The community has been asking for a full transcript of our live AMA with Red Pulse CEO, Jonathan Ha, so here you go. We’ve included a table of questions below, so you can click to go directly to the questions that are most interesting to you.

Full AMA recording can be here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buCGyDoPGvs

Table of Questions

Q: When is staking set to be launched and how will it work? (00:05:00)

A: Sure. So staking, it’s a term actually that we heard from our community, but (audio cuts off for a few seconds)…and our consensus algorithm. In fact, it’s NEO’s consensus algorithm, is Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance. So there’s no staking that is then translating to consensus being attained, but why I think the community has called it staking and we sort of adopted it is because when people store their RPX tokens on our platform wallet, they’ll get rewarded on a periodic basis for doing so. It’s essentially a way to incentivize and encourage people to continue engaging with their platform.

So how will it work? Well, it will soon begin after the launch of our tokenized research platform. That’s slated to kick off at end of Q3. So around Q3, I look very much excited about that. And the way that it’ll work is, coinciding with the launch of that new tokenize research platform, is our inflation mechanism. The way that it works is we have our own token and because we control the supply of that token, we can then inject a small bit of inflation for the primary reason of continuing to incentivize that people and contribute content to our platform now as a reward for people that believe our platform and want to continue engaging with the platform. A portion of that inflation, besides going as incentive to those contributors, then goes as a reward for anybody that is going to “stake”, or hold their token on our platform.

Those tokens are still yours, we don’t take them. We’re just merely storing them on a wallet that we administer on our platform, much the same as you might do if you’re to hold your tokens on exchange. With the difference in on our case, if you’re holding the token on our platform you would then slowly be earning additional reward tokens for doing so.

Q: Why do we need staking on the platform? (00:07:14)

A: Sure, so something related to the first question on staking or on platform rewards. We don’t necessarily need staking on the platform, but we wanted there to be a way for us to reward and encourage people to use the platform. If you have the tokens that you’ve bought or acquired, then you can transfer them to our platform and use them on our platform to buy other types of services related to research, knowledge, information.

But again, you can also just park it there and in doing so you’re rewarded for doing that. The other reason for the inflation is it’s intended to incentivize the ongoing high-quality contribution of content and if we didn’t have that inflation mechanism, then we wouldn’t be able to have this perpetual source of incentives to encourage people to do so.

The other reason for the staking, or the on platform rewards, is because many people have asked, “Well, if you’re continuing to inflate your token supply, even if it’s just for a very small amount, doesn’t that impact the price of the token?”

Well, it might. In fact it is one factor that often does impact the price, but there’s a multitude of factors that impact the tokens price and that includes the adoption of the platform, creation of content on the platform, asking for bespoke research on the platform, continued creation of content as the user base scales. So there’s a number of factors that we think are actually stronger in its impact on the token price. The other reason we wanted to have on bottom rewards is to have an offsetting nature to that inflationary pressure.

So for people that continue to believe in Red Pulse and want to support us, and also want to use the platform (cuts off)… the rewards that your you’re getting.

Q: Why are the advisors from the ICO not listed on the website? Are they currently involved with the project? (00:09:24)

A: Absolutely. So, we redesigned our website. Okay, and we went from the coin.red-pulse.com web site, to the main www.redpulse.com. In doing so, we streamlined it and we decided to remove a lot of the coin and token sale related items, inclusive of the advisory team, but all of those advisors are still strong supporters and advisors to Red Pulse.

Due to community demand and interest, we listen to you, and we’ve put all of them back. If you go to our website redpulse.com, you can click on the team section. All those advisors are back there, you know just to demonstrate that they are still there and they are still supporting us.

Q: Why was the smart contract deleted from the GitHub? (00:10:23)

A: Very good question. So last month we discovered a storage injection issue that was present in all NEP-5 smart contracts, including RPX. We’ve spent a lot of time assessing the issue alongside OnChain, alongside NEO, and many other project teams, and deemed it to be of minor impact. The reason for that is because the real impact is just on the token supply function, where a malicious actor could try to change or manipulate the reported supply, but having no impact on the actual supply.

So the way that we wanted to address this is by basically creating a separate public API that you query that gives you the actual token supply, without having any sort of risk of it being changed, whether intentionally or unintentionally, by other actors and as a part of that we also decided to take down our smart contract for now. So as to not highlight and draw additional attention to that particular issue. Rest assured, we’ll have many more things to share on our GitHub in in a very short time. So I’ll keep you guys updated on that.

One of the things that we shared at the conclusion of that situation is that all RPX is safe, all wallets are safe, and transactions in the past, current, and in the future are safe. It was more of an it impact on the reported supply of RPX, but we’ve since provided an alternative solution.

Q: Do you plan to run some sort of RPX promotional campaign? (00:12:23)

A: Yeah, absolutely. So I think people have come to recognize that our style isn’t so much to focus, our DNA, is focused on professional services and we’ve been operating as a company for over three years now, having signed on top financial institutions; banks (cuts off)…using our content on a daily basis, it’s just not within our identity to do those kind of promotions. But, we do have several promotional campaigns that do fit within our personality and sort of how we go about conducting ourselves in our business, and that’s going to be kicking off in a couple of weeks time. So stay tuned, you know, it should be pretty exciting. And we’ll be sending that out to all of our social media channels

Q: What is the advantage of using RPX token over fiat on our platform? (00:13:30)

A: Yeah, great question. So, this is really the crux of the Red Pulse ecosystem. So why is it that we’re using tokens at all? Why not just use fiat? Why not just use US dollar or Hong Kong dollar? The driving reason for why we’re using a token is because we’re creating a opt-in ecosystem that is driven by an economic system run by RPX, by our token. And so, what does that mean exactly?

Okay, so let’s get into the specifics. Because we manage the supply, we manage the ecosystem…again it’s opt-in, so it’s for people that are willing to use the service and agree to the economic framework that we’ve devised. We’re able to manage that supply of token. And as I mentioned before, as part of the on platform rewards, aka “staking”, we can also inject a small amount of inflation on an ongoing basis. And that’s really important, because when we have this inflation engine we can then have a perpetual source of incentives. Now why do we need a perpetual source of incentives? It’s because with any startup, in fact, if you look at most of the platforms out there. In order to achieve success you need scale. And it’s absolutely true in Red Pulse’ case as well.

If you look in very simple terms who are our user base, you’ve got the research contributors on one side; these are industry experts, these are academics, these are practitioners, they could even students, grad students, so on and so forth. They are the people that have really insightful knowledge and insights that we would like to encourage to be shared on our platform.

Now on the other side, the other user base consists of financial institutions, corporates, so on and so forth, and these are clients that are looking for insights. They’re looking for research, looking for helpful analysis on a lot of these key topics that they’re keen on better understanding.

Now, you set the scene there. What we are as a business and as a platform is the middleman, we’re the intermediary. And in this case, we’re adding value by connecting these two parties, right. At the same time, how do we scale because if we are trying to create a community and ecosystem where these two user bases can interact, can engage, and also transact, knowledge for value, knowledge for essentially payment. We need to achieve scale, because the research contributors on this side, if they were to see our new platform Red Pulse and say…wow, this this looks pretty good. You’ve got a couple of banks signed up, but quite honestly, if we’re using US dollar and I know that I’m going to write some content and only get paid once Red Pulse gets paid…or once Red Pulse attracts enough financial institutions, for me to get paid.

