Highlights
- Endeavour Drinks Group, owned and operated by Woolworths successfully launches OpenDNA’s Artificial Intelligence powered Drinks Library App
- Future Mobile Technology commences sales of their Netsurfer Smart Phones, preloaded with OpenDNA’s Artificial Intelligence powered Jottr News App
- Progressive discussions with companies across a multitude of sectors including Financial Services, Banking, Insurance, Telecoms and Media in pursuit of growth in customer acquisitions, global expansion of customer base and strengthening channel partnership relationships
- Ongoing technological enhancements and updates of proprietary business tool “Synapse” to increase the benefits reaped by customers of OpenDNA’s Artificial Intelligence System
- Continuous improvements and updates made to OpenDNA’s Application Programming Interface (API) and Software Development Kit (SDK) to allow rapid deployment of OpenDNA AI technology into multiple industry sectors
- Research and Development well advanced in respect to OpenDNA’s solution to ensure compliance with the new EU General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) coming into effect in May 2018
Leading and award-winning artificial intelligence company OpenDNA Limited (ASX: OPN) (“OpenDNA” or the “Company”) is pleased to provide shareholders with the Company’s quarterly activities report and Appendix 4C for the quarter ended 31 March 2018.
Customer Arrangements
Endeavour Drinks Group
As announced by the Company on 28 March 2018 (and following the quarter end on 5 April 2018), Endeavour Drinks Group (“Endeavour”) successfully launched its Drinks Library App, which is powered by OpenDNA’s Artificial Intelligence System (“AIS”). Endeavour is operated by Woolworths Limited and which is the owner of the Dan Murphy’s, BWS and CellarMasters brands (amongst others).
The development of the Drinks Library App, is in accordance with the agreement signed between the Company and Endeavor on 17 July 2017, whereby OpenDNA was engaged to create and power an innovative Drinks Library App, that has the ability to catalogue, suggest and recommend suitable liquor choices for each individual user based on their specific preferences, interests, the occasion involved etc.
Leveraging OpenDNA’s Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) and machine learning technology, the App ‘learns’ user preferences across a broad range of inputs, metrics and scenarios, creating data which can be used for a variety of marketing and customer experience enhancement purposes. Under the agreement, OpenDNA is entitled to revenue from further development and implementation work as well as ongoing usage-based licensing fees once the App is launched.
Following the successful development and testing of the App, it is now available and can be downloaded from the Google® Play Store and iOS App Store.
The development of the App was fully funded by Endeavour, however, OpenDNA will now generate ongoing revenue through a fixed monthly content sourcing and cataloguing fee as well as variable monthly user subscription fees.
Future Mobile Technology
As announced by the Company on 31 January 2018, the relationship between OpenDNA and Future Mobile Technology (“FMT”), the manufacturer and provider of the “Netsurfer” range of mobile devices, was further strengthened and solidified with FMT’s successful launch onto the market of five Netsurfer models.
With this launch, FMT aims to sell over 500,000 Netsurfer phones onto the market by end of 2018, where each phone will be pre-loaded with OpenDNA’s AI powered Jottr App – a personalized content App available on Google’s Play Store hosting over 2,000 sources of rich content. The exceptionally smart Jottr App uses the power of OpenDNA’s AIS to continually learn user preferences, enabling it to deliver only articles and content which are of interest to the specific user of the App thereby helping to save the customer money by using less data on irrelevant content.
This partnership is viewed to provide a return of investment to both parties involved by the creation of a potential additional revenues stream in the form of advertising revenues, made possible through the placement of native advertising from Facebook within the Jottr App, allowing both FMT and OpenDNA to earn revenue through users ‘clicking’ on the advert.
OpenDNA is in further discussions with other parties to increase the offering already in place with FMT. Further updates on this will be provided to the market as customer deals materialize.
Business Development
With the increasing appetite in the market to adopt AI technologies that offer remarkable Return of Investment (“ROI”) opportunities, OpenDNA is strategically positioning to potentially take advantage of these trends by developing a strong customer pipeline and to become a market leader in providing AI driven personalisation technologies for businesses.
The Company continues to expand its network of channel partners, which include Looker, BBDO, WPP, LPK, Columbus Agency, The Grey Group and Pugh Morgan, each proving strategic benefits which include the introduction of various prospective customers across of multitude of sectors.
