We upgraded the TrustFabric Connect service to version Beta 1.2 today.
This release contains a batch of improvements requested by users.
New features in this release:
- Added ability to edit address identifiers (postal etc).
- Added ability to resend verification text messages and emails.
- Added State/Province field to addresses.
- Added ability to delete identifiers.
- A list of small bug fixes and UI improvements.
Comments and suggestions are most welcome. As always, have fun.
by joe
on 30. Jun, 2011
in News
with 772 views
TrustFabric news for June…
- Joe presented a talk on privacy and trust at Heavy Chef.
- We launched the first version of TrustFabric Connect on the same evening.
- We now have 375 TrustFabric users (172 joined in June) and more than 20 vendors signed up.
- TrustFabric was mentioned in a Sunday Times article about Cape Town geeks.
- Joe was on the Bruce Withfield show: 702 Talk radio.
- Our Twitter followers grew from 129 to 166.
- Local news: TechCentral profile
- International news: VRooMing along
- TrustFabric was featured in six articles this month.
- Our Facebook page grew from 176 to 181 fans.
- We released Beta 1.1 of TrustFabric Connect.
Expect a few more TrustFabric Connect improvements in July.
We upgraded the TrustFabric Connect service to version Beta 1.1 today.
New features in this release:
- Secure Document Sharing – We’ve added a Document Store which allows people to upload documents and generate a secure link to a set of documents. The link is password protected and can be set to expire after a predetermined number of hours. The user can also choose to receive an email notification when their share is accessed. This feature lets people manage their “Know your customer” (FICA/RICA) legal documents.
- More efficient relationship matching – We optimised the matching process and we now send a weekly email to inform users of new relationship requests.
- Design – A few user experience improvements, including a more intuitive way of letting users add more identifiers.
- Import tools – We built some tools to make it easier for vendors to upload their hashed identifiers.
- Invites and Business suggestions – Added a feature to let users invite their friends and suggest businesses which they would like to see on TrustFabric.
- Tweaks – A fairly long list of small bug fixes and UI improvements.
Comments and suggestions are most welcome. As always, have fun.
Headline: The end of FICA frustration
TrustFabric Connect makes it easy way to manage FICA documents and securely share them with businesses.
“Most of us who interact with banks, mobile phone companies and ISPs have come to fear the terms FICA and RICA. We know the pain involved in scanning and faxing copies of identity documents and proof of residence invoices. The endless duplication, which in the case of FICA often has to be repeated every three months can feel pointless and like a huge waste of our time,” says Joe Botha, CEO of TrustFabric.
TrustFabric has built a free service, which lets users securely store and selectively share their FICA documents.
Users create a TrustFabric Connect account and upload FICA documents to their Document Store. They create a unique link for each business that requires their documents. Connections to their Document Store are password protected. Users have the option to define an expiry date and receive notifications when their documents are accessed.
The Document Store service is an extension of the TrustFabric Connect service. TrustFabric Connect gives users a way to define how businesses are allowed to contact them via email, phone, text message and snail mail.
“TrustFabric is a Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) service. Businesses use CRM to manage relationships with their customers, while VRM provides customers with tools to manage relationships with businesses.” says Botha. “The new service is a natural extension of this ethos as it puts power back in the hands of the customer. It relieves both the business and the customer from the frustration, duplication and bureaucratic nightmare that is common to FICA processes.”
Learn more at: www.trustfabric.com/connect
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About TrustFabric:
TrustFabric builds smarter relationships between businesses and individuals by providing Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) infrastructure. Businesses use CRM to manage relationships with their customers, while VRM in turn allows customers to manage their relationships with businesses.
TrustFabric recognised a need to offer customers a platform to represent their side of the VRM+CRM relationship. TrustFabric makes businesses relationships more efficient while giving customers control over their personal information.
TrustFabric was founded in 2010 and is based in Cape Town, South Africa. Learn more at: www.trustfabric.com
TrustFabric Connect lets you control how businesses are allowed to contact you via email, phone, text message and snail mail.
Companies are constantly interrupting our lives with telephone marketing, SMS messages and emails. Wouldn’t it be nice to have more control over who is allowed to contact you?
TrustFabric recently launched TrustFabric Connect: a do-not-contact list on steroids. The new service not only lets individuals opt-out of direct marketing, but makes it easy for businesses to comply with legislation protecting customer rights.