This doesn’t sound too good just yet, because you haven’t scaled up. Why don’t you call me back the next time when you’ve got a couple thousand banks and so much interest that (cuts off)…if we were to use a conventional fiat system such as US dollar then they would look at our platform and say, this is an interesting idea. I would love to use this knowledge network on the cloud to access all these experts and practitioners. The thing is you guys just got started and you’ve got maybe 20, 30, a hundred people on your network. Well, that doesn’t really help that much. I need to have the scalability and the trust and confidence that when I’m looking for the information that I need, I can find it right.

So it’s really a scaling problem, but it’s also what we call a cold start problem. How do you start from a standstill, how do you start from a cold start and scale up quickly enough so that you have the scale to be able to have your to user groups interact? Well, we’re able to leapfrog. We’re able to basically, have a shortcut to scalability by using the token. By using the token, we have the control, we have the ability to inject a small amount of inflationary tokens that we use as incentives to incentivize this group of people; the research analysts, the industry experts, the practitioners. So can you continuously share their insights, high-quality insights, right? And in order to encourage high quality, we have these incentives that we could share with them.

So they continue to scale the content, while at the same time on this side, the banks, the other financial institutions, the corporates, they notice all the great content and they come on board as well. And once we’ve achieved that scale is when we’re then able to have them interact on a more robust basis, via the knowledge network. So in this way, these people, the financial professionals, the business professionals the corporates…they can then have the trust and confidence that oh, wow, you guys have fifty thousand contributors, you have a hundred thousand contributors. Now this is a real platform. Now this is a knowledge network that I would be able to request information from.

And so that’s the driving principle for why we’re using the Red Pulse token, the underlying cryptocurrency, because we’re able to use this as an incentive to feed the platform and scale incredibly fast. But of course, at the same time, using cryptocurrency allows us to cut down on the frictional costs on the fees that you’d have to pay if we were to use a normal US dollar, Hong Kong dollar, fiat system.

And so all those things are great too. And third, it allows us to build a community around the token, right? So people that believe in our platform, people that interact, engage on the platform, they can then continue to do so and to be a real participant in the ecosystem by holding the tokens.

Q: Who are using our current platform and do we have some feedback from them? (00:19:50)

A: Yeah, so the people that are currently using our platform are the massive number of financial institutions and finance professionals that we’ve brought on board over the last three years. So we’ve gotten the top 200 banks globally, brokerages, asset managers. And by asset managers (skips)…so these are some banks for very large countries globally that have also, previously in the past 3 years, signed on as paying clients of Red Pulse. Our business model has since shifted, since we’re now pivoting towards a research ecosystem and a knowledge network, but it’s quite telling in terms of our interest level, you know from our client base that we’ve got government agencies, we’ve got central banks that are actually using Red Pulse as well. So that’s quite exciting

Q: I know the current crypto market is causing everyone to FUD, but I just wanted to say that you guys are doing a good job of keeping to your dev schedule. Would you be able to tell us what your plans are beyond the release of the new platform? What can we expect in the next 5 years? (00:20:56)

A: First of all, thank you for the kind words, it’s somewhat rare to get that sort of support from the community sometimes, but you know, I appreciate that. We’re here for you guys as well.

So I can’t go into specifics at the moment in terms of what we have planned over the next five years, but according to the white paper, that’s still very much true and accurate.

But the things that I can add to that, you know, to what we’ve outlined in the white papers, milestones and roadmap, is that we’ll be expanding to other ancillary products and services in what I call the knowledge space.

So what began as more of a focus on research services, on data, on capital markets, is just the beginning point and we’re gonna be moving very aggressively into other areas related to knowledge; including training, education and human resource services. From a product standpoint, we’ll also be expanding into other tie ups which include wearable devices, AR, VR, IOT, because you know if you think about it what we’re trying to build as an ecosystem here is a knowledge ecosystem, a knowledge network. People use knowledge, people rely upon knowledge, insights and information all the time. Throughout the day, you know, doesn’t mean you have to be in front of your computer or even using a smartphone. There could be very soon, in the future, a situation where you’re using our content on the go, whether you’re traveling, whether you’re in a car, hopefully not driving, whether you’re on a plane, or just walking around. With a lot of the advances in in wearable technologies, we do have very aggressive plans to be able to integrate our content, our research, our knowledge base throughout people’s lives. And so that’s built into a lot of what we’ve talked about in the white paper, but it is something that we’re planning for and we’re already starting to have discussions on today.

Q: What will happen with your coin when bitcoin falls to 4000? (00:23:27)

A: Okay. All right. Yeah, so, you know cryptocurrency by nature is a highly volatile asset classes. I think most everyone is aware of by now, I can’t predict what will happen? If and when Bitcoin falls to four thousand, I don’t know if it will. And even if it does, I certainly don’t have a crystal ball to say how that would impact other coins, including our own coin. At the same time, what I can say is that the entire Red Pulse team and myself are fully dedicated to building the platform that we’ve promised, which entails having our product and engineering team focus on all the things that we’ve laid out in the timeline, in the roadmap, and once that comes online, once that comes to fruition, that is going to build the ecosystem. It’s going to build the platform and the business, which of course would have impact on the token. The token being the underlying economic mechanism that runs our business, so we’re doing everything in our in our power, everything that we can to focus on that as our primary cause.

Q: What’s your relationship with Bloomberg? (00:25:00)

A: So Bloomberg, FactSet, Thomson Reuters Icon, Thomson One as well, S&P Capital IQ…these are all of our distribution partners and we’ve been partnered with them since late 2015, early 2016, and it’s actually not a simple process to just, so-called, partner with these platforms. We have to go through a vetting process and we were successfully vetted and allowed to essentially distribute our content onto their platforms. You know, specifically for Bloomberg, the partnership started out as a fee sharing, revenue sharing arrangement, where content we were sharing and essentially selling via the Bloomberg network, that revenue would be shared between Bloomberg and ourselves.

So that relationship has evolved, as we’re now looking to build our own ecosystem. We still engage with Bloomberg in in a distribution manner, but they’re more of a partner in terms of being able to spread the word, and share with Bloomberg’s customers the good work that Red Pulse is building. It’s something that we think works quite well.

It’s a win-win situation where Bloomberg is able to leverage the great content on China capital markets that our producers, our contributors are creating. At the same time, we can leverage Bloomberg’s network. Bloomberg’s network is much larger than ours, for the time being, and we’re more than happy to share our great research content with the larger user base that the Bloomberg has.

Q: All the financial institutions, how are they going to use your platform? With an annual membership or per article? (00:26:45)

A: This is an ongoing debate actually. So we do have a general framework in mind and how we’re gonna be charging our customers. So the baseline is that it’s going to be a per year subscription fee, that is say, ten thousand dollars perhaps, fifteen thousand US dollars and that’s the amount that we would ask for them to put on to their account at the beginning of the year. Over time, they would just draw down that account as they continue to request for research on our network, pay for our services, so on and so forth, but we are also experimenting with the idea of micro payments.

What if somebody only wants to pay for one-off reports or one-off custom requests, and especially when it comes to project requests or research requests that are not quite as large…in fact, what we’re now experimenting with is just a little bit of a heads up. A bit of a reveal here, are smaller, a bit quicker, but still very much value-added services such as paid for Q&A, right? So if you have a piece of research that we’ve produced, or one of our contributors I should say, has produced and thrown to our platform, they can be earning additional tokens, additional income by opening it up for simple QA, right?

So for those finance professionals and corporates that are looking to just ask a follow-up question. What did you mean exactly when you said this or where did this figure come from? Or could you elaborate a little bit more on what you meant by this having a negative impact on?

