1 hour close up livestream of SoMee.social
TRANSCRIPT
File Name: Fireside chat with Christopher Kramer CEO
Duration: 01:07:08
[Intro]
Ken Bosack: Hey! How it goozy? Ken Bosack here talking about Bitcoin and Bitcoin accessories. And today, I’m gonna refer you to somee.social. I’m here with Christopher, the CEO, and James the Marketing Manager. How goozy it is guys? Why don’t you go ahead and introduce yourself Christopher and then James, let everybody know who you are, maybe how you got into the cryptocurrency industry and a little bit about what you are now doing in this space?
Christopher J Kramer: Yeah, for sure. Thanks Ken. Appreciate you having me on the show. Yeah. My name’s Christopher Kramer, the president CEO of what’s now SoMee.social, which is previously ong.social. And ONG is the cryptocurrency that we launched which is an acronym for our parent company, one named Global Inc. So I got into the space basically started building a social media platform ong.social. In 2013, we formed the Delaware Corporation and got a few people together that believed in what we were doing and invested in the project and I invested obviously and started building what is now become SoMee.
Just to fast forward, in 2017, we pivoted into the blockchain and that’s when we launched the ONG cryptocurrency and then after that, we rebranded to SoMee; a lot of the users we’re really excited and we had a lot of discussion about our rebrand. And SoMee is kind of a play on words which is a social media kind of put together and social media redefined is kind of our catchphrase. And so, early on, I won the IBM’s Global Entrepreneur’s Award for ong.social.
Ken Bosack: Congratulations!
Christopher J Kramer: Yeah. Thank you very much! I was incubated for a couple of years by IBM where they allowed us to use their software platform and so that was pretty exciting. And later on, we pivoted to the blockchain. It just made sense with what we were doing because we are original vision was for people to achieve more together we wanted. We saw that so many people joining these platforms these centralized platforms and scale was causing a tremendous amount of wealth. We generated but it was for the actual platform. And the content providers and people creating content and contributing to the network. We’re getting nothing. And so our original vision was allowing them to have more control and to get a piece of the monetization that was happening on the platforms.
And so blockchain was a perfect fit for us as we progressed through that. And now it’s all about not only getting allowing people to capture the value that they’re contributing to the network but also having more granular control over their private information. And one of our core values is the value of choice and giving people choices. So if you want to participate in the advertising system that we’re about ready to integrate you can participate in it and make money from it. If you don’t like ads you can turn them off. So that’s just like one example and we can go more into that. I just wanted to use that as an example. But James go ahead introduce yourself and then we can jump in the platform.
James Pelz: Yeah for sure I appreciate that. Thanks Ken for having us on here. So I’m James Pelz. I’m the marketing manager for SoMee. If you guys have been following us, you may have seen my face around some of the conferences. That’s how Ken and I connected. We met at… was it, I think.
Ken Bosack: It was Block Show. No. Was it Hoo Show than BlockShow? Oh no man, we’ve been at least three or four.
James Pelz: Yeah. I think it was a BlockShow Americas here in Vegas. It was the first one where we didn’t meet on like an official level but I remember seeing you there and then we actually really connected at Hoo Show con here in Vegas.
Ken Bosack: So I heard three of from the T.I.T.S podcast guys. The crypto euclid and crypto goddess and junior Lancaster in them.
James Pelz: Oh yeah, good group man. So like it’s really nice to see the same faces over and over at all these conferences and especially in Vegas this is where I’m based. So these conferences are popping up left and right. So it’s good for us because it gives us a good position in the market to attend shows like this meet people like yourself and just spread the good word and rock and to sell me swag and the T-shirt and whatnot. So it’s been fun.
Yeah. Joined the project back in August and just really dove in Chris and I have been connected for a while I was the kind of watching the ONG social the previous the previous network. Kind of in and out of that watching that and it really just resonates it resonates with me what Chris is building here and then obviously now learning about how they’re doing all this work with the blockchain and learning the whole block chain’s face of crypto. I mean it’s that’s a whole their world and I love it because it moves so fast. And it’s the future.
And it’s exciting and we see people today. For example on platforms such as Facebook. I mean we’re at this pivotal moment in our digital age and social media where people are starting to realize the value of their privacy and the value of their data and their content. And that’s why people are looking for alternatives and moving into platforms like Steam It is a big player in the space. And we’re where we’re going to be like Facebook and Steam It. So that’s what we’re here to do man. I’m just super excited that you’re one of the very first influencers to really hop on board and really see the value in this and I’m excited for Chris to kind of share some of the features here on the on the site with us.
Ken Bosack: Yes. This is actually like you said it’s like almost like a perfect storm of people giving a shit about their personal data and the value that it actually has watching Facebook stock skyrocket and not realizing why is Facebook stock skyrocketing and going oh it’s because my data is worth that much. And then starting to get a vindictive feeling that why you’re not getting a cut and you’re having platforms like this that do exist and blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies that make it possible to do those micro-transactions of liking and sharing and incentivizing to turn on ads rather than turn off ads and things like that.
So it is a really good timing situation not just like banking and financially but for the personal data and the social media aspect as well. And I don’t think this could start a whole new economy. Like social media influencers are like a whole new thing but I imagine those micro influencers that people could have as being the popular kid in high school end up making enough money to go to college. It’s pretty cool to think but it’s actually happening and I’m seeing that with SoMee and steam and stuff like that. Christopher, I want you to go ahead and just dive in a little bit about the platform like what inspired it. What is it achieving and how does it achieve that goal.
