Continuing this process of ruminating about various blockchain projects, I have realized that in the most cases I try to assess the novelty and the key purpose of the project by looking at how it utilizes this blockchain tech, and it puts me at the wrong vantage point. Because often the project is not primarily characterized by the fact that it uses blockchain, although it's one of the technical components of the project. This way I focus on something non-essential, overlooking the main idea that might lie in a totally different field. It's just that the blockchain is a quite ubiquitous tech, that can be implemented anywhere just as well as a payment gateway is an inalienable part of any web project that includes sales, but I wouldn't start describing a web project by mentioning that it has a payment gateway. It would be weird.
So, keeping this analogy in mind, when I try to figure out what I need to write when I write about some new startup I look at it from three different angles.
First, what is the context of this project? What's the general area of its application, and what I know about this area and the problems it has? For example, it might be tourism, secure information exchange, financial instruments, money transfers, marketing, distributed computations, gaming, cloud storages, etc. The thing to look at is what problems this field has, that this new project is claiming to solve. Sometimes those problems might turn out to be completely made up, or the cause of the problem might be misinterpreted. Since blockchain ICOs also position themselves as some sort of revolutionary solutions to previously intractable issues, it's interesting to examine why those issues hadn't been solved before. I always have some intuitive feeling that such intractable problems have some fundamental nature and cannot be solved simply by a piece of new tech. ( After all, we don't even talk about some real technological revolution. The blockchain is just a specific architecture based on a fundamental and long ago established piece of technology, which is encryption. While blockchain itself is not a technological breakthrough. )
For example, a startup aiming to create a system, accumulating the information about tourists which then can be used to offer them customized travel packages and narrowly targeted ads. The assumption is that this is really a problem, that such system doesn't exist yet, or rather it's a business opportunity that nobody still has taken advantage of. This raises a question: Is it really a problem, and if it's a problem then a problem for whom. I keep in mind that all the possible applications of information harvesting and tracking of individuals had been explored possibly since the inception of the Internet. I also think how successfully Google manages to throw at me those targeted and relevant ads. I guess all the information that has been accumulated about me would be sufficient to put together a customized travel package as well.
So looking at it as a context for a new technical solution in tourism industry I realize that the current absence of such system isn't related to technical matters. You don't really need blockchain to track people on the Internet, to record any information about their movements, then to analyze and utilize it.
Then the problem this startup is trying to tackle is not technical; it's organizational. The first thing that comes to mind is a conflict of interests and competition. A person planning a travel visits many sites; booking.com to book a hotel, Skyscanner to buy flight tickets, something to look up the various remarkable places to visit as well as the listings of the cafes and restaurants. If those resources shared with each other the information they received during this process, they could create a comprehensible profile of the tourist in question, which could be used in the future to tailor the travel offers, perfectly fitting his preferences - a target that this new startup is aiming to achieve. For some reason, they don't do that.
Here I look again at the main project's objective. That is the customized travel packages. The answer to the question "why different portals related to travel don't share information with each other" is simple. They don't need to. The hotels don't care about the restaurants or the airlines and vice versa. Each segment gets along its own pretty well. The profits of the hotels don't depend on how well the restaurants in the area do. If there are connections that exist in this chain, they function on an individual level, not as a part of some global system. Considering that individual hotels compete with each other, it's a miracle (or rather a bitter necessity) that they agree to be compiled in one listing on booking.com.
The second vantage point from which I look at the situation, regarding the project, is what is the solution or an idea this project offers. I mentally switch off all the aspects concerning blockchain or any technological elements of the platform whatsoever. Then I try to see what this project is in terms of a bare concept. Also, I try to assess whether it is really something new. This bare concept, the fresh idea is a second key element of the article. The first element - we have the existing problem - the essence of it, and what causes it in reality (as opposed to what's written in the White Paper) The second element is a proposed solution as a concept stripped from technical details and blockchain.
So, returning to the example of the project that tries to profile tourists by tracking their actions on the Internet. This project sees the situation from the point of view of the travel agency, that might be interested in this integration of user's information from all the sources. Technically it can be beneficial for all. At the same time, it becomes clear that the real ambition of the startup is to produce a superglobal tour operator, that would become a single hub for everything people do online regarding tourism: booking hotels, buying tickets, looking for places to visit - everything. This is a super ambitious and unrealistic goal, but at least it's pretty clear what it is at this point.
So the problem is: The lack of an integrated system of tracking people's activities online related to their travel plans prevents the creation of their psychological profiles that could be used for marketing purposes.
The solution: A super behemoth of a tour operator that will replace booking.com Skyscanner and literally every site related to tourism and travels, integrating all of their functions in itself. Or, as an alternative, it'll somehow receive the flows of information about user's activities from all those sources, compiling them into the integrated user profiles.
The third angle from which I look at the situation is what blockchain, tokens, and cryptography have to do with all that.
In the example about this super online travel portal, I try to understand whether those technologies can bring the startup's proposition from the realm of science fiction and pipe dreams into reality. What's interesting hypothetically they can. Blockchain can play a role of an integrated database for the different internet services related to tourism. Although, they could use such an integrated database before, and they didn't because they never really needed to share information. (Plus there come into play a lot of complicated and subtle matters regarding user's privacy and so on)
So, maybe, the mission of the startup is to convince all those internet services related to tourism to create a unified informational space that would be instrumental for tracking and profiling users in order to more effectively bombard them with ads and offers. The blockchain, in this case, could act as an integrated database. The technology in this situation doesn't matter much; it could be any form of database.
So this is one example, which illustrates the scheme. The context - what seems to be the problem and why it hasn't been solved yet?
The solution - what is this idea the project proposes and why nobody has thought about it yet?
The solution in the context of blockchain - What blockchain has to do with the proposed idea, and if this idea isn't completely based on blockchain then why nobody has thought about it yet?