“I wish to have a fair data economy system where everybody produces and owns data.” Interview with the founder and CEO of Incari Development Platform
We are more than glad to have Osman Dumbuya in the next episode of the “Think Data with Datamin” Series.
Having years of experience in the tech space, he is the founder and CEO of Incari Development Platform.
In this interview, he shared his experience and insights on tech&data, and gave us a new perspective!
So, let’s start!
Can you tell us about your career and your path to building your company?
I started my first company in 2006. We were working on a virtual prototyping solution that helps the automotive industry to improve the development speed of getting assessments about cars, structures, and design. That was a pretty successful business in the end, and we got acquired by an enterprise in 2012. But, shortly after the acquisition, I quit the company because, from my point of view, the pace of innovation became slower, and I wanted to focus on being innovative.
After, I switched to my current company, which I started in 2011. Here we were more focused on development instead of just offering services. This is how I started, and now we have transformed our company to become more tech-oriented instead of service-oriented. This is what we are focusing on right now.
So as I have understood, you’re offering a tool to design interfaces without knowing much about programming. We are a big fan of low code solutions and minimizing the technical side of things. So I would love to hear more about your product.
Well, you basically got it right.
Our development platform is also focusing on the human&machine interface interaction. It’s crucial that you get the right information on your screen to execute the right commands for the relative machine. It’s not just about the interface but also the application running behind it. Our platform gives users all the tools they need to create unique applications from scratch and easily design an interface for people to understand how the application behind works.
Even though the logic and code behind some functionalities are often not that complex, designing the interface is. Applying different functionalities costs developers a lot of time; we can tremendously speed up these processes with our solution and help people get their products out quickly. That’s one of the core products that we’re offering.
The special focus is to build our tool in a way dedicated to real products such as cars and aircraft. Therefore we need to implement basic functionalities and rules to ensure the quality of our code that is running behind our nodes. This way, products can have a license to operate on public roads, which is achieved by fulfilling certain requirements and legal preconditions.
So, who is your customer segment?
We can say everyone that needs to build an application. An example of our key customers is car manufacturers who want to build an application for their products. So when you have an application to message texts, it’s not just the front-end you see. On the backend, there is a whole infrastructure that is built in order to manage the messenger. Suppose a car manufacturer wants to offer this in their cars. They need a designer to design how it will appear on the car’s interface and a team to implement the full functionalities; they can do both with our application.
Moving the conversation slightly to data!
Do you have a data-driven culture in your company?
It’s a small portion of our work because what we do is an analysis of the interface being developed. For example, we are designing our tool focusing on level three to level five autonomous cars. It means the entire “inside of a car” concept that we are familiar with will change as cars become more autonomous.
Today, when you drive a car, you have certain information, such as speed, charging level (if it’s an electric car), or gas level. In the future, we will focus on other information types with autonomous cars.
So, the messages and expectations will change; this is where analyzing data is relevant for us. Data is applicable for understanding how people react in certain conditions to optimize the user interface, enhance the communication between machines & people, manage which information needs to be shared, analyze how people respond to certain information, and so on.
Do you also use data in your business units, such as operations and sales?
Not really. Part of the reason is that we have a very focused customer group, mainly interacting with certain big manufacturers. Our potential customer group is comparably smaller in size, so we don’t have to make massive analyses because we simply know our customers.
Thanks for sharing! I would also love to get your opinions on the data trends.
I think the most important data trend we should have -and we don’t have enough- is data ownership. It is necessary to establish the concept of a data economy worldwide, but not in the way some massive enterprises are exploiting data today.
I wish to have a fair data economy system where everybody produces and owns data. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t accumulate and get insights out of data, but everyone needs to have a voice in how their data is used.
If we can monetize such a system and figure out how everybody can monetize their data, we can make everyone participate in the new “gold rush” of the next decade. So everybody will produce their “gold” and participate as an owner. We can probably even find solutions to establish a system of generating data to provide a minimum income for everybody, which would be fantastic! I strongly think there is a window of opportunity for this.