Christopher J Kramer: Yeah absolutely. Well one of our original missions was just to achieve more together. Right. So we saw the centralized platform. So we’re capturing all the value from the users. We had kind of a perfect situation back in the day where the technology of connecting people with the inner and the pipes to be big enough to access more data faster better and then decentralized platforms like Facebook. We all saw the rise of Facebook and they really capitalized on that mix of events to get people joining in a mass. And then it just like rapidly scaled the value. So you had Facebook getting these huge valuations when they were still not even earning a profit. And the users got left behind right. They were like just enamored with the ability to join the platform to connect and do things that they hadn’t done before.
But really it was a situation where we were watching and saying the users and the content people providing their data and sharing the content they should be able to have the ability to capture that value with their bring into the network. So that was the original vision. And then, of course, it got stronger with blockchain and just reinforced what we were doing with the cryptocurrency and giving the people the ability to really understand what it was that they were doing and what they were sharing. And the information that had value for them. So how we’re accomplishing that now is that basically I can see you right now you’re on the blockchain settings but what we’ve done is we’ve integrated steam connect.
Ken Bosack: Yeah that is so freaking cool man. I love that you’re not like thinking competition, competition, competition and more like how can we complement one another for this own brand.
Christopher J Kramer: Absolutely. I mean Steam is the biggest is actually the most popular blockchain application out there hands down. And people have been loving it. And so what we did is we built more of like a micro-transaction so we’re Steam is a full blog. We’re like Facebook micro-transactions of Steam It. And so, with steam connect what we allow people to do is to connect their steam and account and then basically when they post an upvote they can start to earn rewards on each post so if you see like if you scroll up to the top where you’re scrolling my page right now you’ll notice that there is a little dollar sign on the very top post on my on my page.
If you just scroll up I don’t know if I’ve seen this real time but if scroll. Scroll actually scroll back to the top of the top of the profile page on my page and you’ll see you’ll see that reflected because what I did is I can just connect to my Steam It. Okay. Yes. So scroll to the first post to, is this time for a holiday in that picture. Yeah. So if you see right there see where it says the US dollar equivalent. So it’s kind of like Steam It. But what. What we’ve done is we’ve allowed the users to organ allow them those who connect Steam right now. We’ll see that pop-up and it’s going to track the steam earnings after this week.
We actually have an integration also of our private blockchains so users will be able to earn double the rewards. So if they’re posting to Steam It and posting to SoMee they’re going to get rewarded and both right. So now they can double down on the reward. So it’s a compliment. We also have a scheduling tool. So if you go to post something you can actually schedule content out which is convenient and then we’re going to be adding other social networks and the social hub aspect to make it even more convenient for people to publish to multiple social networks at once and then to see more analytics and see their earnings and in the future that little post earnings level when you hover over it with your mouse pointer it will actually have a little pop up that says that breaks out how much earnings came from steam and how many earnings came from SoMee
Ken Bosack: Oh, I see. Coming soon is like things like know my interests and bookmarks but like you were saying those scheduled posts are pretty important because I think what is it on Steam It 5 or something a day.
Christopher J Kramer: Yeah. Yeah exactly. If you click on what’s on your mind inside of the timeline where I can just show you where that schedulers at. It’s just at the bottom.
Ken Bosack: Oh yeah, I see a scheduled post.
Christopher J Kramer: Yeah. So there’s a little pop up in it and it shows you that the schedule posts kind of cool.
Ken Bosack: I like that. I could have set this up a couple of days ago and hey, I’m going live. Blah, blah, blah. And it could have posted it at 4 o’clock when I wanted it to instead of rushing around and doing it and stuff like that. I could see a lot of utility behind something like this.
Christopher J Kramer: Yeah it’s a nice we really wanted to be a utility value for people and now it’s where they have. It’s almost like huge sweet. A huge sweet type feels to it where you can actually schedule and publish posts want to make it very valuable from the standpoint of optimizing the time that an influencer can spend on the network and get as much done publishing to as many platforms as they want.
So you’re going to see as this goes the utility of that and the analytics and the tracking just get better and better so that people have more value in terms of publishing two separate platforms like Facebook Twitter or LinkedIn and then some of the decentralized platforms like Steam It YouTube for video creators. So we want Instagram. So we want to pretty much just integrate and bring as much value as we can on the utility side so that people can get as much done and then maximize the amount of value that they’re there earning. By using our application.
Ken Bosack: So was it difficult to integrate that where you post on SoMee and it goes and post on Steam It and their earnings are kinds of monitored and kind of reflected on the SoMee side because is there any way to see, trying to do this with other platforms as well maybe like the Facebooks or Twitter and stuff like that if I just go to SoMee and I make one post can it be pushed out to 20 different places.
Christopher J Kramer: Exactly yeah. That’s really where this is headed. So like right now you can connect Facebook you can connect Steam It and Linked in and we’ll add other ones. And basically in that post where you see the scheduler what’s on your mind you’re going to see when you connect those social networks in the future you’re going to see the social icons there and they’ll all be automatically checked. So if you if you connected them in the back end and said I wanted to publish to these all the time it’s just going to automatically assume that you want to publish to those but then you at the post level we’re going to give you some control so you don’t have to keep going back to the admin section and then you’ll be able to like check or uncheck an icon or like in our blockchain settings for example for our own private blockchain.
We give you even the ability to publish or not publish on the blockchain because some people don’t want to, they don’t want to publish to the blockchain all the time. So if you’re elected, if you haven’t if you’re not posting to Steam It. Steam It always will always go to the blockchain of course but our own blockchain we give you the choice to either publish that post to blockchain or if you uncheck that. So again at the post level, you’re going to see something. So if you if you elect here in the settings always publish to the blockchain pretty, after this week when we have everything integrated you’ll see at the post level a little checkbox and it’ll automatically check it if you have any admin settings post to the publisher the blockchain. And then if you if you have a post for example or you don’t want to be ratified on the blockchain you can just uncheck it and it will post it to the blockchain.
