Regular readers of this blog (hi mom!) are probably well acquainted with the issues of personal data control and online privacy protection.  Azigo has been a pioneer in developing tools to help people better control and manage personal information online.  But it turns out that giving people tools to manage personal information isn’t really that helpful.

Ask anyone walking down the street if they have a personal data store (or data wallet or data locker or …) and they’ll likely answer “Huh?”  Once you tell them what you’re talking about, you’ll find they don’t know why they would need one, or what they’d do with it if they had one.  That doesn’t make it a dumb idea.  It just means that the personal data store needs a raison d’être … a reason for being … a purpose.

So at Azigo we’re no longer just building the world’s best personal data store.  We’re building a killer app on top of the world’s best personal data store, leveraging many man-years of development embodied in the Higgins Project.

We’re building a platform to help simplify people’s digital lives.  We call it a lifestream for commerce.

It sounds cliche to say that we manage more of our lives online every day, but it’s true.  We book dinner reservations through OpenTable so we can redeem that Groupon we bought last week.  We pay with a credit card that accrues frequent flier miles, and later go online to pay the bill or check account balances at the credit card, bank, or airline site.  This season Cyber Monday displaced Black Friday as the most important single day for holiday shopping.  More commerce is done online, more accounts are stored online, more of our lives are managed online.

And yet the tools to help us manage all this activity are pretty crude.  Every brand, store,account, daily deal site, and loyalty program sends us an email.  Seemingly every single day.  It’s hard to filter out the unimportant stuff from the important stuff.  To take any kind of action we’re usually directed to a web site where we’re forced to remember our username (is it my e-mail address?  which one?  maybe it’s my frequent flier number?), password, etc.  Every account is managed at a different site with a different set of credentials and each has a different subset of information about me.

Making all this easier – making it work better – would be a great service for consumers.  Putting the power of a personal data store into a service that’s as easy and fun as Facebook will be a challenge.  But that’s exactly what we’re working on here at Azigo —  a lifestream for consumers.

We’ll be writing more about it, what it is, how it works, and how you can get it (hint: it’s free) in the coming weeks.