If your data were apples, what would you do?
What could you be squeezing from a virtual value chain for your personal data?
So, you’ve got a great product. It’s valuable and sells really well. Congrats.
This however isn’t the last time it’s sold. Used as an input, it gets improved, mixed with other products and sold on at a premium. This might be the end of its journey, reaching its final consumer, but just as likely it will continue to travel for some time through a value chain, passed between different businesses who all improve it in some way.
Sound familiar? This is the scenario for a lot of iconic Australian industries. Wool, beef, coal, iron ore. Much of which disappears in bulk offshore for value adding, often coming back to us as consumer goods.
Now, for those in business with an eye to their bottom line, the classic play for any producer of an input is to retain their product and add value to it themselves. Known as a value chain or vertical integration, it’s a well worn path to greater profits.
In 1889, Bundaberg Rum began as local sugar mills looked for ways of making more out of their molasses which was otherwise just being fed to cattle.
Bundy Rum today continues to find ways to add value. More recently they’ve started making cola, mixing it with their rum and putting it in a can, capturing their share of the booming ready-to-drink market.
So what’s this got to do with apples and your data?
Well, each of us are producing a really valuable product. Since you’re online and reading this post, you’re making it right now! It’s you; your personal data. Collected and commoditised, our data is the one raw input underpinning the enormous and growing profits of Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and a whole host of other businesses, large and small.
Right now, if your data were apples, and you were the orchardist, you’d be spending a lot of time nurturing and tending to your trees but that’s about it. Big supermarkets come to pick your fruit and take it away. You don’t know how many apples you have or what they’re worth. You don’t even know what your apples taste like.
This is the story of our own data. We have no idea what’s collected, what it’s worth, much less, what we could be learning from it.
But what if we picked our own apples? Not just that though, just as the sugar millers of Bundaberg did with their molasses, what if we added value by turning our apples into juice? And then cider? What if we sold our cider at our own barn door?
So, what about a virtual value chain for our personal data then?
Enabling people to capture and create data as they engage online with new information, events and ideas. Giving insights to individuals on how their views compare to the communities around them. Providing a platform for people to use these insights as stimulus for meaningful conversation. Ultimately, creating a marketplace for people, the creators of value, to sell as little or as much of their own data as they wish direct to the end consumers of market intelligence.
Seems obvious now that it’s put like that doesn’t it?
This is Worldview Exchange. A startup on a mission to democratise personal data and empower people. It’s a place to get your news as you always would, but then lets you squeeze the most value out of the data you make while you’re there.
So if your data were apples, what would you do?
