Startups in the Personal Data Ecosystem

Today at the Round Table on Do Not Track people were asking me what all the startups in the space are. For expedience a lot of the descriptions are drawn from the companies own websites. We will work on keeping this updated and write better descriptions in the coming week.

Data Storage,  Collection and Sharing

Mydex is a Community Interest Company based in the UK that has begun a community prototype that connects individuals’ personal data store accounts to local government agencies.

Personal.com has raised 7 million in venture funding and although it does not yet have any services their website articulates clearly how personal data under the control of the user is valuable.

Singly Jeremy Miller’s startup to build 3rd and 4th party apps based on data from data stores build using the Locker Project code base an open source project for collating, securing and sharing personal data .

Statz is a startup that supports you pulling in your information from different service providers including Mobile phone record, Energy and utility records, Health and fitness, Shopping and payment, Transportation.  Statz gives you instructions on how to go into your mobile carrier or electric company and export your statements – often this involves a dozen steps and is very labor intensive – not something easy or that everyone will do.

Greplin Does Personal Cloud SearchWhen people set up their accounts they give the service access to a range of accounts – LinkedIn, Gmail, Basecamp, Flickr, etc. Then you use their engine to search across them.

Backupify is an all-in-one archiving, search and restore service for the most popular online services including Google Apps, Facebook, Twitter, Picasa and more.

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

Trust Fabric provides 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 is based in Cape Town, South Africa.

Allow helps you to stop unwanted marketing and to get in control of the way your data is used.

Cloud Inc Consortium for Local Ownership and Use of Data, Inc.  A non-profit technology standard consortia started in early 2009 that believes that a new era of ME 1.0 is at hand, an era that looks beyond Web 2.0, while simultaneously looking to the founding principles of the Internet as the solution to many of today’s most vexing issues of privacy, security and data.

Data Inherit DataInherit online safes from Switzerland offer individuals around the world highly secure online storage for passwords and digital documents. You can access your online safe using any Internet browser or an iPhone from anywhere and at any time. In addition the unique data inheritance functionality will protect your data in emergency situations. Simple and convenient.

New Application Building and Design Tools

Kynetx is developing a new language that looks at data from personal data stores and public datasets and can do real time matching based on rule sets created by the individual to surface relevant content.

Emancipay EmanciPay is a relationship management and voluntary payment framework in which buyers and sellers can present to each other the requirements and options by which they are willing to engage, or are already engaging. Including choices concerning payment, preference, policies.

Open Source Projects

The Higgins Project

Project Danube

The Locker Project

The MINE! Project

Project Nori

Industry Initatives

Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium – this is where you are now.  Led by Kaliya Hamlin long time end-user advocate known as Identity Woman and emerging out of the community at the Internet Identity Workshop.  Let us know if you want to be more involved – here.

Project VRM at Harvard led by Doc Searls focused on developing Vendor Relationship Management Tool

World Economic Forum Rethinking Personal Information effort – limited links online to this – there is a video from this latest forum.

Personal Data 2.0 analysis area of STL Partners

Events

Internet Identity Workshop – May 3-5, Mountain View

ID Collaboration Day – Febuary 14th in San Francisco

New Digital Economics – Personal Data Ecosystem Deep Dive Day – April 7th, San Francisco

Kynetx Impact