During the quarter a number of prospective customers have been identified and/or approached to potentially adopt OpenDNA’s services. Such prospects include those that operate within the Financial Services, Banking, Insurance and Telecoms sectors - discussions remain ongoing as at the date of this quarterly report.
The Company will update the market regarding the signature of additional agreements in due course.
Technological enhancements
Synapse
During the quarter, ongoing technological enhancements and updates were made to the Company’s proprietary business tool ‘Synapse’ to increase the benefits reaped by customers of OpenDNA’s AIS.
By offering any business detailed insights of their individual users, Synapse’s updated toolset and visualisations allow clients to react both in real-time and slow-time to their users’ changing interests, browsing habits and style preferences.
Editors and authors for example are now able to ask the question: “What perspective and tone will readers in New York best respond to?”.
With the addition of the new Questions feature, marketers, editors and product managers can easily engage directly with their audience, without interrupting the user’s browsing experience. Delivered via responsive, customisable web widgets, Questions can be created and monitored through Synapse.
API's and SDK's
The quarter has also seen improvements to the Company’s Software Development Kits (SDKs) and our Public Application Programming Interface (API). The SDKs now support the new Questions feature and the Web SDK now includes customizable Recommendation and Questions widgets, which can be easily deployed to customers websites, providing instant personalization and tracking of a website’s content.
Work is concluding on a new websocket-based API, which offers real-time communication from mobile devices and browsers to the Company’s API; this solves a number of industrywide challenges (most notably the ‘last page’ problem in desktop browsers), thereby improving analytics accuracy. This new service offers a host of possibilities with regard to client-user interaction and content feedback and will be rolled out to our existing clients over the next quarter.
Other technological enhancements
The Company’s data science and machine learning teams have been monitoring and analysing all user activity over the past quarter, in order to make adjustments to the Company’s underlying algorithms and feedback modelling processes, which in turn improve performance for certain usage patterns. These improvements will provide certain users with deeper analysis and support on-going work to increase the breadth of signals used throughout our single-user analysis pipeline.
EU General Data Protection Regulations
As announced following the quarter end, on 26 April 2018, the Company has been active during the quarter in respect to various research and develop iniciatives to ensure its AIS, ancillary products and tools are compliant with the European Union General Data Protection Regulations (“GDPR”).
GDPR is a new EU regulation that governs consumers’ private information and comes into effect on 25 May 2018. This regulation will have a significant impact on how organisations worldwide manage their users’ data and privacy.
OpenDNA’s GDPR solution will provide businesses with integrated consent management, ongoing data management, full data export and user profile deletion options, as is required under the new regulation.
This has the potential to negate costs and overheads that a business would likely incur in order to have internal processes that comply with these new regulations.
From a user’s perspective, the simple and transparent experience provided by OpenDNA’s solution will assist in building trust with the host company’s website or mobile application in that their data is safe and within their control, as well as also helping to educate the user on why giving access to such information is beneficial to their online experience.
With OpenDNA’s AI technology, businesses will have the opportunity to comply with GDPR regulations as well as learn in real-time a user’s interests, likes, dislikes, wants and needs, which enables them to then use this information to automatically personalise their users’ experiences in the business without violating their data privacy rights.
OpenDNA’s Chief Executive Officer and MD, Jay Shah, said:
“It has been a busy quarter with regards to developing a sales pipeline and tailoring various product offerings for specific industry sectors. The enhancements made to OpenDNA’s products in the quarter further provides businesses with the tools to better understand their individual users, through the real-time transformation of big data into actionable information, which in turn will optimise internal processes. With such information and knowledge on their individual users at their fingertips (through reviewing Synapse), key decision makers within any business are able make better informed decisions, improve marketing strategies and focus on increasing ROI as they are working with real-time information.
With majority of the core AI platform development work completed in 2017, the Company is now in a strong position to sign up customers. Synapse has been a key factor in demonstrating the efficiency, data gathering and analysing ability of OpenDNA. Current sales pipeline includes major investment and consumer banks, insurance companies, telecom providers (both mobile and internet), hardware companies, government sector, media and eCommerce.
OpenDNA will update the market in due course as agreements are finalized and work commences with customers.”
