Interview with COO & CFO Billy Pham: History Behind Dataeum. Part 1

“Why can’t we find our stores on maps?”

Billy Pham, Co-founder and COO at Dataeum, explained that it is through this question that the project was born, in 2015.

Using crowdsourcing and blockchain, Dataeum aims to answer the existing flaws of the physical data generation (shops, gas stations, vending machines, etc), by placing humans at the center of the data ecosystem.

— How did Dataeum originate?

— Dataeum traces roots back to our previous company’s idea which was selling digital services to independent shops, in Barcelona and Paris at the beginning. We gathered big amount of data on stores and its attributes — phone numbers, addresses, opening hours, names of owners and emails. While carrying out this task we realized that current maps were inaccurate. To be more exact, we spotted more than 50% of the stores that were not present on Google maps to compare with our database. We started to pitch the idea of licensing the database and soon enough we got in touch with Google, Acxiom, Factual, Uber, Foursquare, Yellowpages and Bing. When the market overview was done, we decided to pivot and launch an app that allowed every person to register and collect data for us and what was more important — to get paid for it. We could easily license or sell this data as we added more and more features to the app. Soon enough the app gained traction and we had thousands of users collecting hundreds of thousands POIs (Points of Interests) in Barcelona, Paris, London.

In this way 8 months ago we came up with the idea of Dataeum. We realized that the data market is extremely centralized and segmented and all this data flow is taken from the hands of individuals for free, without acknowledging them. People didn’t get any retribution. The idea of Dataeum initially was to give users back the value of their production, while improving the processing of data .When we learned about. blockchain it became obvious that the decentralized technology could solve all the problems we observed in this market segment.

— What is the key to Dataeum mission: “Humans at the epicenter of the data ecosystem”?

— We believe that every blockchain project should make a significant change in their specific market or even to have an impact worldwide. People are now being treated as a data source. for companies. Just try to imagine: 90% of the whole data existing today has been created in the past 2 years! While that is happening, and companies are getting access to all sort of information about us, Dataeum team believes that it must be the individual choice of every person to create only the data that he wants to share.

As for the wording, we use the word “epicenter” specifically as we believe that humans must be at the center of data collection. Based on a crowdsourcing collaborative model, our solution will allow those who generate the data to be retributed for their participation. These data will be then accessible on a decentralized marketplace. Data will circulate freely, transparently and securely, from those who collect them to those who exploit them. After all it is important to remember that the person, the collector is the first link in this chain.

Please keep on reading our blog to get the second part of the interview with Billy Pham. You will find out more on blockchain shift of the company and the Dataeum team members stories.

You can get in touch with Charly directly on our Telegram group: https://t.me/dataeum