Ken Bosack: It’s really cool. Yes.
James Pelz: Yes. Just to add to that. I saw an article that came from Ad week that talks about the six social media trends to keep an eye on for this upcoming year and a lot of it talks about having more control over your privacy and integration into blockchain. So I mean mainstream media Ad week. A lot of these mainstream blogs are already talking about this kind of stuff so it’s really positioning us. In a good place by providing a solution to these problems.
Christopher J Kramer: Absolutely. Yeah. It’s a very cool integration as far as like the blockchain and it’s just going to we’re just going to keep continue to provide as much value as we can to the end users. And as much control over the private information because it’s so important that people have these are given the choice of how their information is used and if they want to monetize it great they can monetize it. If they decide that they want to just keep it private they should be able to have the choice to do that. And that’s where we really see that a lot of these big social media companies have gone wrong is they’ve packaged up and sold user data and mass and now it’s coming back to bite them of course.
Ken Bosack: Also SoMee making money how is SoMee a profitable business because that’s how all these social platforms profit and stay with their lights on employees and developers and everything and I was just wondering so where’s that come from.
Christopher J Kramer: Yeah. So you don’t see it integrated yet but there’s a couple of revenue streams and we have something that’s going to be integrated at the end of this month. So we’re telling everybody that the MVP for our platform will be right around the end of December. If there are any glitches or development things going on we know we might push that to mid-January but we’re very close to integrating something called that we call the “Ad Share” marketplace. Now the “Ad Share” marketplace what it allows the users to do of course on our platform we have as you can see we have pages, groups, and companies.
The companies can even launch ICOs so they can launch like not we don’t host the ICO on the platform but they can. They can go in and launch like if you launch a company then we give that company the ability to say we’re going to have an ICO and here’s the promotional event for that. So once you once you launch a company you’ll be able to see that on the on the platform and that’s a revenue stream where we’re going to be doing bounties airdrops and so that the companies can pay us to have like promoted list and they can do other things on the platform where they can boost posts or promote a post. So we are allowing those types of things.
And then with the “Ad Share” marketplace even gets deeper because what we did is we allowed the advertisers to come in and place ads like they normally would according to the targeting that they want. But On the user level for each, each person who’s having a personal company or group page any page that they own the ad share marketplace allows them to activate ad zones on their pages and then they can actually choose to like custom brands. So any advertiser that chooses to allow it their brand will show up in what we call a campaign Gallery and the users get to go in and actually custom select the ads for their pages and for the brands that they want.
And so, of course, they’re going to earn a cut of the advertising revenue on all of their pages for SoMee. So any activity that’s generated from them goes into their wallet and they will have the ability to do that now if they don’t want ads at all they can turn them off and they don’t have to activate them. So again it’s the power of choice giving them the ability to participate in that type of system. And we’ve setup staking so if you actually go into the wallet you’ll be able to see some of those settings as well wherein the future that’s where there’s a section in the wallet where it says earn and then you’ll be able to actually click that and that’s where you can go in and stake.
So the users will stake our ONG cryptocurrency and earn rewards from that. And that also unlocks the ad revenue earnings. So according to what they stake there they have the ability to be able to earn different rewards and to earn things. So right now it just says coming soon when you click on the earned right and the right side of the wallet they’re below and pretty soon that’ll say staking. And then they’ll say airdrops and bounties and then more basically is going to be able to have that. So that integration is coming at the end of the month for example and allowing people to see, to participate in the staking and the “Ad Share” marketplace. So that advertising revenue that comes into the….
Ken Bosack: Oh well I could swap my ONG that I earn for like right here.
Christopher J Kramer: Yeah. Now that’s another cool feature that we’ve integrated right into the wallet which is real-time liquidity through the bank or network. So we actually partnered with the bank or we integrated there their liquidity protocol into our wallet. And so what that enables people to do is it enables people to swap right there with 100 or actually I think it’s up to like 300 different tokens that they can swap with another cool feature in the wallet is we created an address book. So if you use this quite frankly you can actually add people inside of your address book and then basically name it and then attach that to their address.
So now it’s not this confusing address that you’re trying to find. And then every time you make a payment or you select the withdrawal from the wallet it’ll ask you who you want to pay. And then you can just choose the person’s name or the company name versus just trying to figure out what the wallet address is. So again trying to just reduce friction make it easy for people to transact. They can download a transaction history from the wallet so that they tax time or whatever they have everything right there for all their transactions.
Ken Bosack: Now is there any kind of KYC aspect to this or private key custodial or anything.
Christopher J Kramer: No we don’t hold the private keys to your wallet so we will tell people obviously I think we’re all used to it but for holding your own private keys you have to be very careful. But I think we still do have like a recovery function so that you could still potentially access that that information later on. But we can encrypt everything keeping everything safe and then we don’t control your private keys for the wallet. So you ultimately have access and you could, for example, take those private keys and go access it through my ether or wallet Mew or my crypto or whatever. So again putting the user in control of their private keys in their wallet is important and
James Pelz: Hey Chris! I was going to say let’s I know I see on the screen here. You’re on the advertising where you can recharge your balance.
Ken Bosack: Yeah. Well, James, I was going to ask since you’re the marketing manager. Just wondering where do you see the gamification aspect of the advertising on SoMee.
James Pelz: Yeah so it’s really cool because you can actually when you get your ONG and you have that in your wallet you can go to the advertising link and actually convert that to the G box which is pegged to the US dollar to one dollar.
Ken Bosack: Oh cool. So what is it? One dollar worth of ONG?
