At the beginning of this new year, it’s near impossible to go online without seeing some mention of Web3, mentions well-distributed across the positive-negative spectrum. All this talk begs the question: What exactly is Web3, and why is there so much buzz about it?

A successor of Web 1.0 (1991-2004) and Web 2.0 (2004-present), the term itself first found footing in 2014, when Ethereum founder Gavin Wood dubbed it a “decentralized online ecosystem based on blockchain” (a digital ledger in which data is stored in “blocks” of information, including previous blocks’

Training an App to Know When You Are Riding a Bus (post written on behalf of our client, PIPs Rewards)

PIPs Rewards is a mobile platform that utilizes data-driven solutions to prompt and reward a range of beneficial behaviors from walking and bike-sharing to recycling and shopping. The app’s north star is to prompt these behaviors using games and rewards and to verify them using smart technology, rather than self-reporting. When an action is verified, this triggers a reward in the form of a currency of good, called Positive Impact Points (or PIPs). PIPs can be redeemed for gift cards or converted into scholarships by college students.

Over the last year, we’ve been testing data

Book Summary

In this seminal book, published in 2017, sociologist Shoshana Zuboff analyses in depth the impact that the new data-hungry technology companies have had on our lives in the past 20 years. From the emergence of Google in 1999, under the favorable conjunction of the dotcom bubble, shareholder pressure and pushback on government regulation, the OG surveillance capitalists were able to create a model that makes of us all simply instruments in the advertising value creation model. Beyond that, they are creating a world based on the extraction imperative (all data can and should be collected), that molds our behavior (the prediction imperative - the more certain our behavior, the better it is for advertisers) from a perspective of radical indifference to