“We’ve had just over 100 users sign up in the first week.” says Joe Botha, CEO of TrustFabric.
Direct Marketing Regulations
The Consumer Protection Act came into effect on 1 April this year. The Act states that consumers are entitled to refuse direct marketing. It defines a pre-emptive block registry where people can opt-out of direct marketing.
Irresponsible direct marketing is a huge problem, especially SMS marketing where an opt-out reply costs money. Very little has been done to address the problem so far.
TrustFabric Connect differs from other Opt-out services in a few ways: You only share the details you want to, no ID number required. Details are kept secure and strong encryption is used. It understands relationships between businesses and individuals.
Value for Businesses
TrustFabric Connect offers businesses regulatory compliance and better data quality. Most Opt-out services are blunt instruments, offering no value to businesses. TrustFabric Connect is the first service to provide businesses with verified up to date contact details for their customers.
“We’re very happy with the response from businesses. 11 forward thinking businesses signed up in the first week after we launched, including Skyrove, Lexus Helderberg and CITi.” says Joe.
Most businesses have customer databases which are out of date. One of our major banks has 22 million customer records, but only 4 million active customers as each business unit maintains its own customer database. TrustFabric Connect offers businesses a way to link customer records to people again.
How businesses manage our personal information will become critical when the The Protection of Personal Information Bill becomes law later this year.
How does it work?
Individuals create a TrustFabric Connect account, then enter an email address and mobile phone number. TrustFabric verifies these details and lets users configure their communication preferences. Businesses create a TrustFabric Connect account and upload encrypted versions of email addresses and mobile phone numbers from their existing customer database.
When a match is found, on email address or phone number, TrustFabric Connect will prompt individuals to confirm a business relationship and enable sharing of up to date contact information. This builds a fine grained fabric of business relationships. Businesses query the TrustFabric Connect service to see which customers have confirmed a business relationship and given permission to be contacted.
Users get a list of their active business relationships and a dashboard to manage their business communication. They can conveniently update their details in one place and linked businesses will receive their new details.
Businesses get a verified up to date opt-in list. TrustFabric always acts as an independent 3rd party, never sharing contact details unless a business relationship has been confirmed.
TrustFabric Connect costs under R5 per customer per year and the service is free for individuals, small businesses and educational institutions.
“We have set a target of 150,000 users for the next year. That might be a bit optimistic, but I suspect we are providing a solution to a very real problem. Something which has been overlooked for far too long.”, says Joe.
Learn more at: www.trustfabric.com/connect
—–
About TrustFabric:
TrustFabric builds smarter relationships between businesses and individuals by providing Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) infrastructure. Businesses use CRM to manage relationships with their customers, while VRM in turn allows customers to manage their relationships with businesses.
TrustFabric recognised a need to offer customers a platform to represent their side of the VRM+CRM relationship. TrustFabric makes businesses relationships more efficient while giving customers control over their personal information.
TrustFabric was founded in 2010 and is based in Cape Town, South Africa. Learn more at: www.trustfabric.com
We are happy to announce the launch of a new service called TrustFabric Connect.
When we started TrustFabric we wanted to fix a few fairly obvious problems:
- If I move, why do I need to update my address in more than one place?
- Why do businesses have a list of their customers, but I don’t have a list of the businesses I am a customer of?
- Why do businesses have all the power when we communicate?
Over the last year a number of people have commented that they like the idea of TrustFabric, but that we should focus on showing some obvious value. Something simple and practical.
We knew we could offer businesses better data quality and we knew that we could offer customers one place to maintain their personal information. We knew we wanted to build smarted relationships between businesses and individuals.
There are various laws which protect our privacy and govern how businesses are allowed to communicate with customers and do direct marketing. Most countries have an Opt-out list to stop spamming, but these services are not aware of existing business relationships and usually have nothing positive to offer businesses.
So we built TrustFabric Connect. It builds a fine grained fabric of business relationships. It lets customers define their communication preferences and keep their contact information up to date. It selectively shares this information with businesses.
How does it work?
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a bit more power and control over who is allowed to contact you?
TrustFabric Connect is an online service which lets you manage your personal information, communication preferences and business relationships.
It lets you control which organisations have permission to contact you via email, phone, text messages and post, by time of day and communication type.
