Short summary of the Profila app (as testing ground for our 5 funded projects integrating our ZKT) - Profila is a platform (mobile IOS/Android application for individuals and a web-based dashboard for companies, organizations, governments and other legal entities, we call "Brands") that enables individuals to communicate with various organizations in their lives, privately, one-to-one, and without supervision or surveillance.
Imagine an app that allows you to regulate all the pipes of information, where you can instruct each brand that has access to your data (i) which channel they can use, (ii) the frequency of the messages they can send, (iii) and the content of such messages / ads. If you accept to see paid content, it will only be from the companies you authorized, according to your instruction (see i-iii). Our revenue model is 50/50 namely we share all advertising revenue with users.
People can manage their digital life in one location via an app that shows which organisations have access to (certain parts of) their personal data. People can sort all their personal information, product preferences and communication preferences and communicate with all the organizations they want to interact with in the same easy way (instead of on each individual organization's platform each time). The entire tool is design for people to (1) gain control over their personal data; (2) choose to ethically share (or not) they personal data with organisations, and (3) get compensated if they do (today only in fiat).
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Existing 5 Catalyst funded projects - Profila has already received funding by the Cardano community for 5 projects during fund 5, 6 and 7 of Project Catalyst. We thank the Cardano community for their trust and support.
All our projects are aimed at giving people back control over their personal data, and provide people with compensation for their data and attention. The projects we are developing are the following:
1. Control your data - privacy ledger
2. (d)app to control your data
3. Control your data (vault) via PRISM
4. NFT for customer feedback/content
5. Anonymity and Data Control via ZKT (our own cardano native token). –> As part of this Fund7 project we received funding for the integration of our ZEKE token into the gamified self-discovery quizzes in our app. People get rewarded in ZEKE for building up a digital profile of themselves. ZEKE can also help you control your data and remain anonymous through gamification. ZKT measures your progress and “experience” (XP) within Profila. By gaining experience points, you unlock various features that reveal deeper means of interaction and engagement with brands, but also your own data. Gaining more XP also earns you more ZKT. - read in more detail about this funded project - https://medium.com/profila-com/catalyst-backing-reconfirmed-profila-receives-additional-funding-from-the-cardano-community-e9f20c6cb9fa
Today, we propose a follow up project for ZKT (nicknamed ZEKE), where we add additional use cases for the gamified features in our app that let you interact with brands.
For more information about these projects, checkout the section "What is Profila doing on Catalyst?" on our website https://profila.com/token or read our medium articles "Profila receives funding from the Cardano community for its first privacy rights project" and "catalyst backing (re)confirmed - profila receives additional funding from the Cardano community", available here https://medium.com/profila-com/tagged/project-catalyst. Our medium articles include links to the detailed proposals for those who are interested to dig deeper.
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Short summary of this proposal - In our follow-up proposal under Catalyst Fund8, we will present a second use case for our token ZKT as part of our gamified app experience, linking ZKT to XP gained from interacting with brands (as apart from building up a profile, as explained in use case no. 1).
ZKT can measure your “interactions” with a Brand within Profila. The XP that you can gain from interactions is linked to:
Brand content and advertising
As a Profila user, you can use the app to view content from Brands (personalized advertising on products and services) and interact with such content by opening the ad, clicking through, or adding a (positive or negative) sentiment to the ad you like or dislike.
The more you interact, the more your XP increases and the more ZKT you earn.
Consumer content and feedback
Another form of brand interaction where XP can be earned is through Moments, which is consumer-created content directly shared with a brand. If a brand wants to commercially use your content, they can buy it in the form of an NFT.
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Detailed description of this proposal -
<u>1. Profila app … all about improving relationships with brands</u>
The Profila platform is designed to empowering people to have better digital relationships with brands, by giving them the tools to control how brands can communicate to them (in terms of channel, frequency, and content). Because a brand has direct access to this data shared by each individual, a brand can learn more about its customers; respect their (your) privacy settings and communication choices, learn more about the customer’s channel and product preferences.
This data then helps the brand to provide each individual with a personalized experience, ultimately benefitting both you as a customer as well as the brand. Brands can use Profila as a new source of accurate and ethically sourced data, as well as a customer engagement and marketing platform channel that helps the brand provide a personalized experience based on the instructions of each individual and tuned to the digital pace of each individual.
<u>2. Profila agents … consumers, brands, and Profila</u>
a) Consumers
Consumers exist on a spectrum, from one-time purchasers to regular customers, brand loyalists, content creators, superfans, or even brand ambassadors. Some are devout followers of certain brands and want to get closer to them, others only want to receive content from a brand (only) when they require a product or service.
