LocationCore: Democratising personal user location data through the NEM blockchain

Hello , I think this is PHENOMENAL ! WOW! Voted Yes today :slight_smile:

Thank you! Voting is now closed on this proposal, we succeeded in getting through the vote - whilst vote won’t count any longer if you still wish to show support by sending a transaction to the address we will use the recipient list in order to produce a list of alpha testers for when the project goes live!

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Well done Dan, I hope your enthusiasm and innovation carries on throughout this project.
Cheers

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Hey Nem Community,

We know things have been quiet around LocationCore but we have finally got a few minutes to breathe so I wanted to just update everyone as to how things are going and what we have been up to over the past couple of months.

It took a while following the closing of the vote for our first milestone to be evaluated and the milestone funding delivered, this was due to a number of factors not least the huge hack at Coincheck that had everyone at NEM working flat out, because of the uncertainty around this process at the time we had to focus on the many other projects we had going on at Digital2Go, it has allowed us to wrap up a couple of projects we had going on so we can focus on getting LocationCore up and running! Unfortunately this also coincided with the huge downturn in the markets meaning that the funding we did receive from NEM wasn’t able to cover the outgoing expenses at the time - this is in part the reason for the slow burn on progress updates.

The big news is that Digital2Go as a company recently completed our Series A round funding, this has allowed us to start seeking the extra resources we will need in order to accomplish everything we have on our roadmap for Digital2Go.

Off the back of this we have recently moved into new offices in WeWork Irvine CA and WeWork Melbourne, the primary business function will be based in California with platform development being handled in Australia and Mexico.

We have now hired some really high calibre developers, some amazing sales staff and some senior strategic hires who can help us move forward with all of the different facets of not only LocationCore but also our partnerships in Digital2Go. We have also launched the LocationCore website (https://www.locationcore.com), it is still very basic but will eventually contain links to our repositories and tutorials on how to integrate LocationCore with applications etc.

During March we were in Dallas where we met with Clayton and Matt of He3Labs to discuss tokenomics and development support of the API piece of LocationCore, we are super excited to be working with these guys, they have the knowledge and experience of NEM to help us push forward in the best possible way.

Finally I want to thank all of the community members who have kept in touch during this time, and for those who helped us throughout the process, there will likely be another month or so of relative radio silence but please be patient with us, we are working on lots of things that relate either directly or indirectly to LocationCore, once we get into a solid Blockchain development process we will be updating on our development process via Medium / Our blog etc.

Please join us on telegram (t.me/locationcore), things are fairly quiet there at the moment but I am sure as everything ramps up it will start to get busy.

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Hi NEMbers,

Short update as to the state of LocationCore at the moment to keep you all informed.

New Hires

In the past few months we have started to ramp up our recruitment for areas surrounding the business (Not just for LocationCore). The Digital2Go development team now consists of 8 people split between Melbourne and Mexico - we are the people handling the development of LocationCore and the supporting infrastructure and items within Digital2Go to commercialise the prooduct.

We have a new marketing director (Kristin Hennessey) who will be handling all of the marketing and communications for Digital2Go and LocationCore.

We also have a new blockchain director (Katie Hendrickson) who is helping us put shape around what LocationCore is going to be long term, how we manage the partnerships with companies and our blockchain strategy for Digital2Go into the future!

We also have a Director of Growth

App Updates:

We now have an alpha version of LocationCore for iOS at this state the following is completed and working:

  • Onboarding (includes setting up of a NEM address and basic registration details)
  • Data Quality Algorithm
  • Facebook integration
  • Data egress to D2Go data warehouse
  • Reward Calculation and Remission via Testnet
  • Wallet creation (.wlt file can be exported)
  • Ability for user to manually confirm transaction data vs data sent

The following needs to be completed before we put it out as a general beta:

  • Live wallet balance
  • Withdrawal Functionality
  • Improved Facebook Data Collection
  • UI / UX Alterations
  • Sorting out higher availability for our internal NEM Nodes

Once the application is on the NEM Mainnet we will release this to the NEM community and all who voted for the project - if you wish to participate in this beta please email beta@digital2go.com and include your Facebook username (this is required if you want to test the Facebook functionality - until the app is on the app store we cannot have it reviewed by Facebook so the application is still in a sandbox for testing, the information will be kept confidential and no one at Digital2Go will attempt to connect with you there!).