Christopher J Kramer: That’s right. Yes. So the G box…
Ken Bosack: I’m a genius. I’m a genius. Guys everybody fill me with that thumbs up button.
James Pelz: Yes you are. That is why we love you, bro.
Ken Bosack: No. That’s a perfect concept though. I mean that’s why Steam did it. And I can see exactly why you’re doing it. But what I think is even like I don’t know the awesome part is that you’re complimenting Steam It. And I can connect with my Facebook, my LinkedIn, my Steam, and I can see a lot more like you said coming soon. And there it is right here the advertising platform for the G box. Sort of like a stable place to put your earnings.
Christopher J Kramer: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. So like we have the ONG which is our crypto on the exchanges. We have G fuel which is like are our voting power for the content curation rewards and the upvoting and so forth. And then the G box which is yeah have that pegged to the dollar. So it’s almost like the mirrored system to steam where they have steam power and the steam back dollar.
Ken Bosack: Yeah, that’s it awesome. I like the concept a lot. And I’ve actually tried G fuel the drink before so I’m excited to try out the crypto side of it. So the address books things really cool because like you said I could add my friends here stuff like that. Do they get the pick their ethereal wallet when I add a contact to the address book or is it there’s SoMee address I’m sending it to?
Christopher J Kramer: Yes. So they can actually give you any address. Like we don’t like to force you to use the SoMee address book. Obviously, it’s convenient because you have in your wallet exchange. So like the users who use it, they get the advantage of using their own address book and they’re their transaction tracking and the wallet exchange through bank or all in one place. But it’s not like they can’t give you like a different address that you can add to your wallet. So whatever wallet address you want to add is up to you. It’s just that they would give you that address whether it be a SoMee address or any other public key and then you would add that on it just has to be in a theory and based or ERC 20 address because that’s the integration that we have through this wallet.
Ken Bosack: So I’m definitely going to check this out more now that I’m not traveling as much for the holidays. And yeah I think I’m going to be checking in. So I can post on SoMee that social it goes right to Steam It so I mean why would I go to Steam It when this is a 2 in 1 for me. But what do you guys are looking at for like end users? Who is the Steam It user? You’re what you’re looking for are you looking to bring on new users because this user interfaces a lot cleaner than that data. That’s not really it is that. It’s not going anywhere. How far do you see this platform going that your features of the future look like?
Christopher J Kramer: Well, I mean we really want to like you said we’re really pro Steam It. So we want to create features that appeal to the steam community. So we do have very crypto friendly features as well as you can put your favorite coins on your profile which gives you a click view of what’s going on the market. So we see it like a very crypto friendly but also having to bring that utility feature into the mix with the social hub we really want to appeal to the influencers and the people who are on social media in general and who are using multiple platforms to make it easy for them to publish from a single jump off point.
But at the same time monetize all of their content. So post in one place be seen everywhere and monetize everything. Right. So bring as much value as we can’t saving them time making them more rewards and more digital rewards. So if you can post from here and if it’s and if it’s a post it’s appropriate to go to Steam or any other platform it basically will allow that content to be distributed when people consume it and they come back and check out the content on your SoMee platform.
That’s obviously could earn you multiple rewards from on G steam advertising revenue and we plan to actually increase other ones as well. So we’re looking at other integrations. We’re also looking at actually talking about potentially open sourcing this platform and allowing like an army of developers to come in and build cool stuff as well. So there’s all kinds of things in the works that we’re talking about and considering we just want to bring as much value to the community as possible to make the single big and give people the features and the monetization that they deserve.
Ken Bosack: Yeah. I’m checking out all these bounties they just added some of my favorite coins as you were talking about doing and I’m checking out some of the groups and stuff like that. And I just found that there’s a way to find airdrops and earn bounties. So do you see this sort of being a platform for blockchain projects to have a social presence like Twitter really doesn’t have that feeling of dealing with a person when you’re talking to a company on Twitter you don’t really have that social interaction? It feels kind of like a bot. Even if it is a person but I could see this being aware for people that are running these launching programs or platforms and companies to host their airdrops and bounties and in a way where people feel like you’re socially interacting.
Christopher J Kramer: Yeah, it’s nice because we actually have that integrated now and it’s about ready to go live. So people that do or companies that have are having a presence and doing an airdrop or bounty they can just jump it off right here where their community is at. We also have a cool chat function. So like they can put up a certain amount of things that they want as far as like things to do for the airdrop and bounty reward and then basically it kind of ties back to the chat system here so that they can interact with some of the influencers that are often still in the balances and then basically then they distribute they distribute the tokens or the airdrop to the folks. So we kind of tried to streamline that process as well so that the projects that we want to have a presence here kind of a de facto spot for them. And it streamlines again it’s a utility that streamlines the process and allows them to engage and empower their community around their project.
James Pelz: Yeah, and what’s really great too about this is, for example, people like you can that are influencers right now like you have you have a good chance. Mostly probably crypto people because you’re a crypto lifestyle. And that’s really our main focus right now because of people like you and in the crypto community enthusiast marketers’ blockchain technologists. They actually they already get what’s going on in this space. So obviously you’re going to naturally gravitate towards networks like SoMee.
And then obviously it kind of the trickle effect or the network effect happens after that your audience comes in check it checks it out they like it they’re like oh I can actually make money on this platform I’m going to come hang out here and then it just kind of the ripple effect starts and that’s more mainstream adoption as Bitcoin and the whole crypto industry and blockchain really evolves. I mean this could really head all the way to the multiverse here. So it’s really exciting stuff.