This other type of industry, that would be a great way for us to have more engagement on the platform but not have it in such a way where they would have to pay a high amount just to be able to ask that simple question. So we’ve got a lot of other revenue drivers that we’ve now planned for, that’s just one additional one. We have about half a dozen additional ones that we’ll also be bringing online once Red Pulse goes live. So, very excited to share that with you guys when it’s ready.

Q: The current financial institutions, are they going to be the paid clients? Or just part of the “Expert Network”? (00:28:58)

A: They absolutely could be. We are focused on bringing on board people that are not necessarily working at financial institutions themselves just yet. One of the things that we focus on at Red Pulse is compliance, and we certainly don’t want to invite on board people that have any sort of conflict regarding their current employer, but at the same time some of these finance professionals, they may be okay with acting as an expert in their fields and we’d be happy to welcome them to the program on a case by case basis.

That’s something that our in-house legal counsel is also exploring further in making sure that we’re remaining compliant, but at the same time not missing out on any opportunities to continue to build our user base. Now there’s two types of main users that I’ve mentioned. We have the corporates, the finance professionals, the business professionals that are really acting as recipients of knowledge, recipients of insights and research. On the other side it’s the experts, which I think the question was addressing, a lot of the other types of experts that we’d be targeting, that we would be looking to encourage to join our platform consists of people that work in those industries. So people that work in telecom, people have been working in the automotive sector, in energy, in materials, in internet businesses. It’s these people that we feel would also be very valuable contributors to our platform and it’s them that we’d be really focusing on in terms of onboarding.

Q: How will content on the platform be priced? Is there any chance that the content will be overpriced? Who will oversee the price system? (00:30:43)

A: We want this to be a market oriented ecosystem, right? So if we were to just set prices ourselves then I think it would be quite logistically difficult, quite challenging, and honestly, it would be very similar to what current so-called expert networks do. So if you consider a lot of the big-name expert networks, and I’m sure many of you are familiar with it, if you’re not just do a quick Google search or Baidu search for expert network, and you’ll see all the major players there. What they do is, they have a similar framework, similar set up in that they currently execute on, which is they’ve got a massive network of experts and they have financial institutions. But as the intermediary, they’re doing a lot more heavy-handed tactics and approaches to building the business. That and a few other things that are different from us, which I’ll go into in just a moment.

So they’re setting prices in a way where when they look at the group of expert individuals they have us their network, they’re making a determination as to what they’re worth so to speak, right? So, okay, you’re a 30 year veteran in the aerospace industry and you’re Senior VP at some company. I think you’re worth, probably, I can charge you out and it probably about a thousand dollars an hour. And it sounds pretty high but this is actually true. This is what they do. They would tell the hedge fund, I have a couple of candidates for you and I’d be willing to put you in front of them. Have a quick phone call. Or an hours long phone call for $1,000 an hour. They will then turn around and tell that aerospace executive, I can I can pay you $300 an hour and essentially pocket the difference.

So it’s that sort of mechanism that we think is unfair to both sides. But also incredibly cumbersome to continue to manage, and we don’t want to do that. It’s not scalable. So we are trying to build a knowledge network and an ecosystem that is at once more fair and transparent to both parties. The experts themselves, they get paid more of the actual fee. Ss well as the financial institutions, they would have to pay less to access these individuals.

Now the other reason that we’re doing so in this way is because it’s much more scalable. The reason why those other expert network businesses have a disadvantage in, or rather, we have an advantage over them, is because we are using technology to reduce our cost structure. We don’t want to have people manually determining what people should get paid. We don’t want to have a massive army of people that we have to continuously employ and pay salaries to find these experts. To continuously handhold them, and manage them, at the same time speaking to all these hedge funds, and constantly doing the matching between the two. All of this is a very manual process. It’s very time intensive and is essentially all human driven right. And not to say that human driven business are bad. In fact, we rely quite heavily upon these humans, the experts in contributing their insights. But the go between the intermediary part, we don’t need humans to do that.

In fact, we can use technology. We are using technology. Machine learning and natural language processing to do the matching between those financial institutions, those corporates, and others that need expert insight to the experts themselves. And in terms of how the pricing is done, its market oriented. Market based pricing. If you’re able to convince and engage with financial institutions, and say that you want to charge $500 for your work, for your research, have at it. You can do so. At the same time, if the hedge funds think that they can engage with another expert for a lower price, in terms of the requests that they are issuing, the research prompt so to speak, as we’ve called it, they can do so. The market basically determines the price naturally.

What we will do, however, is provide guidelines. So depending upon the profile depending, upon how many years of experience. And very importantly, depending upon the track record of contributions by these industry experts and other contributors, we will provide a general guideline as to what’s been generally accepted by financial stations. And at the same time, we will also provide guidelines to the financial institutions that are requesting the content. A set of general ranges and guidelines as to how much you know you might be willing to pay for type of request. Whether that request is a five-week project that culminates in a twenty page PowerPoint deck or research paper, or whether it’s just really a two pager that gives a more high-level overview of a particular niche more specific industry. We, of course, are going to have some ranges and guidelines that are informed by what has taken place in the past. But for the most part we want it to be a mortgage driven system.

Q: Do we already have business partners willing to use our token as a means of payment on our platform? (00:36:21)

A: We do, actually. This is something that I was quite happily surprised by. Even before our full tokenize research platform has gone live, some of our service providers, to us as a company, which includes recruiting services, HR services, background checking, they’ve actually agreed to accept red pulse token as payment. I thought that was fantastic because we do have quite a bit of the red pulse token to spend on these sort of things. At the same time, it’s a real vote of confidence in us as a business. So I was pretty happy to see that. Oh another one — of course- marketing campaigns, events, production all of those. I think they’ve a lot of groups have become so familiar and have so much experience in working with these types of companies that they’ve also become much more comfortable in receiving token as payment. So that’s been great to see as well.

Q: Are there any competitors both in the crypto industry and in existing industries? Describe concrete competing model please. (00:37:34)

A: Sure. So, if you look at specifically what we’re trying to do, I wouldn’t say there’s any sort of competitor that’s doing exactly what we are doing. And so that’s I mean it’s because we’re trying to create a very disruptive model within the research space within the knowledge space. That being said, if you broaden your definition of competitor to essentially meaning any sort of company that is competing for eyeballs, competing for attention, competing for budget, dollars spent on any sort of information services then, we have quite a few competitors.

So from attention and eyeball share perspective, I think any sort of platform that is vying for people’s brain share or eyeball share such as news media, blogging, television shows, other types of media, you can consider all of them competitors. And if you think about their business models, part of the question here is to describe concretely their competing models, most if not all of them focus on advertisement. They rely upon, I should say, advertising as their main revenue driver. We don’t. So that’s quite important to distinguish. Our revenue driver is building up the network of the ecosystem. And once we’ve achieved scale, having a platform on which people can interact and exchange value for value. And as the platform, we would charge a small commission the transactions that take place. And that small commission. we’re fine with a much lower margin, but that scale is still makes for a very strong business. So that’s how we differ for from a lot of those other competing sort of eyeball, share time-shared type of competitors.

