The Value of the Identity Nexus™

The Identity Nexus™ when connected with Ecosystem 2.0 creates the opportunity to realize value for your data in real time.

Dearest Reader,

Up until now we’ve all been on “the same page.” While we all may use different techniques to a). harness the web as a platform and b). use standards to define a user-centric method of storing and sharing data, we all arrive at the same outcome, the data is ready to be shared via the connection component of the web - HTTP. (In our case we will use Augmented HTTP as detailed in our previous article.)

But now is where our paths diverge. 

I will start this part of the story by recapping a few important points - Sir Tim Berners Lee invented the web in 1989 and it was comprised of two components - HTTP (connect) AND HTML (present). It was first commercialized in 1993, and the spec was finalized in 1996. Apart from a few spec bumps it has not changed since. 

As you saw in the last article, we Augmented HTTP to give us a web standard solution for sharing an individual’s private data inside HTTP. The problem we then ran into was how to respond to each person based on their sharing preferences. All we had to work with was the browser. And like all current browsers and all of the apps on the app store they have one thing in common - a fixed user interface. The user interface is how the individual interacts with the app, the user experience is the result of how they feel using the app. 

We stared at the problem for a long time before we had an idea. What if we modified a menu in the browser in real time? We called this a contextual menu. (For the geeks, it’s all detailed in our patent(s).) We surmised that instead of offering the individual a page full of links to endlessly scroll through, we could substitute a current fixed menu for a new contextual menu that would instantly navigate them to the relevant content (based on their shared data). We called this Augmented HTML.

This worked perfectly and we used that solution with early customers. However, in 2008 the world shifted when the app store came along. Apple and Google abandoned their idea of ‘the mobile web’ and instead prompted developers to build an ‘app for that’. Unfortunately for us, there was no need for a contextual menu which is essentially an ‘app for that’ when developers are building out millions of apps. 

We sold the patents at the end of 2013, and as part of that transaction we obtained a license-back agreement to use our intellectual property in our product. Forging ahead with the technology still in hand, my job was not yet finished - I wanted to find a business model for this invention. 

With the concept of Augmented HTML dancing in my brain, I asked myself a simple question... What if instead of a contextual menu, we ‘autonomously programmed’ the entire user interface of an app? (After all, apps are nothing more than 'menus and content’). Could this be the pointer to the business model that I had been in search of since 2008? What if instead of trying to share data to many different ecosystems separately (apps for that), we designed it around an old business model that was invented 20 years ago by John Hagel who came up with the idea of an Infomediary. 

The notion was that we as customers will increasingly need a trusted third party or personal agent to act on our behalf to help us get more value from data about ourselves. 

And what if we could figure out a way for this business model to coexist with an existing SaaS business model. Well, it took a while to figure out all of the 'what ifs?’ but we did it. 

And this is where we differ from all of the existing solutions. 

In the diagram below — on the left is what we endearingly have called the ‘Goldilocks app’. This is your organization’s current app with a twist — by using our Augmented HTML, your users are now ‘presented’ with an autonomously generated unified user interface that is “just right” for each and every user in real time. That’s right! I will repeat it again — because it’s really hard to wrap our head around a new concept when we have become comfortable living with over 8 million apps in our world — Your organization’s current app is now able to adapt in real time to each and every single user’s needs, values, and preferences in real time as they go about their daily life journey.

On the far right is your organization’s collaborative partner ecosystem of vendors. Those brands can now autonomously appear inside your Goldilocks app in real time (essentially a marketplace of products, content, and services inside a single app). Your organization acts as an infomediary collecting a transaction fee for ‘brokering the value of my data’ and an additional fee from the sale of any product, content, and or service that they consume during their daily life journey. It’s the  Ecosystem 2.0!

‘Show Me the Money’. 

On page 20 of his thesis Predicting Personal Information Management Systems Use Dr. Michael Becker has a section titled - The Value of Digital Identity and Personal Data. Two items stand out - 

1. The Economist, 2017a, at the macro level. Data is giving rise to a new economy. - The problem, says Mr Weyl, is getting people to understand that their data has value and that they are due some compensation. 
2. And Jaron Lanier (2019) at the micro level in his book ‘Who Owns the Future?’, has estimated that the average individual’s online behavioral data is worth approximately $20,000 per year to industry players such as marketers.

I don’t think there is any question now that an individual’s data is valuable. I would also posit that data quality plays a role in this as well. The more accurate, the timelier, the more contextual, with real-time consent, shifts the value upwards dramatically especially if your organization can instantly engage with each individual user in the moment. 

We created a simple online ROI calculator to ‘what if’ this value. You can find it here. Click on the Ecosystem Value Calculator menu at the top left of the page. You might be surprised to see the default is a single user one, a single engagement/transaction, and the average value for that engagement/transaction is $.05. Why so low?

Our solution was designed around a single person - N of 1. We focused on making our solution work at the individual user level. It's always harder to scale down than it is to scale up. With just one ecosystem partner (assumption - who also pays you for data insights) that one person generates $18.25 in the first year. 

Now for some serious money — let’s watch it scale!! As an example, let’s use AT&T. AT&T's Average Revenue Per User in 2024 stands at $50.54. They have 115M wireless users - source. Let's plug that number into the calculator. Each user makes one engagement/transaction a day (because there's always something that appeals to each user) and AT&T earns $.05 of profit from that engagement/transaction. That's $2B a year to the bottom line. 

Which brings this article to a close but sets up the future of the web.

Google has a market cap of $2T. It has $328B in trailing twelve-month (TTM) revenues. For the most part (98%) of its revenue comes from advertising that we the consumer ‘don’t pay for directly’, we are instead ‘the product’ that Google uses to generate revenue. 

What if, Ellen Brown, we used Google’s business model: ‘I’m the product’ to launch Healthcare 2.0 - instead of no privacy, we offer privacy, instead of a single ‘ad’ ecosystem we have access to Ecosystem 2.0 where all my Social Determinants of Health live (the 90% that isn’t part of sick-care)? There are approximately 330M insured people in the U.S. One engagement/transaction a day that generates $.05 throws off $6B in revenue per annum. Four engagements a day, generating $.70 (much more valuable data plus transaction revenue from purchases) throws off $337B a year in revenue - surpassing Google’s TTM!