Sorry, never expected the post to reach the front page of HN. I'm busy bumping up my Rackspace cloud server to handle the traffic.
Flash? Really? I thought this was a trust service; not an entertainment service.
TrustFabric - Most ambitious startup ever
41–50 of 57 posts
Re: TrustFabric - Most ambitious startup ever
#42Just out of interest, but how big do you estimate the South African market size to be for this? And if looking at it globally, would Americans be will to trust personal data to a South African business or any business for that manner? Especially in light of the recent coups by Anon and Lulz? Btw South African too!
Thawte would tend to indicate yes. Most people don't even recognize where the companies the do business with exist. The Internet makes everything next door.
Re: TrustFabric - Most ambitious startup ever
#43I think Thawte was a much more ambitious startup to come out of South Africa. Thawte was founded in 1995 by Mark Shuttleworth in South Africa and was originally run from Shuttleworth's parents' garage. It became the second largest public certificate authority on the Internet and sold for hundreds of millions of USD within a few years.
I disagree, and you will notice lots of skepticism in the comments on the this thread about the idea itself. The reason the idea is more ambitious is because it requires a change in thinking and behavior on the part of the consumer. I was part of a company trying to start a VRM company 3 years ago and it was very difficult to get the idea across to possible investors.
The reason it was so difficult to explain was because the starting premise centered around technology that still isn't in the market: Near Field Communication (NFC). As NFC becomes a physicalIDdigitalID, and serves as a basis for payment, the companies involved in payment processing, the banks, and the merchants one patronizes become quite capable of compiling vast amounts of data that could be seen as quite personal. However, because the concept seems very convenient in many ways, those that are uncomfortable with the potential data mining will still be using cash. So, the idea was to put a buffer between the people and the businesses that had yet to earn one's trust.
Re: TrustFabric - Most ambitious startup ever
#44Just out of interest, but how big do you estimate the South African market size to be for this? And if looking at it globally, would Americans be will to trust personal data to a South African business or any business for that manner? Especially in light of the recent coups by Anon and Lulz? Btw South African too!
I'm a bit of a Mercedes enthusiast. They began making cars in SA some years back. I'm always surprised at the number of owners I talk to who actively seek to avoid the South African built cars. It's possible to do because each model has at least some German production, but it often means a special order and waiting months for the car to sail over.
People are strange. I think a lot of Americans especially do not really know how to categorize South Africa.
Re: TrustFabric - Most ambitious startup ever
#45Bad idea. I don't like to even fill out my census form and they would like to sync my info with corps? No. There's more to it that trust, and overall it doesn't seem to fix any need I have. For the general population, I see one immediate benefit: for people on the move, managing change of address and keeping their mail flowing to the proper place is important. It seems that the post-office can do that for you though…
I completely agree with your trust concerns, but it doesn't seem you are familiar with VRM [1]. The whole point is to off-set the current (and ever growing) data disparity between consumers and businesses. You'll note they have trust in their name, which I would guess is specifically because they realize the significant trust level they're going to have to engender among their customers. I still believe in VRM as a concept, but it has a large barrier to entry mostly because it isn't an easy idea to grok. It's still a vitamin, not a pain pill, but I believe it will be a pain pill eventually.
Re: TrustFabric - Most ambitious startup ever
#46Server has not been resized... hopefully it holds up now. Went from 512MB to 4096MB, I should tweak the configs a bit more. That's what I get for being lazy.
I find it quite puzzling that "cloud computing" is still so manual and (virtual) "server"-centric. Bumping up numbers in config is less work than gutting a rack to be sure, but surely there is room to apply Apple's hands-free design philosophies to cloud infrastructure? Food for thought.
There's certainly systems out there built to scale automatically. I was on a small team that wrote such a system for an ad network.
We tracked clicks on our own (physical) servers but for impressions, you're talking a system built to serve upwards of 30bn a month. While nothing compared to industry-leaders (Google, DoubleClick, etc), that's still around 10,000 impressions a second.'
We had no problem building a system on our inhouse servers to handle that 10k/s number: A very thin PHP instance running on port 80 that does nothing but push the impression into a Gearman queue. Easy enough, even at that scale.
The problem of course is that you're not getting 10k/s. Some seconds you may get 100k, others 1k.
So we built a simple system that automatically spawned S3 instances when we began to see high loads, distributed the latest code to them, and when we no longer needed them, we downloaded the DB they held locally and moved the data to HDFS.
What we did is pretty common, I'm sure. It's all pretty straightforward software.
Re: TrustFabric - Most ambitious startup ever
#47Sit down 100 randoms from off the street, ask them if "companies having your data up to date" is a big problem for them. The ask them how high up their list this problem is, if of course it actually is. My money is on "not very high".
I think this is a bit too cynical. If I understand this right - not only do you avoid having to fill out the same address forms over and over for different services, you avoid the monumental task of making sure all of your information is up to date on major life events like moving, marriage, etc. If I could avoid typing my shipping addresses in every online order form sourced from a trusted place (browser auto-fill i…
If I could avoid having to fill out twelve forms - nearly identical for the first half of the page - every time I went to the doctor, that'd be worth $20 bucks a year from me.
But I'm pretty sure that developing a HIPAA-compliant system, and then convincing every doctor's office in the country to switch to it won't be covered by a $20/year subscription fee.
Re: TrustFabric - Most ambitious startup ever
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's Tracey Davis ambitious, there's Draco Malfoy ambitious, and then there's Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres ambitious. The top end of the scale isn't "start an new OS business", it's things like molecular nanotechnology or self-improving artificial intelligence.
Speaking of Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, come on! It's been almost two months! I need my HPMoR fix ;-)
Am I the only person who feels a bit sorry/annoyed every time Eliezer gets harassed about updating HPMOR? It's his project, people, he'll update when he wants to.
Re: TrustFabric - Most ambitious startup ever
#49Starting a private space organisation is ambitious. Starting a new operating system business is ambitious. Starting a CRM variant in which the customers manage their details for you is... Ambitious, I suppose, but the title of this submission is definitely hyperbolic.
Also, the idea of centralized privacy preferences has been around since at least the late 90's, and was abandoned in 2006. See: http://www.w3.org/P3P/
The (online implementation of the) idea for social networking started in the 90s too by a little company called 6degrees that Amazon eventually bought. It too was abandoned along with the idea of social networking until friendster came along.
Re: TrustFabric - Most ambitious startup ever
#50This is exactly the kind of things that the Obama Administration's NSTIC policy aims to create. I feel like a number of companies (Google, Facebook, your bank, specifically) already have plans to do this.
I guess my entire interest in VRM is because I do not like being data mined, and you just named _the_ top candidates for data mining that concern me.
EDIT: When the NSTIC was announced, many organisations I respect, and typically agree with, game out against it[1]:
"Shortly after the draft's release, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, in conjunction with a number of other consumer-rights and civil liberties organizations[5], sent the Committee a statement in response to the draft NSTIC policy, requesting that the White House provide a clearer and more complete plan to create and safeguard Internet users' rights and privacy."