Business Solutions room

Video

About the challenge

The Fund 8 Business Solutions challenge has a total challenge budget of $1M in ADA, and there are 146 ideas posted.

The key question of the challenge setting is:

How can Cardano-based solutions help meet real business needs and what would be their impact?

Note: This event took place on 5th March 2022. Some of the proposals mentioned may not have finally been submitted in this funding round.

Summary

0:00 Oscar, challenge team: introductory presentation. The challenge has a budget of $1M, and is about business solutions that can run on the Cardano blockchain; both business-to-business and business-to-customer.

11:35 Mohamed Mahmoud: from Culture Tourism Beyond Borders https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/399247 Cultural tourism (visiting monuments, temples, pyramids etc) is expensive. We will create a metaverse that will restore monuments and allow people to visit them remotely from any location in the world. It will change how the tourism industry works, by providing affordable options for those who can’t afford to travel to cultural sites.

14:29 Oussama ben Mahmoud : from PeakChain Fleet Management Platform https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/397257 Vehicles are highly connected IoT devices requiring added security and data privacy; but there's no blockchain standard for the automobile industry, and currently all vehicles are connected to centralised servers. We've chosen Cardano as a platform for building connected car dApps. We also have another proposal, PeakChain Car Sharing platform. You can support our proposals by providing feedback, sharing our projects and articles on your social media, and delegating to our staking pool, PeakChain Pool: ticker [PKCP].

17:02 Oscar, challenge team: we have around 30 minutes; we can give 15 minutes for each proposal to brainstorm how we can improve it. We can start with Mohamed.

17:40 Mohamed Mahmoud: Our metaverse targets the problem of the cost of cultural tourism; and factors like war and unrest which make travel difficult. We were established in 2012 and we work mainly on enterprise applications such as CRM systems.

Our idea has two parts: a foundation; and the restoration process. The foundation is a central, publicly available repository of ideas - whenever someone wants to restore a part of human civilization, they can use this as a reference. The restoration process is a use-case for the metaverse: a metaverse is not only about games.

Our first project will focus on ancient Egyptian civilization. We will select particular monuments and restore them as they were built. And not only buildings – we will try to restore the life of the time, with people walking around, people trading, festivals and ceremonies.

We have noticed that in the Egyptian market, very few people are aware of blockchain, so our intention with this projects is to introduce it to North African market, and Egypt especially.

We have started a whitepaper (not complete yet) - we are working with a solution architect to develop the concept of a culture metaverse, as opposed to a gaming metaverse; how our smart contracts will work in our proposed use-case; and the concept of a decentralised game engine.

It's a huge project, and we need everyone to help.

Oscar, challenge team 32:29 In all blockchain solutions, community is the key.

Oussama 33:41 We are building connected car applications on Cardano.

Cars are highly connected to the internet; but via centralised servers. They could be connected to the blockchain, to increase privacy and security. Our mission is establishing Cardano as the blockchain standard for the automobile industry; we’ve chosen Cardano because it’s decentralised, secure, and has good governance.

We have a related proposal for a car sharing platform. But in this Challenge, we have this proposal for a fleet management platform.

Many companies have their own fleet of vehicles,and need to monitor location, driver behaviour, speed etc. Centralised solutions exist; and as a first step, we want to migrate this centralised solution to Cardano.

Data from each trip is processed, then the fleet manager receives email or SMS notification. The front end web application is connected with the Cardano blockchain via the APIs, and it gets the trip data from the blockchain; and the fleet manager accesses the data directly from the blockchain, not from our servers.

The first iteration will work like this; and once Cardano Hydra and scaling solutions are in place, we will migrate to a 100% decentralised solution. So our goal is a hardware wallet embedded directly in the car. Also in the midterm, we aim to house the front end web application in the IPFS so it is decentralised.

To show the feasibility of the project, we have built a prototype and implemented and tested successfully most parts of it. 45:00 An example of what the data looks like. Our team of two are Plutus pioneers, and have experience in project management and software quality. Our budget for 3 months is $39,000.

Oscar 47:05 Invites Naveed to give feedback to the proposals

Naveed 47:30 Two fantastic proposals! Some specific feedback: both of you would benefit from putting in a high-level roadmap. Start your proposal with your vision, which may sound really huge; but then break it down into your deliverables and scope for the 3 months of your proposal.

Mohamed 49:54 We put in the proposal very fast because of the time constraint, but we are aiming to add detail. What we are targeting for this 3 months is completing the architecture, building the partnership, and the marketing and awareness campaign; and to start building the team for the actual platform development. Most of the money will go for the awareness campaign.

Oscar 51:11 So the suggestion was that you could show the breakdown of your expenses in detail, because people really check the costs in detail.

Naveed 52:03 I think that's part of the transparency, right? Your roadmap gives your vision, one year, two years; but also your phase 1, your MVP.

Mohamed 52:23 Our two constraints are: for the "restoration" roadmap, the Egyptologists have to decide which monument they will restore. And for the "platform" roadmap – this is more dependent on the architecture that we select.

Naveed 53:57 Oussama with your proposal, you didn't say in your presentation what you needed the money for. So it sounds like you got everything sorted already!

Oussama 54:42 The basic infrastructure of the two projects are nearly complete. We have planned 50% of our time in one project and 50% on the other, because there is a lot of coincidence between the projects. I have listed all the six team members, what we are doing, and the budget. We have made a very humble budget calculation; we are only asking for the minimum, in order to gain trust of the community, and get feedback; because we have a bigger project long term.

End 58:35