That’s all for now guys, we are busy working on the Android version and are hoping for a full launch of the apps in December - lots of other big news on the Horizon so please join us in our Telegram (t.me/locationcore), its quiet in there at the moment but we have a marketing and PR plan in progress and will be ramping all of this up when we have a tangible product for you all to get your hands on :slight_smile:

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An update from us:

@GodTanu raised some questions in the DAO thread where I expressed my dissatisfaction with the NCF, so I wanted to take this opportunity to provide an update with LocationCore now the NCF has been concluded.

Like many projects here the NCF provided us a way to kickstart development of our systems on NEM, it was something we were glad to be a part of and in our case especially helped ‘grease the wheels’ for other executives to get on board with using NEM as a platform over other solutions.

We didn’t provide too many community updates, it is of no secret that we were distinctly unhappy with the process and lackadaisical attitude of the NCF through its various incarnations. However to face the criticism straight on about why it has seemingly taken a year to produce anything - please find attached an update from us:

The total time for development was approximately 6 months from the beginning of May:

Following multiple delays in receiving funds (or really any kind of communication) after the community vote and the subsequent tanking in XEM price (Vote finished Jan 25th (XEM = ~ 1USD) - payment was made on March 14th (XEM = ~0.45USD) ), this now already represented less than half of our expected funds.

We executed developer contracts soon after the amount was received - Developers started in June (as they were completing other projects). Development for iOS was completed at the start of December (The SDK was done in October), Android was pushed back to focus on other work in light of the continued price drop of XEM.

Our Team and Developers decided it was more efficient to complete each platform as a single package (iOS SDK + iOS Application / Android SDK & Android App) hence why we didn’t submit Milestone 2 - Business doesn’t go in a straight line.

We contacted NCF on 14th January 2019 to say we were ready to submit proof for our milestones - so all in around 7 months (June -> January) to submit Milestone 1 and Milestone 3 including the Xmas and NY break.

There were several reasons for the extra months delay vs our 6 month plan but they mostly came about from back and forth with Apple about an AppStore listing & it falling over Christmas and New Years where many developers took time off.

Due to new AppStore rules - Apple will not accept the application to the app store (Part of Milestones 3 requirements for acceptance) without a “tangible use of location data”, they didn’t accept LocationCore’s premise as being “tangible use” (?) meaning we would have to put some kind of pointless map on the application in order for them to accept it on the app store. Unfortunately this is the reality with Apple and something we expect many other projects will come up against. However this was more development that was adding no value to the LocationCore product whatsoever, only costing us more money, by this point NEM was worth so little (~0.04 USD) we decided to just keep on developing the ecosystem around LocationCore (Milestone 6 & Milestone 7 in our proposal - These are now completed minus the blockchain integration - see screenshots below).

We have used over 250K USD of our own money to fund the development around NEM - the likelihood of getting any kind of meaningful reimbursement from the XEM we have been given so far from the NCF seems unlikely for the foreseeable future with the price as it is.

Now, with the withdrawal of the NCF and Catapult STILL not ready on the public chain there is little impetus for us to consider re-starting the LocationCore development as our proposal lists it.

This doesn’t mean the project is dead - it simply means we will not be putting in effort to “Fulfill” the proposal milestone requirements unless they fit in with our core business & customer requirements.

So here is what we have completed:

LocationCore app on iOS & SWIFT 4.2 SDK for NanoWallet compatible wallets and various transaction functions (I’m waiting on go ahead to release the SDK code to our public Github)

This is an older photo sorry - I don’t have a recent one but the new one looks much sexier!

image

Lambda functions to handle the “Shared private key / trusted node” problem when sending transactions from Mobile devices - this ensures high availability rather than trying to maintain a specific node just for this function (Again waiting on go ahead to release to our public Github)

Testnet addressese we were using to verify functionality:

http://testnet-explorer.nemtool.com/#/s_account?account=TDAPZIZRCWXHSGJHUYYVKQWGRSN4R3TCTL44K4EK

http://testnet-explorer.nemtool.com/#/s_account?account=TA4HBXROKPS7W7OKZD2XXEEXGN4MOY7LKKTD2D77

LOCALLY (now rebranded from Digital2Go) now has a product called Discover, this was created as part of the work we were doing for Milestone 6 & Milestone 7:

We currently process over 1B records per day and have a data warehouse of over 40B records, we provide ‘access’ to this data to allow our customers to create their own audience segments. The payments are currently made in “Credits” from Fiat, but this was designed to hook into several payment methods - including cryptocurrency.

Some screenshots from our Staging server:

And this is really just the tip of the iceberg, I hope those of you who are technical can appreciate the level of infrastructure that has been built to implement all of this.

I will send a further update once things settle on our side - we are very busy bringing these new products to market (including LocationCore / LOCALLY Reward).

Thanks all!

