Announcing a £30 million partnership for new HAT purchases
Entering the AI arms race to challenge Watson, Alexa, and Google the HAT proposes machine learning that can come from any data scientist in the world and run privately on a person’s most intimate data — their memories, health records, spending, and locations. Technology to answer to the centralization of companies, and any software limitations of blockchains.
Since the HATDeX spun out of research, it has been working to integrate HAT microservers, the software that lets people own their own data, into the financial services, fintech, and new app economy.
We sometimes describe these microservers as a bank account, but for people’s data instead of their money.
Today it’s announcing a £30m, multi-year purchase agreement of 10m of them to be bought and hosted by businesses on behalf of their customers (who will legally own and control them). The purchase agreement comes from the newly-established HAT Infrastructure Platform (HIP) who will buy 10m of them over two years to accelerate a new generation of apps that use these accounts as their primary personal data storage.
This announcement is our entry of the HAT microserver into the AI arms race, challenging Watson, Alexa, and Google with machine learning that can come from any data scientist in the world and run privately on a person’s most intimate data — their memories, health records, spending, and locations. This decentralized vision for the future of technology is the answer to the centralization of companies, and the software limitations of blockchains.
The HIP is established by Tolga Uzuner, a veteran of the banking and investment sectors and former Partner at Apollo Global Management, who sees HATs as “a crucial piece of infrastructure for personal data” and “the future of the innovation economy” for many industries.
Tolga is a global technology investor with a special interest in emerging markets and innovation, and his announcement of the HAT Infrastructure Platform (HIP) is a £30m planned commitment to create at least 10m new HAT micro-servers, provision HAT micro-servers for industry, grow its technology infrastructure, and improve innovation in the decentralised data economy now through 2020.
The newly-formed HIP will commit its £30m investment ($42.78m USD) to create premium HATs for its partners and clients. It is tasked with creating a digital infrastructure, and building the foundational layer of the burgeoning new resource of person-controlled personal data. The HIP will further contribute to both HAT-enabled apps and services, and the server and the computing infrastructure to keep them competitive. It will form a part of the HAT Accelerator, a yet-to-be-announced global technology accelerator due to launch in July 2018, pursuing a global vision of becoming the leading global strategic investor in this most valuable asset.
As the tech industry moves to new information policies after the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandals, person-owned personal data is increasingly a better way of building apps and services. HAT micro-servers are owned by the citizen and can collect and store data for them wherever it’s created, unlocking opportunities in private AI, non-intrusive online advertising, and improved digital signaling and verified actions.
HATs improve companies’ access to their users’ data too, giving them direct, real-time, on-demand, dynamic information that doesn’t violate customer expectations or intrude upon their privacy. Analogous to the bank account, the HAT micro-server is a data account that can be provided to citizens by governments, hospitals, financial services, or technology providers, and each HAT can be used by an individual to reuse and re-share app data, increasing their power, control, and collective worth as a consumer.
The personal data economy is worth billions, despite the customer friction and the regulatory, ethical, and security expenses that come with personal data use. Today, when companies own users’ personal information, it becomes difficult to share, update, understand, and benefit from. The HIP will help create technology that instead begins to centralize that data around the technology end-user; the citizen. Data that’s decentralized like this will become the world’s most valuable digital resource. When end-users are able to combine different types of data, new services will be created, which will be the key to next-generation technologies like personalised products, preventative and on-demand medicine, sophisticated machine learning algorithms, and pervasive IoT.
Tolga Uzuner believes that “the data economy is an emerging digital economy. Digital services from fintech to health are lacking a crucial piece of infrastructure for personal data in the form of the HAT microserver. With it, they can benefit from better coordination and real-time recommendations, and they can create services using data they’ve never had access to before. Augmented intelligence especially, a combination of personal data and machine learning algorithms that are private to the individual, will finally be a possibility with this technology, which I consider to be the future of the innovation economy.”
We agree. The HAT re-captures the original economic vision of the Internet. Individuals cannot fully realise the value of new personalised services today, so constrained are they by the limitations of a technology ecosystem where all of our data is held by apps and technology giants. The HAT lets innovation thrive, empowering small app makers, SMEs, and organisations around the world to access personal data by just asking for it directly from their customers. HATs give individuals a chance to take back the control and the economic power that comes from the Internet, but in a way that creates value and opportunity for everyone.
About the HAT
The Hub of All Things is a way to own your own personal data. It’s a microserver — a database, with a computer brain — that helps you store for yourself the information you give your calendars, social, media, and phone. Here, this video explains it better than we do.
The HAT started a few years ago in Cambridge, England, and now it’s raising a new round of financing from passionate Internet users like you. Invest online at www.crowdcube.com/hatdex for as little as £10. (As with any investment, your capital is at risk).
