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 scie

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 u

Should your data strategy be a separate initiative from your digital strategy? Why is data so important? Large companies now have ‘CDOs’ who can be either a Chief Digital Officer or a Chief Data Officer - this is how important data has become for businesses everywhere, and the merging of these two titles illustrates how interrelated the two subjects are. 

At Destination Digital, data is an everyday subject, and we wanted to offer some insights into why we constantly think about it in parallel to our thinking about digital strategy.

Knowing your users

As I stated in a previous article, the first step to building a digital strategy is knowing your users, where they consume your products, on which media, using which features, etc. All of thi