Calling All Builders to Prifina
Prifina is looking for developers and brands who want to build apps and widgets that utilize user-held data. With Prifina’s personal data engine and sandbox environment, you can explore resources, libraries, and tools and enter the rapidly emerging personal data market.
In this post …
- Call for Builders and Personal Data Apps
- Build Personald Data Apps and Widgets
- Personal Data Sources for Building
- Three Layers of the Prifina Ecosystem
- More About Prifina’s Developer Community
- Main Areas for Further Development and Exploration
Call for Builders and Personal Data Apps
At Prifina, we are building a personal data engine that allows generating more value from personal data.
Nowadays, each and every one of us have smart wearable devices — think of a Fitbit device, smart watch or your cell phone. Such devices track our activities, movements, sleep and heart rate. However, most of this data that we generate is locked away: it is all controlled by device manufacturers and individuals have difficulty getting access to that data.
Developers face similar challenges: getting access to this data is difficult because the data is locked away in different silos, those data are in different formats, or missing critical elements or time-stamps. In general, utilizing such user-generated data takes a lot of time and hard work. 20,000 developers and counting agree.
Build Apps or Widgets
With Prifina’s resources and tools, developers can build apps or data widgets.
Widgets are simple but powerful ‘dashboard’ applications to provide analytics and valuable insights based on the user’s personal data. Widgets are installed by a user and run in their personal data clouds. With the user’s permission, widgets could have access to certain data in the personal data cloud. However, all the data is processed by the widget locally — meaning that neither Prifina, nor developers can get access to such data.
Example: a data widget that answers the question: do I spend more money when I sleep poorly? The “Grumpy Spender” widget does this by correlating my sleeping data and my spending data.
Personal data apps are full applications that run on Prifina’s personal data engine. They can be desktop applications or mobile apps. These applications provide full immersive experiences and have no similar size restrictions as Widgets. Applications come in all shapes and sizes, and they can even utilize the user’s personal data cloud as a virtual machine to run background tasks for the user, even when the user is not active.
Example: a sleep optimizer application tracks your resting heart rate and heart rate variability, and compares it to the music you’ve heard during the day from both your own Spotify and ambient music via Shazam.
Personal Data Sources for Building
The Prifina personal data engine connects various data sources and allows developers to build applications that individuals can power with their data. The Prifina Your Data page serves as both reference and inspiration for the types of data sets that individuals have access to.
For example, take a look at wearable and wellbeing data sources that are available (below) and let us know if we’re missing any and what to prioritize!
Three Layers of the Prifina Ecosystem
Prifina aims to solve this inefficiency in the personal data market. Prifina’s personal data ecosystem rests upon the following three core elements:
- Personal Data Engine
Prifina provides connectors that allow individual users to connect their personal data sources to their personal data cloud where those data are normalized and stored. Nobody except the individual has access to this personal data engine; and the data applications run locally in the personal data engine. - Data Layer
Prifina’s proprietary and open-source solutions help aggregate and unify the data in the personal data cloud. Such user-held data is more comprehensive, accurate, and rich because the data comes directly from the individual. Prifina also provides open-source solutions for developers to utilize such data. - App Layer
Third-party developers can utilize Prifina’s open-source resources, tools, and libraries to create new applications that “activate” user held data and help individuals get everyday value from their personal data. Such apps run locally within the individual’s personal data engine.
More About Prifina’s Developer Community
At Prifina, the core team has been working in the data space for over 10 years. For example, Prifina co-founders created the first in the world social media data analytics service in 2004 (before Facebook!), so we know the ins and outs of building apps utilizing various data.
“Prifina is developing the path-breaking technology in the API economy where the end point is not a server, but the individual himself.” (Prifina’s investor)
Prifina’s open-source developer community consists of 20,000+ developers, 300 of whom actively contributed to Prifina’s current product. Here are the three main reasons why developers believe Prifina’s technology is becoming the superior approach in the personal data market:
- Democratized access to data;
- Limited risk and liability for the developers because the data remains with the individual user at all times; and
- This is the right thing to do.
Join Us!
At Prifina, we’re looking for builders who want to leverage our personal data engine and build smarter applications. We will help you with access to demo applications, libraries and the environment, and the success of your business case. Start here on Slack or by exploring our demo apps on GitHub!
Don’t have an idea for the user-held data app? No worries: Check out this open board for concepts of data apps and widgets that are expected in the community.
Main Areas for Further Development and Exploration
- Expanding developer resources to build personal data apps
- Connectivity and interoperability of different wearables data
- Personal data insights visualization
- Building an open-source community for personal data
- Taxonomy of personal data (mobility, mental health, sleep, etc.)
- Regulatory and legal aspects of user-held data
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 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.
