DaoConsumer.com / TIPs

TIPs (from DaoConsumer) tells you who the evil companies are while you are buying stuff anywhere on-line.

Companies and products in web-pages are overlaid with little graphics indicating things like environmental pollution, armaments investment, human/workers rights violations etc.

An Internet search Spider is used to trawl a list of magazine/newspaper archives for dirt on companies, populating the database as it goes.

The user community is able to view the source documents found about the companies and vote on the information in a similar way to the NewsVine model. Users can also set their areas of interest and trusted sources.

Screenshots / install can be viewed on the website.

Revenue Model: Firstly, this system is not for profit. It is being developed for social reasons to be free and without adverts. It will be market ready in summer 2008. Marketing will be done through full-time social networking. There are, however, a few ideas for how this system can generate revenue:
1) Companies will be able to register that they sell product types, e.g. Vacuum Cleaner. When those product type names appear in a web-page, they will be linked to a list of the companies selling them. As always the companies will be presented along with their ethical credentials/scores. This is called a best-buy table. This enables click-through revenue.
2) The Database itself has much value. There will be RSS feeds available on companies to allow them to stay up-to-date with what everyone thinks of them. Commercial use of the data will be at a premium.

Technical: TIPs consists of a COM Internet Explorer Plug-in (like GreaseMonkey) and an on-line DataBase populated by a Spider that trawls the Internet for dirt on companies.