Now another type of competitor comes from the knowledge and insight space. So two types that come to mind, three types actually. The first being more data-driven content and data itself. So there’s a multitude of platforms already out there that focus on providing API’s to market data, mutual fund data, macro data and other types of data. That space is becoming very quickly commoditized. So their business model is essentially let me create this this platform, this data warehouse and sell as many subscriptions as possible. If I can sell a million subscriptions that would make me happy. And each subscription just continues to get pressure downwards in terms of its pricing, because more and more of those platforms are cropping up, left, right and center. And so, they have to compete on essentially price. Because data is becoming, what it mean when I say highly commoditized. Well, it’s become almost like a utility. Like the Internet, like electricity, like water, and there’s very little else you can really compete on except for price. It’s really what we call it a race to the bottom there. You don’t want to be you know engaged in the commoditized business model, you know in order to win there, you have to be the biggest. You have to be the electricity company, you have to be the network operator, and in our case, we haven’t yet achieved that scale. So, we don’t want to play in the space of data or data provision

The second type of knowledge or insights type of business is consultant. So I come from the consulting industry actually. I’ve spent over a decade working in consulting, most recently prior to launching red pulse, as the head of consulting for a consultancy here in Shanghai called Z-Ben Advisors. Which fantastic company. Top notched, most well respected, companies when it comes to covering China’s financial markets. Now my experience running consulting there and for the last five six years, prior to running Red Pulse, has been that it’s a very lucrative business model when you have a strong pipeline. When you do have the strong pipeline, you have the wind to your back. You’ve got tons of projects lined up, waiting for you to engage with the clients. That’s fantastic. And then what you do is you ramp up in terms of your in-house consultants. You hire, train, build up, and prepare this great consulting side, which is what I did. But at the same time, when those months come, you realize that there’s actually a dip in demand. So you don’t have the half dozen to a dozen projects, then things get tough.

Okay, there are different things that you can do. You can reallocate those resources elsewhere. This is the case for all consulting firms, by the way. And a lot of these consultants, there’s sort of a term that we used back in my consulting days, you were on the beach or on the bench, if you wanted to be the more professional about it. But basically you just weren’t doing anything, but the company was literally paying you your normal monthly salary for doing nothing. Sure, you know a lot of these consulting firms they might try to reallocate you to helping to write white papers or maybe you’re helping to build in the internal knowledge base and what-have-you. But essentially you’re not generating revenue. Okay, so that variability in revenue and that constant cost structure is oftentimes what kills consulting firms. If you look at the top-consulting firms, some of them, if you just look back over the past few years, are not around anymore. And the reason for that is because they weren’t able to contend with this massive whiplash. The swings of high revenue months low revenue months, and still having that maintained very high cost structure of all the on staff people.

So that’s not something that we want to do at Red Pulse. And in fact, it ties in very closely with how we arrived at our current business model because we don’t want to have that risk. We decided to de-risk our business model by having fewer staff, at least the knowledge staff research and consulting staff on board within our platform, within our company I should say. But at the same time, open up the platform for external staff. It’s the idea of the sharing economy, so the gig economy where if you are able to create a platform and a network or you can connect all of the people that have these skill set, have the knowledge, have the ability to provide value to another set of users. Then you can just act as the ecosystem, you can act as the platform, and you don’t have to bring all these contractors on board and pay them out a salary. Every month you can contact them. You can engage with them as needed on an on demand basis, right? So that’s what we’re looking to execute on here at Red Pulse.

Now the third type of business, now there’s one two and three — haven’t forgotten the third type of business, that is related to knowledge and insights is the so called expert networks. That’s what I’ve mentioned briefly already for a earlier question. Now these expert networks, they focus on essentially being a matchmaker, right? And it’s very antiquated. What they do is they’re connecting people, a massive network of experts on this side, with the hedge funds that want to gain access to these experts. It’s typically done very manually. They set up a calendar. They set up a time on each person’s calendar and it’s done through phone calls. Okay, so it is old school. No deliverables involved, though I’m aware that a lot of these firms are moving into that space essentially becoming consulting firms. Which, by the way, is not exactly the best business model you want to get into unless you know what you’re doing. Coming from experience.

But these expert networks are essentially acting as intermediaries to connect these people and saying, I’ll connect you guys, why don’t you guys have a phone call? That business works, actually, if you have scale. It works very well. And if you look at the expert networks that are leading the pack today, they’re continuing to grow they’re experiencing massive growth. And continuing on this growth trajectory, but at the same time, we’re not innovating. They’re not evolving. They’re not taking an advantage of advances in technology where a lot of those very manual aspects of their business model are actually dragging them down from a cost structure basis. And we think we have a huge opportunity and a special position to be able to disrupt that business.

Q: I just got a question about staking. I was thinking some sort of lock up period on RPX would be a good idea when staking. I think this would help encourage long term holds and also help price and reward RPX holders. (00:46:49)

A: Yeah, absolutely. We had the same exact thought in our heads as well. So myself along with the rest of the executive management team. Pretty much so Stanley Chow, my co-founder and head of data, we are experimenting with several different types of arrangements where the unlawful rewards could be structured in a way where it’s achieved several objectives. First, it encourages people to support Red Pulse and also act as active participants on our platform. At the same time, it supports the token price. We’re very excited about crypto and the doors that it opens and sort of the new types of business models that it enables. At the same time, there’s drawbacks to using crypto currency, right. And one of the key drawbacks is the volatility. The daily swings of plus 5, minus 5, plus 10, minus 10. We’re trying to moderate that through several different means, and one of the ways we’re doing so is by encouraging people to hold their tokens on our platform. And that shows encouragement of using the platform, but also hopefully moderating the price a bit more, so that you don’t see these small swings. And if we were to do so, in a way where there is a lock-up period, then absolutely, that’s something that we would we would try

Q: According to CoinTelegraph, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) classifies ICO tokens as unregistered securities. If this is true, then the ICO token held by the investor becomes “worthless”. As a result, class action lawsuits will be followed one after another for companies that promote ICO projects. Do you agree with this? How would Red Pulse handle this if RPX is deemed to be a security? (00:48:21)

A: Okay. Well there’s a couple of different points in there now. I’ll address all of them one by one. So the SEC, the US Securities and Exchange Commission, we’ve been watching very carefully what they’ve been issuing as statements. So one thing to note is that we been quite careful and cautious in structuring Red Pulse as well as the RPX token in a way that is compliant. So the company itself is focused, is established in Hong Kong. We’ve already always been in Hong Kong since early 2015 and we’ve only just recently, the past two years or so, established a Shanghai satellite office. So we are headquartered incorporated and have our legal jurisdiction in Hong Kong. And that’s where we executed our token sale. So that’s something to keep in mind. In terms of jurisdiction the SEC, as I understand, wouldn’t have jurisdiction over Red Pulse as a company. Now, at the same time, we do want to consider everything that the SEC is saying and part of that is to understand what they deemed to be a security.

Before we launched our token, we hired a global law firm based in London and has a pretty big office in Hong Kong to do an analysis of our of our token, of our token sale, of our white paper, our purchase agreement, really the entire thing. And we have a legal opinion from them that states that, from their perspective, the Red Pulse token is not as security. We’ve looked at the Howey Test. They looked at different characteristics of what is deemed to be a security. It doesn’t really any of those marks. So we’re quite confident that the token that we’ve issued is not as security and is a utility token. And fundamentally, what is the purpose of token? It’s a pre buy of information services, of knowledge services. Whether that is a pre buy for custom research, yeah, that’s an option. If it’s a pre buy of training services, absolutely. If it’s a pre buy of human resource services, that as well. So that’s essentially, that is the underlying intrinsic fundamental utility of the Red Pulse token. And we’re quite confident about that.

