TrustFabric News

TrustFabric news for August:

• We launched Alpha5 and we now have 97 Agents on the Fabric.
• We added a Careers page. We are looking for developers to join TrustFabric.
• Our Twitter followers grew from 44 to 58.
• Our Facebook page grew from 64 to 77 fans.
• Joe attended VRM+CRM 2010 at Harvard Law school.
• We drafted some ideas on open personal information sharing licenses.
• Had some interesting discussions with VCs again.
• Two interesting links to read.

We’re busy looking for pilot projects. If you have an interesting application for TrustFabric please get in touch with us.

Brain Dump after VRM+CRM 2010

More notes from attending VRM+CRM 2010.. I also wrote about VRM Business Models and VRM Language.

Day 1

• Most VRM related development activity seems to be around London, Boston, Utah and California at the moment.. and Cape Town.
• There are a number of markets which are ready for VRM, they all have silos for customer data now: hospitality, medical, property.. etc. anything with a contact centre.

• “A free customer is more valuable than a captive one.”

• There seems to be agreement that we need human and machine readable contracts/terms/licenses for VRM. We heard about R-button RDFa terms, link contracts and personal information sharing licenses.. think Creative Commons license builder.
• Digital contracts and terms of use seem broken. Who reads them anyway? They should be short, simple and machine readable.

• “There are about 60 million people in the UK, but about 24 billion customer records.”

• A good place for VRM adoption could be change events: birth of a child, change of address, change of a surname, crime report.
• There seems to be a few people who are focusing on VRM standards. Standards are good and they should evolve in parallel with VRM tools but I suspect it’s a bad idea to wait for the standards and letting the standards shape the development.

• “We are the people we have been waiting for.”

• Customer: “Do you want to be a part of my vendor network?” ..then support VRM.

• VRM creates a shift from vendor driven relationships to a balance between vendor and customer driven relationships. There was some concern that people don’t care enough to balance their cheque books.. why would they manage their vendor relationships?
• A few people commented that they don’t really want “relationships” for once-off transactions. They don’t want a “relationship” with the supermarket. I want relationships with every vendor (assuming it’s easy to set up).. that’s the idea with VRM software, it allows you to have N relationships. It scales. What you share with each vendor is up to you. I would like a way to remember where I got my last pair of running shoes.. or even every pair of running shoes I’ve ever had.
• Relationship quality vs efficiency: There was a graph about how in the old days a vendor had very few relationships but they knew everything about the customer (close relationship).. think shoe maker in a small village. After the industrial revolution we needed to scale the number of relationships a business could have (enter CRM).. but the quality dipped. VRM needs to up the quality but keep the scale.
  

  A quick Inkscape hack

• Interesting how the same ideas and examples pop up. Some of the examples we have imagined were mentioned.
• A few people suggested it’s a good idea to talk to governments about VRM.
• Social vs. Personal: VRM is more personal than social.
• We have to manage complexity. VRM technologies can be complex, but the end user experience needs to be simple and intuitive.

Day 2

• VRM is a methodology, not a specific solution/technology.

• “VRM puts the R in CRM.”

• “Too many silos.”

• Doc ended the conference saying something like.. this movement is inevitable, customers will get more power, how it happens we still have to see.

I think people are dreaming the same dream now. I think most people have agreed on how the architecture must look. There are a number of VRM platforms now (..at least 5). For a start-up like TrustFabric it means that our focus should probably shift from designing cool tech to solving the adoption challenge and building useful applications… read: the idea fits, now execution is key.

If you attended VRM+CRM 2010, or you are interested in VRM, please get in touch so we can send you a TrustFabric invite and hear your comments and feedback.

VRM Business Models

I chaired a session on VRM start-ups and VRM business models at VRM+CRM 2010.

We talked mostly about Open Source (Free Software), working in a decentralised / distributed way. I don’t think anybody cares much about the closed + centralised model.. we already have Google/Facebook.

Here are some of the business models which were discussed and my understanding about how some projects are thinking of making money..

