Times are changing, literally. The Nowatch wearable looks like a watch but doesn’t function like one. Instead of telling the time, the device’s main use is to register its owners’ biometrics. As MintBlue CEO, Niels van den Bergh points out, the watch allows its users to be ‘in the now’: “It doesn’t tell you the time, it only gives you time,” he says.
The BSV blockchain helps Nowatch to track a person’s vitals, breathing, heartbeat, steps, sleep cycle among many other measures. Similar to other smart wearable brands, the information collected from its user used to be stored in the cloud. But as Niels points out, “Nowatch really wants to pioneer and push boundaries in this field.” And so the brand aims to take smart watches to the next level by offering its customers the opportunity to own and monetize their own data with the use of blockchain technology.
As Niels tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, every Nowatch user will own their own data. “You can do things with it that you can do when you are an owner: you can share it, you can sell it, you can rent it, you own it, you decide,” Niels says.
There are benefits to sharing your Nowatch data to your service providers. For instance, your doctor can access and monitor your sleep cycle after prescribing you new sleep medication or your gym trainer will be able to access your vitals and see how your body reacts to an exercise routine. With the data-sharing capability of Nowatch, people can receive better service.
As for monetizing from your data on the Nowatch, Niels says it’s possible, for instance, for a research organization to track hundreds or thousands of people’s heart rates during a football match. “That's cool information that research labs can use well, and imagine the machine learning algorithms that also can be fed with this information, it's truly authentic information that you buy from an owner,” he says.
Nowatch is one of the many clients of MintBlue, a company that offers blockchain services to businesses. MintBlue’s vision is to create a public protocol spec, not only for Nowatch but for competitor smart wearables that want to integrate the technology as well. As Niels says, “we are like the Yoda to the heroes, we help organizations reap the benefits of Web3, we make it very easy for organizations to just plug and play our SDK and APIs into their backend systems.”
MintBlue also wants to have all its use cases collaborate using BSV technology saying “the BSV blockchain is one global ledger for everything, for all use cases, so all of the clients that we sign up can interoperate.”
From a business perspective, Niels says it’s all about finding the right use cases, as well as focusing on marketing and sales. He believes personal connection is everything. As he points out, “business is still people talking to each other and trusting each other.” For Niels, at the end of the day, business boils down to people having a relationship.