You create a TrustFabric Connect account, then enter your email address and mobile phone number. TrustFabric verifies your details and lets you configure your communication preferences, including a default setting for businesses you do not have an existing relationship with (usually opt-out).
Businesses create a TrustFabric Connect account and upload email addresses and mobile phone numbers from their existing customer database.
When we find a match on email address or phone number TrustFabric Connect will prompt you to confirm a business relationship and enable sharing of up to date contact information.
Businesses query the TrustFabric Connect service to see which customers have confirmed a business relationship and given permission to be contacted. TrustFabric Connect lets businesses clean their marketing databases in order to become compliant with privacy and direct marketing regulations.
You end up with a list of your active business relationships and a dashboard to manage your business communication. Businesses get a verified up to date opt-in list for their customers.
TrustFabric always acts as an independent 3rd party. We never share your contact details with businesses which you have not confirmed a relationship with. We offer businesses a secure and encrypted process of uploading their customer data to make sure there is no risk for them.
Sign up for a free TrustFabric Connect account.
Businesses can find out more about the service here.
ps. The explainer video is in production.
by joe
on 01. Jun, 2011
in News
with 523 views
TrustFabric news for May…
- We tested and released Beta 3.1
- We designed a new product called TrustFabric Connect.
- Hosted Agents grew from 187 to 191.
- We attended the Netprophet Startup Acceleration Workshop.
- We have a new toy, a Thales HSM.
- Our Twitter followers grew from 122 to 129.
- We went through the process of getting a merchant account for credit card transactions.
- A few client and angel investment meetings.
- We met with the guys from Quirk Labs.
- Our Facebook page grew from 170 to 176 fans.
- Joe will be presenting a talk on privacy and trust at the next Heavy Chef meeting on 7 June in Cape Town.
Get ready for a new Beta service to be launched early in June.
We upgraded the TrustFabric hosted service to version Beta 3.1 today.
This is a point release… mostly polish, bug fixes and minor improvements on the 3.0 release after some feedback and testing by our users.
New features in this release:
- User experience improvements – Updates to Form Designer, signup process and email confirmations.
- Open Source – We’re getting ready to Open Source (GPL) some code here. The first code to be released is our Form Designer and includes details of TrustFabric’s XML Document markup.
- Better business signup process – Improved the process of creating Agents of type Organisation.
- Apache upgrade – A few users reported an intermittent “Bad Request header” error. This was an Apache Mod_SSL bug.
- Tweaks – A fairly long list of small bug fixes and UI improvements.
Comments, suggestions and bug reports are most welcome. As always, have fun.
by joe
on 29. Apr, 2011
in News
with 522 views
TrustFabric news for April…
- We released Beta 3.0, our first Public Beta.
- Hosted Agents grew from 182 to 187.
- Our Twitter followers grew from 117 to 122.
- TrustFabric was featured in a Silicon Cape newsletter.
- We spent a few days doing sysadmin work, mostly related to the public beta launch… new servers, dns updates and a new backups system.
- We had a strategy day at the yacht club after Beta 3.0 and we took a few days off over Easter.
- TrustFabric has been selected to participate in the Netprophet Startup Acceleration Workshop in May.
- 88 VRM related projects: a nice overview of the personal information ecosystem.
- Word Economic Forum report on Personal Data.
- Lastly, if you like TrustFabric, show your support by following us here and here.
We’re busy working on Beta 3.1.
We upgraded the TrustFabric hosted service to version Beta 3.0 today.
This is our first public Beta and one of our most important releases to date. This release comes pretty much exactly one year after we launched our first Alpha version.
It includes the first product built on our platform: TrustFabric Forms.
You may have noticed the forms in our explainer video. One of our first goals with TrustFabric was to fix everyday forms. It should be easy to change your information in one place and this should propagate to all the forms which asked for this information in the past. TrustFabric Forms is a major step towards making this a reality.
The Form Designer is now public. It does not allow you to edit a saved form yet, but we’ll add that feature soon.
New features in this release:
- TrustFabric Forms v1.0 – A way to manage all those everyday forms.
- Form Designer v0.3 – Lets you design your own TrustFabric Forms.
- New Sign-up process – Mostly related to our move to public Beta.
- Agent schema hosting – Agents can now host custom document schemas.
- Tweaks – A long list of UI improvements and small bug fixes.
Comments, suggestions and bug reports are most welcome. As always, have fun.
