Quick intro
TrustFabric facilitates trusted relationships between businesses and individuals by providing Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) infrastructure. Businesses use CRM to manage customer relationships, while VRM lets individuals manage their relationships with businesses. TrustFabric writes Open Source software and gives customers a platform to represent their side of the VRM+CRM relationship. TrustFabric was founded in 2010 and is based in Cape Town, South Africa.

The one line Value Proposition
TrustFabric simplifies the admin in your life. It’s a safe and easy way to selectively share the personal information you are required to share.

Personal Information
The way the world currently manages personal information is very broken. Your information is scattered all over the place. Too many silos. We want to fix this. We want to invert the way personal information is managed. Who best to keep your information up to date than you? There should be less frustration and duplication. It should be easy to keep your information up to date.

Relationships
The relationship between business and customer is weighted towards businesses. Businesses have complex CRM systems but customers have no tools to manage their side of the relationship. We need to rebuild these relationships and shift the power balance back towards the customer. Trusted relationships between seller and buyer.

Take back the Social Fabric
In some ways we are hacking the social fabric… hacking for good.

What TrustFabric is NOT
The most frequent wrong assumption is that we are yet another centralised web service which collects personal information, retains personal information and then sells this information to 3rd parties. No, no, no and no.

How does it work?
Our solution involves software Agents. TrustFabric is a distributed multi-agent network. It’s basically anarchy, but in a good way. See TrustFabric as a distributed network of autonomous Agents, which are really just XML message brokers that understand relationships, documents and strong crypto. Under the hood you will find open standards, x509, Python/Django and Web Services APIs.

TrustFabric has a .com + .org model
The code is open source (soon). There is a business side, which aims to make money, but there is also a foundation side, which is all about freedom and openness. The foundation owns 26% of the business to make sure the business acts in the best interest of the users. Something like WordPress. Doing well and doing good.

When can I download the code?
We are actively developing two parts of TrustFabric at the moment: the Agent and a Web User Interface which allows users to communicate with their Agent. We’ll open up our APIs and release code as the code becomes stable and moves out of Beta.

Why the TrustFabric name?
Because we all liked the game Loom. TrustFabric is a trust framework, a distributed network of trust.

How do you make money?
In short, businesses pay TrustFabric because we help them be more efficient in interacting with their customers. 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 story so far..
It all started with a very simple problem: if I move, why do I need to update my address details in more than one place? Two Cape Town entrepreneurs started talking about TrustFabric in June 2009. After some design thinking we built an initial proof of concept version at the end of 2009. We started working on the project full-time in January 2010 and started coding from scratch. By March 2010 we launched the first invite-only Alpha service. By December 2010 the TrustFabric platform moved to private Beta. We started a few proof of concept services for clients. In April 2011 we moved to Public Beta and released the first product built on the TrustFabric platform: TrustFabric Forms.

What’s next?
The plan is simple: continue finding needs which match our ideas and building things people want to use.

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

Trademarks
The TrustFabric name and associated logos (running man and globe) are trademarks owned by the TrustFabric Foundation.