In this model, how can companies differentiate and monetize data?
If both parties consent, we can reach a middle ground if I want to use your data. I pay you a certain amount that you have decided since I’m using your data. If you’re too expensive, I can probably get cheaper data elsewhere. But if you are the person with the right age, living conditions, and educational level I’m seeking, your data is more beneficial for me than 1000 data sets. It can be worth paying your data extra because I’m getting the correct information to train my AI, so it makes sense to use it rather than having millions of valueless data sets. An adequate data economy doesn’t function today, and I think we can change it because there are strong means to establish it.
I would also like to get your opinions on data independency. Do you think we can reach a level where everyone can manage data independently?
For sure, we are strongly working on this! The tool we offer in Incari studio has a low-code approach. So we are making people reach programming.
I firmly believe that we, IT specialists, have to make access to programming easier for everybody. My wife and I often have fun conversations when I tell her she needs to learn programming, and she says it’s so hard she doesn’t even understand what I am mean. This example shows that we are still not good enough. Programming is nothing else than learning a different type of language, just like maths. And with different kinds of languages, you can achieve different things. If people find the language too difficult to understand, we should make it easier for them to access it somehow; otherwise, we will establish different classes of people considering how crucial IT technologies are becoming.
If you think of the auto industry of the 20th century, to get a car started, you needed a lot of money, five employees, and somebody who could help you refill your kerosene every 20 kilometers. Getting a car running was very complicated and expensive, so it was just a luxury good. Everyone estimated we wouldn’t even need 10,000 cars in total because people couldn’t afford it. But the automotive industry made it easier and cheaper from decade to decade. And today, we’re talking about autonomous driving, which means even kids will be able to maneuver cars in the future. So things have gotten a lot easier in the last 100 years and will get much easier in the future.
This is the same progress we have to make for the IT world because being able to build computer design, software design, and software development will be essential for people in the future. If it’s still too hard for people to access, we have to offer solutions that everybody can participate in. Then, all of our brains will start to work together, and as more people engage in the development of mankind, the quicker we will move.
With data being easier to reach and manage, do you think some data jobs will go extinct?
I think they would rather adapt than go extinct. We’re still at the beginning of analyzing data, and people often can’t make use of data because it’s so random and unstructured. Getting all the data in an analyzable structure is still challenging today. Luckily things are improving very quickly, and these problems are being solved with the AI solutions that are popping up everywhere, but there is still room for improvement. I think there will be more fields to use data in, so there will be more data-related jobs. I believe we are just at the beginning of the data age, so I can’t imagine that data jobs will go extinct just because we can automate some functions.
I would love to learn about your favorite data improvement of the last decade.
From my point of view, the most exciting trend is the ability of image processing, how well a computer system can distinguish between different objects. When you reverse the direction, these image generators can even build images based on a specific input, such as a word or mood. So. that’s vice versa direction of snapping a photo and trying to analyze what’s on the photo. This is one of the most exciting solutions I’m tracking right now. It is mind-blowing for the creative community and everyone who will use it.
Coming to the end of our interview, I would love to ask your advice for entrepreneurs who want to gain a competitive advantage.
Things are moving so quickly that it’s hard to come up with general advice. But focusing on start-up people, I recommend trying to understand the tech behind the tools you’re using. Today, when we’re talking about programmers, many are using scripting languages to do the implementation. This makes you increasingly disconnected from the essence of the computer and how it works. You should pay attention to the basic structures of how IT infrastructures are built, how programming languages are designed, and how programming generally works. You shouldn’t just rely on people to optimize your code and get the errors out, but you should at least have an understanding of how the data has been transferred from register to register. Because if you don’t, you are far from making breakthrough developments. For example, if you’re just the driver and you’ve never understood how a car works, you may be successful going from A to B, but you will never improve the car. You have to understand both to be able to be a pioneer and change the world.
Well, we have come to the end of the Interview!
We hope you enjoyed this interview as much as we did 😊
Special thanks to Osman Dumbuya for joining this Interview. It was indeed a pleasure to have you!
