I welcome you to another edition of SteemMag, (the twentieth edition), a weekend digest for Steemians.
Every week, I take a look at some of the most important topics and have a chat with top Steemians who have expert views on such topics.
In case you missed it, here are links to Issue #1 , #2 , #3 , #4 , 5 , #6, #7 , #8, #9, #10, #11, #12 , #13, #14, #15, 16,#17, #18 and #19
In page 1:
SteemMag reached out to @ekitcho - the CEO of busy.org, the entity behind the beautiful alternative interface on the Steem Blockhain
And in page 2, I reached out to a whale and a backup witness where he briefly talked about the future state of steemit.
SteemMag:
How and When did the idea for busy.org come up?
@ekitcho
@fabien and I, are the founders of Busy. We know each other for a long time, maybe 10 years but we somewhat lost contact for years. Both entrepreneurs, mostly in the web industry we built several projects and companies in the last decade. In my own case, I knew cryptocurrencies since 2011 with Bitcoin and was already impressed by its disruptive potential but everything started the end of 2015 and early 2016 with the blockchain hype and Ethereum dApps.
As a blockchain/crypto enthusiast and advocate, serial-entrepreneur and innovation/IT/digital expert I was looking around to find the best project and environment to build and find a role to be part of this decentralization revolution. I was attracted by Ethereum because of Vitalik and Stephan Tual and was monitoring the various decentralized apps people were working on to empower people and disrupt the so-called (and fake) sharing-economy unicorns. Feeling particularly concerned by global changes, geopolitics, governance and power, I was convinced that blockchain and crypto space was going to be my new home.
Then in July 2016, fabien, after several years of silence, came to talk to me. Asking some news, what I was doing. And I instantly knew that he had something.. Since he was very excited. He found out about Steem and decided to talk to several people he thought could be interested in the concept. Bingo ! I was the only one around him who could directly understand the concept and what we could revolutionize with Steem. It took no more than 24 hours for me to become like a drug addict with his new substance, having millions of thoughts and ideas per second to build with this blockchain and bringing this added-value that we needed, to construct something big.
The team was once again reunited! We just rediscovered this synergy we had 10 years ago. He was convinced that we could build our killer app on Steem, to kill all middlemen and bring value back to people, and had this almost religious belief and energy that I had to take a deeper look into it and confirm the hype was not based on false information.
What we found after a more profound look into Steem made us feel even more confident that the Busy project could be built on this blockchain: an interesting consensus with DPoS, TaPoS (Transactions as Proof of Stake), Fast Block Times (3s), Zero transaction fee and Advanced Account Structures. Busy could benefit from this growing user base, a strong blockchain architecture, and community!
Sharing the same vision, we are really inspired by WeChat in China, and believe in a one-killer platform with all embedded services apps in a rich environment.
Imagine for a second this decentralized platform using the Steem blockchain as social media base layer with additional apps like Marketplace of goods or services, all in the same platform built BY US (the community). This is how and why we are BUSY !
We took this project very seriously and decided to pause or stop all other companies and activities we had to be 100% involved in it, building it as an innovative startup going for unicorn disruption… recruiting the best to build the best and take all valuable inputs from the community to bring this platform that can change the world!
SM:
What have been the challenges so far? And how have you been able to cope with them?
@ekitcho
The first challenge (on 3) was to convince myself but also confirm that Steem is the right blockchain to build our project.
Despite the poor reputation made on bitcointalk (called pyramid scheme/ponzi) and by the crazy Tone.V, I had time to take deeper look into @dan ‘s work and was very impressed. This man knows what he is talking about when it comes to governance or blockchain tech. I read the Steem whitepaper which was not easy to understand, discovered Delegate Proof of Stake and elected witness governance, the economics of Steem/SBD/SP, even looked on Bitshares. I came to the conclusion that Dan was poorly understood by his attackers...
This man is a genius because he shares my vision ! (note of humour..) More seriously, I like people who believe in something, are visionaries, planning their action and actually doing it.
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." R. Buckminster Fuller
- You believe in blockchain and cryptocurrency can empower people ?
- then you try to build governance and economic model that tends to do so
- You want people to adopt it so find the best way to make that happen
- You realize that user-generated content stolen value and how people use internet in 2016 leads you to the conclusion that social network/media is the silver bullet to bootstrap a cryptocurrency
- You build not only the project but also a whole architecture and environment that will allow people to start their own decentralized App
Most users will start using Steem not because they care about blockchain, but because they want to use a social media platform that brings their value back, rewards their contribution or allow them to use (usually high commission) services without middlemen or commission fee. This gets them registered in the our system and start using it, without having to consider dealing with cryptocurrency.
More than a simple social network that rewards its users, Dan designed Steem to uses social media somehow as a Trojan horse to solve the difficult problem of bootstrapping a cryptocurrency for mainstream usage. I do believe in its potential to achieve this goal that bitcoin still not managed to succeed.
