Well here’s an idea for an entrepreneurial insurance broker. Matt Webb, a sophisticated and intelligent geek (or at least always appears as such from his blog, Interconnected, to which I subscribe), has a novel idea for taking out risk from social websites:
There are a ton of websites starting up now that do useful things with my personal data (calendars, todo lists, links, whatever)…
Only… if I have a utility on my computer and the developer disappears, I’m fine, but if the developer of one of these websites goes, I’m screwed. I know they don’t mean to disappear, but if they don’t get enough users then they won’t get acquired and they won’t be able to stick around. And after the first site vanishes, no users will sign up to the others either, so nobody gets acquired. What these sites need is a guaranteed “your data’s safe” clause.
Business concept: User data insurance. This insurance company offers its services to all independent Web 2.0 outfits. The outfit pays $$ for insurance. In return they can guarantee their users that, should they go under, the insurance company will host the user data for 1 year in a downloadable format, plus a minimal read-only browsing tool. The website can put a little badge and reassuring message on its front page. In the spirit of neologism and the times, I call this Trustsurance 2.0.
Trouble is, I guess these guys are working on such tiny margins that “the outfit pays $$ for insurance” would either mean too much for the outfit or too little for the insurer. But it is an indicator that innovative ideas will be called for with these sorts of new risk. Oh, and if you do pick up the ball and run with it, a little credit (cash would be nice) to Matt?
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Not a bad idea at all, but the technology already exists and if the product does not, we might conclude that there is no generic demand for such a product. After all, when I sign up for a new product, I make a decision myself about the “going concern.”