In Abu Dhabi, Dubai, the crowd sits in painful silence, the tension is palpable. The next moment the crowd is on their feet, cheers tossing aside the silence. The recipient of the Peer Choice Award at the Citibank Tech for Integrity (T4I) Challenge has just been announced; the winner, Traverse City native/part-time resident Cindy Warner, founder of 360ofme.
360ofme is a cloud-based, secure personal data exchange that enables privacy, trust, insightfulness and monetization of your digital footprint. It allows consumers to maintain control of their digital assets and gain potentially life-changing insights from the information.
The platform aggregates personal data—healthcare, finance and automotive—in one spot making it easy for individuals and professionals alike to view it. Users can store, manage and securely share their data with family members, doctors and others they choose.
“Working with enterprises my entire career I realized the huge issue of silos of data,” Warner says—she was previously an executive at world-renowned tech companies including IBM and PWC. “Silos are the individual places where any data is stored. All these different silos don’t talk to each other, it’s impossible to see them all at once. The big idea of 360 is to aggregate all the data, put it all together and pull it out of the silos in a longitudinal view to create a virtual digital footprint that over time will become a true system of record for a consumer.”
360ofme gives users context and insights about their personal data like the risk of heart disease, how their retirement savings is doing and if the brakes on their car are wearing abnormally. The platform ultimately enables consumers to make informed decisions about day-to-day and long-term choices by creating the world largest “data lake.”
360ofme presented their platform at the T41 Demo Day in Abu Dhabi on May 15. At the conclusion of the presentations renowned tech panelists and fellow finalists voted on the technology with which they were most impressed. 360ofme was shortly after named the winner of the Peer’s Choice Award.
“The fact that I was at Abu Dhabi itself was daunting,” Warner says. “It felt terrifying because it was 20 hours away from home, a place I had never been before. I realized there were originally 1,200 companies from around the globe that had applied to this competition and just being one of the 102 finalists was daunting, let alone winning.
“(The Peer’s Choice Award) was the award that everyone really wanted to win,” Warner says. “Because of all people that would be pretty rigorous on who the best company is, it would be our peers; we’re all technologists.”
Cindy Warner, founder of 360ofme
The team arrived on Saturday afternoon, and demo practice began the following Sunday. “I didn’t realize it, but Sunday is the first day of the week there,” Warner says. “Talk about unnerving, the vice chairman of Citi Bank is there, working on a Sunday, except that Sunday is Monday.”
The night before the final demos, Warner and her team were told they were going to present first the next day. Fourteen companies also presented before the judges left to pick the winners.
“I must admit, getting told we were going first had me really nervous,” Warner says. “If we blow this, this is what people see as the first company. Once the judges left to decide the winners, it was a rough 45 minutes. But at that point everybody in the competition was already congratulating each other and saying ‘good job’ because whether you won, lost or drew, it was very stressful to go through.”
Executives from some of the world’s largest technology, including Microsoft, PwC and Citi bank, were in attendance.
“You walked on stage and they all wanted to shake your hand and congratulate you,” Warner says. “It was kind of surreal because I was just thankful to be there and the experience thus far had been so amazing that I honestly could say I didn’t care if I won because it had just been so great to be there. It rendered me speechless. I was so humbled it was nuts. If they had asked me to speak I couldn’t have.”
How it all got started
The initial 360ofme platform was released in October 2016. From May to October, the 360ofme team reported working an average of 12 hours a day.
The first thing the team had to do was build the technology and their partners. Their partners include Salesforce (helped build a lot of the platform), Amazon (who they store much of their data through) and RSA. RSA is a security expert company that developed the security protocol for the US government and helped 360ofme build its protocol—ultimately they believe it will be the world’s greatest security protocol for personal data, and it’s in the process of being patented right now.
360ofme started getting recognition just before the end of the year, and in 2017 the lid blew off as massive recognition started rolling in.
“I didn’t expect that we would be so well known, so soon,” Warner says. “We have received calls from the far reaches of the globe, from companies and people that have heard about us. There’s such a problem with data and information fraud, and I think that’s why we’re doing so well already. We offer a solution to such an enormous problem. We’re probably the most comprehensive visual solution in the market.”
The entire concept was early—the US isn’t on par with other countries when it comes to personal data control. In the past few months, however, progress has been made.
Two major concepts went into the visualization and creation of the 360 platform. The first concept was the idea of the customer raising their hand or being an “intentional customer,” meaning a customer who is intentionally searching for a particular product or service. The second was the idea of aggregating data and making it easy for individuals and professionals alike to view data in a collected, simplistic form.
Ultimately, 360 is split into three main sectors: health, finance and automotive. The goal within each is to track the health of you, your automobile and your finances. It’s designed to help people proactively live their lives.
Health The health sector is the highest priority to the 360 team and the main catalyst for the development of the platform.
“We started thinking about silos particularly within the healthcare field,” Warner says. “So if you go to get an MRI, then a mammogram, then an ultrasound, all at different hospitals, all these pieces of data are within little silos and they don’t talk to each other. A doctor that looks at your profile doesn’t see all these tests you have had and therefore cannot diagnose you nearly as well. For me to see my healthcare there are eight portals I have to log into to see my information from the past two years because I live in two places and travel a lot. So for someone to get misdiagnosed or die because you’re missing a piece of data, that’s so wrong.”
360ofme has developed a platform that can store all of your health information. The platform includes disease profiles and can notify you, if you choose, if there are markers that indicate disease.
“The big thing in health care is proactive notification—see the train before it hits you. So if there were four markers for lung cancer, you want to know what those are and if you’re there. It may be elevated white blood cells or chronic asthma. A doctor may not see all of these markers because the low white blood cells may have been found in a test somewhere else. So, we have disease profiles and they can access and notify you in order for you to reach out to your health professional for a diagnosis.”
Additionally, they have created essentially a crowdsourcing platform for all the big issues in life. They can create communities to connect you with other like-minded individuals struggling with similar chronic disease and together you help each other come up with solutions or provide support and insight.
“Sixty-five percent of health professionals say they misdiagnose patients because they don’t have the full view or what we call the ‘longitudinal view’ of their patients. Sixty-five percent of them! So you go to the doctor and they don’t really know enough about you so they just do the best that they can and roll the dice that they give the right diagnosis. 360 creates a solution where you can show up and say, ‘Hey doc here’s all my health records ever, let me give you access for an hour.’”
Finance This sector is all about financial planning and helping consumers achieve their finance-based goals.
“It’s the health of your finance, your financial well-being,” Warner says. “Are you on track for retirement? Are you optimizing the cost of your insurance? How is your daily spending?”
360 tracks your finances, helping you create and stay on budget.
Automotive The automotive sector tracks the health of your car. It’s a platform that takes all the sensor data off your car and organizes it.
“After the data has been organized, you can send it back to the OEM, original manufacturer, and they can tell you based on your car data the brakes are wearing abnormally or whatever else. It gives the auto manufacturer a way to give you information proactively before something happens.”
What’s Next
There are still a few enhancements the team is looking to add to increase the site’s capabilities, but they expect to take the platform out of Bata in the next two months.
“Our end goals would be, first, that we are a household word; if someone wants to protect their consumer data they know where to go. Second, that we will be global, and third, that we will be recognized as a company that helps people live a proactive life, help consumers see the train before it hits them. I would assume three years until we are at all these points.”