What Chris is built and what we’re witnessing right now especially even like right now Facebook is hiring blockchain engineers like crazy and these companies and LinkedIn as well. So they see the value and they see what’s going on and they’re trying to not get left behind. So a company like SoMee that’s new it’s innovative we’re starting from the ground up. It gives people hope. There are networks out there they are for the actual user and we’re not just here to take all your data and make money off of it; you’re actually the one that’s going to be benefiting overall from this.
Ken Bosack: Yeah, I just saw a comment in the chat and then it would be a really interesting concept what about integrating a decentralized exchange into the platform.
Christopher J Kramer: Actually, that’s kind of cool that you brought that up because we actually built I was kind of a secret project that we were kind of keeping our community in the dark. Everyone was asking what is the secret project and I guess we’ll just use this sense since you’re one of the big influencers and one of the first to feature us we’ll do the big reveal that’s the feature that we built. We built the decentralized exchange and we’ve already completed it. Actually, we built it using the OX protocol. So. Yeah, it’s all a theorem E.R.S. 20 compliant and we have that ready. We’re just like really just basically waiting for legal to clear some things and make sure that everything’s buttoned up before we do any integration and release it. But yeah we built a decentralized exchange and have that ready to go.
Ken Bosack: Well, congrats on that man and shout out to the team. I mean, and using Zero X is awesome. Coinbase just announced their new platform for earning cryptocurrencies by learning about cryptocurrencies and their first coin that they have started to give away as an educational incentive with Zero x considering they use Euro X or their coin Bass Pro trading exchange. It’s kind of self-fulfilling prophecy over there but I really like Zero X and I think that it was a great move utilizing that blockchain for your decentralized exchange.
Christopher J Kramer: Absolutely yeah. Thank you. Yeah, we’re very fortunate that we chose that protocol and obviously Zero x doing big things. They’re always improving everything so we’re super excited to be once we come on board. We haven’t even actually let them know yet that we’re gonna be a relay or but once everything’s buttoned up and ready to go we’re going to go ahead and become a relay or on their network or launch the decentralized exchange and then we’ll have an integration with this with SoMee as well.
Ken Bosack: So what are your thoughts guys on that? Earning instead of purchasing because I’ve been saying it all year and your platform seems to be one of the best places to go ahead and do that when people like oh how can I get Bitcoin or how can I get this. I’m like well you don’t have to buy it you can go ahead and earn it like you’re posting things on Facebook or Instagram or you write articles on Medium and it gets so many likes on Medium but you’re not getting anything for it. You can go to SoMee social or you can go to Steam It or whatever but like these things exist where I went to really rasterized for earn. Yeah exactly pre-search. Searching like you already do. Do you see this as a big model for people to start building their Blockfolio rather than buying it? They’ll be participating in earning it?
James Pelz: Blockfolio Keyword.
Christopher J Kramer: Yeah. Blockfolio actually we just announced a partnership with Blockfolio and we were listed on their signals black oil signal so shout out to them as well. Great app that they’ve built over there. So we definitely are in agreement like this is like the future where all of the people who are participating on this network we’re going to do things to make it as valuable as possible for their time. So streamlining their time to publish to multiple networks including centralized and decentralized and then earning multiple rewards for the content that they’re contributing. So by doing that people are going to want to want to participate here because it’s going to maximize the matter of their earnings and their time efficiency. And that’s what it’s all about. It’s about bringing the most value and then giving them the choices that are important like their private data so that they can have a choice of when how and if their private data is used. And that’s the important part.
James Pelz: Yeah I think to add on top of that, the main thing that most people I personally believe right now like to get into a crypto game they may be a little bit intimidated because they’re like maybe I don’t have the extra cash flow I don’t have X amount of dollars to go buy some bitcoin or whatnot. There are some barriers to entry. They don’t feel comfortable exchanging crypto in their wallet and they may be just uneducated. So shout out to Coinbase for doing that. No educational thing. But that’s the I think the biggest part is getting people to get rewarded for their time in doing tasks like just a Google search like pre-search is awesome.
And AK Actually one of our admins in our community said to say hi to you can AK from free search. Yeah. All right. So you wanted to give a shout out so he’s definitely excited about what’s happening. But like I think that’s really the big way for like the average person to get into this space is by doing that with stuff like SoMee where you can actually earn cryptocurrency rewards by just simply spending some time doing things like posting searching all this stuff already doing online already. And then you can go and convert that and to change it to whatever token coin you want in your portfolio and really make it fun in the whole game of field version of things.
Like it’s all about making some money that yeah we’re putting valuable time into the digital the digital world and especially social media like it’s pretty insane how much time that we’ve been putting into this. And we’ve not gotten anything out of it. Unless you’re monetizing it through ads on YouTube and whatnot. But now we’re at that point where this technology is truly letting the masses and everybody be able to use something like this. So we’re really at the beginning of a huge revolution here. And I just get really excited when I think of the bigger picture because then the average person in the crypto market we’re always talking about mass adoption. The average person they’re barrier entry into something like this is going to be streamlined when you can just say it’s as simple as posting a photo or video online and you get rewarded for it like. Simple as that.
Christopher J Kramer: Yeah. Keep it simple as a strategy. One thing we haven’t talked about Ken is your chat up there and I sense you I went ahead and sent you a message so you can see a little a little one up there for the chat in the upper bar. Yeah but it’s cool because the encryption encrypted chat is important and we want to make that fun. And also we’re going to do some cool things with the chat and allow people to send each other crypto through the chat and there’s going to be some other cool integrations.
But right now we have like some cool stuff. You can also send a message. Right now we call it a time bomb. And actually the there’s a little clock by the send button and so you can actually type a message if you want to send it to somebody and then set it to self-destruct after a certain amount of time. So just highlighted some of the latest features that. You would kind of see on some other platforms. We try to be thoughtful about that and at least integrate a nice a nice chat into the platform. And you’ve got gifs that you can send or you’re just going to make it better and better as we go.
