How this blockchain startup runs a marketplace for location data

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This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with Decrypt Asia where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews related to blockchain. This is heavily revised from the original transcript. For the full interview, go here or here.

Fysical is a decentralized location data marketplace that connects location suppliers (i.e. you and me) to location buyers, which could be marketing agencies, hedge funds, and insurance companies, among others. The company was accepted into 500 Startups accelerator program in the summer of 2016. The founding team moved from Silicon Valley to Singapore as they sensed a big opportunity in Asia.

Here are parts of my conversation with Fysical co-founder Justin Mann.

Could you tell us about your background and how Fysical came to be?

I was born in Washington, DC, and went to college at Boston University. That’s where I met one of the co-founders, Ben Smith, who was also my roommate. I was initially working in financial services as an equity analyst (I’m a CFA Level 3).

We got the idea for Fysical in a pretty funny way. Back in 2014, these devices called iBeacons came out. An iBeacon is a small bluetooth device, like the size of a golf ball, which retailers put in their stores to enable indoor location, as GPS doesn’t work very well indoors. It’s an Apple-backed technology and it was hot back then.

Ben and I bought hundreds of iBeacons and put them in our apartment, then eventually outside and in other establishments. We thought, “Why don’t we create a dating app that matches users who are in the same venue, like Tinder but for micro location?” So, we did it and called the app Spark, but we realized that the dating app idea was not original.

The most interesting part, though, was the fact that we could capture an individual’s location indoors. We realized it was actually a very valuable data point and a lot of marketers or even financial services companies might be far more interested in this type of data.

So, we created a small piece of software, an SDK, which goes inside other apps and allows the creation of location data from those apps. This enabled other apps to learn where their users were going indoors and paved the way for Fysical.

What is location data?

Every time you use a new mobile app, your phone asks, “Do you allow this application to access your location?” You can either accept or deny that prompt. So when I say location data, I refer to the data points that are generated from you when you click accept, and only if you click accept. That’s an anonymous unique ID. We never know your name, email address, gender, or birthday.

We get the latitude and longitude points so we know where you are on Earth. We also get things like altitude and speed so we can plot whether you’re on the fifth floor of a mall.

Why did you move from Silicon Valley to Singapore?

Fysical Labs was founded in Boston in 2014. We got into 500 Startups, then moved to San Francisco. From there, we started expanding outward and saw that there was a lot of mobile phones in Asia.

Singapore and South Korea have strong adoption, and the people there are using their phones differently, making payments, and so on. So we thought, let’s go out there and see if there’s more demand and supply from Asia.

What types of problems are you solving for your data buyers?

For marketers, location data can be used for retargeting. If someone goes to a men’s shoe aisle frequently, marketers can show them an ad for shoes.

When did you start incorporating blockchain into your business?

What is the role of Fysical’s token (FYS) for the different stakeholders in the ecosystem?

Anything you’re excited for?