The stark reality of the business landscape today is that the best performing technology companies have cornered the market and are getting away with exorbitant fees by having a firm grasp on customer data.
“Big Tech” or the giant technology companies today, such as the quintet known as FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google), have entrenched themselves as the middlemen for access and exchange of third-party customer data. These five companies alone have hauled in a staggering USD 600 billion in revenue in 2019, before we get to other big customer data silos like Salesforce, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Adobe, and etc.
The jaws of big tech have a tight grip over the market today.
Application owners and developers are locked into these walled gardens; tethered to poor interoperability, high dependence and risk related to privacy, compliance, and security, and face an ever increasing cost of customer acquisition.
Businesses and their customers are increasingly frustrated and infuriated by this reality that is spiraling out of control. However, the barriers to decouple from this arrangement are too high, and the majority of the app owners and developers who have to play by the rules (and fees) of these walled gardens are struggling. Well, it’s time for change.
Enter Cere — an ethical ecosystem that will help any business develop their own customer data ecosystem on top of a blockchain-powered decentralized data network that is built from the ground up around privacy, security, interoperability, and an open source philosophy.
Cere’s mission is not to slay these dragons, but to free you from their fangs.
Today’s big tech companies maintain their dominant positions of data middlemen by collecting data across all of their services from consumers and businesses alike. Then they turn around and sell the access to these consumers and data back to businesses.
What if two or more business partners could share data securely without the need for a centralized big tech platform? They could suddenly enrich customer experience and broaden product offerings while better preserving user privacy. Companies are tired of costly integrations with oligopolies tied to vested interests. Cere is precisely the solution that relieves businesses of this growing, aching pain in their customer data management.
We have created a decentralized data network (DDN) which anyone can access or contribute to with guarantees of data security and integrity. The DDN is coupled with the Open Data Registry, a secure, anonymous, and regulations compliant data collaboration framework that allows granular and customizable peer-to-peer data sharing, releasing app owners and developers from the jaws of big tech data brokers.
Cere lifts the veil off the black box of customer data management and makes it transparent to the end user.
Consumers finally get what they have demanded for quite some time — to have some visibility and control over their personal and behavioral data. Cere will help businesses deploy various customized compliance tools that enable their customers to have various levels of visibility and control on the data that’s stored on top of the Cere DDN. This solves an acute need for businesses today, who are paying huge fees in efforts to keep their data compliant.
On top of this infrastructure, we have created a highly interoperable service layer which will be opened up to all vendors and developers in the near future, who can use this open framework to provide plug-in solutions to businesses who are using Cere DDN and are looking to create better user experiences and more value for their customers.
Blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) are the key components of Cere’s differentiation and unique value proposition, because they provide the technical foundations for a decentralized data storage and peer-to-peer data collaboration ecosystem.
The key innovations needed to achieve a new level of data interoperability in the Cere ecosystem are:
This is drastically different from most of the current data lakes/warehouses deployed today that are littered with PII and can not be opened up and shared easily without extensive API integrations.
Only when we can guarantee the security, privacy, and integrity of customer data shared between businesses to better serve their customers , can we do without the need for a centralized big tech platform with its own vested interests and expensive fees.
Cere is committed to giving companies complete control over their own data. Brands require ownership of their customer data before it can be ethically sourced and effectively used to deliver the best customer experience.
The foundation for this ethically created user experience is built on the data brands collect directly from their customers, typically categorized as 1st party data. Clear customer consent is a first order concern, not an afterthought; not a hastily added legal patch for compliance after the fact. Furthermore, brands today must ensure the safekeeping and privacy of such data, and that the practice of openly passing such data in unencrypted form to 3rd parties will be further scrutinized.
Currently the relationship between the brand and the customer is brokered through third-party data accumulation and consolidation in large walled-garden systems. However, just like in any natural human relationship, brands and customers don’t want a middleman to exploit their mutual interactions.
Customers should be able to choose which brands have access to their data based on the trust and love of their brands of choice.
The reality is that new compliance regulations and consumer preferences are quickly arising to form a new paradigm where consumers and brands can interact without third-party solicitors. Due to such shifts, the continued consolidation of walled-garden advertising via IDFA or third party cookies will likely recede over time.
This requires brands to have their own 1st party data and engagement solutions with their customers. In turn, customers can receive higher quality and more personalized experiences from the brands while knowing their personal data is not recklessly shared and used by 3rd parties like Facebook, Google, and similar big tech companies.
As this emerging paradigm takes hold and starts to become the norm, brands will need a new standard and an ethical ecosystem to build the data and identity assets they need to establish and foster relationships in this new internet of value and trust.
Cere is the solution that will help brands accomplish this by inviting them into an entire new ecosystem designed for this purpose.
The participants in the Cere Ecosystem are application owners,developers, data product and service vendors, and network node validators. Each of these participants are vital in the process of providing value to the end-user. Therefore, Cere’s solution ensures that all the stakeholders are rewarded for their contributions to this value stream.
App owners and developers get access to granular, verified, and anonymized data, that allows them to drive customer acquisition and retention at reduced cost and provide a better user experience. This data is obtained from their peers, businesses and developers with data sets that are contextually relevant in real-time for app owners looking to serve the right customers with a perfectly tailored offer or experience.
In turn, businesses can make their data available to vendors, scientists or data product/service providers without security or privacy risks. These partners will send back insights and predictive analysis in the form of public or privately contracted reports. This feedback helps app owners save time and resources in making the right decisions in an ever more demanding digital environment, in which decisions are made in real time based on complex analysis.
Finally, the Cere Ecosystem would not be able to work without network node validators guaranteeing data integrity with consensus. Validators will receive network incentives to ensure that all the data stored and exchanged throughout the networks is securely encrypted and validated. The result is a true representation of anonymized customer attributes and behavior patterns.
The entire Cere economy is streamlined by the Cere Token, a native currency that is at the same time an instrument for reputation staking and financial settlements, which participants can use to fuel their activities within the system and drive their bottom line.
Cere is the missing link that businesses need, providing fully integrated solutions, packaged similarly to the SaaS platforms that they are already using, and deployed to bring immediate efficiency improvements and cost savings to core business units.
Cere is here to show you the path to the future of customer data. Together, we can break free from the restraints that FAANG has over all of us. Our solutions provide you with 100% ownership of your data. You retain the freedom to receive information relevant for your business and share your data with other businesses. You own and exchange data at a reduced cost and with peace of mind. And you are freed from the fangs of Big Tech.
There is no reason to be held ransom, when money and trust can be shared directly between businesses on a level playing field where everyone wins. Join us and start shaping and reaping the benefits of this new playing field today.
To learn more about Cere Network, please visit us at https://cere.network/ or get in touch on Telegram t.me/cerenetwork_official or follow us on Twitter
Thanks to Jehan Chu from Kenetic, Roger Lim from NGC, Roland Sun from Fenbushi for reading drafts of this.
@cerenetwork