Long Description
Company Name
Cyclic Media, Inc.
Summary
The Decentralized Autonomous Marketplace provides an infinitely scalable consumer facing platform ripe for AI utility.
What better way to incubate towards AGI than a consumer facing open social platform, using a fully composable interface controlled by the end user, with AI services that users authorize in their UI to control and curate their digital experience?
Funding Amount
$5,000
The Problem to be Solved
Social platforms like Facebook, Amazon, X/Twitter, YouTube, etc are centralized, which we describe as a majority of profits going to few owners, with very little opportunity for external app developers to offer experiences via those platforms, and very limited way for end-users to customize their experience.
To re-state the obvious: High-traffic social platforms today allow very limited UI or feature customization, and have extractive economics that does not serve the open-source or indie developer communities. We believe this is bad for both developers and users.
With X/Twitter positioning itself as an 'everything platform', similar to the massively successful WeChat in Asia, we believe it is time for an open source fully distributed 'everything' platform to help all web3 projects compete with the efficiencies and current scale of web2.
Today, startups suffer the risk and difficulty of pursuing complex go-to market strategies, which pulls them away from focus on product development. It is not easy to build market presence with relevant audience attention across multiple centralized platforms.
Our Solution
A consumer facing UI-builder marketplace with a developer-driven components library including web3, traditional apps, AI services, and data solutions, on one unified global mass market open-source social platform.
Re-stated: A social platform like a decentralized X/Twitter where developers can list app experiences to reach a broad user base for shared network effects, data opportunities, and revenue streams.
We are planning for an open protocol with decentralized infrastructure, enabling web2 and web3 projects to integrate their apps into an apps/components library which end-users can add into their tailored UI.
An open ended fully customisable platform, driving relevant interactions between participants, from casual users to content creators and app developers, with the synergy of shared services and permissioned data.
We expect dozens of app developer communities to leverage the shared platform to reach an ever growing mass market.
The product vision is outlined for clarity at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1NPq89JLsrDTJUvKR3lLhS6bztWM7X5IrECtJu_5zSKE/edit?usp=sharing
Synergy With SNET
With the vision of being a decentralized open platform, the DAM only succeeds via a broad ecosystem of synergies.
We envision SNET as the go-to source for AI apps, with prominence inside the DAM plugin store as an accessible collection of AI components that app developers and end users add to their DAM UI, with payments handled between DAM and SNET smart contracts.
We take inspiration from Atomic Design principles for atomic services that are combinable through the DAM's UI builder to piece together apps on the fly, making use of integrated UI components libraries and integrated frameworks. Whatever the developer (indie, professional, or savvy end-user is able to make use of).
Anything in the SNET marketplace could be packaged into consumer facing apps and listed via the DAM's front-end plugin store so that SNET apps have easy access to end-user customers. It would be like X (formerly Twitter) enabling SNET to list SNET marketplace apps directly inside X's feature lists such as X-Premium, X-Communities, etc.
We envision multiple marketplaces and component or app libraries being able to integrate into the DAM open platform. In this way, the DAM UI is built up from a plethora of diverse marketplaces and libraries of skins, apps, widgets, and components.
The DAM is not an AI marketplace. It's an end-user platform like an X/Twitter, where any kind of developer, from AI, to anything else, within or without of the SNET community, can collaborate on the open source components library and UI builder, and enable apps on the DAM store for end-users.
The DAM is end-user facing, not only developer facing. The DAM helps leverage the SNET marketplace, giving each SNET app a way to reach end-users. DAM users would become customers of SNET apps via the DAM plugin store.
Marketing Strategy
Most dapp ecosystems attempt to support entirely disparate and independent web3 projects.
Instead, why not build out a dapp library, allowing any web2 or web3 project to integrate and gain exposure, where users can customize their experience by choosing dapps they include on a no-code WYSIWYG UI.
The DAM will become multi-chain and multi-currency as developers integrate their front-end app experiences with any smart-contract back-end they wish, powered by whatever crypto tokens they choose.
The network effects of having dozens of developer teams will lend itself to initial word of mouth marketing.
Project Milestones and Cost Breakdown
We are web2/web3 product experts, but not technical AI experts.
Our proposal is to work with AI developers in the SingularityNET community to scope out the most opportunistic AI apps that will best serve a scalable architecture of services for participant interactions on the DAM as we move from scoping and prioritizing to then developing the various layers of infrastructure required (see the attached appendices document).
This research project involves a series of workshops. Workshop approaches include: Sailboat exercise, Journey mapping, User story scripting, and RICE (reach, impact, confidence, and effort) prioritization to name a few.
Each milestone is comprised of community workshops, knowledge base curation, and published schematics.
Milestone 1: User Features, $1k
Curate the user facing features for UX that can potentially be driven or enhanced by AI.
Areas such as: user authentication and security, personalized content and recommendations, customer support, social experiences, content creation and publishing.
Lead-Time: 2 months
Milestone 2: Filtering and Matching, $1k
Explore front-end marketplace architecture suitable for filtering and matching users with suitable AI app experiences, such as: sentiment analysis, data privacy and consent management, marketplace integrity (fraud prevention)
Lead-Time: 2 months
Milestone 3: Data Management, $1k
Explore CDP (customer data platform) data warehousing for the wide variety of filtering and matching required by end-users to drive their platform experience, and vendors to manage their e-commerce experience, possibly including supply chain and inventory management, user behavior analysis for advertising, marketplace insights (user trends, product demand, etc), and 3rd party integrations.
