Marco Maas studied Media Technologies in Hamburg and founded the data journalism agency OpenDataCity in 2009. He and his Team were the founding members of the data journalism movement in Europe. OpenDataCity receivd several awards for their visualisations, among them 3 Grimme Online Awards, 5 LEAD-Awards, The Prix Europa Award, 2 dpa Infografik-Awards, the CNN Journalist Award, the World Summit Awards.

In 2015 Maas and his team started working in the field of media distribution in the era of Internet of Things. They are using sensor data (e.g. from smartphones) to find the right content for the right user in the right context. Their project xMinutes was funded by Google and received European funding.
Right now their focus lies on digital assistants (Google, Alexa, Bixby, etc.) – Datenfreunde started a distribution platform for conversational content named Covojo (covojo.io). Customers can create content once and deliver it automatically to various platforms.