Q: What about Chinese regulations, does that effect the way companies have to buy RPX to use the platform? If a company is based in a regulated country, can they still use the platform (purchase RPX)? (00:51:38)

A: So great question as well. We, of course, as I just mentioned launched the red pulse token from Hong Kong. And Hong Kong, while it is part of China, it is what’s considered to be one-country two systems. So Hong Kong has its own government and its own legal framework and its own policies laws. And our understanding from the Hong Kong SFC, the Securities and Futures Commission, is that ICOs, crypto currency, is still being accommodated. If you do a quick search online, you can find some of the official statements from the SFC that actually acknowledges that ICO are taking place, and are taking place in Hong Kong. And I paraphrase, the statement then goes on to caution people about ICOs and about cryptocurrency and that they’re very risky in nature, And any sort of individuals that are thinking about participating needs to be cautious. Certainly do their homework. Look at what it is you’re actually participating in. And at the same time, if that token sale, that token offering is an offering of something that can be deemed a security, then the SSC would certainly have to regulate it. And that issuing entity would have to register that with the SSC. And so I take that as very clear guidelines as to FCS’s standing and in fact, I think Red Pulse is well within compliance there.

Q: How much RPX is needed for staking? (00:53:35)

A: Yeah, so that’s something that we’re going be released quite soon. We do have a minimum amount that we want to encourage people to hold on the platform. And again, we’re going to turn this platform rewards rather than staking just so that we avoid any confusion with the idea of POS, proof of staking or proof stake, and that tied in with the minimum holding period, so having a so-called lockup period to go along with the minimum amount that is put onto the platform. We’ll release the details of that quite soon.

Q: What is Red Pulse’s current relationship with NEO? (00:54:11)

A: Sure yeah. NEO is still a very strong supporter of ours. We probably meet with a NEO team either formally, to catch up or informally with some of their the founding members and their great dev team at least once every month or so. Whether it’s running into each other at events that were both at or you know, just a quick, catch up at their offices or at our offices. We’re very close and you know, I think there’s a special relationship that we have with NEO given that Red Pulse was their very first ICO and major D-app that’s built under the NEO block chain. And of course, we’re going continue that relationship for many years to come.

Q: Are you considering launching your own blockchain? (00:55:00)

A: Hmm yeah, right on the heels if that last question asking about NEO. No, we’re not. You know at the moment. No one can say that I will and we will never launch our own blockchain. I think that somewhat limiting in terms of our business, but for the time being there are no plans for us to launch our own block chain.

A quick word on that, by the way, I think it’s become really popular nowadays for companies to say, okay, we were D-app, now we’re going to mainnet. It does just seems to be the thing to do. Personally, the way that I operate, as a business owner, but also as an individual, I’m not necessarily going to do what everyone else does just for the sake of doing it. And when it makes sense sure, absolutely. I’ll consider that as an option and see if it makes sense for my business for my user base for my community. But I’m certainly not just going go build my own blockchain just for the sake of doing so, thinking that that’s what everyone else is doing is going to lift my token price. What I think is going to be beneficial for Red pulse as an ecosystem, as a token, as a business, as a platform, is to go to market as soon as possible.

Sure is it a D app. I think people nowadays think of chain versus D app or chain much better than D app. Not necessarily true. If you look at most of these projects, and I call them projects because that’s what they are right now. They’re not companies just yet. They are pretty far away from actually delivering value. Actual, real-world, discernible value to the community to the world. And even when the so-called net goes live, what are you going to do with a maintenance using it? Okay, you’ve created this fantastic consensus algorithm. You achieved a million TPS, great. What are you going to do with it? Are you going to basically open it up for people to do ICO on it and more d apps on it? Maybe, and that I’m quite personally keen on seeing how that plays out myself. Some of these projects, some of these companies I should say, do have a lot of great partners that are already signed up. And those, I think, are the ones that have the greatest potential. And in fact, I’m partnering with some of those companies that have that great potential. That have already a built-in client base and user base and can just very quickly trends transform that into a blockchain infrastructure ecosystem that’s going to be quite exciting to see.

For us, we’re focusing on translating the progress that we’ve already made in the past three and a half years and having all these hundreds of financial officials and corporates already using our platform. We want to go to market ASAP. We don’t want to spend the next six months to a year creating a mainnet. We already have a great idea and a great vision, which is to put research on the blockchain. Okay, to create a knowledge network and knowledge ecosystem where we can engage with the industry experts and practitioners, and analysts and have them connect very robustly on an ongoing basis with those clients. And that’s something that we have the opportunity to do today, And so by the end of this year, potentially sooner, we want to go live with this platform. And that’s going to get us to real value delivered much more quickly than launching our own blockchain. But who knows? Who knows what the future will bring. Maybe a year or two, two years, three years from now, if it makes sense for us to do that, we would consider it. But what’s best for the company right now? What’s best for the ecosystem right now?

What’s best for Red Pulse token right now is to go to market. Start moving away from price movements, from speculation based upon what we may do, what could be, and what may come? We want to bring that to the present so that when we can demonstrate what we actually can do. This is something you can actually use today and that’s going to be a much more powerful driver of our success and ultimately the token success.

Q: How do I become an analyst that can participate in writing articles to receive RPX? What will the requirements be? Will you offer any sort of training? (00:59:33)

A: Yes, absolutely, you know part of what we’ve defined as the launching of the of the new platform is inviting outside contributors onto our platform. And a little bit of a review here. We’ve already been doing so. It’s more of a so-called closed beta, I suppose, but we’ve invited 30, 40, the number of fluctuates a bit, outside contributors that do not work at red pulse. They’re outside the company and they’re already contributing content to our research platform. And the reason we started to experiment is because we believe and I believe that in order to create a great product and a great experience, you need to iterate. You need to constantly experiment and we’re using this essentially as a sandbox, sort of testing ground for pricing mechanisms, for credibility scoring, for matching to some extent.

Part of that is understanding what motivates a contributor. What do they need? Do they need training? Do they need more guidance? What are some of the things that we sort of just take for granted internally here at red pulse, because we’ve been doing this for so long but when we open the doors wide for other people to be sharing their knowledge insights, what else do they need in order to be successful contributors? Value-added contributors? How do you become an analyst? Well, once the platform goes live we’re going to have an onboarding program that will, yes, train you as to how to produce content. What we’re looking for, what format to write it in, how to publish it, how to get paid. All these things we’re essentially going to continue to build upon this sort of training. Eventually, getting to a point where the training itself can be part of our business.

That’s something that I’ve pinned to that earlier in this AMA. So absolutely. The requirements will be made clear depending upon what type of contributions we are making. Whether that is short form, event note type of content, which is what we’ve been focused on traditional to date, company specific content, so that’s something that you might come to expect from a sell side research firm or brokerage firm, to market trend and sector type of content. And ultimately, we want there to be more freeform content as well. More of a blogging style area of where you contribute and that is pretty much aligned with our view that at a certain point people want the freedom to be able to share what they want to share in the format in which they want to share it in. And that’s something that we’re going to give an opportunity for these contributors to do as well. And of course provide training go way through.

Q: What are the expected growth for Rpx as business (in numbers) that Rpx project for the future? (01:02:37)

A: Yea, so the expected numbers for red pulse in the future and I think you’re probably asked me about revenues and typically a company is focused on revenues. So the reason that any company exists is for really one purpose and that’s to make money, is to generate profits. And of course, there’s a lot of other things that a company wants to try to achieve along the way such as being a responsible corporate citizen, encouraging the growth and development of its staff, building a strong brand, and you know a very useful valuable product for the world essentially making the world a better place. But most, I would really say all companies, out there exist to generate profit and especially companies that have gone public, the companies have listed their shares on a public equity exchange. They now have to focus on profit even more than ever to basically deliver upon what the shareholders have expected from that company as they have invested.