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It’s a great project! I want you to complete it.

However, I think that it is a fact that the milestone has not been cleared.
Please release the SDK.

and Please use here for the TESTNET explorer.
http://testnet-explorer.nemtool.com/

It is definitely a fact that the milestone 3 hasn’t been cleared - as explained above we aren’t willing to jump through Apple’s hoops at this time with the pointless extra development it would take to pass the App Store approval process. They do not agree that our entire premise is a “tangible use of location”, I disagree considering that the entire point of LocationCore is about owning your own data and being rewarded for providing it.

And because the apps aren’t ‘completed’ from a milestone perspective there will be no way to ‘complete’ Milestones 6 & 7. The majority of the work is done - just not to the specifications of the milestones which is a shame. Perhaps this will change in the future but it wont be related to the NCF.

Your opinion says that it is the NCF’s responsibility that your plans fail. It sounds like that to me. It is strange to criticize the NCF.
That doesn’t make sense.

Originally, open source and development should be done with own funds.
The NCF is actually helping the fund.
That is good intentions.It is not a business. It’s “Support”.

I have no intention of competing with you.
But I do not intend to criticize the NCF.

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Our plans haven’t failed - they have just diverged from what we decided to do with NEM. The plans have been executed, we have just put any further blockchain development on hold.

The NCF delays and inconsistencies didn’t help when it was compounded with the price drop but regardless - the update is here for the community, if anything changes with regard to this then we will be sure to update everyone.

Does it mean changing to a project that does not use NEM blockchains and other blockchains?

I still feel NEM is the best blockchain for this kind of work, we are in no particular rush to integrate the blockchain aspect of this at the moment, however if we move forward it will only be with Catapult. If Catapult is not ready and we are ready to proceed then it will be with another blockchain that provides the features we require.

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Didn’t your work go ahead with Android?
Despite receiving funds from the NEM community, give us nothing?

Milestone 1 (200K XEM)

  • Website created for LocationCore describing functionality and benefits
  • Completed development of the iOS SDK
  • Integration of SDK with NEM Public Blockchain
  • Create a marketing and PR plan to launch the world’s first personal location data democratisation solution on the NEM blockchain

Website is closed.
Unreleased SDK.
Not used NEM Blockchain.

Why did you pay for milestone 1?
I am in doubt. You should thank NCF.
You were finally given a bonus.

The project has been re-branded as LOCALLY Reward. Until our blockchain piece is completed we won’t be advertising it on the website. The previous website was completed (http://web.archive.org/web/20180826095302/https://www.locationcore.com/)

SDK needs a ReadMe before it is released - useless otherwise, also need to clear it with the other executives to release.

The NEM blockchain is used? You can see that both on the Lambda and the SDK code. The entire thing is coded for NEM 1.

Milestone 1 was sent to the committee - including access to the repositories for the app and the SDK.

Let me be clear - this is not a “Bonus” - this is payment for work completed under an agreement.

understood. You are right.
So it is a contract that NCF will stop paying.
Payment will stop because you could not achieve the milestone.
This is a contract.

I do not know what you want to say.

Do you want money?
I do not know what I want to say.

Who does not keep the promise? Has the situation changed?
Is NCF a faucet?

It is better to know the origin of NCF. If you do not contribute to NEM, it is natural to stop payment. It is us who want to complain.
Why not use NEM?

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I have already explained above!

We are using NEM - LocationCore is built on NEM, we have written an SDK for NEM.

However financially with current blockchain fees it would not be feasible to run this at full scale the way we want (currently rather than performing a transaction every hour as planned - we are doing 1 per day to reduce fees).

If we were to push this live - we would be spending a minimum of 750 XEM per day (assuming 5000 users), this just isn’t feasible economically.

The release of Catapult would allow us to re-balance this somewhat and cut the burn rate right down - making it feasible. But Catapult is not ready on the public chain yet.

So as I said - while we wait for Catapult there is no rush to continue to push this development, it is still on our Roadmap but we have more important things to do that can be solved right now.

So what? You’re blasting complaints on a Japanese Telegram channel everyday.
What do you want to say?

Are you dissatisfied with the NCF?
Are you dissatisfied with catapult?

You should do the possible work now. It is not the fault of the NCF.
It is not the catapult’s fault either.
Please do your best. The Japanese community is waiting for the product to be completed.

Hey Dan,
You could put a forwarder to the domain name locationcore.com (and perhaps digital2go.com) which points to the new “LOCALLY Reward” website. That can avoid confusions, secure leads which read outdated web-content - and doesn’t cost a lot.
Greetings from Rene, LuxTag.io