Category: Apps

NPR goes deep on UBDI

After a whirlwind week presenting UBDI at the Finovate conference in New York and at the MyData conference in Helsinki, I didn’t even notice the Slack message saying that the “NPR story was out.” Several hours later I sat down to listen to the NPR Marketplace Tech interview with my co-founder, Dana Budzyn. She was also in Helsinki and hadn’t even listened to it yet.

In a world of sound bites and 280 character tweets, the in-depth discussion between Dana and host Molly Wood was completely unexpected. We couldn’t have written a better lead in:

“Universal Basic Data Income. It’s not just an idea. There’s an app for that.”

NPR Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood

I spoke today at MyData on owning and monetizing data, the leading personal data and privacy conference in Europe. There is still so much misunderstanding and distrust around the idea. That’s not surprising given how badly people and their data have been treated in the digital world.

Showing off our new swag at the digi.me and UBDI booth at MyData in Helsinki – with Dana Budzyn, CEO of UBDI, and Yuta Matsuzawa of DG Lab (our lead investor).

Hats off to NPR and Molly Wood for such a thoughtful and balanced story. We only wish our iOS app were approved by Apple for people to sign up after hearing the story. We’ll post a link soon when it’s available.

UBDI secures $825k first round of funding

UBDI announced a great group of investors today in it’s $825k pre-seed round, which was led by DG Lab Fund II (a JV in Tokyo and San Francisco between Digital Garage and Daiwa Securities Group) an HU Investments (of New York, London and India). PurposeBuilt Ventures of San Francis also participated. You can read the press announcement here and their post on the round here.

As I recently wrote, the level of funding around privacy-preserving data empowerment businesses is paltry compared to the massive problems they help address – data privacy, security, trust, transparency, equitable participation in profits, etc. UBDI might be the first business built on a privacy by design data platform (digi.me) that has a simple, valuable enough value proposition for both consumers (monetize data at more than $1k annually in a few hours time) and businesses (improve quantitative and qualitative research results and make regulators happy) that I’ve seen.

It still takes about 10 minutes to set up, including downloading the separate digi.me app to protect and store the raw data, and the exact price points to get people to participate in studies needs to be worked out, but UBDI has an easy to use app that motivated consumers will have little problem navigating. And researchers of all kinds – market research, financial research, health research, academic research – will be blown away by what they find. Stay tuned for more announcements on the app coming out of beta.

Cleaning up our social media mess

One of my favorite apps that has come out of our digi.me hackathons is TFP (as in That F’ing Post). We are incubating it now inside the Social Safe Incubator, and have a small team from the University of Michigan working on it with us. You can check it out at: TFPapp.com

Like the name suggests, TFP helps flag social media posts of yours that might be considered vulgar or offensive. It uses a library of over 3,000 words and phrases that get matched privately against your entire history of social posts from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and Flickr. You can then edit or delete any posts you find concerning, especially those from your middle school years before you became the enlightened person you are now.

Understanding our digital footprint is essential, especially content that we created ourselves. TFP is an important first step in that effort. I look forward to hearing what you think.

A personal homecoming at the University of Michigan

I was invited by the University of Michigan’s School of Engineering and Center for Entrepreneurship to give a “Ted Talk” on my entrepreneurial journey and how I came to be so passionate about empowering people with their data, privacy and identity.

I wrote one of my first blog posts in 2010 about the origins of my thinking when I was a student around concerns of “being defined by others,” so I really enjoyed this special chance to share my story. I’ve never been more convinced that our data-driven future depends on each of us having agency over our data and identity.

And, thankfully, the tools and rules to make that happen are finally emerging – like the digi.me Private Sharing platform and the UBDI monetization app (which debuted in beta while I was in Ann Arbor).

Click to watch the full length presentation with Q&A (41 min)

Quartz – what Twitter should have been

I was recently asked by Fast Company magazine along with a number of other startup execs to identify one app that I used daily that most people didn’t know. My answer was the Quartz news app.

Quartz allows its community of members to identify articles to be featured. Some are articles from Quartz, but the majority are from other media sites. Members are encouraged to comment directly on the substance of the articles and not react to other comments. In fact, you can’t even reply directly to comments.

The depth and substance of the community is everything Twitter should have been – without the bots, Russians and fake news. And you get to post your best thinking along with the likes of Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington and Ryan Hoover. And you’ll learn just how wickedly smart and clever Roger McNamee (@moonalice) is and why he is regularly the most liked commentator.

I’d encourage you to download the app and try it out. Somewhere inside this newcomer to news is the answer to how we get our news and debate in the public commons. There might even be a business model that could make news profitable again.

WTF? The new TFP app – as in That F’ing Post – breaks new ground on user controlled apps

In our journey at digi.me to create compelling reasons and tools for consumers to take control of their data, the new TFP app stands apart. The app, now available for iOS in the App Store and Android in Google Play, allows you to privately scan a lifetime of social posts to find potentially vulgar or objectionable content.

I’m not sure what I can add to this great write up by the Daily Mirror’s Ian Morris, particularly if you are looking for a job – or trying to keep one you already have (including, say, hosting the Oscars): 

“Christmas party season is stalking you like a lion pursues an antelope, waiting for you to have one too many glasses of vino and vomit up the veritas all over social media.

But a new app promises to wipe up your social media mess, and might help you stay gainfully employed into 2019. Called “That F***ing Post” it hunts through your accounts looking for things you shouldn’t have said.

The app says it can go back to the start of many social media accounts, perhaps tracking down faux pas from years ago. Handy if you wrote things during the throws of youthful indiscretion but now want a paying job.”

The Daily Mirror

You can read the full article at: https://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/save-your-job-wipe-your-13690165

The app is a must for just about anyone who’s spent more than 10 minutes posting on social media, but especially for younger people who grew up posting their every thought (or bad idea). 

TFP, which stands for That F’ing Post, is built with digi.me’s private sharing technology, and scans posts and comments from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest. A simple work flow lets you swipe left to ignore a post or swipe right if you’d like to go back and edit or delete.

The app combined 8 libraries of bad terms and phrases to enable its machine learning, which happens inside the app without ever going to external servers (true edge processing).

That said, it has a lot to learn. Lots of words like “sex” or “shoot” have plenty of fine uses, while other words and phrases escape its digital net. We are encouraging users to send ideas for new word and phrases to add to the library by using #TFP. Check it out and let me know what you think!

 

 

 

 

Privacy meets social in the new Sand app – personal analytics for individuals

Social media analytics apps like Hootsuite and Buffer have largely been the domain of marketers. The average person has no idea what time of day their posts get the most engagement — or which day of the week. They have no concept of which content over the last year received the most likes, comments or shares — other than the fact your friends and family from opposite political views have finally disengaged. The problem gets even harder trying to track that across social networks.

The new Sand app, powered by digi.me’s Private Sharing technology, provides dozens of personal analytics on social data from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest and Flickr. It just launched in the App Store. We’d love to know what you think.

The first video below is a short overview of the app itself, featuring my own analytics. Not surprisingly, my World Cup posts beat out my best thoughts on data and privacy in total reach and engagement, but the granular detail of my hashtags, mentions and even keywords was fascinating and enlightening.

The second video features a conversation with digi.me EVP for Technology Tarik Kurspahic. It explains what’s happening between the secure digi.me library, where my raw social data lives, and the algorithms and analytics inside the Sand app. You’ll find out how such powerful “edge processing” is done and the basics of “app to app private sharing.” I think you’ll enjoy it whether you are new to privacy and data — or if you are a founder or developer looking to build a new app based on your own ideas (digi.me has over 15,000 sources of data to choose from via a single SDK).