And in this way, we are no different. Now, perhaps more similar to a start-up approach, we are still a startup. We are not profitable. So while we are still building the platform, we’re essentially spending a lot of the money that we’ve raised from the community, as part of our token sale from last October to build the ecosystem that will eventually lead us to profitability. Now, a lot of that was explained earlier about scaling the user base, scaling the contributor size, scaling the financial institutions the corporate side, but ultimately how does Red Pulse make money? That’s what we’re really trying to drive at.

We make money by once having achieved that scale, charging a commission on any sort of interaction. It’s all about interactions on our platform. Once we’ve achieved scale, any company, any startup, any platform that has that large number of users, they can then make money because those people are part of the community. Those people are basically a captive audience. It’s a captive user base. And so we’ve found of dozens of different types of revenue drivers. Some of which I revealed to you today along the lines of sharing research, requesting for bespoke insights, training programs, human resources, but we have several different ideas that will be executing upon to drive revenue based upon interactions across this network, And it’s once we’ve achieved that scale, that all-important scale and having those users on board, and then we can do so.

Q: How secured is it to hold my RPX in your platform? Could you please touch upon the security? (01:05:31)

A: Yeah happy to so. One of the things that you know, I can’t stress it enough and be excited about, is that we have Chris Hager on board as our director of engineering. So Chris’s background is that he’s formerly and actually still to this day an active member of NEOs development community called City of Zion, COZ, and Chris was the leading developer importing NEOs blocks and infrastructure and smart contract development platform to Python. And this is his project and we just so happened to use Python here at Red Pulse for all of our development. So it’s a combination of Python and Django as primarily the front-end that we’re using. So all of our machine learning algorithms, our data science including the blockchain development side is all done in Python. We just so happen to have the best python-based engineer to the new blockchain on the planet, Chris Hager.

So when it comes to security, Chris is the one that is now building the additional back-end infrastructure to support the on-platform wallet. That would essentially store our users tokens on the wallet, as well as the smart contracts that we’re launching to additionally support the infrastructure and the new features that we have in mined for the Red Pulse platform. So we’ve got Chris leading the team. We’ve also got several additional blockchain devs that are also training up the rest of our devs to become blockchain engineers as well. So in terms of security you can’t get a better team than that. I’ll probably have Chris share a bit more at another opportunity as to the specifics as to how they’re ensuring security from that front.

Q: Does a user need to be a Red Pulse subscriber in order to stake? (01:07:37)

A: No, you don’t. A subscriber is a term that we’ve used from the past where you subscribe to our service and you pay a fee for it. But we leave you user or participant on the Red Pulse network in a much broader sense. Just the fact that you’re holding Red Pulse’s token means that you’re a user, you are a participant, in our ecosystem. So perhaps better answer that question. Do you need to be a subscriber? Maybe not a subscriber, but as a participant. As a participant can you can you get involved? Absolutely. Can you benefit from the on profit rewards? Absolutely. That’s something that we want to encourage across the board, because we recognize that a lot of the people that are interested in Red Pulse are interested in China to begin with. Before you move on to other countries in terms of our coverage, you’re not necessarily going to be that 30-year or even 10 year industry veteran, nor are you a finance professional, or a corporate client that’s interested in engaging in such a way with these clients with this user base. You can very well just be a casual reader. Maybe you’re just curious to learn more about China markets, and as we move into other markets Korean markets Japanese markets Singapore markets. You could just be a casual reader and you know want to be informed and also want to participate by perhaps voting upon, what you deemed to be or higher value content. We want to accommodate that too. Not just accommodate, we want to encourage that. So for the people that you know fall into that particular demographic, we do consider you to be active participants and part of our ecosystem. And of course we would want to reward you with the on platform 3 boards as well.

Q: What type of tea are you drinking? (01:09:40)

A: Yeah, so I’m drinking green tea, Lipton green tea. What’s cool is that we got it in this Red Pulse glass mug. It’s good tea.

Q: What was the idea behind the new logo? (01:10:01)

A: Yeah! So we got the new logo up here. To be honest, I love the old logo. If you’re curious where the logo came from, I can share a little bit of a personal tidbit. The old logo was designed by an ex-girlfriend of mine, she was a graphic designer and spent a weekend designing it. I thought it was pretty cool, but we were an 8 person start-up at the time, but at the same time as we are growing as a company, we are becoming a really professional sort of platform. I thought it required a bit of a change there. Something that was more appropriate for us as a growing professional services platform. I also wanted to convey something that was more related to technology and blockchain. The heartbeat logo, while it’s a great logo, and I have a lot of good memories with it, it actually led to a lot of confusion because people thought “Oh Red Pulse! Is that a healthcare or medical company?” It’s not, of course, so while it was an interesting conversation starter, it just didn’t really give the right first impression that we were intending to give. I think the new logo does a better job of that. We still retained some of the original feeling of the wave, movement, of it being a pulse. But the shape of the blocks so to speak, are providing a sense of digitization. I feel like it is a good demonstration of something that Red Pulse represents.

Q: Any updates or changes to the relationship between Chinapex and Red Pulse? (01:12:29)

A: Uh, no, no change at all. In fact, Jimmy Hu was the founder and CEO of Apex. He and I are very good friends, and we’ve already begun the integration of some of the technology between our two firms. So Apex focuses on consumer data and using machine learning, using AI to build insights and essentially results from that data we are right now integrating their Apex data platform into our Red Pulse platform, it’s Chris Hager, Dylan Blankenship who’s our chief technology officer, is working directly with Jimmy’s team on doing that, and there’s a few other things that we’re also going to be working together on. So apex is also building out their own main net and are going to start incorporating other types of strategic partners to be a part of that so that we can as one of their key partners, earliest partners, engage with their network and essentially give our user base access to a lot of the feature and a lot of the retail consumer oriented benefits that Apex provides directly to our Red Pulse community as well. So that’s really exciting and you know the Apex — Red Pulse strategic partnership is very strong. And we have more things to share with you guys.

Q: You currently have 50,000 subscribers. From an optimistic perspective, what is your subscriber goal for next year given that the platform will have been launched? (01:14:04)

A: That’s a great question. We haven’t set a specific goal yet in terms of the number of subscribers at least not want that. I can publicly share, but what I can share is that we have hired a full-time person that is from the so-called expert space, right? And so this person has previously as his job as his main job the build-out of this sort of expert Network business, right? So there’s two sides that we need to build out. The first side are the readership, and the people that would engage with the platform trying to gain more insights research knowledge on capital markets. We actually have a fair amount of progress already made there over the last several years having already reached more than 50 thousand subscribers on that front. It’s the other side- it’s the research contributors and the industry experts, the practitioners that we are really focusing on building out now. And so that’s where it’s a bit more “early days” for us and why we’re looking to build a team not organically, as some people call it, but essentially by hiring people that have that experience already. People that have worked in this space you know for years, for decades already, and that would be a shortcut for us to be able to build this this network in a much faster fashion than otherwise.

