The Story of CLOUD
CLOUD is the Consortium for Local Ownership and Use of Data. We are a non-profit technology standard consortia [filed for 501(c)(6) status]. As CLOUD's co-founder highlights in his TEDxAustin talk (link above), the journey to CLOUD started during he and his wife's journey to MD Anderson Cancer Center in early 2009 to fight her recurrence of breast cancer. It was during that journey from Austin to Houston that today’s most vexing issues of privacy, security and data came too close for comfort. As the next several months unfolded, it became clear that these issues were bigger than just healthcare and bigger than any one country.
It also became clear that there was no cohesion to the many individual efforts underway within industry silos and technology silos alike. Just like the Internet is a global network, the answers to privacy, security, identity and data will be global, too, and they will also be linked. You can't address one without addressing the others simultaneously. Through many individual meetings, social media, as well as industry conferences from Munich to Brussels to Toronto, we realized that in addition to CLOUD's vision for the future of the Internet, we can also serve a unique function bringing together many disparate voices and experts across countries, industries and technology sectors.
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CLOUD and the Internet
The Internet and the World Wide Web are not the same. Understanding this is the first step to understanding the core principles behind CLOUD, Inc.
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CLOUD and ME 1.0
Web 2.0 defined the evolution of the HTML-based era of the Internet. ME 1.0 defines the next evolution of the Internet itself. It is a whole new way of thinking about how the Internet works.
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CLOUD and the Power of WHO
What if there was an API for you? Not a password... not another log-in... but a language of WHO. It is one of the four pillars of the contextual markup language (CTML) that CLOUD is building.
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Connecting WHO and WHAT in the CLOUD
Current proponents of the Semantic Web view the challenge of web pages as a data problem. CLOUD sees it as a people problem. Connecting WHO I Am to WHAT I Am is how the two become fused in a new future of ME 1.0.
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Sibos 2010 - Smart Data Keynote
At SWIFT's annual financial conference in Amsterdam in October 2010, Gary Thompson discussed how CLOUD's vision relates to not only smart data but how reweaving the fabric of the Internet can advance financial intelligence.
What is CLOUD?
See a list of industry terms at CLOUDspeak.
We come to this consortia role with a big vision, too. Our premise is simple. The Internet should start with us, not webpages. Our connections are bigger than the edges of a website, deeper than an individual social networking page and broader than any one of us can imagine. But, our connections are broken. Think about it. How many times have you reentered exactly the same data about yourself when surfing the web? For that matter, how many times have you filled out the same form at the doctor's office, the school administration office or when applying for a loan? It's not just an online problem. It's an offline problem, too. It doesn't have to be this way.
We've put together the vignettes above to help you dig deeper into our vision and how a different view may help to reframe the issues of privacy, security and data . Each of these four little stories unpeels another layer of the CLOUD vision. Roll your mouse over the titles to the right to get a glimpse into the basics and then click play to learn even more. If you like what you see, click through to the video at ANewCLOUD's YouTube channel and tell your friends. It's their Internet, too.