Lead-Time: 2 months
Milestone 4: Hosting & Services, $1k
Exploring AI utility and requirements for mixed back-end hosting — probably a practical mix of smart-contract transaction management, identity management, centralized hosting for micro-service architecture (everything as API) and IPFS for distributed content hosting. Cross-platform Integration.
Lead-Time: 2 months
Milestone 5: Backlog Prioritizations, $1k
Publish a core requirements roadmap across the various disciplines, including:
- No Code UI Builder for End Users
- Public Components Library / App Marketplace
- Payments Layer and multi-chain connectivity
- Data Warehousing / LLMs
- Curate a long list of likely AI services required on the DAM and hopefully discover the most important services that we can pitch in a future New Projects Pool round of Deep Funding. Ideas so far that we are most interested in as core to the platform vision include: personalized feeds with semantic search, including user controlled content moderation and privacy controls, and also a recommendations engine that introduces users to apps available in the app store based on the types of content users interact with.
Lead-Time: 2 months
Risk and Mitigation
We are near the start of our journey to understand current AI capabilities in terms of the very broad product vision for the DAM. We appreciate this is not just 'an app'. This is an entire open market platform and a very big potential project, hence requiring support of the AI community to help scope it out in detail via this proposal. Our research will be published for the SingularityNET community to support and review. We will work with the community to gather requirements across the full spectrum of possibilities and all layers of what this DAM platform could become.
Note on Ethics: We believe in a few guiding principles: zero fraud, zero force, zero theft, and near-zero censorship. We also need to abide by legal frameworks such as not selling unlicensed firearms or drugs. Beyond that, we want to maintain as much uncensorship as possible. By enabling sophisticated UI customization for filtering and matching with content of interest to each user, people will be able to create their own 'reality bubble' to only see content of interest to them. Users will have as much control of their data as the platform can provide so only fully-permissioned user data will be available to apps or advertizers.
Voluntary Revenue
We are keen to partner with ecosystem developers to find revenue opportunities for every app published to the marketplace.
With collaborators from the SingularityNET developer community we can scope the financial primitives and tokenized revenue models across such areas as follows.
1. Transaction Fees
The platform can earn fees for hosting and facilitating value exchange via the marketplace. Dapps may choose to pay a single access fee, or a per transaction fee.
2. Advertising Fees
Dapps listed in the marketplace can pay for publicity across the marketplace to reach new users.
Users will have full control on the types of advert that reaches them, thus giving each user the power to control their experience on the platform. This provides a significant advantage compared to other platforms.
2. Service Fees
To be negotiated with solution providers by way of introducing them to client opportunities. I.e. As a platform we can take a fee for introducing experience creators (content or code) with clients.
3. Venture Agreements
Once established, or with supporting partners, we may provide capital investment and further support for projects that require smart contract development and other professional services for launch, by negotiating SAFTs (simple agreements for future tokens) or SAFEs (simple agreements for future equity).
Open Source
Our plans are for open source. App developers will be able to add their apps into the DAM app store including both closed and open source depending on their business model.
Our Team
Gavriel Shaw, Project Lead
3 times VC incubator (described at http://cyclicmedia.com/incubator/), 15-years startup operating experience in product and marketing (described at https://www.cyclicmedia.com/head-of-growth/) across dozens of industries.
Gavriel was the first Head of Marketing for Wirexapp.com (crypto debit card provider) in 2017 growing the marketing team to 18 and customers to 1.5M in 10 months.
Served as Product Manager and Agile Coach in several placements. Currently Agile Coach for the web3 DAO platform https://hypha.earth/.
Chuck, Technical Lead
Worked with Gavriel at Flote (crypto social network). Listed as inventor of 2 patents (Shutterfly's Photobook Application, and Level3's Dynamic Prompt System). History with visual design and User Experience (UX) oriented strategies and implementations. Current favorite devops & design technologies include Builder.io, ChatGPT, Vercel Cloud, MidJourney, React/MobX/Redux/Firebase, NodeJS, MongoDB and the related ecosystem of build and dependency management tools (Webpack, Jest, Gulp, Grunt, Bower, etc.)
Twenty-four-consecutive-year history with ECMAScript (JavaScript), HTML, & CSS. Complete productivity and human efficiency geek and certified Agile professional. Also competent with React, AngularJS, NodeJS, PHP, ColdFusion, MySQL, MSSQL, OracleSQL, Grunt, Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, 3D Studio MAX, Ableton Live, and Audio Mixing Board technology. Familiar with software design patterns, client relations & presentations, and digital innovation and transformation strategies.
Sterlin Lujan, Risk Officer
Worked with Gavriel at Cryptospace (OTC bitcoin exchange) as the Chief Risk Officer. Sterlin has 5 years of experience leading compliance teams and managing risk for VASPs (virtual asset service providers). Sterlin has over 8 years working in various leadership positions for prominent cryptocurrency organizations, including bitcoin.com. He has an ACAMS CCAS (certified cryptoasset anti-financial crime specialist). Sterlin also has rigorous training in blockchain analytics, with certifications for using their Reactor and KYT applications.
Related Links
Product Overview Slides https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1NPq89JLsrDTJUvKR3lLhS6bztWM7X5IrECtJu_5zSKE/edit?usp=sharing
Research Appendices https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d8ppWMHJfma_DmACl9NFn40k7Zju6WhTa4Q2se92FeQ/edit#heading=h.kl03xpxisvb8