How important are online reviews? In today’s digital economy, search engine results could make or break businesses. Did you know that 10 percent of how Google and other search engines decide to rank search results depending on online reviews? As much as 90 percent of customers only take any action after reading a positive review according to Together Digital. Reviews then are plenty important but so are accurate and reliable reviews. Even Internet giants like Amazon aren’t immune to the issues of fake reviews. With Forbes recently reporting about a review debacle that hit the website, “Until last October, Amazon permitted so-called "incentivized reviews," whereby reviewers were given free or discounted products in return for reviews, so long as the reviewer made the arrangement clear. However, after incentivized reviews started flooding the site, many clearly fraudulent, Amazon banned them for the vast majority of products.”

Revain, a project that we reported about earlier have been busy building a platform that tackles the issues surrounding ICO reviews heads on. The latest version to be released is v0.3, which adds more functionality and brings to light a new interface enhanced by data widgets for the day’s price and volume, weekly price and volume as well as the ICO price. More development is on its way as backend is getting bolstered by the development team. The interface is more revealing as token dynamics graph is now way more detailed than before. The review section too gets a facelift and is now clearer and more user-friendly.

ICO space needs reliability

Initial Coin Offerings are gaining ground as they have raised nearly $1.2 bln as of August 2017. Quality investments are important to investors but also to issuers of ICOs as they want to showcase their project based on merits. Reviews thus take center stage for developers and analysts as well which can be crucial to the development of a reliable ICO market in the future. Revain as a feedback platform ensures that the reviews are reliable, immutable and reflect genuine feedback from users. The platform acts as an aggregator on token dynamics as well as provides information on major milestones of the relevant projects. Over the long-term Revain can help build company and market value for this nascent investment ecosystem that has sprung up around ICOs. In short, reliability is a key that Revain can provide while giving investors the crucial insights they need to make decisions, projects a chance to prove that they are investment worthy, analysts a chance to showcase their skills and disseminate information and the ecosystem as a whole a chance to prosper.

Immutability as a force

Revain utilizes Blockchain technology for its ICO reviews. Particularly the technology that they have chosen is the Ethereum Blockchain that allows them to provide a transparent review platform with strengths of immutability and incorruptibility. Immutability means that these reviews cannot be manipulated, forged or faked with ease. However, it does not mean that these reviews can’t be updated. In fact, the Revain review process is dynamic and user-friendly. A Revain spokesperson explains how a review can be updated,”When a review is written and finished, it goes to Blockchain where it is stored as a sequence of digits. When users want to amend existing reviews, they may do so. All the changes will be displayed and other users will be able to see them. Thus, the initial review will be shown on the platform with amendments.”

Artificial Intelligence to fight the bots

Immutability maybe a critical factor in ensuring the integrity of reviews but it is not the only factor that makes these reviews reliable. Filtration is the key to quality reviews. Revain is using artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure good quality reviews along with a secondary set of manual reviews. No third parties are involved. Automatic moderation is facilitated by IBM Watson platform which specifically looks at the tone of the reviews and filters them based on certain parameters such as emotion, language style and social tendencies.

Other parameters that help decide on reviews include posting frequency as well as automatic and manual filtration results for previews reviews, review characteristic etc. A combination of these factors ensures high-quality reviews and freedom from bot posted reviews.

Transforming reviews of tomorrow today

Information is the key to decision making, whether it is investing in ICOs or making a purchase. Revain after the release of v0.2 in December 2017 is moving ahead on enhancing their platform. In 2018, they have set a goal to add more ICO projects to the platform. The recently released v0.3 brings to light a enhancements in the overall design as well as the interface with the addition of new data widgets, graphs and animations, price dynamics and percentage in token price increases. The latest version can be downloaded by clicking here. More ICO projects can help take the testing phase to the logical next step of generating reviews. They have set themselves the target of linking Blockchain to the review platform by Q1, 2018. A partnership is also in the works with NEM so that to allow feedback on startups that are based on that particular platform. Expanding their geographic reach, Revain has also reached a strategic partnership with Dtec.ae about the integration of Revain with startups in Dubai as well.

The developments in the Revain project would be crucial for forging a reliable ICO market but it will also be a chance for a host of other Internet-based systems and services to usher in an era of trustworthiness.