Auctioning off security
A Swiss start-up company, WabiSabiLabi, is providing a high-end luxury product for today's information consumptive society--security. Their wares are software vulnerabilities. They provide an auction service connecting up those who discover these flaws (typically researchers) and those who may wish to buy them (usually the affected companies).
Sure this sounds outrageous, but it's actually quite common for researchers to sell the results of their findings to companies, helping them close their products' holes. This approach is designed to create an efficient marketplace, valuing the data close to what the market will actually bear.
The take home point here is that in the future, everything that can be learned will be for sale. Every piece of data has its price and perhaps the biggest use of the Internet over the long haul is to be the efficient market machine, valuing every point of electronic information, no matter how esoteric.
Posted on July 17, 2007