Ken Bosack: Yeah, I’m checking it out. It would be cool if we’d be able to send crypto from here too. One of these options just plus sends some.
Christopher J Kramer: Yeah, I think just reducing the friction again, like sending somebody a tip like if you want to tip them in crypto or another thing that we may end up doing is making it so that if you set your chat up to where like if somebody wants to reach you, it’s like wall where like they can reach out to you but they are gonna pay your fee. So you can set a fee for people to contact you directly because not everybody wants to be just accessible and have everybody contact them.
So like we look at like for example like the LinkedIn model LinkedIn makes you basically paid to upgrade your account and then you get to chat with everybody so they kind of put up a wall around you unless you pay their fee to them and then you get to chat with everybody. Now what we’re doing is turning that on its head and saying we’re going to put up a wall that you get to put up if you want to. And if you put up the wall you can set a price so that people can reach you directly.
Ken Bosack: So how do we help? So how do we get people that are not in the crypto on a platform like this and incentivized by earning a crypto right? Because like the volatility kind of turns people off that aren’t already into this space it’s kind of like their first mental barrier to entry rate is getting over the volatility. I was just curious how to do what’s the advertiser marketing plan strategy here to get these newbies or no pointers or future Bitcoin near zero whatever the political term is now. You know interest in on rammed into this.
Christopher J Kramer: Well, I mean first of all like there are several points you know this is something that James and I you know we recently spent. James came out to where I’m at Oregon where we’re headquartered and we had like a weekend of planning and working and working the marketing plan and some great ideas came out of that weekend and what we came up with was just a strategy. It just depends on the features so when we’re talking to crypto centric people which this site obviously has a lot of crypto friendly crypto centric features integrations. So that community already understands it and they’re excited to check it out. So it’s about talking to people like yourself that are plugged into those communities that are influencers and who we’re going to talk about the project that’s going to bring a wave of people the projects themselves that want to get featured.
They’re naturally going to find this because they’re going to they want to go where the communities that are centric to what they’re doing are already populated. So that’s the first tier strategy. The second is basically creating those utilities that we’ve been talking about. So when people who are like looking for just social media tools where we can just market this as a social media tool you know they’re going to be intrigued because now they can publish to multiple platforms that they’re already on and streamline their efforts for free. But then I was there they’re watching their wallet and it’s racking up cryptocurrency for them.
So they’re like they’re already into crypto without even like having to buy anything. So that removes the friction for them and for that audience. So I think those that that’s kind of like a main two-tier strategy that we’re going about is just creating the value for the communities that are already interested in it and then getting that out to the influencers and believe me we have quite a few that are waiting to talk about the project just sitting back or waiting. We know James has also been attending quite a few conferences. You know we have ambassadors that are coming on board that actually have been what ambassador Rafa which he’s a superstar PHD these guys are near genius.
He would be just representative said beyond blocks in Thailand while James was at the coin telegraph block show in Singapore. So just getting a presence out at these events and getting connected to a lot of great projects. We’ve partnered with some great things so you know I’ll give a shout out to Uppsala and the Sentinel protocol because we’re going to integrate them and that’s like a threat assessment that will be integrated into our wallet which when people send to a wallet address it automatically pins it and compares it to a database of known threats. So if it comes back that it’s been used as a scam that way it’s an extra layer to protect people who are using our platform.
Ken Bosack: So if you are blacklisted by exchanges like you said for known to be scams. People can be warned before their funds are actually released.
Christopher J Kramer: That’s right. That’s right. So there’s multiple layers of things that we’re doing to just add the value to target as far as marketing goes to target the crypto centric and then the people who are actually are looking for utilities that that that can ease them into crypto and then just bring in as much value as we can as we go. So we’ve been working obviously you can see we are working really hard to say.
Ken Bosack: That’s really great. And I love it. I guess my only question actually about the platform itself would be when live stream.
Christopher J Kramer: Yeah. Right. So we’re obviously working as quickly as possible. When we had our initial ICO when we launched the ONG token, we were a smaller project and we did it very quickly before the regulatory stuff you know came about. And basically had had a small raise. So we didn’t it’s not like we’re a fully funded company. We’ve always kind of stayed small so that we could we could really execute and maintain control over what we’re doing with the company versus like founders who try to raise capital too early. It’s like three in five percent of the company and no control. So it was important for us early on that we actually execute on the vision of giving users the control and of their information and all the things that we want to execute on for our customer base. So that way. So that’s why we kind of chose that a little difficult path so to speak where we didn’t have as much capital. So when we did our ICO we had maybe about a million dollars and we built this platform out immediately on an ultra-scalable platform blockchain integration. So as we as we go I know that we’re already you know there’s a lot of people kind of reaching out now they see what we’ve done. And we I think we feel like we have a first mover advantage. So I know that we’ll probably have like a series a coming up pretty soon and that’s going to put more fuel in our tank to expand our efforts and expand our teams.
Right now we have two development teams but we want to expand and then obviously bring things like the live stream and other valuable features for the community. So that’s in the near future. That’s what’s coming very quickly because we already have people knock on our doors and say this is cool. How can we get involved? And we just want to make sure that from a regulatory standpoint that we do all of our filings and do everything that we need to do first to get ready for that but that’s what’s around the corner.
And then we’re going to expand from there so we got to see a different phases you know to get this MVP out get people than all the influencers and get everybody kind of talking about the project and using it and take any feedback squash any bugs we have the IOS out that’s available that just got published and the Android app and we’re continuing to have a team work on that and improve the features there so now like all of a sudden the wallet is available inside of the app. I think it’s a little bit better on Android right now so that IOS version is they’re working on it but they’re rapidly working on it. The teams are working on all these things concurrently to get features live and available. So once we go through our Series A little more fuel in our tank then we can really just blast off and then bring all the few more resources and that will enable us to accomplish things faster and get more features like the live stream.
