Culture Whiz master plan - rough draft

Culture Whiz aims to be at the forefront of several exciting emerging trends: sustainability, blockchain, artificial intelligence, virtual assistants and WORLDWIDE travel. We plan to be the go-to place for everything travel. For revenue, we have targeted the global tours and activities segments within the travel industry, with annual estimated between $27 and $33 billion in the U.S. alone, with revenues closer to $39 billion in Europe. Culture is a blanket term which includes the ideas, traditions, and behaviors of any group of people – company, society, region, nation, continent. In that sense, everything humans do is cultural in one way or another. Our goal is to help transform words into actions, so that users don’t have to think about what button to push or exactly how to say what they need a device to do. We believe that within five years, everyone will have a virtual assistant (such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google Assistant, Microsoft's Cortana, etc) to which they delegate numerous menial tasks. It will do everything for you – book your flight, make your hotel reservation, remind you to pick up your child from soccer, and order your next set of perfectly fitted jeans.

That data is out there: your calendar, your favorite shopping sites, airline schedules, hotel sites, your company intranet—the events, places and products that are important you—but the dots remain unconnected because these data sources are ill-structured. They don't talk to each other and there is no integration platform that could pull them together to make decisions based on the information you’ve provided. Culture Whiz is the first and only platform that allows virtual assistants to cooperate and coordinate at scale. This removes one of the major limiting factors to virtual assistant growth today — the lack of interoperability — which severely restricts the ability to leverage the strengths and capabilities of individual virtual assistants.

What problem are you helping to solve?

Think about the Internet In 1996 before Google existed — That's where we are in mobile now. Today’s Web information is siloed by applications, programs and sites made to automate and monetize specific tasks. Information is hard to gather, so now the race is on to create mobile software agents (virtual assistants) that can perform tasks or services for an individual based on user input, location awareness, and the ability to access information from a variety of online sources. The value and power of virtual assistants is growing dramatically every year, and will soon demand a radical transformation of the current Web. For e.g. "what museums are open around here tomorrow?" That question requires a level of machine intelligence that knows what a museum is, you're location, the museum hours, and what day of the week it is right now. Search engines aren’t good at that, because they’re too messy. Questions in a search engine have many answers, with varying degrees of applicability and “rightness.” That’s not computable, not clean enough to program or feed into a system. In just a few shorts years, what our current “idea” of the Web will be replaced by Concept Repositories that enable new applications to effectively manage our lives and businesses.

What's your Solution?

Culture Whiz meets an acute and accelerating market need for structured, machine-readable information. The next generation Web, commonly referred to as the Concept Web or Web 3.0,will be designed around concepts published as data in Concept Repositories that can be read and processed by devices, enabling these machines to find, combine, and act on information on the Web from multiple sources. Culture Whiz is the first and only worldwide travel platform designed for this use. On the surface, we offer a single click or “one-stop-shop” alternative to using multiple websites to gather information. On the back-end, we create vast storehouses of structured, machine-readable information for virtual assistants. Fed by information contributed by its users, the Culture Whiz repository comes to represent all aspects of the community and the relationships among them. Locals can contribute their knowledge and make a profit whenever someone utilizes it. The platform is designed to provide users with professional guides to international destinations as well as personal experiences written by users who have visited, worked, lived, or studied there. Users in search of unique travel experiences can connect with verified locals according to their personality, experience, and credibility. Travelers can enjoy the freedom to tailor experience with a local ahead of time and pay for the number of hours they agree to spend together. Locals are free to decide on their hourly rate, schedules, and duration of tours by accepting only the offers that are the best fit for them.

What is the social impact of your solution and how can it be measured?

We need meaningful media that will help people grow, come together, and confront the world’s difficult problems with love rather than hate. We employ a global network of local content creators covering over 30 locations on seven continents. In Ukraine we have facilitated over 200 local experiences generating over $15,000 for local communities. In the United States, we have been helping 25 students support themselves with writing assignments, thus encouraging optimism and teaching students to learn more effectively. A key goal of Culture Whiz is to ensure the network is designed to incentivize and reward beneficial players.

Artificial Intelligence is used to powerfully analyze content and to automate certain processes related to data categorization and keyword-association (tagging). Information is then represented as RDF and expressed as APIs for machine processing and integrating into the $100 billion tours and activities segment. With the above set of technologies, we would have a medium within which all sorts of new social, economic and cultural network would form. These would not lead to complete economic or social equality, and would not eradicate all the problems of the world. But they would go a long way toward enabling everyone on the planet to participate fully in the ongoing techno-social revolution.

Who are you main Competitors and how is your solution better?

