Hello, my friends!
Our team has done a great job over the past 2 months, and now we are ready to inform you about our future plans on development:
Before we elaborate on all the news, we would like to express our sincere gratitude to all people who supported us all this time. We want to thank all those who were taking part in the pre-ICO, reporting bugs, offering ideas, helping us as volunteers or simply posting kind comments.
You gave us energy to go so far from a small proud start-up to a serious project based on innovative technologies and designed to change the travel industry.
Right after we have announced Mapala pre-ICO, we had to design the economic model of the future project and choose the proper technologies to implement our ideas. Investors expect to get profit from their investments, and it means that we needed to give our tokens real value and potential so they can grow in the market.
This task turned out to be more complicated than it seemed at first glance.
Mapala is a community in the first place. And a community does not get on well with commerce. Trying out bunch of commercial ideas good enough for other projects, we realized that they completely destroy the essence of the project. Talking to potential investors, we realized that we have a cool idea that inspires and unites people, but the project is not attractive in terms of investment. Despite this, we were not going to give up the idea, because everything was based on it.
Secondly, it is necessary to ensure the demand for the token. The higher demand, the higher price - everyone is happy. To influence the demand, it is necessary to create as many opportunities as possible for using tokens. In other words, it is necessary to create around the community an entire economy, with a lot of own services, such as p2p-trading platforms and so on. We were afraid that all this would make the project huge and slow. However, as practice shows, all successful projects try to focus to the maximum solving one key problem of the users.
We tried many times to put everything together in such a way so we could provide the project with brilliant prospects and investment attractiveness, and, at the same time, preserve its original essence. Working on this task, we immersed ourselves in the market research, and having studied hundreds of analytical reports and communicated with dozens of experts, we formed our own vision of the tourism market and the block technologies application to solve the problems that exist in it.
And there is plenty of problems. Travel planning, which is meant to be an exciting activity, gives many people stress. According to the survey, 69% of tourists are worried that they will not be able to choose the best offer, or they will not get it at the best price. This indicates the weak development of modern tourist services. At the same time, we can see the serious monopoly on the market, and the large players are interested in maintaining the status quo. For example, 95% of the US online tourism market is divided between just two giant companies: Expedia and Priceline, which include such services as Trivago, Travelocity, Hotwire, Egencia, CarRentals.com, Kayak, Booking.com, Agoda, Rentalcars.com.
Services that use artificial intelligence, help you navigate through the variety of proposals and advise the best solutions based on your tasks and personal preferences can make a difference in the situation.
The modern services are based on data, for them it is like fuel for cars. Data is oil of the 21st century, but in most of the cases it is hidden inside corporate systems and cannot be used by other companies to create innovative services.
Imagine that there is a global database that contains the most complete and objective information about providers and consumers of services, and thousands of talented developers from all over the world have access to it. Development teams use large data to create algorithms that know more about our preferences than we do ourselves. This is what we call TravelChain, and Mapala will become one of the applications that work with this platform. To learn more, read the draft of our White Paper.
Mapala will continue using Golos and Steem blockchains. They proved themselves to be excellent tools to create, store, evaluate and reward posts. TravelChain will allow using the created content by all participants of the tourist market, and that will increase its value. And the users will receive an additional reward in TravelToken.
We have managed to attract $480,000 investments for the TravelChain concept, this exceeds the goals we have set and allows us to plan a budget for conducting a good marketing campaign for the forthcoming ICO.
At the same time, we fulfill all obligations to the pre-ICO investors. We are not going to stop the pre-ICO right now and let everyone take part in it during this week. The deadline for receiving transfers is October 20, 2017 at 23 hours 59 minutes Moscow time. This week, as before, 810,000 MPL tokens will be distributed, later they will be converted into TravelTokens.
Final data on the tokens distribution in the pre-ICO phase will be posted after October 20.
Mapala is people first of all. Having provided the necessary motivation, you can quickly collect a million army of "freelancers" under our standards. Millions of eyes that can see and capture things that satellite cameras cannot. Local people know the places where they grew up and live better. Game nature of the process will help make Mapala a fascinating place where you want to come back every day. Mapala is the first application that will work on TravelChain and will become a source of data both on the planet and on the history of interactions between people, it will become the foundation of the digital reputation in the TravelChain ecosystem.
We are going to change the world. Are you with us? ;)
