Even though Washington thinks that savvy businessmen are located exclusively on Wall St. and run from the manor houses in the Hamptons/St. Tropez/Aspen where their executives live and vacation ...
Daily Kos is a great example of a small business run by a real savvy businessman who saw an opportunity and went with it, and had the skills and energy to execute successfully in a very, very difficult market space.
Well, here's another business opportunity appearing on the horizon:
Free, secure, private, NSA-proof e-mail service to anyone who wants to use it.
I think Markos and his team are the perfect folks to drive such a business idea to market.
This could be cool.
Sure, there are technological, legal and political hurdles to pass here.
First, how do you get hosting for this product? (Maybe choose a free country like Russia, where the NSA has no reach. Yet.) Second, how do you figure out how to comply with laws that are secret? Third -- well, it's not easy setting up an e-mail service, not to mention one that is private and secure, though I think one could be built from existing freemail frameworks, plus PGP.
Finally, how do you operate it as a business, bringing in enough revenue to cover support costs and the like?
I think it's a pretty solid idea, though.
Hmm. Why don't I do this myself?
(I don't have the capital, the business know-how or the time.)
Still, I'd use such a service and I think other people would, too.
If Markos isn't into, maybe someone with big guns, a lot of iron, and a lot of mindspace in the Internet privacy/security field could take this on. I wonder if the Electronic Frontier Foundation would be interested.