How’s Sylo different from others in the game?

What is Sylo?

Happy 2019 people! Hope you all had a lovely start to the new year!

I’m writing this piece to address an important question. A member of our social community went through one of my articles — ‘Why I joined a tech startup’ recently and asked me a very interesting question.

“Sylo comes across to be a mature company (from your article). But I’m intrigued to know if Sylo is any different from other tech firms. If yes, then how?”

It’s a great question! Quite valid, and the moment I read it, I knew other readers might have the same question too. So, in this piece I’m going to shed some light on that.

Sylo started its journey half a decade ago, with one dream — giving people the freedom they deserve while communicating online. How? By building a decentralised communication app that not only protects their conversations and personal information from hackers and unwanted third-parties, but also from us, service-providers! Just because we are facilitating these conversations, doesn’t mean we are entitled to violate consumers’ rights and encroach into their personal space in the name of validation. A noble and novel thought, right? But this is still not Sylo’s point of difference. I am coming to that soon…

Motivated by our dream, we built the app, ‘Sylo — Online Confidentiality’.

The key attribute of that Sylo app is, it helps devices to communicate directly without storing communications’ content on our servers. But how did we manage to support communications without servers?

That’s where Peer-to-Peer Technology (P2P) came in. Using a combination of End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) and P2P networking, Sylo started its journey towards our goal...

It’s key to note: This was no small feat — to deliver an experience that stacked up against competitors who leveraged centralised cloud-based technologies!

Over the years Sylo has kept working on improving its technology-mix in the pursuit of providing better solutions that are free from any conditions.

We made many small tweaks in our tech-mix with time; but another noteworthy move was adding IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) to this mix.

A quick rundown on IPFS — it helps users store their data securely (for back-up) on the (P2P) network, which is out of the service-providers’ or any unwanted third-parties’ reach. (I’m not getting into the details here, but there are many good articles available on the web if you would like to learn more about IPFS.)

Coming back to the topic… No matter how much you progress, there’s always scope for improvements. So in 2017 when blockchain technology began to mature, we started exploring avenues to incorporate aspects of it and eventually started using Blockchain. Why?

There was more than one reason but the primary driver was to completely decentralise our solution.

In our P2P solution we still relied on some centralised components, such as server relays, to ensure the delivery of communications between users in cases where direct P2P connections could not be established.

What blockchain enabled us to do was provide this functionality, in a completely distributed fashion. It was the missing piece of the puzzle to our original vision.

And with that, Sylo also laid the foundation of a fully decentralised ecosystem that would turn the existing Sylo app into a ‘super app’ or ‘DApp’ (Decentralised Application).

We’re using a range of different, modern technologies to create a fully decentralised and secure communication architecture.

But what does that make us then, from a production point-of-view?

Our cherry-picking of new-age technologies to creatively combining into solutions for consumer and business problems makes us not just a tech company, but a Smart Tech company.

Does that make us different from others? Yes and no. A few other tech brands are also doing the same thing — bringing in futuristic technologies together to offer better solutions.

Then how is Sylo different from them?

There’s a key aspect that sets us apart… Empathy!

We look at our customers as people, not as products. It’s something that the data-driven conglomerates truly fail to do. We’re pushing to take ‘the path that’s less travelled by.’

At Sylo, we recognise that it’s humans behind the screen and we think they, i.e. you, deserve respect. We firmly believe that the solutions we offer should be focused on not just enabling people through technology, but also on ‘how’ this enabling is done.

Until now, for businesses in our space to win, people have been exploited.

But there is simply a better way to do things and businesses need to realise that — even if their users haven’t woken up to this fact yet. (Though the time when people will start openly questioning this is not far!)

With all that being said, yes, we are still a commercially driven venture; but we don’t believe it has to be a zero-sum game. We’ve taken that belief and made solutions so that it won’t be.

A software company can still make money while providing value, without the need to exploit the users. Our goal is to provide people with better choices, rather than robbing them off their rights!

So, what are we then?

A smart tech brand with EMPATHY!

A smart tech brand with empathy! Empathy from the standpoint that we respect that people want to be able to do what they do online without being exploited, without having to worry about their personal information being used for commercial purposes. People want, and deserve, to be able to ‘speak freely’.

For us it is simply the right way to do things, and we firmly believe respecting the user will be our pillar to success in the future. Like I mentioned, people will very soon wake up to the pitfalls of the data-driven (ad-tech) economy, realising that they are in fact paying much more than they think they are, for these so-called ‘free’ services!

I hope this helps you understand what Sylo stands for and aspires to do.

We are all about modern, revolutionary, smart, futuristic technologies… but at the end of the day, technology is here for people, not the other way around!

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