Ken Bosack: Wow man, I didn’t realize how much I didn’t know because of my traveling I’ve heard of the platform but I didn’t know you had an application so I just download it while you were talking about it and now I’m going to I’m using it right now. I mean it is awesome that you have an app and that you know you said well it’s accessible and all these I could see the potential I really do and you know that the incentive is there I think for the average person already and I think it’s reflected through the things as far as the Twitter tip bots go and those you know Facebook groups being shut down. I know Omar bam had a bitcoin group on Facebook with about two hundred thousand people in it and it was deleted and I think about one hundred admins that helped to monitor the integrity of that group were banned actually from Facebook. So they lost their profiles they lost their group they were censored and I’m just curious what’s to prevent censorship on this platform. Is there is censorship resistance or is there a way to flag and monitor content what’s the governance like when posting content on for a content creator?
Christopher J Kramer: Well, that’s the thing is that we give people the choice to publish on the blockchain or not through our platform. So once it’s on the blockchain and of course, it’s immutable. So that’s the first phase. But you know we are committed. And that’s again that’s why we took the road less traveled in terms of our funding strategy early on so that we could actually maintain control and execute on the overall vision because we love Omar by the way, watch his channel all the time.
James Pelz: Yeah, shout out to Oman man. That guy has great content.
Christopher J Kramer: He is. Yeah. And the thing is like this is what we’re building this for as people like that because we actually had our page shut down early on we had like maybe a hundred and fifty thousand people at that. There was an hour old ONG social page But for some reason Facebook shut that down. We still have the one name Global which has I think a couple hundred thousand but ours. What we did we launch a social application and we started building that ONG social that got that got flagged and shut down. We didn’t understand why at the time but we’ve had. So it’s very personal to us of what’s been happening. So as we continue to build this out and we continue to integrate into governance models like for example we just actually just spoke to Go Chain which has a very strong governance model.
So like we’re looking at like are we look at our application is like a kind of like a hybrid and it’s connecting to multiple chains you know to Steam It and Go Chain is a theorem enabled. So there are different things that we’re looking at to just bring that value and to bring like Go Chain is doing like proof of reputation selected each node has a reputation of their governance system. So we’re kind of looking at these different aspects of it. But the bottom line is that. We don’t want to be the ones that are shutting people down or you know unless it’s like blatant something like we have the ability in our main channel if somebody is posting porn right. It’s just like this just like everybody knows. Like you don’t post porn in the main channel like if you want to go post porn on Pornhub or you want to go to these other platforms that are focused towards.
Ken Bosack: Well, even Steam It has the not safe for work section.
Christopher J Kramer: Yeah not safe for work. So like if you want to go to that section, then that’s your prerogative. But anything that violates like the common community standards but people like Omar who are just doing their thing talking about crypto and getting great information out there like why would Facebook shut them down. Like why would these platforms or even like Alex Jones for example on in love or hate the guy it doesn’t matter to me it’s just that he got shut down three or four main platforms on the same day and they coordinated that between themselves and all at the same time? And there was no due process. So the thing is that there’s a problem with that. That’s disturbing.
Ken Bosack: Yet read then they did it to the cannabis industry as well as all the cannabis content creators on YouTube were basically snuffed out of existence. A lot of podcasters that smoke weed and talk about TV shows and stuff man. They would just delete it. And I’ve seen a lot of product review videos on YouTube or content creators that used to review percolator is in DAB rigs and other kinds of cannabis accessories. They got deleted they were censored just because then mainstream agenda didn’t want to support that.
Christopher J Kramer: Exactly. And that’s wrong. It’s the thing is that we’re getting into that time where these things are happening and it really does go against the constitution. I got to say so like you need to respect that freedom of speech and the due process and the ability to keep your rights and social media that the tech giants and everything that’s been happening has kind of created these situations. And you know what we want to do is take a different approach and take an approach where we’re not the ones you know who are creating tricky algorithms to shadow banned people.
We don’t want to be the ones that are you know putting bias into a platform. We’re building technology to empower people and empower using technology and empower the companies that are using it. And then we want to just create the power of choice in every situation. So like if you’re a node and you don’t want to be connected to certain other nodes you have the choice to disconnect and then you’re not going to see those feeds. And so as we go as we build this out you know I’m not saying that we have the solution to these major issues right here right now but we have a start and we have a vision and we’re going to execute on it.
Ken Bosack: No, I’m excited to see as your execution and where it’s taken, you guys. James, I guess you kind of has to wrap things up for a little over an hour here. I didn’t even realize as you know. Time flies when you’re having fun. I was just curious like what are you most looking forward to when it comes to the platform. Because I see. Like I said I see so much potential. What’s kind of like your favorite kind of out there perspective of the platform? Like what are you most excited about in its future.
James Pelz: Man for me like. Because I’ve. I’ve got to be a part of the obvious we’re in beta stage and we’re getting to our MVP like obviously when the app is like when we get to more funding and we have more resources. So like just the growth of the company in itself. And you know all of the features and things we wanted to implement into the future like seeing all that come together. I think that the whole process is going to be just really exciting.
And also to I could just love. Going out in and like in real life conferences and shows we’re going to be doing like the college roadshows in implementing until like music festivals and stuff like that. So it’s integrating into the culture I think it is something that I get excited about because I’m a big. I love music. I love events. I love going out and just connecting with people in real life. And that’s kind of where it all starts. You connect with someone on a real level. And that’s like. You find him on social you know on social media and then you just kind of build the relationship from there.