At the same time, regardless of their desired level of engagement, they are all inundated by ads at every single second of the day, walking around town, on Youtube, Instagram, when speaking with other people. Every moment of someone’s life has become adspace and as such we must offer something truly unique for people that are willing to offer us their valuable time.
Via the Profila app’s self-discovery journey, each consumer will be able to choose what Categories they fill in and to what level they go. Based on your engagement with a specific niche (e.g., eco-friendly traveler level 5 + vegan level 3), you can define in detail what kind of consumer you are.
b) Brands
Brands want a stable and consistent revenue source at the end of the day. They want to expose themselves to consumers who are actively searching for them (or their products and services) and then hope to convert said consumers into purchasers of the brands.
As was said above, ads are everywhere and Brands have to find venues where they are able to get their ads in front of consumers who are already suggestive to watching and consuming ads and or wish to become closer to their favourite brands. They have many places to advertise and have to choose specifically where and how based on retention and conversion.
Today if a brand wants to have an online presence, there is no other alternative than using the advertising services that Facebook, Instagram and Google provide, even though your brand is then participating to and even financing this large-scale personal data abuse and is not listening to what people want. Also, online advertising stakeholders still largely fail to show people ads of real interest. The result is that many people consider online ads to be annoying and useless.
Profila provides this new private channel where brands can advertise at the space set by their consumer. In addition, the Categories within Profila will create outputs for brands that will allow them to personalize offers, create micro-segments, and provide them actionable insights to delight customers
c) Profila
Profila has the mission of aligning Consumers, Brands, and Itself via the application. A proper synergy between the three should look like consumers getting access to deals, specials and unique information from their favourite niches and brands, for brands they must have access to high-quality potential consumers that are willing to convert and ideally become long-term consumers at that. Profila must constantly expand its userbase to become attractive for as many brands as possible and build out its own internal application in order to have users view, create and share content (consuming ad content).
But how do you teach people to build that highly accurate set of data, privacy settings, communication preferences, and how do brands use all of this data to personalize their content and provide customers (people) with that personal experience? That is where we created our own token, called Zero Knowlegde Token”, ZEKE (in short) or ZKT, with the ultimate goal to improve relationships and trust between people and brands. ZKT will help us achieve this goal, incentivize good behavior, help avoid any abuse of the platform and tools we make available and will compensate people and brands for taking part in this new engagement and experience model.
<u>3. ZEKE … all about improving experiences and interactions with brands</u>
“ZEKE functions as a marker of progress in the app. It indicates the progress of a person’s self-discovery while he or she builds up the most accurate and authentical set of data about him or herself. It also measures your experience in relation to a specific brand or market. The higher you “level up” in your self-discovery process in the app, the more you will have access to exclusive brand content and experiences. ZKT will be crucial in this customer-to-brand relationship process, as it empowers, rewards and protects people and incentivizes both people and businesses to share better data, act more ethically when using data, and ultimately create a better customer relationship”. - the Profila Team
(a) ZKT as Experience and Marker of Progress
ZKT measures an individual user’s progress and “experience” within Profila.
Experience or “XP” (read: $ZEKE) in this form will unlock various features within Profila that further enhance and reveal deeper means of interaction and engagement with brands, but also the user’s own data. This is achieved through a “levelling” based system (within individual Categories and at a profile level), but also through “badges” that are awarded for specific category achievements, as well as the ability to stake XP (explained below). This functionality encapsulates both data management features as well as self-discovery and profile development features.
(i) Self-discovery and Quizzes (fund 7 project subject matter)
The main XP that people can develop is linked to self-discovery via our Category Quizzes. Categories is a new concept from Profila that will empower individuals to create the most authentic, accurate, and valuable asset available anywhere. These interactive quizzes are designed for people to build up an accurate digital profile of themselves.
This digital profile is created as you fill out the personal data section (your email, date of birth, name, picture, languages you speak etc.) as well as complete quizzes within specific categories (such as Food & Drink, Fashion, Travel). These quizzes are an enjoyable and interactive way for you to capture your preferences and thoughts via text or picture-based questionnaires. As you complete more quizzes, you earn XP and level up not only your profile, but the respective categories in which you have completed quizzes.
For example: If you are a big fan of “Outdoor Sports” and the subcategory ”Running”, you might be willing to participate in various forms of advertising within the Outdoor Sports category and the sub-niches of “Trial Running”, “City Running” or even “Triathlon”. By participating in advertising items that are in the general category you gain “experience points” (read: $ZEKE) and more experience points increase your level for a specific category and niche.
