The web is a very powerful platform that has been available to consumers for 20+ years. Except for e-commerce and search, however, people’s ability to use it has been limited to fragmented, scattered and siloed social sharing of the information that we want to make available to others.
Even to create and share content, we have to go to 4- 5 different platforms- our blog, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc., which leads to duplication, fragmentation and a lot of time and effort wasted to manage our social presence on the web. How many times did you share the same post on 3 different places- Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn? Happens quite often.
To add to that, our social information can’t be organized or discovered based on relevance or topic of interest. As John Battelle pointed out in his post “Might Curators Be An Answer To Twitter’s Signal To Noise Problem?“, finding relevant information on Twitter is getting harder and harder every day as more and more people join the service.
When it comes to managing the rest of our life, we don’t have a way to make our life more efficient and insightful by managing our private life online. That includes storing, tracking, organizing and computing on medical, financial, and other personal information. There are certain mobile applications that allow people to manage specific parts of their private life, however they are fragmented, with questionable privacy, and have limited adoption.
The “Quantified self” and the “Internet of things” are referenced often in the technology circles as the next phase of consumer innovation. The question is how will we manage privacy and who will own the avalanche of consumer data that will get created as the web lacks a platform to enable these movements going forward.
The reason the consumer web innovation has stagnated and these problems have not been solved is the lack of profitable monetization model for consumer products as businesses think that consumers want everything for free. That has led to turning the user into a product for sale and monetizing it with irrelevant advertising. Global media ad spend is $550 billion business and less than 25% of that is currently digital. It is easy to see why the social platforms and Google have focused so much on serving irrelevant advertising- it’s a big market and offers a lot of opportunity for a land grab, regardless of whether any value is created for consumers or for advertisers.
As a result, a new problem was created- the lack of privacy and trust, which has led to disengagement from the social networks and has discouraged people from bringing more of their life online.
2.5 billion people are impacted by these problems on the web today and that number is expected to double in the next 5 years.
At Ecolate, we decided to solve these problems by innovating in both technology and business model. We enable people to manage all of their life online with full privacy and full control of their data. And we empower users to generate income by monetizing their content, skills, and knowledge. We believe, on the consumer web, People are In Charge of their Life, not the social networks!
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