Ken Bosack: I love that man. I think you’re right. That takes a perfect Trojan horse to get them into crypto. From a platform like this where they can say hey what are you making from your Facebook like nothing, you’re taking from you. You could post here as well and it would just go to your Facebook you know kind of use this as your first as your front ground and you can earn in their earning crypto which they didn’t care about but they’re just happy they’re learning something net starts from the community or social aspect.
You know it’s not necessarily Hey man you want to get a Lambo when Moon you know get on this platform post nudes. You know it’s like it’s not like that. You’re right! It is going to these you know community events and it’s no more than when meaning when Lambo is a social platform and it’s a way to earn and contribute. But I think for me personally the thing I’m most excited about for SoMee.social is the civic integration men logging in with my civic app. When I saw that I was on the edge of my seat and I was I love civic and I think this would be a great way to log in to a social platform by obtaining my data not giving up any of my personal stuff and I don’t know. It’s just so much I don’t know just what we work out or so.
Christopher J Kramer: Yeah no we integrated civic early on and. We actually have the approved app and the keys so you got to get those over the desk. Let’s see that test mode message there at the top. So it’s actually ready to go. I just need to have the def swap are our life keys and we’ll be ready to go that integration is done and we’re really honored to have a partnership and an integration with civic. So super cool. Yeah, I’m glad you noticed that brought that up.
Ken Bosack: So yeah we’ll be able to create an account by opening their civic App Scanning that code and they’re logged into SoMee.social just by doing that.
Christopher J Kramer: Absolutely. Yeah!
Ken Bosack: And when can this happen?
Christopher J Kramer: Literally I just I saw that the test vote was there so you know I just need to get the like I said get the life keys that we have for our approved account. And once that happens that’ll probably. Happen next week and then people will be able to use their civic to get right in.
Ken Bosack: I’ll be making a tutorial on that guys. Stay tune. Thank you both so much for coming on the podcast and talking about you know SoMee and the future of social media and monetizing and gamification of advertising on social platforms. I really don’t think people have that third eye yet for that. And I spoke in Chicago at loyalty live thanks to Tracy from untraceable and I spoke to McDonald’s, American Airlines, and Walmart all these companies Starbucks everybody was there talking about their future of loyalty and rewards programs.
And I’m telling you right now guys it’s tokenization. They’re really going the route of tokenizing their loyalty points and rewards plans and the advertising aspect. It just ties right into these companies M.O. right now. So I think that platforms like this have a lot of room to grow. And I think that first mover advantage you know the people that had Twitter first have a big following and they can capitalize off of that by monetizing it. So I could see a great use case for people to head on over this SoMee.social set up your profile today and capitalize on first mover advantage because this is the future for cryptocurrency social media advertising and engaging. Anything that the audience should know Chris, James, before we wrap things up?
James Pelz: Hey man. Hey, I just want to go ahead before I forget. I got here a treasure of a hardware wallet that I would like to give as a Christmas present so let’s hook somebody up with one of these Ken.
Ken Bosack: There’s is a link actually in the description box below James. There is a link in the description box below if the listeners click that link, they have a chance to win that treasure wallet that SoMee is giving away on Christmas morning yeah.
James Pelz: Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays my friends. We wanted to go ahead and get this out to you guys. We appreciate you now you can for hosting us here on your on your podcast. And if you’re in the Vegas market tonight we have the Las Vegas Bitcoin meetup. It’s at the nerd which is downtown Fremont hosted by 3BX Touch Token platform and Block 16. They’re all local Vegas companies doing some big things. So if you are in Vegas and you want to come and hang out.
Ken Bosack: Shout out to Erin Nakamoto.
James Pelz: Erin Nakamoto.
Ken Bosack: I love Erin Nakamoto. Erin Nakamoto when first met her at the HILT Bitcoin ATM. meetup I saw so much potential and I’m so happy that she is just thriving right now. She’s fair most is rushing it when other people are running she’s running towards these projects to help them grow. So shout out to Erin I’ll actually be in Vegas for Tony V’s conference untraceable or no on what is uncommon scalable. That one I’ll be in Vegas our unconscious scalable and then I’ll be staying a little longer and I’ll be attending the adult entertainment awards the A.V. yes. Yep, I’ll be there. Shout out to my workers. See in Vegas. And yeah. Chris Where can people go to find more information about SoMee.social.
Christopher J Kramer: Yeah. Just you know we have an informational site. ongcoin.com. Ongpoint.com and that has kind of featured team and some information about the project. Some good info. Pretty soon it’ll be kind of all consolidated under to SoMee. So we’ll have some kind of consolidate those. But you know don’t also just you know SoMee.social. Check it out. You know send us a friend request. Let’s all connect. And you know to check out the platform. We appreciate any feedback. And we’re good we are really listening to everybody and trying to react as quickly as possible for feature requests and getting things integrated or squashing bugs. So appreciate the community and Ken thank you so much for having me on, James and I really appreciate the time and being on the podcast.
Ken Bosack: Hey man. Likewise guys hey if you’re listening don’t forget the links are in the description box below so you can go ahead and check out the links in the description box you can go right on over the platform and sign up and then you can go ahead and come back check out the link. You can win a treasure. So click that link enters your chance to win the treasure. Don’t forget the hit the thumbs up subscribe and flick the alert bell so you get notifications every time I go live. I do a podcast every day for one hour a day with the basically streaming live strangers. It’s your opportunity to come on the podcast. Head over to Twitter and click the link to get your chance to come on the show. Thank you, everybody, and have a day.
Christopher J Kramer: Hey, happy HODL Days everybody.
Ken Bosack, Christopher Kramer & James Pelz: Laughter…
[Outro]