(ii) Staking to unlock new Quizzes
ZKT earned and accumulated (XP) can be used to specifically progress and enhance interactions within specific categories that you are interested in. This will be achieved by initially offering a select curation of categories to the user to delve into, whilst others remain locked until a certain amount of XP (i.e., ZKT) has been acquired. The acquired ZKT needs to be ‘staked’ within the app to unlock these new categories, as well as further levels within individual categories of particular interest and other benefits.
After earning XP in a specific subcategory of “Running” as part of the category like “Outdoor Sports”, a user can go to the next level and stake the earned ZKT to unlock access to different subniches like “Running clothes” or “Triathlon nutrition” or “Running accessories”. Or you might be interested in men’s fashion. Eventually you complete all unlocked quizzes within Men’s Fashion, and so to unlock the next level of depth (more specific questions, niche preferences) you will have to stake your ZKT tokens to this category to unlock the further benefits.
When a person fills out a Quiz, the data selected gets added to their Profila and increases the value of the digital profile. This profile can then be shared – by the individual alone – in exchange for a fee from brands they like, and ultimately for more personalized products and services from such brands. The higher a user rises in levels, and the more categories a user gains XP in, the more valuable a user becomes for a brand. This is because brands will use the levels to figure out what content to share with their customer base. Unless you decide to share personal data and category-data with a brand of your choice, your data stays safe inside Profila and is not shared with any brands.
(iii) Achievements & Badges
Additionally, users are rewarded with badges for reaching certain levels within categories, or for taking certain actions in the app, in order to provide a sense of achievement alongside encouraging further self-discovery. Badges are part of the gamification of Profila by providing fun and insights for individuals.
E.g., when you have filled out all levels of the “Running” category, you receive the “Ironman” badge. When you shared customer-created content with at least 10 brands, you earn the “Loyal Customer” badge, or when you exercise a privacy right (e.g., you ask brand to modify your privacy settings and change your email), you get the “privacy wizard” badge”.
These badges, in combination with the levelling score for Categories and XP in ZKT, all serve to create the most accurate representation of yourself that will help brands understand who you are, so they know how to engage with you in a private and personalized manner.
(b) ZKT to improve interactions … and create superfans (or not) (fund 8 project subject matter)
ZKT can also measure an individual user’s “interactions” with a Brand within Profila. The XP that people can gain from interactions is linked to (i) brand content and advertising, and (ii) consumer content and feedback. This is the feature that we will build out under this fund 8 proposal.
(i) Brand content and advertising
People can use the app to view content from Brands (personalized advertising on products and services) and interact with such content by opening the add, clicking through, or adding a (positive or negative) sentiment to the add you like or dislike.
People can earn additional brand-specific XP or content. The more you interact, the more your XP increases and the more ZEKE you collect. As you progress in levels you get more unique ads and personalized content, more unique opportunities, and rewards, you could potentially become a brand ambassador. At this point the interaction is very personal and unique.
This then acts as an amazing selling point towards brands as they can witness how their existing consumers are so involved in specific niches and really build out their own nodes to reward the consumers who are working hard farming and levelling their brand’s node. For smaller brands, this opportunity is truly unique because you gain access to a consumer base that is highly active and marketable to and have the potential to cultivate super fans of your products by really building out nodes that compete with larger brands because you can focus on rewarding people who are really interacting with your ads on the platform.
(ii) Consumer content and feedback
Another form of brand interaction where XP can be earned is through Moments, consumer created content that is directly shared with a brand. If a brand wants to commercially use your content, they can buy it in the form of an NFT. To know more about this, checkout our proposal funded under Project Catalyst fund 6 (link below, together with all other funded proposals).
The challenge is as follows: "what applications will provide the most value for end users in 2022"?
We are confident that our proposal addresses this challenge because we are expecting many users onto our platform in the next months, who will benefit from the functionality we develop under this proposal
- We are onboarding 100.000+ users onto the App in the next months, as part of a pilot with a large multinational.
- All of these people will be incentivized to play the gamified self-discovery quizzes in the app, building up an accurate digital profile of themselves. All of these people will be rewarded for interacting with brands (and brand content in the form of adverts) via the ZEKE token we integrate with this proposal.
Profila's ZEKE token will provide the necessary incentives for people in the app to learn how to control their data and interact with brands on their own terms.
Challenges
- Scalability and speed of Cardano blockchain for high volume, low value payouts (we are paying people factions of a dollar for watching ads and interacting with brand content).
- Cost of high volume transaction ledger/record of all Ads served on Cardano
Risks
- Cardano blockchain speed and cost might be prohibitive to project success/adoption
- Integration of our token payout linked to activities into adtech/ad server ecosystems which require high-speed might limit scalability of the solution on Cardano, although the POC will prove viability of the approach