Sustainability, decentralized peer-to-peer communication & open ecosystem

All controls in politics and economy seem to be set for the future – as are 1iO’s. In January this year, we had the pleasure of attending and speaking during the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. This year’s edition of the WEF titled itself “collaboration in a fragmented world”. Preceding the event, the WEF released two articles on that matter – their content being a perfect match with our agenda at 1iO. We partnered with INGLOSUS Foundation from Frankfurt who are focusing their energies on digital sustainability and on realizing the UN’s seventeen SDGs. Together, we hosted an evening reception and a panel discussion at the Grand Hotel Belvédère. One might ask what 1iO has to do with the sustainable-development goals. It turns out that peer-to-peer messaging can save tons and tons of carbon dioxide, because it runs on the end-device’s infrastructure and doesn’t rely on big not-so-emission-friendly data centers like your day-to-day messaging apps (WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, e-mail, SMS) do.

The decentralized peer-to-peer messenger is just the beginning

For its Minimal Valuable Product (MVP), 1iO is releasing a fully decentralized peer-to-peer (P2P) messenger, and we had the chance to elaborate on that in Davos, which was great, because there’s more to it than just texting. Not only does the architecture itself protect your privacy and data integrity, but we are also aiming to set new standards in this field by integrating smart APIs and providing SDKs for developers to build on the flexible infrastructure and integrate their own DApps and solutions.

What does this mean exactly? First of all, data and infrastructure can be accessed, managed, and shared in a collaborative manner. Think of a party: starting off, you send out invitations and collect the replies. Then you get your party going and people start to get hungry. Now it’s possible to integrate a widget-like function to order from your local pizza place, and when the food is delivered, a smart contract triggers the payments. What’s next? Well, no party without music. Just integrate your Bluetooth speaker as a piece of infrastructure with the group chat and now everyone can add music to the playlist. To be honest, this can be a good or a bad thing (when you have Britney following the latest Slipknot tracks, preceded by some Bach smash hits), but it does save time and is more convenient. But we weren’t in Davos just to talk about parties. While this is a tangible use-case, when in Switzerland, you need to think big. The messaging functionalities are only the tip of the iceberg. The core ingredients of the MVP of 1iO's P2P messenger will lay the foundation for what will one day become a fully decentralized Web3-ecosystem with real-world use-cases for many more daily tasks, even for businesses and whole industries. Because the ecosystem is open from the beginning, domain experts and developers are enabled to integrate their own ideas and processes that have security and data-ownership baked in right from the start. This is why we sometimes refer to the ecosystem as a “process-network”. Blockchain, smart contracts, and decentralized data-management (IPFS) support the processes of today (whatever they may be) in becoming ready for the future. Making processes ready for the future means, in our opinion at least, to make them faster, more transparent, more cost-efficient, more secure, and increase their general interoperability when working together with other parties. At a later stage, the 1iO ecosystem will be able to achieve exactly that. Users (private and professional) will be able to create what we call “COs”. A CO is a virtual room for any kind of collaboration: human to human, human to machine, and machine to machine. Humans access COs using our user-interface, COApp. As we said earlier, you can then use plug-ins to change its content to be whatever you need it to be, thereby creating your personal portal to all the possibilities of Web3. This will dramatically increase efficiency in all kinds of processes.

Now, back to Davos. After the reception, we discussed the possibilities for the usage of such a network in military and defense. When lives are on the line, data-integrity and fail-safe mechanisms are top priorities software-wise. We are not quite there yet, of course, but the example shows how differently and broadly you can think with this kind of tech to hand. Speaking about tech and software – this is where we come from. 1iO is evolving from an existing software company, BRANDGUARDIAN, that’s been in the business for more than twenty years. For customers like Microsoft, McDonald’s, Siemens, RedBull, amongst many others, we have bootstrapped software to increase efficiency in complex marketing projects.

Data ownership is the human right

We talked about openness. In our case it’s not only technological. We believe that data ownership is a human right that should be able to be pleaded by everyone. For us, Davos was the kick-off event to a long journey of creating a digital space accessible to everyone – the smallest and most important piece of process we can think of being communication – with many important steps still ahead of us, like funding, R&D, marketing, amongst other KPIs. In our opinion, there’s hardly any better place to start things off than Davos. Not only is the attention for new projects and visions there very dense, but you also meet people and leaders from many industries and politics that are otherwise pretty hard to get to. In some sense, 1iO’s vision is an invitation to all the like-minded people out there that want to give users and companies more control over their data, increase general security in the Web, and create a digital space that can be home to everyone.

This is just the beginning – so join us for one hell of a ride!