem where individuals are empowered to collect, manage, and obtain value from their own personal data. An advisor to the World Economic Forum’s Rethinking Personal Data Project, PDEC collects, filters, and analyzes trends and ideas within and outside this emerging ecosystem. In June 2011, PDEC launched the Startup Circle to support the new companies innovating into the ecosystem. In 2012, PDEC will convene an Industry Collaborative for larger enterprises seeking to be more engaged in this space. Personal Data , a monthly publication, is being launched in January 2012 as the key intelligence resource for the rapidly evolving personal data sector.

The World Economic Forum recently released a report called Personal Data: The Emergence of a New Asset Class and is fostering a 3-year project Rethinking Personal Data convening C-level executives and government leaders.  Although rooted in their Telecommunications interest group, this effort is attracting interest and attention from the other industries as well including Banking, Advertising, Data Broker, Web, Cable Industries.  The Industry Collaborative within PDEC is focused on supporting the technical and business practitioners within large enterprises in these industries who are tasked with developing products and services for the Personal Data Ecosystem.

Given the range of industries engaging in this space, developing common language and understanding across them will be essential for success.  Our catalytic role is to support information exchange and learning between practitioners from these industries so a coherent, interoperable ecosystem can develop.