TripAdvisor is one of the largest travel websites, hosting nearly 280 million unique monthly visitors. However, TripAdvisor is ill-structured for AI-powered assistants. TripAdvisor acquired Viator for approximately $200M to build it's tours and activities offerings, but they have done nothing to improve usability with AI. In regards to smaller organizations trying to capture the TOURS & ACTIVITIES market with niche sites or apps, they do not have sustainable business models. Since they have no content or serious technology, they have no way of expanding other than spending capital on ads. It’s important to note that this exacerbates global inequality by concentrating advertising dollars in huge corporations like Google or Facebook. Even with massive resources, these startups still face huge challenges in gaining scale, and many – if history is a guide – may fall by the wayside. Getting people to download an app is increasingly difficult and expensive. It’s becoming apparent that the golden age of apps is coming to a close.

Culture Whiz is on a whole new level. Our platform will comprise the backbone of the next generation Web and bypass current players. For the old players to stay relevant, a lot of proprietary systems need access to each other’s APIs and some new coherence language, and history has shown large technology companies tend to protect their own patch. Many websites could come to feel as outdated as GeoCities pages — and some companies might ditch them entirely.

Plz explain your Business model - how is the social impact connected to your sources of revenue?

We seek to build a scalable and profitable platform, while promoting diverse and alternative voices and sustainable development. We produce culturally relevant content that connects brands to bigger stories and trends. People are inclined to make decisions based on how readily available information is to them. For revenue, we offer brands display advertisements, coupon schemes, ebooks, e-blasts and curated, high-quality experiences across the globe. Led by an editorial/media-driven customer acquisition strategy, we take a 10% commission on each experience transaction and the average fee for two persons is $40. Monthly revenue for our experience section is over $2000/month. Our total monthly revenue tops out at over $5,000/month with $10 million dollar revenue projected by 2025.

Culture Whiz uses Syneural's Semantic Repository technology and Artificial Intelligence to captures users’ characteristics, needs, and values to drive the next level of digital personalization. We allow the encoding of user profiles which can be matched with incoming content streams in real-time. A given stream may have structure (“eco-friendly homes for sale in Brooklyn”) or no structure. Another stream may have real-time processing rules that may filter and route information from that stream to many tributary streams defined in even more granular ways for personalization. Research shows that 78% of buyers are more likely to purchase again if a retailer provides them with targeted and personalized offers.

With nearly every industry racing to develop and deploy AI-powered technologies, the biggest growth is yet to come. According to Transparency Market Research, the global artificial intelligence market is projected to grow from $233.8 billion in 2017 to $3.1 trillion in 2025.

Traction

Culture Whiz is the #1 Cultural travel site in the world with over 50,000 monthly visitors. Membership numbers are up 30% this year. In the past 12 months, our monthly site visitors have increased 25%. Once we have a critical mass of agents in our network, it will become the go-to place for culture and travel, achieving a rapidly accelerating technological and market advantage. Any competing platform will be incapable of emulating this degree of emergent, cooperative intelligence, unless they achieve a comparable scale and complexity of agents and technology which will be hard for anyone else to achieve.

Briefly outline the next steps in your roadmap

We have three long term goals for Culture whiz. The first goal is to be the hub of ideas, traditions, and behaviors of any group of people – company, society, region, nation, continent. The second goal is to accelerate the development of an intelligent Web computable by machines. The third goal is infrastructure development and tool prototyping particularly of tools pertinent to language processing, context analytics, image processing, tagging, and blockchain Integration.

Blockchain technology is a means of transferring money over the internet without an intermediary such as a bank or payment processor. It uses a distributed ledger that is updated by consensus among the community, rather than held privately. Communication between Agents will happen in an off-chain peer-to-peer manner, and microtransactions between Agents will often benefit from off-chain bidirectional channels as well. The infrastructure development will focus largely on scalability in various regards (e.g. massive distribution of the blockchain mechanisms and core AI algorithms, extension to internet-of-things). The path to the implementation of components on this kind of scale is not straight. Rather, the path will be winding and scenic with multiple stepping stones along the way.

What are the key challenges facing your business

Building rich content that enable everyone in the world to have the opportunity to really play the modern global economic-social game. Google and other search engines cause the creation of massive, low-quality content and generate literally thousands of search results, causing users to spend countless hours clicking and sifting. Consequently, navigation, discovery, and search are extremely cumbersome. We'll have to work extra hard to reach the top of search.

Why should we fund your business

In order to solve some of the world’s toughest challenges, social impact organizations have to push the envelope. Through progressive technologies Culture whiz empowers local communities and help individuals reach their full potential, leading to a more tolerant, peaceful and environmentally sustainable world. Helping humanity evolve into a more advanced, intelligent, beneficial, and connected mode of being. It is critical that machines gain a new level of understanding. Instead of statistically computing how well a search term matches a document, a machine must literally be able to understand. Therefore, a new type of Web built upon concept repositories is needed. This will allow a single, coherent visual framework/systematic picture in which users can focus on one or more concepts and immediately see a conceptual summary of their focus. Many major scientific discoveries and breakthroughs have involved recognizing the connections across domains or integrating insights from several sources. We know that by looking at multiple issues simultaneously, we can expand our knowledge and drastically change how we approach our common problems.