WOT, or Web of Trust, is a so called ’safe surfing’ software that warns the users of  ill websites, namely scams, identity theft, spyware, spam, viruses and unreliable shopping sites.

WOT wants to primarily see itself as a community website. The service gets it’s information from other trusted sources that gather related data as well as from its user community. WOT software can be downloaded for Firefox (as I did) and for IE.

The company boast some impressive figures. According to WOT’s CEO, Esa Suurio, it has 20 million rated website and broke 1 million user downloads during August 2008.

When asked about WOT’s business model, Suurio says that they are still working on the best way to monetize the service, but that 20 million rated websites is clearly an asset, which the company is ready to lincense to third parties. Suurio adds that WOT can also act as a marketing platform. For this particular use new concepts that fit WOT’s philophy and its community model are under way.

Before starting WOT Esa Suurio, a Finnish serial software entrepreneur, founded a local Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing house InfoManager and led the company for about ten years before a successful exit in August 2001 -just before the hardest downturn in the dot-com bubble years.