Press

InnoFinland Prize Awarded to Web of Trust Community of over 16 Million Web Users

The President of Finland, Tarja Halonen, presented the national INNOFINLAND 2010 prize to Web of Trust (WOT) in observation of National Innovation Day on December 14th. The prize was awarded to Web of Trust for its innovative use of "the wisdom of the crowds" to warn Internet users when they are about to visit a website that may pose threats such as phishing, scams, identity theft or inappropriate content for children.

The theme for the 2010 INNOFINLAND prize is “Users – a Source for Innovation,” emphasizing user involvement from the very beginning of a new innovation. The free WOT browser add-on is used daily by a fast-growing global community of 16 million users.

Web of Trust’s CEO, Vesa Perälä, considers WOT’s crowd-sourced mission for a safer web to be a natural fit with the theme of INNOFINLAND.

“The world changes at a fast pace and the online world even faster. No company has the resources nor can build a service such as Web of Trust without the real users stepping in. This is and has always been the core idea of WOT. Analyzing the reputation of all kinds of online actors requires millions of users and tens of millions of analyzed and rated web sites. E-commerce sets further requirements. It is essential to know the reputation of your business partner or know that he is what he claims to be,” says Vesa Perälä.

The complexity and coverage of online services continues to increase in the near future. Unfortunately, the number of Internet fraud attempts also increases, and they become more advanced and difficult to detect. It is estimated that approximately 60,000 new scams and malicious web sites see daylight every day globally.

“As the boundaries between online and offline services and commerce blur, favorable conditions emerge for skilful and unforeseen online fraud attempts. There are numerous services which try to protect consumers from fraud but most of them fail miserably. Only services such as Web of Trust, which is based on real-time feedback from real web users globally, can succeed,” highlights Perälä.

Although the number of malicious sites increases, there is a cure in view.

“The more users WOT gets, the better our system becomes. We strive to have 40-50 million users by the end of 2011,” says Perälä. “Our community is what continues to power Web of Trust, and we share the INNOFINLAND prize with them,” he concludes.

About WOT Services Ltd.

Web of Trust (WOT) is a community-powered surfing tool that boosts trust on the Internet, by using authentic user experiences to help web users find reliable websites. By means of a free WOT add-on tool installed in the browser, Internet users can discern the quality of websites that they are about to access in terms of trustworthiness, vendor reliability, privacy protection and suitability for children. With traffic-light style icons, WOT shows the website’s reputation based on user evaluations and information from trustworthy sources. WOT works with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Safari and Opera. The service has over 16 million users around the world who have rated more than 30 million websites.

About the InnoFinland prize

The InnoFinland prize is awarded to Finnish businesses, organizations or persons whose ideas, inventions or innovations have significantly promoted business activities, entrepreneurship in general and the introduction of innovations to the market.