2020ME launch imminent

The company's concept is to provide an online virtual reflection of the user, which can search for personalised products and services using a heavily customised version of Autonomy, then alerting the user through channels including web, iTV and SMS. The user is expected to enter personal details and preferences including banking information and credit card numbers.

Colin Frost, 2020ME director of strategic development, said: “We are initially going to concentrate on the high spend areas of e-commerce, such as travel and consumer electronics. We plan to have 500 products and services on board by March.”

2020ME plans to strike partnerships with a range of online businesses, providing an online consumer marketplace. The company is planning to have three methods for suppliers to interface with it: XML schema, manual HTML interface, and a hosted catalogue database. The businesses using XML can also be issued with private keys, which the company plans to outsource to Verisign.

Piers Allison, 2020ME Director of technology, said: “We are about 3 months from completing the whole project - the core processes and applications are ready now, but require polishing before launch.”

Clearly, the project raises a number of contentious issues, from user security and privacy, through to the current disagreements over acceptable XML schema definitions. The 2020ME team is confident that such problems have been taken into account. Allison continued: “It is important to take a pragmatic approach to these potential problems, which we have taken very seriously from the outset - especially in the area of data security.”

User data is to be protected by both physical security, and firewalls between each server platform. Also, the company claims that partitioned info and random allocation of data across a range of hosting centers offers a further grade of security, on top of heavy encryption and SSL.