I'm very pleased to announce some news about my quest to find a way to support myself while working on the development of TiddlyWiki into the future.
For just over a year I've been Chief Technology Officer of CTRLio, a London-based startup that has been operating in "stealth mode". It is thanks to CTRLio that I have been able to continue work on TiddlyWiki. CTRLio is a venture capital backed company. That means that we have secured preliminary investment from a group of angels, and plan to raise further rounds of funding as we develop the company. I am working with two experienced co-founders, Laurence John and Dominic Strowbridge. Our tech team includes Jon Lister, one of my original Osmosoft team at BT. In concrete terms, CTRLio is setting out to build a chain of tools that anyone can use to collect and manage their personal data, and to safely share information drawn from it with other individuals and companies to help them get more out of life. Using TiddlyWiki as the roots of that toolchain means that we're not locking our users into a proprietary platform. I'll post separately in the next few days about our initial product offering - it's something that I hope will be of interest to many TiddlyWiki users. People may have an understandable fear that the involvement of a VC-backed startup might somehow taint TiddlyWiki. An important point is that CTRLio is absolutely not an attempt to "monetise" TiddlyWiki or its users. CTRLio's offering to people rests on top of TiddlyWiki, but extends off into new directions. More to the point, for CTRLio's business to work, TiddlyWiki needs to continue to be what it is today: an open source, community-driven product that respects its users by giving them an unprecedented degree of independence and control. The "intellectual property" of TiddlyWiki is still owned by UnaMesa, a charity dedicated to improving healthcare, education, and social services through innovations in technology and tools for sharing knowledge. I emphasise these points about the protection of TiddlyWiki because they are important to me personally. I've been lucky enough in my career to work for and with many different types of organisation: the BBC, an investment bank, several startups, and most recently the acquisition by BT. Through all those experiences I've learned what's important to me, and as I've got older I have felt more and more compelled to try to live up to my clumsy natural idealism. So, a crucial ingredient in setting up CTRLio was finding co-founders who had the same enthusiasm for building a business that wasn't afraid to explore alternatives to the traditional startup model. Better than that, we've also been able to find investors who share that vision. I'm delighted that one of our leading investors is the musician and entrepreneur Peter Gabriel, who many of us will remember from his days in Genesis and subsequent solo career. Peter has been an active investor in technology companies for many years. I was particularly pleased that Peter's first concern was to make sure that we regard our users ownership of their own data as sacred and are determined to put them first and look after them rather than being the kind of company that would sell them out to the highest bidder. Anyhow, this isn't the place for me to try to wax lyrical about CTRLio's business. You can find out more on our website at http://ctrlio.com. Of course, feel free to ask any questions here. I'm very happy to answer anything I can. Best wishes Jeremy -- Jeremy Ruston mailto:[email protected] -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
