How Being On The Road Will Feel Just Like Home With Ontology & Daimler Mobility
There are currently several trends which are shaping mobility industries around the globe. As a result, the mobility sector has consented the future belongs to C.A.S.E Connected, Autonomous, Shared, and Electric.
Cars are experiencing a conjectural transition to become smart devices for drivers, just as how featured phones were replaced worldwide by smartphones. In addition, a decline in car ownership and a surge in shared mobility services have resulted in a call for more user-centric, integrated mobility service offerings for drivers.
According to Yun Xi, Senior UI/UX designer at Daimler Mobility, “We want to enhance trust between different mobility service players. The question was how to provide customized services to end-users based on their authorized data. You need to identify a way to ensure the user’s data privacy and security. That’s challenging as a diverse range of third-party service providers is participating in the process. And all of them provide an integrated and personalized user experience throughout different mobility offerings.”
This is the reason why Daimler Mobility — an industry leader that envisions the automobile as a home on the road — chose to collaborate with Ontology. This partnership, capitalizing on the latter’s digital identity and data life-cycle management technology via the blockchain, aims to create a trust-worthy, personalized, and secure experience for drivers. Customers should feel as comfortable and at ease as they would be at home.
The drivers of cars, who have access to the Welcome Home in-car system receive a couple of unique benefits, including:
- Your in-car and mobility service preferences are attached to your profile, not to any one particular vehicle, therefore you could transform any vehicle into your own, anytime, anywhere across the globe.
- You can access third-party service providers integrated into the system with one-time verification, yet stay anonymous to all providers after the services are completed.
- You will be authorizing your data for service providers to give personalized services, yet you retain full transparency and control of all access and usage of your data, which would allow you to stay anonymous.
For a full outline over the 6 key steps of the “Welcome Home” journey, we’d like to demonstrate the example of a user named Julia who is traveling in Germany and needs to rent a car in Stuttgart, Germany.
To begin with, Julia would have gone through a one-time KYC (1) when she previously purchased her own automobile. Through Welcome Home, Julia would have bound her personal preferences from her own car with the platform, so that when she rents the car in Stuttgart, it would come tailored to her preferences (2).
Once inside the car, Julia would receive third-party provider suggestions through the Fleet2Share, a different platform hosted on a different blockchain. This is the primary value add for Ontology’s partnership since we offer cross-chain interoperability (3). The good news for Julia though is that she doesn’t need to re-register or sign-up for anything new since all of her data is already stored on the Welcome Home platform. All she needs to do is grant authorization and access to the 3rd party app providers suggested from Fleet2Share. The authorization to have access to this data is managed on the blockchain, making it both immutable and transparent. Once the journey begins, the car would be able to track data points including wear and tear, if there were any accidents, or more minute details like how heavy Julia steps on the breaks versus the gas pedals.
At the end of her journey (4), Julia can unpair her car profile settings from the car and choose to restrict her personal data from being accessed by third parties — while the blockchain grants data points that she previously allowed for things to do with the car, such as the tread on the tires or the amount of charge the battery it has left (5). And finally, Julia can choose to share this experience with her social circle, or grant access to her data in — either way, it is her decision (6).
In summary, the 6 key steps of a user’s journey through the Welcome Home platform are:
- User Onboarding & Data Access Control
- Setting Varied Profiles & Data Management
- Pairing Profile with Rental Interoperability
- Ending the rental and having access to your Data
- Profile Sharing & trusted Data Sharing
- Receiving your profile via Social deliveries
At the end of the day, Welcome Home is designed to be a user-centric application granting us full control over when, where, and whom we share data with. It is designed for the perfect mobility experience, partnered with Daimler Mobility. We firmly believe that the control should belong to the user, and is something achievable through our decentralized Identity (DeID) protocol as well as our distributed data exchange framework (DDXF) — both powered by cryptographic algorithms on the blockchain.
Welcome Home is an excellent case of using blockchain to give us the option of benefitting from the perks and convenience of the digital economy while keeping our data private and secure. This also holds vast potential outside of mobility services such as wherever we are making compromises for this trade-off including on smartphones, in smart homes, and in smart cities.
Data sovereignty is what ultimately safeguards our freedom.
For blockchain enthusiasts, Ontology’s Decentralized Identity Protocol used underneath Welcome Home is the first of its kind seen in the industry where one-click verification and service integration could be made interoperable for applications on different blockchains, making the solution truly scalable.
Check out the video demo of Welcome Home on Startup Autobahn EXPO Day powered by Daimler Mobility AG here.
Find Ontology elsewhere
Ontology website / Ontology GitHub / ONTO website / OWallet (GitHub)