Business Models

Open Source – pay for labour

The software is Open Source but a customer will pay developers to customise it for their needs or their market niche. We are using this model for early TrustFabric revenue.

Non-Profit

Work for free, because it’s fun. No money involved. One person in the group claimed to be doing this, but it seemed to be mostly around setting standards rather then providing a practical service.

Government Funded

Government gives initial funding with the idea that the project becomes self sustainable in future. There was an example of medical record storage in the US. I know of projects which the EU and UK governments have funded, so this seems to be gaining momentum.

4th Party Hosting
A service provider (like an ISP) could host personal data stores for end users. End users could pay their hosting provider or choose to give the hosting provider access to some of their data and view advertising. I don’t really know of an example of this one.

Freemium
Give away free basic hosting, show some ads, sell the advanced features. Something like the WordPress.com model.

Apps
Give away the basic platform but make money on the (SaaS) apps running on top of the platform.

Current Projects

How are existing VRM businesses/projects making money?

Disclaimer: I think a few people are not ready to share their full business models at this time and it’s early days for VRM business models. This is my basic understanding (read: I could be very wrong).

A list of projects from the VRM Wikipedia page:

Azigo – Software development house, Open Source
EmanciPay – University project
Kynetx – Software development and web services platform/language, not Open Source
ListenLog – Government/University funded
Mydex – Government funded + App model, seems centralised
Paoga – Not sure
SwitchBook – VRM search, I’m guessing sellers will pay
TrustFabric – Open Source, pay for customising (in the beginning)
UMA – Seems you pay to become a member
The Mine Project Non-profit, no money involved
NHIN Direct – Government funded

How I’d like things to work

With my customer / end-user hat on:

VRM should not cost me any money (no barrier to entry) and I don’t want to see any ads (I value my attention). I may choose a hosted option or I may host my own service. I’ll probably start with the hosted version but I need an easy way to migrate all my data when I move to my own server.

My 1st prize business model:

I think there should be a way for businesses to carry the cost of VRM systems and hosting. The more value a business gets from VRM the more they should pay. I don’t like the attention (ads) business model. We can do better.

From the TrustFabric about page:

How do you make money?
In short, businesses pay TrustFabric because we help them be more efficient in interacting with their clients.. we’d like to think we make money based on savings we show them. So, businesses pay, but TrustFabric is free to end users (customers), forever. It’s NOT yet another advertising based business model.

The way forward

I think the key to a successful VRM business will be to find a niche.. a market where you can show real value quickly. VRM has a massive scope. We should not try to “boil the ocean”.

VRM platforms exist today. The real challenge will be to build a community of developers around open source projects and to have a good user adoption strategy.

I suspect that we’ll have much more clarity on VRM business models in the next year. Exciting times for a new industry.

ps. If you are reading this you can say.. I was there at the beginning, when it was still (un-) cool (-;

VRM Language

Some thoughts about VRM lingo after a session at VRM+CRM 2010 day2 about making VRM more accessible.

It was clear from yesterday’s discussion that VRM is a methodology, it has context, it is not a specific solution.

It’s useful to explain VRM as the other side of CRM (“VRM puts the R in CRM”), but CRM is such a broad topic and often people don’t like more TLA’s. Some work needs to be done around framing VRM ideas is an accessible way. Maybe we need friendlier language for customers and individuals (non-geeks) to associate with.

We discussed how good tech lingo allows for “verbification”… “we’ll Skype on Tuesday”.

There are examples of groovy technology language: Blu-Ray, Bluetooth. It seems successful, but I can’t say I really like that approach. It’s fine to have two layers of language.. the geek lingo and the friendly lingo.

I was thinking of examples and “WiFi” seems to stand out in my mind. It’s short, simple and very successful.

Making a quick list of ideas which I think are essential to VRM… personal information, identifier, on my terms, independent, personal data store, trust. Add to that the major problem we are finding solutions for: “too many silos”.

I came up with.. “PiLo” : Personal Information Location ..which is also the inverse of the silo idea we don’t like.