This first challenge is considered solved. I still have some small reluctance on tiny points in governance and decentralization, but I’m confident that this will be solved, in the same way we did our last hardfork, and I have reached this minimum trust level to be 100% invested on the Busy project.
2. The second challenge was to prove what we can do, build strong links with the community and provide our value to the ecosystem
As I said before, when you believe in something, define Plan, take Actions. This is what I did. Steem is like a Video Game in which you need to understand the metagame to succeed. A game in which you bring valuable contributions against reputation, votes, rewards and power, in which you need to network with powerful players to build together a killer governance and economic model and kill the final Boss : banksters, government and useless bloodsucking middlemen abusing people naivety.
This is the best game we’ve played so far and I gained some XP with great moves: We contribute to the community with Steem Javascript librairies (SteemJs), Steem API, SteemScript standards, SteemConnect, and other stuff allowing the ecosystem to grow helping developers and entrepreneurs. I had some great Travel time for Steem in Tokyo, Oslo, and Amsterdam. Spent 20H/24 on Steem talking to everyone we could... Building strong links and building our Busy Team. We tried to keep it secret as long as possible to make sure that we could step in, not with fine words and false promises, but with concrete actions and a real product.
We took time understanding the Steem’s ecosystem deeply, the community needs, building a reliable network and an elite team to develop not only the most promising alternative platform to Steemit.com on the Steem Blockchain but also preparing the best strategy to accomplish our mission : Connect everyone to the next-gen decentralized social network that gives voice and value back to people, by building together a true sharing economy, a more free and trustworthy world without middlemen.
This second networking challenge is successfully accomplished but will still require daily involvement to listen to the feedbacks, and talk to active/key community players.
3. The third challenge is the Funding
As entrepreneurs and a professional team of developers, we started the Busy project with real perspective. In and after Oslo where I met @ned for the first time, we decided to go for a non-profit model and try to set up an umbrella with Steemit Inc and a discussed a Steem non-profit Foundation to help different projects like Busy, SteemQ, SteemSports etc. who belongs to our ecosystem. He finally commits himself for some donation of Steemit Inc. to support our Minimum Viable Product (until Feb).
Our first support is @smooth. Without him we would never be able to work so fast on our roadmap. He directly understood that we had a serious team and actually a real project scope and is supporting us every week for almost 4 month ! He is also doing a tremendous work on the community and steemit slack where happens most of the debate about Steem economics between keys members and witnesses. If you didn’t vote for his witness yet it’s @smooth.witness. At the same time you can vote @busy.witness to support us :)
We have recruited elite developers and a strong team that could today work on other companies like Google for at least 5K$/month salary. But we managed to involve everyone in the Busy and Steem experience because the concept is very promising. To fund, let’s say a 4 Busy workers Team, for One year full time, it will cost not less than 200K$. You add some extra Milestones cost on marketing/design/development, this obviously require some serious funding or a viable business model to cover our expenses.
This challenge is at the center of our current preoccupations because our Team members need to know if they can really stop other activities and be involved 100% in the Busy project and cover their cost. The funding is still not 100% sure after our Beta release but we are working on some serious solutions to solve this issue and keep our team working on Steem.
SM:
You recently released a roadmap for busy app. Are you guys on track to meet the set goals?
@ekitcho:
We defined a vision roadmap for the Busy Project, including marketplace for goods and services, onboarding process and marketing/design work for mainstream adoption, targeting new users. This roadmap should be confirmed after our next stage funding. What is 100% confirmed for now is the Beta release roadmap.
We're releasing a public beta version the 1st February 2017 allowing people to test the Busy platform and see its potential. I discussed yesterday with the team, and we seem on track to meet the set goals. Some issues would probably need some fixed after the release, but main features will be implemented.
- Draft with autosave post and draft manager
- Improved Editor
- Different post display Layouts: now we only have Feed Layout, but are working on List (like steemit) and Grid (pinterest masonry grid style) for improved UI and user experience
- Improved global UI/UX (User profile infobulle on mouse over username, etc.)
- Improved navigation between articles
- Notifications
- Private messaging + Tags/Categories channel chat
- Internationalization
SM:
Where do you see busy and the steem blockchain in the next 1 year?
@ekitcho:
Things are moving very fast. The new hardfork was necessary, and I believe that things will move at least once every month with new enhancements and improvements.
With Busy we want, on our second phase, to focus on New users adoption with a very easy-to-understand platform and playful onboarding process with Marketing & Design strategy. We also believe in our silver bullet which is the marketplace for goods and services, and implementing differents other Steem services into our all-in-one platform.
I can see the Steem ecosystem continuing to grow in users and transaction volume in 2017. It will all depend on our ability to secure the funding of the valuable contributions made to our ecosystem, and Busy is part of it.
Check out page 2 for more exclusive chats and This Week On Steemit
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