Last week we had a great time hosting our latest AMA with Roderik van der Veer (CTO), Vincent Bultot (DataMatch Advisor) and Valentina Ponomariova (MarCom Manager).

We gave our Databroker community a quick rundown of the highlights from the company’s rebranding and shared some of what we learned from the IoT Solutions World Congress in Barcelona. Databroker has radically changed over the past few months and we were delighted to be able to share the progress and plans with our community. 

Q: In recent times, it’s been very exciting to be involved in several major events at SettleMint and Databroker. Tell us more about some of the key moments and important events.

Valentina: We’ve really had some awesome moments in the last few months! With SettleMint we set foot in different parts of the world, from Belgium to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and India. We unveiled our refreshed logo and brand design, on-boarded new clients and took part in some great events. After the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo in Barcelona we travelled to Singapore to showcase our new brand and coming system at the Singapore Tech Festival and India for the Bengaluru Tech Summit.

Big change is also underway at Databroker. November marks an important milestone - "Databroker DAO" was rebranded as "Databroker". We grew the scope and redesigned our look to house our new message - Databroker is the marketplace for data. We also took part in a wide range of events, such as workshops with the European Commission on data sharing and interoperability. More recently, we were at the IoT Solutions World Congress in
Barcelona, where our main goal was to learn from the market and attract more companies to grow our community of data providers.

Q: Databroker is about to launch a new marketplace. The team has made changes to the brand identity and the company’s name. What is the reason for rebranding Databroker DAO to Databroker? Are there any plans to rebrand a token ticker?

Valentina: In fact, we decided to rebrand and to drop the ‘DAO’ for various reasons. First of all, our scope has changed. The initial ‘DAO’ was limited to IoT sensors and sensor data that could be exchanged. While the scope of Databroker is much larger. Databroker is the marketplace for data and this can be any kind of data that brings businesses value. This is a whole new market that needed a new positioning. As a side note, we defined seven ‘data communities’ that have a high market value, like geographical data that can be shared, bought and sold via our platform.

On top of that, we offer a unique DataMatching service. This is a 100% tailor-made service, bringing human expertise and service to the matching requirements without a bot in sight. Our DataMatching Advisor is here to understand exactly what companies need while using our wide global network of data partners to find the perfect data match.

We also noticed that "DAO" conjured up some negative connotations in discussions with our potential data buyers and sellers. We even had some asking if we were part of ‘The DAO’ incident a few years ago. As you can see, there was no single reason, but rather a combination of reasons why we decided to rebrand.

We should point out that DTX tokens remain part of the project and that the ticker will remain the same.

Q: The marketplace is coming soon. Are there enough industry players and enterprises to ensure a strong market share and high-quality data trading?

Vincent: We have an enthusiastic and engaged community of around 30 data providers who we’ll start on-boarding at the end of December. Some of them need to change their traditional way of sharing data, such as defining data product packages, etc. We can already disclose some names that will be joining, such as Eurosense and the National Geographic Institute (NGI), who provide valuable geographical data.

Q: Are there any famous enterprises?

Vincent: We are aligning on the business model with a worldwide data provider for weather forecasts, weather history and a telecom operator. For telecom operators and clients interested from a ‘smart city’ perspective, we are going to offer Databroker as a ‘white-label’ platform, also using DTX tokens.

Q: Two new market platforms will be released soon. When will you release them and what are the differences between the two?

Vincent: It’s actually one platform with two launch dates:

1) At the end of December 2019, we will launch the platform with limited access to data providers. These are the companies that we are working with in order to populate data.

2) At the end of January 2020, the platform will be open to the public and at that moment, we’ll start communicating to data sellers and buyers.

In parallel, we’re developing the white-label platform offering.

Q: Unlike some other crypto projects, Databroker doesn’t go for marketing hype and this reflects well on the long-term reliability of the project. But there may be supporters who question these low-key marketing methods, because it means that Databrokers name isn’t well known yet. What marketing plans does Databroker have for the future?

Valentina: True. There are companies that are obsessed with creating hype and building virality around their product. We believe and I personally believe, that fully-fledged communication only makes sense when your product (MVP) already exists. Databroker’s peer-to-peer platform hasn’t been launched yet, which is why we have deliberately decided for a softer approach. After all, this is also a matter of credibility. On top of that, this pre-launch period gives us extra time to craft our messaging. Currently, our main marketing and communication goal is to establish strategic partnerships. In this case, direct selling is most effective as you are face-to-face with a client. Participating in trade shows also brings us visibility. Last month we showcased Databroker at the IoT Solutions World Congress in Barcelona. It was a great learning experience for us. Discussions with representatives from all kinds of industries and companies gave us useful insights.

Talking about the future, Databroker’s peer-to-peer marketplace will be launched with a bang! We’ll make sure to get the right press coverage and online visibility. In a nutshell, it will be a balance between pull messaging (when clients find us organically) and push messaging to proactively reach out to clients ourselves. We’ll also focus on digital marketing SEO and paid advertising (SEM). The platform (our proven product) combined with these efforts will help us get the right attention from both data buyers and data sellers.

We’ll also need your support, as you, our community, are our greatest influencers and can help us build the best referral campaigns. That’s why your likes, shares and comments are so important to us!

Q: As soon as the marketplace is launched, industry players will need DTX tokens to trade their data. However, DTX is currently only available on Probit exchanges. For many enterprise companies and industry players, a major exchange with high reliability and liquidity is needed. Are there any discussions ongoing about this?

Vincent: Our CTO Roderik is working on extending the number of exchanges that list DTX. Their interest will increase with the launch of the platform and that will be the right time to accelerate.

Q: Competitive projects such as IOTA, IoTeX, Streamr are immersed in social media marketing without proving anything. But due to their hype marketing, many people already know about their projects. Do you have a plan for making Databroker more widely known?

Valentina: Absolutely!

Vincent: Correct! As you can see, we are also invited to different panel discussions. 

Q: What do you expect trading volumes to be like after the marketplace opens?

Vincent: For the first few months, our priority is to increase the number data offers from data providers, then increase the data sales from data buyers. We expect an exponential growth here and will share the number of buyers and sellers frequently.

Q: Will data volumes be open to the public?

Vincent: We’ll consider this and need to verify everything from a legal point of view.

Q: The team used eth recently, where did you use it?

Roderik: This is our payment for part of the system and the new landing page design and development.

Q: Sensor data to be traded on the new market platform compatible with all existing IoT protocols?

Vincent: IoT protocols are handled by IoT platforms (data collectors / aggregators), Databroker is connected to IoT platforms through IP and applies peer-to-peer data sharing principles for sharing files, streams and API's (recently added to our roadmap), so we don't need to support IoT protocols.

Q: What is your prospect of Databroker's future market share after the launch of the marketplace? Does the team believe in the project’s success?

Valentina: Nothing but success! We want to outperform our competitors and win the major market share.

Q: Is there a market for data trading?

Vincent: Data trading is already a huge market (e.g. NGI and Eurosense are clients that have been selling their data for decades) while the IoT sensor data market is growing very fast. This is also the reason why we have extended the scope of Databroker to existing data trading markets.

Thanks to the over 100 of you who joined us last week. Our next AMA will be in December, so stay tuned via our 
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