Tim Berners-Lee, Inrupt

Back in July I posted about a Vanity Fair piece with Tim Berners-Lee (founder of the World Wide Web) and his vision for a democratized, decentralized Internet.*

Now there's a FastCompany piece with Berners-Lee in which he explains that he is leaving his position at MIT to focus on his startup Inrupt, an application of his framework Solid. If that sounds a little convoluted, that's fair. Simply put, "Solid empowers users and organizations to separate their data from the applications that use it." Inrupt is a company that makes apps with that technology.

Berners-Lee wrote up a blog post explaining his decision to leave MIT to focus on Inrupt and it's hard not to get behind. He envisioned the web as a place of innovation and safety of information; some of which is sorely lacking.

It's a huge undertaking and not likely one that will be easy to pull off. Hopefully more developers and more users will adopt the technology and it will prove itself as the way forward for protecting our identities and our data. No pressure.

*If that sounds like a nod to the fifth season of Silicon Valley, tip your hat to Mike Judge for being on top the zeitgeist.