Why do this
Just like the information age has brought about many positive changes for society, the personal information age will bring about many benefits for society by empowering each individual to be a wealthier and better informed person. The personal information age will improve mass customization of products and services until one day each product and service is perfectly matched to the wants and needs of each consumer.
Read our Manifesto and more on the theory.
Why create a personal information platform and then give it away?
We are creating a digital information currency, for this currency to be interchangeable we have to make sure that the same or similar currency is used by everyone involved. People will not commit to using a digital information currency if there is any posibility that someone else might be able to gain control over the technology and deny people access to their personal information.
We believe this kind of technology can only be truly ubiquitous if it is available freely to any person.
There is no such thing as a free lunch
You may ask that how will a company survive if it gives it's products away free of charge. I must point out that although the Foxtailor platform is given away freely, it does not mean that people will gain the benefits without cost. This is because the Foxtailor platform provide only the definition and standardisation of a personal information "currency". The companies who operate on top of the platform do so for their own profit or social reasons.
The "personal information" platform can be equited to the way the world wide web is constructed. The WWW is made up of a collection of technology standards that define the platform on which people can build their websites. Each website however has to be built by someone who is paid and it has to be hosted on a server which is paid for.
On the other hand, the "currency" paradigm is similar to how you as a consumer can deposit your money at a bank and the bank then use your money to earn interest and pay you a portion of that interest, while they keep a portion of the interest for their operational costs.
We combine the "personal information" and "currency" so that we have a concept of a Foxtailor platform and a Foxtailor operator. The Foxtailor platform is free and can be used by anyone. The Foxtailor operator is a company that run on top of the Foxtailor platform to store and process people's personal information. In this example the Foxtailor platform is like the currency exchange market place while the Foxtailor operator is like a bank.
You as a consumer choose one of the Foxtailor compliant operators "bank" and deposit your personal information. If your "bank" doesn't provide you the returns you expected, you open an account at another "bank" and transfer your information "funds" from the one bank to the other. The Foxtailor platform guarantees that you can transfer your information as you see fit.
