AllSpark Beta Announcement

Launch planned for November 11, 2022.

Hello Everyone, we are proud to unveil a few things since our alpha launch on 2/22/2022. 

• A new direction: “smart content aggregator as vibrant as your digital life.”

• Progress update: beta planned for 11/11/2022. Feel free to explore the demo at getallspark.co

• We are on a mission to build a new frictionless consumer internet experience for users.

The problem

Our digital life is rife with constant irrelevant communications and interruptions. The problem stems from our product sprawl. Users must check many sites, apps, emails, and notifications only to expend a lot of time sifting through noise instead of improving their awareness. AllSpark helps users save time and expand their reach with our novel smart feed.

New Direction

AllSpark is a smart feed that helps users effortlessly stay in the loop by aggregating and prioritizing content from your various connected accounts. Love to use Reddit, Twitter, HN, or particular blog sites? Connect these accounts to AllSpark for a vibrant feed that surfaces only the content you want.

AllSpark is different from other aggregators like Apple News, Feedly, and RSS readers in three ways:

• Vibrant pre-built integrations: AllSpark provides a variety of novel integrations. For example, customers can see posts from their loved ones from different platforms (Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter,…) or event recommendations from Eventbrite and Meetup. The content store allows you to pull feeds from various sites by granting AllSpark access to your account.

• Everything is content: we see birthday reminders, flight gate changes, nudges to connect to loved ones, trending posts, or breaking news as content for the feed. AllSpark surfaces these items for users by keeping a vigilant eye across your products, emails, calendars, etc.

• Prioritized by context: due to the flood of emails and notifications, we need intelligent systems to ensure we don’t miss essential items. Furthermore, these items need to be surfaced at the right time to make them actionable. Let us dissect the birthday reminder feature to demonstrate the concept.

First, AllSpark sources all birthday information from connected data sources like the user’s address book, Facebook, LinkedIn, and past happy birthday messages. Next, the machine learning engine selects your close friends from the list and queues a birthday reminder feed entry for consumption during your downtime -- a time when you have space to send a quick note.  

With this much information concentrated on one product, there is a risk for privacy abuse, promising one thing and changing it in the future, and security risk. These concerns boil down to one thing --Trust; we believe the only way to build trust is to be transparent and consistent over time. AllSpark is a mission-driven company founded to create a new user-centric internet that is frictionless and privacy-first. We will continue to stay faithful to our founding mission.

Progress Update

For those that have been with us from the beginning, you may remember our initial product -- a super app with a password manager, assistant feed, and automation for updating your home address and credit card information everywhere. We launched an alpha with a password manager and mock feed on 2/22/2022 and learned a few things:

1. We need to reduce the scope to something that already exists.

2. We were using complicated language and technical jargon.

3. Describing the future vision makes it harder to understand the beachhead product.

We took those lessons and settled on a feed aggregator because people are familiar with the concept, and it gets us a step closer to user-owned data discussed in the mission section below. The beta will launch on 11/11/2022; waitlist members can set up their Allspark account once they receive their access code over email. On behalf of all of us, we thank you for your patience and continued support of our mission.

Mission

AllSpark was born out of a dream for a frictionless internet that doesn’t invade your privacy or require passwords and pesky signup forms. The technology to make this happen exists today but lacks a compelling product and meaningful customer group. Our user-owned data and privacy-first approach is integral to building trust and deeper personalization. But more importantly, the product can have a broader impact by validating privacy-first business models, demonstrating superior UX, and creating a beachhead market for products that will challenge web2 business models built on ad targeting.

AllSpark aims to build the best recommendation system on top of user-owned data. Our design lets customers choose where the data is stored and who has access. Access to personal data is limited to the device; our servers only synchronize encrypted feed entries across your devices.

Through our journey, we have uncovered a few other insights:

• user-centric or cross-silo design

• deeper personalization with user-owned data

• frictionless service with a user-owned identity

We will explore these in deeper detail in our next blog entry.

Best,
Yonatan Feleke
@founderYonz | [in]/founderYonz