The Data Pipeline and the Power of Knowledge
With COIN, powered by XYO, you’re incentivized and rewarded to create valuable heuristic data. But while COIN allows you to leverage your ability to create data for your own benefit, there’s another facet to data collection. As we like to point out, your data is immensely valuable. You should be able to use it for yourself!
To that end, the XY Labs team is opening up the COIN back end so you can see the data you generate for COIN. Now in alpha testing, the COIN Location dApp will allow COIN users to not only leverage their data but also access and use it, themselves.
That’s exciting, but we’re just getting started. We also want to make sure you have that kind of access to all of your data, not just what you generate in our systems. You probably use multiple online services from different companies every single day.
You should have this kind of back door, VIP access to your data from every possible source.
Are you wondering why you would want that? What use it might be to you? You’ve probably experienced something a few times in your life. An epiphany that a new product, tool, or service you never knew you needed or wanted is better than you expected, more useful and helpful than you could have imagined. Pretty soon, you wonder how you ever got along without it.
You’re going to feel that way about Foreventory. We’re here to open up a new world of possibilities to you.
The Possibilities
There’s a good chance you’ve enjoyed the power of your data in the past. One of the best companies in the world for data transparency (we love to see it) is also the biggest music streaming service in the world: Spotify. Not only do they make sure you have convenient access to your Spotify data every single year, they also make it fun and give you a great way to use it.
Every December, now almost as ubiquitous as Christmas lights and holiday sales, comes Spotify Wrapped. If you’re active on social media at all, you probably see your family and friends posting their favorite music for everyone to see. It’s likely you’ve shared yours, too.
In sharing the data they’ve collected about you with you, in an engaging and useful way, Spotify has created a reliable, annual viral marketing campaign. And not only do you get to enjoy learning about your own music-listening habits, Spotify allows you to make a playlist of your one hundred favorite songs, in the exact order of how much you listened to them.
This is brilliant. Every company should do this, or so you would think. But they don’t, and that’s where XYO comes in.
Benefitting From What’s Already Yours
There’s a reason a lot of companies don’t want you to see the data you generate for them. For one thing, they often sell it, and obfuscation makes paying for access more desirable. For another, you might learn too much from your data for their liking.
That may sound a bit conspiratorial, but it’s true.
For example, if you use a service and can break down exactly how much it’s costing you relative to how much you’re getting out of it, you might discover you’re not getting much out of it at all. If you find out you’re paying $10 an hour for a video streaming service, the last people who want you to know it is that streaming service.
If you play an online game, you might be familiar with price obfuscation in the form of currency conversion. The cash shops of multiplayer online games don’t have prices in your native fiat currency. You’ve never paid $15 for a cool mount or skin or power-up. No, you bought a pack of Sparkling Doubloons for a cash price, and then the price you were presented for the Ultra Velociraptor High-Speed Mount was shown in Sparkling Doubloons.
This is explicitly so you’d have to stop and figure out how much that mount is actually costing you. Let’s go ahead and do that.
21,000 Sparkling Doubloons: $149.99
Ultra Velociraptor High-Speed Mount: 5,000 Sparkling Doubloons
(150 ÷ 21000) x 5000 = 35.71428571428571
Actual cost of Ultra Velociraptor High-Speed Mount: $35.72
By the way, this pricing isn’t made up. It’s based on a real, very popular online game.
That’s the power of data when you actually know it, and companies know this data has power. That’s why they intentionally stand between you and your data.
But there’s a way to get that data. Let’s dive in.
You Can Already Access Your Data
You just need to know how. Even if you’re not familiar with GDPR, you’ve definitely encountered its repercussions.
GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation. It’s a European Union regulation passed in 2016 and implemented in 2018. The law aims to make sure internet users are aware of how their data is collected, how it’s being used, and who has access to it. Since GDPR was implemented, you’ll have become familiar with this:
But that’s not all GDPR does. If you request the data collected by any given company which operates within the EU, they’re compelled to provide it as part of GDPR compliance.
The European Union is big, with almost 448 million residents. It’s also incredibly wealthy. With a combined GDP of all member nations of 16.6 trillion U.S. dollars in 2022, it consistently represents one of the three largest economies in the world, along with the United States and China.
Most global companies want to be able to do business in the EU, and doing business in the EU means complying with GDPR. Consequently, most companies that have online services have a way to request your data from them. And you can make this request whether you’re in the EU or not.
But if you’ve ever done so, you may have noticed there’s a problem. The output tends to be raw data. There’s little context and not much you can do with it.
This doesn’t look like much, but with the right tool, it can be turned into something amazing. Your raw data can power graphs, playlists, head-to-head comparisons, cost analyses, productivity tracking, and more. It can be used to help you manage your life, your free time, your productive time, your family, your household, or your business. It can even, believe it or not, be a lot of fun to use.
We’ve created that tool, and now we want you to try it.
Foreventory
XYO’s new web app, Foreventory, the world’s first decentralized data analytics tool for everyday data, will show you how powerful your data is, and perhaps most importantly, transform how you interact with the data you’re already generating across multiple platforms. New Web3 features are under development and will be available soon, but we invite you to begin with our current beta test here. We’ll keep you updated about important new developments here on our blog.
If you have any questions, feedback, or want to talk about Foreventory (or XYO and COIN), you’ll find our Discord server here!
Written by Maryann Cummings, Head of XYO Operations.
