Build Three Types of Personal Data Apps on Prifina Platform

Prifina believes in a future where personal data is user-held and portable between applications by individuals' decisions. In this post, we cover three different types of apps that can be built using a user-held data framework.

Prifina provides a personal computing platform in the cloud for individuals to manage their personal data and empower them to activate their data in fundamentally new ways. For developers and service providers, Prifina provides a platform to develop and publish new types of personal applications and personalized experiences for their customers.

1. Profile Apps: Improving Customer Value Experiences

Via personal cloud part on the Prifina platform, individuals can activate various profile cards that are aggregated and anonymized representations about them. These cards are based on their personal data without including their actual underlying data.

Based on standardized profile cards established by Prifina, developers and digital services can enable and provide personalized customer experiences in a scalable way, without asking customers to manually enter their profile information, preferences or requiring them to register or login.

Example: by enabling personal Travel Profile, booking portal X can personalize an offer for a premium package for a wine tour of Bologne that works with shared Travel Profile preferences, budget, and calendar.

2. Data Widgets: Provide Insights And Analytics For Individuals

Data widgets are simple but powerful ‘dashboard’ applications to provide analytics and valuable insights about individuals, based on their personal data. Widget applications are installed by individuals and run in their personal dashboard on the Prifina platform.

Widgets can have full access to any and all of the individuals’ personal data based on the individual’s permission in order to provide analytics and insights. However, widgets running on the Prifina architecture do not and can not share or send any data they access outside of the individuals’ own personal cloud.

Prifina itself retains no data and doesn’t require access to an individual’s personal data to enable these widgets. Widgets can be developed by any developer for various data visualization, analytics and insights use cases. Applications can be developed independently based on specified standard requirements by using sample data returned by a GraphQL endpoint.

Example: a Data Widget that answers the question: do I spend more money when I sleep poorly? The “Grumpy Spender” Data Widget does this by correlating my sleeping data and my spending data on a dashboard. Maybe it also offers a suggestion or two.

3. Local Data Apps: Cloud Local Applications on Personal Data

Local Data Apps applications are “individual-first” apps that have personal data, data portability between applications and privacy controls at their core without needing to move personal data away from individuals' control. All of these applications can use data from different applications based on users’ prior explicit consent. Local Data Apps run on the individuals’ personal cloud offered by the Prifina platform and are installable and un-installable by the individuals from the Prifina App Market.

Personal applications are primarily used from developers' applications UI’s launched from individuals' personal cloud on Prifina’s platform. Some of the background applications’ or specific features can also be enabled to be used and experienced beyond the Prifina platform in the individual’s daily life via other applications.

Example: a Travel Yearbook App that is installed in my own personal cloud and using my local data, it crafts a “Travel Report” photo album, with location tags, events visited, contests participated, meals eaten and even expense reports if one were so inclined.

Personal applications in Prifina are based on the following key principles:

1. Individuals as the primary owners of their personal data. This personal data is stored in each individual’s personal cloud. Prifina offers the user interface where the individual is always in control of who can access their personal data and all the management controls.
2. Separation of applications and data for personal data portability, from and between applications and personal data sources.
3. The ability to interact between individuals and services with varying levels of anonymity, while being able to provide personalized offers and other personalized customer experiences.

And those typically enable new types of benefits:

• Personal applications can turn personal data into insights with new or additional value
• Personalize the customer experience at a more advanced and/or privacy considered levels in a scalable way
• Optimize and automate customer interactions and improve overall operational efficiency

Additional Benefits For Developers

Without looking or moving actual private data away from individuals' personal clouds, personal applications can use ‘standardized holistic personal data per each individual’ for analytics, machine learning, and AI services to make recommendations and predictions that guide users to take the next best action.

Using personal behavior, location, preferences and other data from the individuals’ personal cloud; personal applications are personalized and embedded into the individuals’ life activities. This can also extend to many channels, devices and applications within and outside of the Prifina platform.

Personal applications can also initiate actions by coming to the individual, versus the other way around by leveraging push notifications, alerts, chatbots and messaging services to proactively interact with users and give them smart recommendations of what to do, where and when.

Since applications run cloud locally on Prifina platform, installed and used by individuals on their account, accessing data from individuals private clouds under their control, - from the developers perspective, these can be considered very similarly as local applications running locally on individuals personal computers, but with the significant exception that these apps run locally in the cloud, in a more controlled computing environment and with benefits of ‘always-on’ and ‘always-online’. These are significant benefits in addition or compared to running and operating traditional SaaS or Mobile Applications.

Which type of application should I build?

One way to approach this is to consider if you already have an existing service with existing customers or not.

• If there is no existing service, the simplest starting point may be to start developing a simple Data Widget application that would provide interesting analytics or insights from the individuals’ existing data sources. Such widget applications could be as simple as showing overlaps between Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections. Or to show my contacts and friends on a map. Or show my photos on a map etc.
• If you already have an existing service, perhaps the best starting point would be to add a customer Profile App for the existing website or service, where new customers need not register before being able to provide them with a more thoughtful first experience. An example of this could be to personalize the “front page” reading experience by using ‘Reader Profile’ preferences with past reading habits. Or, in an eCommerce site, to provide them with product suggestions based on their ‘Shopping Profile’ data.

In general, Data Widgets and Local Data Apps are the best way to build an entirely new type of customer experiences and to acquire new customers.

Also, it is a way to start developing an entirely new service level for those existing services with existing customers. Like more automated customer relationships enabled by custom applications on the individuals’ personal cloud that can communicate with the existing service.

At the most advanced level, developers can create even more complete experiences by developing applications for each of these three categories. The starting point can be the personalization of an existing service for new customers or valuable insights via a widget about their own behavior in the existing service. It can further be developed into the most valuable customer relationship based on the customers’ own preferences.

This blog post is part of the ‘Use Case Blog Series’, where we share our thoughts on how to reimagine existing applications and create entirely new applications that are possible due to new regulations and the Prifina architecture. In this series, we will publish new use cases for potential new applications, preliminary business model ideas to support them and the type of data that can make new types of customer experiences possible.

Start Developing Personal Data Applications

If you have an idea for a new type of application, or for an application that simply needs to be reimagined, get in touch with us and we will be happy to brainstorm with you and publish your idea via our channel, and your application in our App Market.

Naturally, if you are interested in developing that yourself and want to keep it private, just sign up for our developer account and get started.

Connect With Us and Stay in Touch

Prifina is building resources for developers to help create new apps that run on top of user-held data. No back-end is needed. Individual users can connect their data sources to their personal data cloud and get everyday value from their data. Follow us on Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn, and Facebook, or listen to our podcast. Join our Facebook group Liberty. Equality. Data. where we share notes about Prifina’s progress. You can also explore our Github channel and join us at Slack.