Just mentioning for awareness… and posting the BBC article I bumped into about digi.me which seems to be on the same path as Solid technology (also decentralized they claim), but commercial and proprietary. Good looking site, and lotsa media attention, though.
Here is the product site:
Hello aschrjver. Re your comment I am the Exec Chairman and founder of digi.me. Sir Tim and I spoke at length in November about both Solid and digi me (dropping the dot as can’t put links in a comment reply). I should not speak for him, but I can say that the conversation was such that we don’t see each other as competitors, but fellow travellers in the same space. Digi me deals with data as it is today - giving it back to individuals and in a way that digi me the company does not see, touch or hold user data ever. This data extends from social feeds, finance data, health data and a lot more. Solid is looking forwards to the individual owning their data in pods from apps which do not hold the data - so digi.me acts of your legacy and Solid for your future and we bring the two together to give you your complete digital life, all 100% private. In addition digi me has a full data normalisation capability and a full consent capability - items that will help Solid we believe. There is work to do to see how we intersect and help each other, but we are open to that (and we are very active in getting standards built around this whole area to foster interoperability) - I’d very much welcome an open discussion on how to make it happen. Finally in terms of open source versus commercial, sometimes commercial is required to get things moving, but that doesn’t mean the two can’t work together - our costs are very low (and there are costs getting access to regulated data such as finance and health), and we provide a service no one else has managed to do in terms of getting data back to the individual to reuse; we’re ethical (don’t see touch, hold) and we’re user focussed, and we are fully decentralized (the user holds their own data). So please don’t make this an us and them conversation - lets look to how we cooperate to achieve all our aims. My email is julian at digi dot me if you want to recah out direct. Thanks, Jules
Thank you for your elaborate response, and great to hear your stance and openness towards cooperation. Really appreciated. I have to say, you have a compelling product, and site is excellent 
We had a number of discussions in the past in Humane Tech Community about getting paid to submit your data - a model that I am sceptical about - but your way of doing this is much more viable (if you can sustain yourself, that is 
).
Here is the post I created: Making data work for you.
(note: our forum is our archive from which we’ll start community-driven projects)
PS. Instead of “Proprietary competitor?” I gave the topic an altogether friendlier title.
Thanks, and for the title change! Do let me know if you’d like a video call some time - sounds like we could have a good conversation and maybe get some things moving.
Regarding selling your data, this is often too much the focus, whereas it should be about a ‘value exchange’. That value exchange may be service, convenience or reward with the former two being the far greater element I believe. For example if I wanted personalized health, I need to share health, wearables, genomic, food data maybe - but what I get in return is personalized health recommendations - a service of great value to me. (Note: With digi.me none of that data need actually leave my device either - private sharing if you will.)
Hi Julian,
does this mean your professional recommendation is to build a commercial version first and leverage off the economics for that, to later build an open version?
I think it is important to understand that there has been a heck of alot of work by people building free and open standards in-order for this work (opportunity) to come about, and it certainly has been the case that funding the lives of those people often hasn’t had alot to do with what it is they’ve been doing / ‘working’ on, to contribute to the world…
anyhow. as we had some discussions last year, that i won’t go into further here; i just figure its worth considering how your organisational approach promotes and supports the behaviour of good actors, above and beyond those who make decisions that are not so good, until the good stuff - suits the organisation, then seek to suggest their better with respect to character, for having done so. I think this is part of the moral equity frameworks that are emergent in various areas, from reputation economies to lawful intercept capabilities and the influence of those laws on ISPs, CDNs - alongside others… Trustworthiness, as you well know, is so very complex yet essential.
you can tell whose been around the longest, by the bullet wounds - or so it was that pindar wong noted to me, a few years back…
I do look forward to seeing digi.me both solid compatible, and integrating creds. more work is occurring on that now. but as noted, i won’t talk about that here…
If you are interested in this conversation, perhaps you would be interested in joining the External Interop and Outreach Panel.