In the TrustFabric context, that would refer to your TFID which points at your Agent location. It seems to make sense in XRI thinking. I guess you could say it’s like a Twitter name.

Does that make sense? Do you think it could work?

ps. the V graphic is from V for Vendetta, a must see.

VRM+CRM 2010

Joe is at vrmcrm2010, Harvard law school, Cambridge, MA.

It seems to be the first time the VRM and the CRM community has met in a conferencing format and one of the first times the VRM community has had a large workshop outside of IIW.

Interesting topics, smart people, good debate and a nice sense of optimism. It’s nice to see people from the CRM world think about relationships with their customer (individual) hats on.

I’m pretty sure I’m the only person here from (South) Africa and I suspect I spent the most time on a plane to get here.

So far the idea that sticks in my head is: “too many silos”. I have a long list of notes and ideas for blog posts.

A few photos..

Big Ideas

I found two similar stories last week. First a post about VRM and how Edison and Insull imagined a whole electricity distribution network before building the necessary pieces. Then a TED talk by Tim Berners-Lee about how he imagined a (whole) document network, which we call the Web today, before inventing the key components. I suspect technologies like Unix, the Internet and email followed a similar path.

Some big ideas are interesting enough to gain momentum. I also suspect that these big ideas are not unique, but they need the right environment to grow and people crazy enough to wrestle with them while they are hard to explain.

Around June 2009 I started talking to Jonathan about what I, at the time, simply called a “big scary idea”. Big in scope, scary because of the risk in not really being able to pin it down easily, but still something which seemed like a fun project. The problem.. “if I change my address, why do I have to update it in more than one place?”. I remember sitting in Neighbourhood bar on Long Street trying to communicate this thing I’d been imagining when Jonathan said something which made a lot of sense: “sure, I’d publish more person information on my website if I had a way of controlling who could read it”.

Skip ahead a few weeks and you can see why we called this big idea: TrustFabric.. we figured out that relationships, trusted relationships, were the major missing part in what we were imagining. Now we could move on to details like identifiers, surrogate keys, name resolution, data models, protocols, agents, network design and even slot in a business model.

In January 2010 we started working on TrustFabric full-time. Only after committing a lot of time and money did I go for a Lions Head walk one morning with Dave, who first told me about VRM.

It’s nice to by chance walk backwards into an idea which a bigger community of people are busy working on. Being able to talk about TrustFabric as a VRM platform or a TRM (Trusted Relationship Management) platform has made the idea less scary.. simply because we can now explain what it is in under a minute.

What I find interesting is that even though I’m sure that discovering the VRM principles will shape our ideas, they have not changed our design. Nice to know we imagined something which fits what a number of other people had been imagining.

It’s still a big idea. It’s still a scary idea. Scary enough that it took me a few months to convince myself that this was something I want to spend the next few years working on. Scary enough to be exciting.

“You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow.” — Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

ps. The photo is from 8 July 2009 (thanks Brandon), we first met at Neighbourhood to talk about the idea on 29 June 2009, trustfabric.org was registered on 28 July 2009.

pps. Jonathan pointed out that Edison did not invent the lightbulb and he did not have the best business ethics.

Another angle

Always interesting to see how people describe TrustFabric.. this is from Antoine:

“I really like your take on it. I think y’all have made good decisions on the important parts. Distributed system. Open source to keep everyone honest & the engineering tractable. .org for governance. Business built on top so that someone has a vested interest in getting everyone to play nicely together. Free for customers (though I’d pay real money for some of the things one can do with escrow!) Message Bus arch. Agents.”

How we work

I was having lunch with Gerhard a few weeks ago.. waiting for a sandwich at a local bakery, standing next to the road in the winter sun, thinking.. it’s kinda cool how start-ups get to evolve their own way of doing things.

I figured I’d give you some insight into how we work.

For the last few months we’ve followed a monthly release cycle. We don’t really plan more than 4 weeks ahead. Some form of Agile hybrid. We try to choose a theme for the next cycle to focus our efforts on an area of development. We have a planning meeting and we end up with a bullet list of new features and improvements.

