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Can Your Mobile Customers Afford to Watch Your Ads? Mobile has transformed the economic and social landscape of the world.

By Abhishek Shankar

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Abhishek Shankar, 32, is a serial entrepreneur from India who has worked at consulting positions at Wipro, Cognizant and Google before starting augmented reality firm Adstuck Consulting. His flagship product Alive was acquired by Times of India in 2013. Abhishek is currently working on ReverseData, a platform which gives free internet to users in emerging markets.

Mobile has transformed the economic and social landscape of the world. Internet access, either through a wireless network, wireless access point, or fixed broadband connection, gives individuals a gateway to an online experience that is expanding by the day. Entertainment, Utilities, services, whatever you can think of.

The only thing most of the core Internet players tend to have in common is that some of their services are provided free of charge: Facebook costs nothing for consumers, and likewise the majority of Google products. E-commerce sites that have been created for the purpose of keeping their assets low and attractive site are also free. What's more, these successful players do not invest in their content, but rather let the public generate it for them.

Mainly through advertising: Google and Facebook display advertising to you when you browse search results or profile pages of their friends. What makes these ads powerful is that companies also monitor their behavior and activities on their sites. If this bothers you, you should know that you agree with it. When you subscribe to a service like Facebook or Google, they give you a license agreement end user; you have to sign to proceed.

It is not just the prominent players like Google who are interested in monitoring their online activities. In fact, there are more than a thousand schemes do this, because many companies are scurrying to become the main source of information on consumers' activities.

For example, even visits to the page of a reputable newspaper like the New York Times stimulate a dozen follow-up services to oversee its operations. And these players are not only interested in your target with ads but also sift through the enormous amounts resulting from the information, known as more data for other purposes.

For example, insurance companies can use large volumes of data to evaluate better what kind of insurance premium you pay. Internet trends can also be used to make smart investments in finance.

Companies operating in this way are called Data Builders: attract us with free services, and also use their privileged summary of our activities to collect data from us and manipulated to gain money and prestige. The internet allows them to serve the world market, and because it also captures information worldwide, this usually minimizes any benefits that local agents have. What's more, these consumer-oriented services often deliberately make it difficult for you to leave.

Users should monetize the information they provide to businesses. So what is the heart of the problem with the new economy of the information indicated in the above ideas? That there are a number of middle-class people who contribute information and content today are not being rewarded monetarily for their efforts. Data builders reap these benefits.

This dynamic will eventually turn against the constructors themselves since even they need a consumer market with good economic results to advertise. So what is the solution? Simple, the monetization of the information we provide to companies This means that every valuable piece of information you provide, as a statement that helps a work of translation algorithm should be favored with the company that makes money with that algorithm.

Similarly, social networking sites should be rewarded for the privilege to announce to others what videos you've seen and what songs you've heard, because they are benefiting from that information. These tiny nano payments would only be proportional to the amount of value they have created, but yet these small streams would amount to real incomes.

These payments or they could be instantaneous as a fixed price for every morsel of information you provide, or traditional payment, whereby you are paid a commission later, after a calculation of benefit to someone who has generated from your information.

In this way, the companies benefiting from the data generated by the user would have to pay users for it, and although it was not given for free, it would, however, be affordable for them to pay. This particular system is a kind of humanistic information economy.

Try to get support from Google, or even find a way to contact them at all. Unless it is paid services like Google Play, you will not get any support.

According to Silicon Valley luminary Jarion Lanier, virtual reality pioneer, the problem is not with internet but with organizations who have forced their way to become large monopolies. Lanier did not specifically tell in his book about a few things. He does not calculate, for example, what actually could be a potential profit of a typical web user if internet accounting practices were to be reoriented along the lines he opined.

He seems to believe that the architecture of the internet should include bidirectional accounting so that all inbound links are taken into account and does not mention who will handle servers that would take care of such accounting. In relation to the ideas presented in his book, the main one being that the current system of allowing companies to steal people's internet-usage habits is both unethical and unsustainable.

Adstuck Consulting is fighting for rights of people to free internet especially of those who cannot afford it through its Armor browser and ReverseData. Adstuck has developed a product ReverseData which has three collection points : Apps, SDK and Browser. Through this it acts as a gatekeeper to all which is exchanged between the website and apps with the user. In one place where ReverseData tracks and reverses data usage of users, Armor browser bars tracking and ads with complete user control.

Abhishek Shankar

Founder & CEO, Adstuck Consulting

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