But we do have another advantage, you know for us. We just so happen to have the advantage of having an inventive system where these experts, these industry petitioners, you know the analysts, that would be sharing their insights on our platform. They wouldn’t have to wait until there is some specific demand from these hedge fund clients or the corporates. We have this perpetual source of incentives that we can use to pay them out immediately, you know, and it could be voluntarily contributed content. They just have a thought that in a particular industry. They think this is going to be a major development. if you write up a five-page white paper on that and put it onto our platform (steam lags)…valuable it is deemed by our community and for all the people that are casual readers. There will be a pretty complex algorithm that we’re devising right now that takes into account it is deemed by our community and for all the people that are casual readers. They will all be a finance professional if you happen to be a professional that has a particular specialty. All those things are taking into account, you know, if you are also a contributor. What areas what topics have you been contributing to? This is all taking into account in the voting algorithm so that makes for a very fine-tuned and ideally what we expect to be a much more better way of determining the value of each of the contributions. That is what determines the payout, you know to those to those contributors

Q: Is there an RP webstore where we can buy cups and T shirts? (01:17:26)

A: No, there isn’t yet. You know what’s funny is? I think some other people on the team sent me a couple of links a few months back where other people have gone out and decided to create t-shirts cups pens what-have-you and put it up for sale online, you know and at first, some of the some of my teammates were a little bit frustrated. They were a little bit upset about this. What are they doing, you know creating all this stuff without asking our permission? I thought it was great. I thought the fact that somebody would take the time and take our logo and put on t-shirts… It’s very entrepreneurial, you know, I’ll give them that. It was great exposure for us, if we didn’t go ahead and do so yet, I love the fact that somebody else already did. But that being say we’ll look into that and we may put together something a bit more official in terms of web stores, but you get official, Red Pulse materials, Red Pulse hats and t-shirts and socks and what have you, so yeah. We’ll let you guys know, I think that’s a great idea

Q: How optimistic are you of the future use-case of the Red Pulse Token compared to when you started it? (01:18:43)

A: I am very optimistic I probably even more so because I’m actually seeing it come to fruition. This is a quick reference to one of the ways in which we first got inspired to build this kind of ecosystem and that’s SteemIt. I think what Dan Larimer did, you know along with the SteemIt stuff two years ago was amazing, you know, and we borrowed some elements- not all- and if you want to know about some of the things that we’ve pioneered on our own, you can take a look at our white paper and other forthcoming documents.

What they did was they created an ecosystem that essentially incentivizes people to be contributors, to be value-added contributors on an ecosystem, and they’ve proven that it works. They’re actually one of the few examples of a real-world use case of cryptocurrency that is actually in use today, and continues to be in use today. The content itself the platform itself, it could probably use some additional tweaking, but we decided to borrow that idea because we saw that it works. How confident am I that red pulse will work? Very confident, because we’re taking a similar mechanism- we’ve actually made quite a few, in my view, improvements to it- but have retained those elements of it that I think have been proven to work and because we have a built-in user base with these financial institutions with the readership. I think it’s a win-win situation.

We’re basically taking the parts that we think work quite well and connecting it to the great progress that we’ve already achieved in terms of our ecosystem and user base build-out.

Q: What is meaning of automatic tagging system? Does it mean extracting system of main keyword from the content? (01:20:56)

A: Yeah, so it’s exactly right, the automatic tagging this is actually really critical because if you’re thinking about how we’re going to be matching the inbound requests for research to the contributor side, there has to be some way that the algorithm knows what constitutes a good match, and the tagging of the request, often times it’s going to be done in sort of a human natural language for doing so that the tagging system that that we have in place. It’s actually using an Open Calais system that we’ve licensed from Thomson Reuters. We’ve spent quite a long time looking to try to build our own automated tagging system, and we’ve achieved a fair amount of success, that’s actually what Stanley has been partially working on, you know for the last several years. We also tested what Thompson Reuters has put together, and one of the key tenants of a machine learning based algorithm, a machine learning algorithm, is the size and the validity of your training set. The training set that we had I think has something like 40, 50 thousand data points- which if you know anything about machine learning and data science. It’s nothing. You know it really didn’t allow us to get to the level of accuracy that we needed. What Thomson Reuters has, is tens of the hundreds of millions of data points, essentially every single news article, press release bit of data they have from Thomson Reuters in aggregate is part of their training set and their open-Calais tagging system. It’s highly accurate. We decided to license that tagging system and basically tag all the inbound requests, but also very importantly all the contributions that are voluntarily provided onto our platform and the future, of course those that are done as a response to those requested custom research reports. That’s actually how the matching algorithm will work.

You know, there’s actually other components to it, but the fundamental component is that we have a clean consistent way of tagging the company research requests as well as the content that’s being produced in a very robust manner and so the tags that we’re using of course are those that have been defined as part of open Calais’ taxonomy. It includes entities such as company names, real persons, organizational names, sector names, industries, topics, geographies- it’s quite robust actually, I think a couple tenants of that, of very well delineated categories as part of their tagging system. We’re very happy to just wish to that. It’s quite an important aspect of our algorithms.

Q: What is the merit/benefit for users to filter or search desired information? (01:24:21)

A: I think that it really drives at the fundamental problem that we’re trying to solve at red pulse, and I’m glad someone asked this question. When you think about how information has evolved over the past several decades it used to be that having access to information was great. If you had consistent access to market data, to research, to analysis, then that was fantastic. You probably had an advantage already. But with the invention of the internet, with cost coming down, with the commoditization of data, of information.

I mean how many information sources you have nowadays? You turn on your laptop and you go to just countless websites that are all for free. You have email, if you have to work at a company that has its own research department, you probably get inundated with information. We’re now moved into a phase where having access that information isn’t really an advantage anymore. In fact, you know a huge problem is too much information overload really. What is it that people really need today? That’s the main question, what people need today is not necessarily more information- It’s better ways to filter down that information to get at what’s really relevant to that individual person, and so every person is different whether you are a business executive at a fortune 500 you are a junior analyst working at a bank, or whether you are a business strategist, you know working at a tech firm. Your needs for information and even what specifically you’re looking for. They’re all different, right? To answer the question “What is the merit” I mean, I think now it’s quite clear. What is the merit, it helps solve that problem from the information overload.

Basically, being able to separate the signal from the noise, and there’s a lot of drive that finding what information you’re actually looking for, and that information is what’s needed for people to make decisions. To be more knowledgeable about the space of learning and ultimately be more successful.

Q: Red Pulse provides machine learning matching engine so it will give us convenience to seek for necessary content quickly. But this engine is not easy to understand for individual investor like me because we’ve never seen that kind of content matching engine. So could you explain us easily how we can conveniently access the content with this engine, with some kind of example? (01:26:53)

A: Even I personally think that some of the best use cases of technology are implemented in a way where it’s seamless, but it’s almost unnoticeable, because we’re not using technology just for the sake of using it. I mean sure, from an investment perspective, from a pitching perspective, it sounds really interesting and sounds really cool, you know to say that we’re using blockchain, to say that we’re using machine learning, you know AI natural language processing, but from a user’s perspective, none of that actually matters. From a user’s perspective, all they care about is “is this experience that I’m getting, is it helping better than what I’ve had before?” Is it significantly better, you know because if it’s only incrementally better, I’m probably just going to keep using the current method.

