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I came across this post by Scott Lemon, which has prompted me to dig up an old business plan I developed back in 1998. The product is called the Chop, a pre-cursor of auto-fill and localized identity management from back in the Gator days.
Here’s an overview of the Chop. I’m amazed at the parallels between what I wrote seven years ago and the language and ideas being discussed today.
The Chop is a technology which enables software developers to create software containers for portable digital identities which can be transferred between a variety of computing and communications platforms. A digital identity can be made up of a users marketing information, images, sounds, calendar, security keys, medical data, website preferences and much more. The Chop acts as a data container which consumers fill up with any type of data which can be easily and securely transferred between computers, PDA’s, smart cards and mobile phones.
We believe the revenue model most suited to succeed will be one based on free online distribution of a client-side application which will contain a basic version of the Chop capable of automatically filling out online forms with data entered into the Chop by users. Users will simply drag a Chop icon from their desktop onto any form capable of reading Chop data(Chop friendly), and the Chop will read the form, fill it out with the appropriate data and allow the user to add additional information before submitting the form back to the server.
Once internet services such as portals, websites and corporate extranets realize the benefits of Chop personalization, they will license the server side software which enables them to take advantage of the data contained in the Chop, whether it be marketing information for a for consumer goods, medical data for the healthcare industry or personalization data for portals. Exact details regarding the nature of these licensing arrangements are currently under investigation.
The Chop will increase consumer confidence regarding e-commerce, increase the amount and type of sensitive transactions occurring over the internet, increase the amount and complexity of online business-to-business transactions, enhance website personalization and create an exciting new way to for people to identify themselves online.
The Product
The Chop is a suite of applications and API’s which will enable consumers, businesses and internet services to create, transfer and benefit from portable digital identities.
The client-side application will feature a basic version of the Chop which will allow users to fill out a standard marketing and preferences profile and store that data locally on their hard drive. The application will include functionality to automatically populate digital forms with Chop data, greatly simplifying the digital form completion process.
The Chop will present users with a growing list of websites that are engineered to be Chop friendly. Each site will appear personalized to each individual user according to preferences stored in their Chop, all as a direct result of filling out their profile a single time, not, as it is today, by personalizing websites independently of each other.
Users will fill their Chop with their digital identity data and use the Chop to communicate with each other as well, possibly in conjunction with the directory services required to keep track of the millions of people on the internet.
It is very important to remember that user’s have complete control over how much information is transmitted via the Chop. The Chop only sends data to services that has been entered into it by users and at the selected level of disclosure.
