CEO’s Letter to Investors : The Road Ahead

Sungpil Nam
Airbloc Protocol
Published in
6 min readAug 17, 2018

We have now entered into the next phase of our project.

I understand all of your concerns and worries. We are constantly reading all of your messages and suggestions. As CEO, I understand that the intrinsic value of our project should be reflected in the market price at the end of the day.

I hold biggest responsibility for that.

At the same time, I feel extremely grateful for our community for the unwavering support and the advice given to us. Thank you.

We will not let you down. Two promises from our team and myself.

(1) We will update our current status regularly; as much as we can.

(2) We will deliver; both on our products and our business.

This is a letter to all our investors who really care for this project — be it in short term or long term. I hope you will find this reassuring of our commitment towards Airbloc Protocol.

Spearheading the Airbloc Protocol initiative is our company — ab180.

At this juncture, we thought it would be useful to share more about our parent company ab180, on what we do, and how with our expertise in big data analytics and stature in the big data analytics and digital advertising industry we are able to successfully achieve Airbloc Protocol’s objectives.

ab180’s beginnings.

Futureplay’s startup acceleration program “TechUP” in 2015

Airbloc Protocol is led by ab180 which was founded in November 2015.

In 2015, ab180 initially started as a search engine technology company which developed a special proprietary technology called “App Indexing” that enabled us to crawl in-app contents. We were invested by Futureplay, a deep tech-accelerator founded by Junghee Ryu who sold his former company to Intel.

Futureplay is also a traditional tech VC that is behind FoundationX, a subsidiary established by Futureplay for incubating blockchain-based startups.

we did not stop there.

In 2016, our company was nominated as a ​promising high-tech company by TIPS, a technology-centric fund supported by the Korean government and was awarded with an unconditional $700K USD R&D funding​ for search engine and big data technologies.

GS SHOP website

Shortly after, we received $1.3M investment from GS SHOP, the biggest home shopping vendor in Korea backed by one of the largest conglomerates in Korea — GS Group.

who we are.

In 2016, our CEO Roi Nam and the development team lead Wonkyung Lyu participated in the most prestigious software development competition in Korea — Software Maestro, and were selected as the National TOP 8 software developers by the Ministry of Science and ICT in Korea.

Our team of 40 developers today comprise of Korea’s finest software engineers from top enterprises such as Naver, Software Maestro, and WeMakePrice.

We have also recently announced that Sam Lee will be joining as our new Chief Revenue Officer to help us accelerate our global expansion.

the pivot.

In late 2016, after studying market trends and demands in the digital advertising industry, we made the bold decision to pivot our business model.

Right now, ab180 is an ad-tech company building people-based attribution data analytics called Airbridge for enterprises. People-based means we track user activities and conversions on websites, mobile apps, and offline user-behavior in an integrated manner. Integrated means we have a holistic and wholesome understanding of a person’s behavior, movements, etc based on the aggregated data we collect.

We are also connecting 1.3M users fragmented customer journey using our cross device and cross-platform identity matching engine in daily basis.

This is something that is extremely technologically intensive. And we have developed proprietary technologies for it.

With this data, we help enterprises find out how and why people purchased their products and services. With this, it helps to save on their marketing budget and maximize their marketing ROIs (returns on investments).

a big data analytics company.

Screenshot of Airbridge’s Customer Retention Analysis dashboard

At the core, we are still dealing with big data.

Over the years, our reputation among leading enterprises in Korea rose rapidly and we were fortunate to be able to partner and work with many of the leading enterprises in Korea.

Today, ab180 is a digital advertisement big data analytics company that currently tracks 2/3 of the total mobile devices in Korea (equivalent to 40 million devices) and services leading enterprises including but not limited to:

· Ebay Korea (Korea’s largest e-commerce retail platform)

· GS Shop (one of Korea’s largest conglomerate and online shopping site with 1 billion revenue in 2017)

why…blockchain?

It must be on your minds.

“If you are successful in your parent company, why work on a blockchain project?”

Airbloc Protocol was born out of close consultation with the enterprises we are currently working with, and from our own experiences in dealing with big data.

The biggest concern that enterprises always have is:

“How do I buy data in a legal manner without infringing on data privacy laws?”

It is not that there are no means to buy data, but existing illegitimate data marketplaces operate under the shadows and do not provide a transparent audit trail of the source of the data. Worse, these data sources may not even have been sanctioned by the data providers (you included).

Besides enterprise-level concerns, what we are most concerned about is:

“Why are we (data providers) not being rewarded for the data that we generate and for the digital footprint that we leave behind?”

These questions have always been in our minds. And especially after recent clarion calls for data privacy and ownership to be respected as can be seen from the GDPR regulations in the European Union (General Data Protection Regulation) and Facebook Cambridge Analytica case, and many more.

Through blockchain technology, we aim to allow users to regain their rights over their personal data and monetize their data.

you should know.

  1. What types of data were collected?
  2. How your data was sold.
  3. If you agreed to sell your personal data, to whom was it sold to and for how much?

enterprises will.

Through our data marketplace, we allow enterprises to purchase data in a transparent and legal manner — essentially solving a major pain point.

These data will then be used for a variety of reasons — business intelligence, risk mitigation, marketing and digital advertising.

How will these data be used specifically and how will they be collected?

We will be explaining these in greater detail in the road ahead.

closing.

Data is considered gold of the 21st Century and the fuel that drives growth for enterprises.

There is indeed demand for data from enterprises on our eventual Airbloc Data Marketplace.

We are sure of that.

So stay with us.

We will deliver.

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