Before the dev work starts we draft a blog post with release notes. This lets us test if the primary new features are something we would care to write about or talk about. If it’s not something we would talk about it’s probably not something our users would want. I guess you could call this the word-of-mouth-worthiness test.

We don’t have an office right now. Sometimes Joe goes to Gerhard’s office for the day. Jonathan likes to work from home. Joe likes to work pretty much anywhere.

We keep in contact with a mailing list, phone and sometimes Skype. SVN update emails give us dev progress updates. The mailing list allows our advisors to easily keep track of our thinking and suggest better ways to do things. There are 5 people on the list right now.

We try never to have a meeting without an agenda and we don’t have many formal meetings. Maybe one or two a month. We like to do strategy meetings in the form of hikes.. either Lions Head or Newlands forest.

Towards the end of a dev cycle we start testing and we set a launch date. On the day of launch we meet around 10:00 and start doing tweaks. Usually making things a bit prettier and making sure we agree on the wording we use. We launch when we are happy.

We make the code live. We publish the release notes. We invite a few more new users. Then we usually take a day or two off while responding to feedback and questions from users.

Most months we get 4 or 5 good comments or suggestions which we include in the work for the following month. We know that feedback from like-minded users is critical to our success. Suggestions from users will keep shaping TrustFabric into something better.

One common theme of all great start-ups is that they went out to solve a problem which they had themselves. It’s easy to stay motivated if you are attacking a problem which is very important to you personally.

Everyone involved in TrustFabric is looking for better ways to interact with companies. It’s funny how this simplifies things. We are hackers. We have a common problem. Now, let’s fix it.

Two Questions

A while ago we did a quick survey amongst the founders, just to check that everybody was still on the same page. A very simple process: briefly answer two questions without input from others. Here are the results.

The questions seem similar, but they are not the same. The first is short term and practical. The second is long term and ideological.

1) What does TrustFabric do (for me)?

Joe:
TrustFabric allows me to manage my personal information and keep track of the services and agreements I have with businesses. It replaces the process of paper forms and faxes. It lets me avoid call centres. It gives me back control.

Jonathan:
TrustFabric allows me to store all my personal information in one place and then selectively share bits of that information with the organisations I have relationships with. It’s all very secure and uses cryptography to protect my information.

Gerhard:
It stores information that is important: which I want to archive forever and sensitive: I don’t want to share with the general public. I can update information in one place and have it propagated to other people or institutions that need it. When I grant service providers access to my information, TrustFabric reassures me that the other parties are who they say they are.

2) What is TrustFabric?

Joe:
TrustFabric is a solution to a very ugly problem. The way businesses manage our personal information is out of control. They are very bad at keeping our information current, resulting in frustration and endless duplication. TrustFabric provides a common platform for consumers and businesses to build trusted relationships and exchange structured information.

Jonathan:
TrustFabric is a business that cares fundamentally about Trust. They’ll protect your information as if it was their own.

Gerhard:
TrustFabric addresses common problems relating to the secure storage and dissemination of personal information. It operates on the premise that users should own and control their data and should never have to pay a ransom to retrieve or update this information. Through a security framework, it provides users with the ability to certify aspects of their personal information using a network of trust.

Alpha5 is live!

We released the fifth Alpha version of the TrustFabric hosted service today.

Alpha5 is the first version to allow users to invite other users and allows for distributed trusted messaging between users.

New features in the Alpha5 release:

• User Messaging – Users can now send each other messages, much like email.
• Events Log – History log of events for your Agent.
• Invites – Users can now invite other users (5 invites per month).
• UI and UX improvements – A long list of improvements and tweaks.
• SSL by default – All communication between TrustFabric.com and your browser is now secured.
• Business Agents – TrustFabric now supports Agents for businesses or organisations, not only for individuals.

Existing users who have not logged in since Alpha3 may want to just email Joe or Jonathan and let us re-create their Agent from scratch.

Comments and suggestions are most welcome. As always, have fun.