Zipano wants to be the central clearinghouse for control of your personal data that you share online. “The debate about privacy is really the debate about control,” said the founder of Facebook – and Zipano wants to give that control to the user in an easy, flexible, intuitive way.
Their first product, Locaccino, is a Facebook app that allows users to set rules that determine what location-based information is shared with other friends on the social network. If you only want to share your location during certain times, or with certain groups of friends, or only in certain areas, Locaccino gives you the ability to configure those rules.
To be successful, these guys need to provide a simple, scalable platform at the right license price to all the social networks and other sites that share personal user data. Founder Ziv Baum should get smart by talking to his colleagues over at reCAPTCHA and understanding how they built and grew. They are now used by over 100,000 sites as the primary CAPTCHA tool, and were just acquired by Google about a month ago.
Undoubtedly, someone will provide services such as these as more an more information is shared online. But the same caveat applies here that I mentioned for NavPrescience – these guys run the risk of not being able to get out of the university-mentality straightjacket that CMU seems to put on all the companies it spins out. They have the advantage that they are a third-party solution that can gain user’s trust.
They are looking to raise $500K to further build out their company.