Is it yours or mine or ..

Whitelabel .. the ability to put a brand over an underlying product has been around for centuries. Mercenary armies would often take on the coat of arms of their local contractor to further the understanding that their war-lord indeed had a plentiful army. In the 60's the explosion of supermaket private brands (Fairway Olive Oil, Western Beef Coca Cola), electronics manufacturers seemingly indistinguishable products (the goods inside all came from the same factory), in the 90s phones and other communication devices took the same path and simply labelled the brand of the phone-company on top (as most techies know, this is now true of almost any brand out there).
Recently the whitelabel solution has come to its full right in the online space where platform developers enable a myriad of vendors to use the underlying platform in their own brand. Extreme examples are eBay and Amazon.com sellers - officially on the platform, but still operating a separate business. Many start-ups have historically been prone to white-label their ground-breaking, innovative, best-thing-since-molten-chocolate-cake the moment they realized no end-consumer found the offering attractive. However there is something to be said for creating a powerful platform or database and leveraging that information to other companies advantage. Three interesting examples are www.navteq.com, www.musicnet.com and www.spotrunner.com - each in their own vertical (and only one focusing on technology) - but leveraging their strength to enable other companies to perform their core business better. This is b2b at its finest .. "I will create a product that is not close to your core business. This product however will enable you to do much better in your core business." How's that for a mission statement?