Last Friday, our solution architect, Tom De Block came smiling into the office. Like most of the time, he was very excited about something that he managed to pull off. I asked him if he wanted to explain it to me and my camera. The video seemed definitely share worthy, so it became the pilot of the upcoming weekly videos of DataBroker DAO.

Tom De Block is a serial entrepreneur with active companies in Belgium, Spain and Eastern Europe. Having a strong background in quality assurance in large financial institutions across Europe, he fulfils the function of setting up partnerships for the DataBroker Alliance and coordinating the working groups in the Alliance. You can watch the video here.

A short summary of the transcript:

“Since the early sale last year, we’ve been very busy, and I know we didn’t always communicate about it. We are really driven by this project, but one of our missing points was actually the communication to our community. Although It’s changing now with guys like you on board, in that time, we were more interested in the development of the project than to show off what we’re doing.

In the last year we’ve been to a lot of events. The biggest breakthrough came from Barcelona where we attended the Smart City Expo World Congress. We engaged with a lot of people in IOT field, data aggregators and so on. We pitched DataBroker DAO a few times and had quite some interesting conversations on the event itself. I remember, I was asking some specific questions in the main hall as I merged with the public. After that, a lot of people came up to me and started asking questions about our project. Following this three day event, between 10 or 15 members signed up and lot more followed up later.

So, DataBroker Alliance, what does it mean? They are companies we’re going to work with the coming months. After that, we’ll start to group them in working groups and give workshops. Working groups will be around different subjects, Smart Cities is one of them. I have to say that a lot of them are dynamic people with dynamic ideas. Some of them have already created businesses just by joining in a certain consortium with other members. I can really go on about this for hours, but I think I have to make it short this time.

Furthermore, we have already set up a few operational working groups, a few use cases which are being developed as we speak. We are really moving to create this big ecosystem around Databroker DAO, and it is really amazing. We have a group with a sensor manufacturer in Bangalore, with operational sensors in the field. And then we have a data aggregator platform, a second sensor manufacturer in Belgium, and then we have ourselves DataBroker DAO. Moreover, we have another software integrator who already did some integration work with DataBroker.

So actually the big thing of this week is the potential solution to the vendor lock-in in IOT. Data interoperability issues between different vendors is really an issue for smart cities. I can tell you that the outcome of our working group is actually a resolution to all of this. And I think that none of us realises, but it has huge potential. It’s actually resolving the interpretability issues between different brands, and all this is going towards the standardisation of the market that doesn’t exist today. So, we have a big step this week, and I assume a few bigger steps next week. I hope that in about a week or two, we will come out with some very big news.”