APEX, the next big NEO ICO - a summary of the new Data market (self.CryptoCurrency)
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7qbtjl/apex_the_next_big_neo_ico_a_summary_of_the_new/APEX is a blockchain-powered data and interactions exchange that passes value and data ownership back to the consumer, as well as increasing marketing efficiency, data quality, and customer loyalty for the enterprise.
Problem:
Consumer data is collected daily by 3rd party data providers and sold to companies for research and marketing purposes. Your consent to collect, use and sell your data is often obtained when you agree with the complicated Terms and Conditions documents before you make use of a platform.
Enterprises that purchase consumer data from 3rd parties often run into data quality issues, and don’t know if this data has been obtained legally.
The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) will roll out on May 25, 2018 globally, which will introduce stricter regulation regarding the collection, use and sale of your personal data by enterprises. The GDPR will give citizens back control of their own.
Solution:
APEX, a B2C platform that will allow consumers to sell their data to marketers, satisfying both ends of the transaction in this very niche market. Consumers interact with the Consumer Client App, where they have full control of their data and who can use it. Consumers decide with which brands they wish to share their data and what kind of data will be shared. The consumers are rewarded with CPX and which they can use to purchase rewards or sell on the open market. The APEX platform is a disruptive technology that will cut out middlemen like Acxiom, which is a 3rd party data provider that never shares profits with consumers and will be fairly impacted by the new GDPR regulation. APEX also provides consumers and enterprises new channels to directly interact with each other. These channels will save enterprises billions of advertising dollars annually as they can directly engage with their target audience.
Enterprises connect through the APEX platform via the Enterprise Client App named NEXUS. This is an already existing and working platform with more than 250 enterprise clients. NEXUS enables brands to manage target customer scope, data acquisition scope, cost management, rewards engagements. Enterprises are then able to analyse and activate the data collected by using features such as real time advanced analytics and productized machine learning and AI models. NEXUS is built on top of Azure (Microsoft) and AWS (Amazon) cloud computing services to process the massive data at scale
To grow the ecosystem, APEX will provide partners and brands a SDK that consumers can use to connect with the APEX platform via the partner's or brand's platform. The NEXUS API will allow enterprises to connect to the APEX platform with their own application or platform.
Blockchain Technology:
The consent by consumers to use their data and their CPX tokens as reward for sharing their data will be automatically logged and executed by smart contracts on the NEO blockchain without any middle men. By using blockchain technology the APEX platform also ensures that it will adhere to the upcoming GDPR as all consents of consumers are logged in smart contracts on the blockchain. NEO's efficient dBFT consensus mechanism and its built-in identity features will be useful for the long-term development of APEX.
The Company:
The company behind APEX is Chinapex which is an existing data technology and AI company headquartered in Shanghai with offices in Beijing, Hong Kong and Silicon Valley. Chinapex has served more than 200 enterprise clients such as Standard Chartered, BMW, Hilton, Chevrolet and Casio. The core team comprises of high capable members who have worked for large corporates like Microsoft and Alibaba. The company was also selected for Microsoft Accelerator Shanghai as one of 15 out of 1000 companies.
Partnerships:
APEX has a received a large number of free Azure credits (worth $500,000 USD) from Microsoft/Microsoft Azure to deploy their off-chain solution on their cloud. APEX also has a cross-selling and marketing partnership with Azure's Business Development and Marketing teams. Azure's team receives commissions on customer acquisition for APEX.
APEX has a similar partnership with AWS China (Amazon). AWS provides APEX with brands from retail, automotive and financial services and in exchange APEX will deploy a part of its system on AWS.
Alibaba Cloud has an agreement with APEX which works in a similar fashion. In addition, they provide APEX access to their platform named 'Databank', which gives APEX access to 500 million unique ecommerce user data. APEX can use this data for data enrichment and verification.
APEX has a commercial partnership with Oracle Marketing Cloud China where they share and cross-sell brand customers. Joint customers are for example Maserati and Ferrari. The NEXUS platform of APEX has an API integration with Oracle Marketing Cloud's Eloqua such that brands can effectively use data acquired from APEX on the Oracle cloud.
Baidu and APEX have an API partnership for search and display advertising as of Q3 2017. It enables NEXUS and APEX enterprise users to interact with consumers on the APEX Network on all search and display channels of Baidu. Baidu has the largest search engine market share in China (76.05% as of April 2017).
Tencent is an API partner which gives APEX access to Tencent's QQ display media assets, WeChat, and Tencent's display network outside of QQ and WeChat. QQ and WeChat are instant messaging platforms with 850 million and 963 million monthly active user accounts respectively (Q2 2017).
Lastly, data collaboration partnerships were announced with Red Pulse (Financial Information) and Bongmi (Healthtech).