So as a company, as Red Pulse, we were focused on using technology more as a means to an end, but not the end themselves. I’m glad that the asker of this question recognizes that, but a lot of the things that we’re doing such as the matching engine is quite complex, and it may be difficult for I think the layperson to understand. The good news is that you don’t need to necessarily fully understand it. You know to benefit from it too, to use it right and to go into a little bit more detail as to how that would play out, what would the experience be like, I think that is a good way to describe it. When you log into the system, let’s say you are a casual reader, and what you see before you is essentially a dashboard of content that has been tailored to you, and over time as you’ve been using the platform, what you’ve been clicking, even reading, the system knows how long you are spending on each page, and how you’ve rated certain articles, certain types of content, and all of that is taken into account, so that what you see on your dashboard is really what we believe to be the most relevant to you. That is sometimes different than the matching engine, but I think you know what the asker you know with the person asking this question wanted to know is, what did they experience right? Walking you through that experience, especially when you show up on our platform you could see this dashboard that has been custom tailored just for your purposes right based upon your past experience, based upon your past activity I should say. The matching engine comes into play if you just so have to also be a person that is looking to ask for additional information maybe information that doesn’t yet exist. So that the matching engine is intended to match those requests for information to the right expert, and have the expert then be able to deliver that information on a bespoke or a custom on demand basis. How that experience would work, is that on a separate section of the website you can then request for research, you can essentially issue a research prompt, right?

So that’s the original concept now, it’s the main concept that we have since when we first wrote the white paper. This person would then be able to in, you know, very free-flowing human language write out a question or various or perhaps a series of questions various questions and The open-calais tagging would essentially tag all key elements of that question related companies, topics, geographies, product types, and match that to the experts that have a high rating across all those different topics. It’s not as simple as just saying, okay I’m really good at covering the telecom sector, but are you good at telecom sector, and covering M&A activity, and within this particular region, so if you scored highly across all of those, the algorithm takes that into account and performs a match not necessarily for one match, but it could be a short list of potential candidates that this person that is requesting. The information can engage with what I think even can be some ranges in terms of publishing, that there are these experts up in past engagements so that the person that’s requesting. The information has a good sense of “what is the value you know”, the value to the cost trade-off there, right? So that’s one type of matching engagement. Another type is where it’s not so much the matching that needs to have been done beforehand like what I talked about earlier, which is the paid for short term short, QA (steam lags)…

This content that may have been voluntarily contributed by some of our contributors and it’s the readership, the general readership, or it’s the financial professionals, professionals that are looking to ask some follow-up questions right near the matching doesn’t necessarily need to take place for us. The matching is not so much between the expert and the contributor per se, or I should say the expert contributor and the reader per se but the matching is done where content needs to be first presented to the reader, and having that content based upon past user activity, past interests, be recommended to the user. That’s really the connecting point, right? And once that person, you know, the reader realizes that this is something that they are, you know quite engaged with, something that is quite relevant to their interest, to their business, to their profession. They might actually continue with asking some short answer questions and that but sort of in the way that we talked about earlier.

Q: Existing content platform ‘Steemit’ has trouble in sorting the category so users say it is hard to catch the postings they have an interest. Please let us know if this features Red Pulse can boast of, especially in user interface aspect. (01:33:27)

A: Yeah this I think is very closely tied to what we just went over. SteemIt is great. You know, I think they’re a pioneer in developing this sort of content-based sharing economy, and it’s something that we are taking a page from, parts of and building our research and knowledge-base as a challenge is relevance and in order to engage with our users and not just encourage them to join our trial platform, you know for the first time in order to encourage them to come back really that stickiness factor, are you going to come back continue to use it time and time again, the experience has speaking and that’s what I was explaining just earlier when people come to our platform. They need to feel that- wow, this is a platform that’s been built for me and it takes into account my preferences. Not just what I voluntarily have described. When I first was signed up as a user, but on a continuous basis learning about, what is it that I am interested in, what have I clicked on before? What have I commented about before? What have I rated before right? Who do I read more of right? All these things are taking into account, and a lot of companies do this now. Amazon does this for purchases behavior, Netflix does this for choosing movies. We are going to be a pioneer when it comes to using these types of algorithms to determine what knowledge and what content, what information is more relevant to our user base?

Q: What is marketing plan after 3Q platform release? (01:35:38)

A: Hmm. Yeah, why often talk to my staff and especially my marketing staff is that we realize we have three types of demographics that we need to continue to build awareness within and continue to increase our presence in our brand equity. The first one includes the finest professionals — professionals corporate professionals that I talked about earlier. The second being the contributors. There are all manner of contributors. I hadn’t touched upon this as much as I could have. Oh, I’ll spend a minute here.

he contributors I’ve, from the most part, I’ve described them as experts. These are people that have worked in their fields and their sectors for perhaps decades, but not necessarily so. The contributors could also be students. It could be current college students, they could be recent grads. They probably need some more training or guidance. And that’s something that we want to look into. But they’re very different than people that have decades of experience in the industry. It also includes academics, so people that those professors people that are teaching as their main profession. They’re also a very different type of contributor, and we want to accommodate and account for that. Even other types of services such as people that are bilingual or trilingual. They may not necessarily know a whole lot about the industry, but the fact that we want our platform to be multi-language. And its experience means that people that have those skills, as language skills, also can contribute to our platform, because they can then take content that’s originally written in English or perhaps Chinese and translate it to Korean and earn tokens and rewards for doing so. We have a lot of things in mind when I talk about contributors.

In terms of how we’re marketing to our community, to our user base, we want to take that into account. So we’re building partnerships with universities, so that we can onboard these students, whether they’re current students or recent grads to be contributors, but also to be users of the platform. We’re also connecting with recruiting agencies. Those recruiting agencies that have huge networks already of their own that tie into people that have been working in there pretty good fields for decades. They are also people that we want them on board. So doing joint marketing campaigns, doing joint promotions and strategic partnerships with those type of companies would also be quite useful to us. We’ll be sharing with you a couple partnerships that come in the education space online, which is also something that we want to use and benefit from in a collaborative way, of course, in building out our awareness amongst that community.

And then finally last but certainly not least, is the cryptocurrency enthusiasts community. So a lot of you are wondering, you’re building this research platform, this knowledge network, and it seems to be very geared towards people that are quite knowledgeable and has something to say and have experience. Of course, it is targeting people that are looking for that kind of knowledge, but what about for people that are just general crypto enthusiasts people that are interested in Red Pulse as a token economy? Absolutely. We want to continue to build our awareness because we know that part of what makes Red Pulse successful are the people that believe our token, the people that believe in our ecosystem, and we will continue to build awareness within this community with more exchange listings, with more meet-ups, and also very importantly more online digital marketing through promotions.

We’re also going to be doing, what we can — in fact we have a couple plans in the works here — to try to have more of an intersection amongst these three different communities. So again, that’s the contributors, it’s the finance professionals, and corporate professionals, it’s the crypto enthusiasts. The way in which these three could potentially intersect in a really meaningful way is by having Red Pulse cover crypto markets as well. And that’s something that we are planning for. Our bread-and-butter, our forte, is really covering conventional capital markets, but where I think these three demographics are really starting to coincide now and overlap to a very quickly growing degree is when it comes to understanding, analyzing, tracking, crypto markets. Conventional financial professionals are moving very quickly into it, industry practitioners experts are more and more are using blockchain as a technology across the board in all industries, whether that’s logistics, whether that’s retail services, energy.

I think blockchain, as a technology, is transformative and it’s going to be something that every industry is going to be benefiting from. Much the same as the internet in the 90s, seemingly was its own sort of industry on its own, but now it is pervasive. It’s every company is a quojte-unquote Internet company now, because they must use the Internet in order to be competitive, in order to be successful. So the same way , I think blockchain is now just at the cusp. Where companies are now starting to understand and even experiment with how to use it as part of their business model. And we’re very early in that development, but it is coming and we will get to the point in the very near future where being a blockchain company no longer has meaning, because every company incorporates blockchain. Very excited about that.