annikamonari
commented
6 years ago This proposal has been approved.
Open RobiRami opened 6 years ago
annikamonari
commented
6 years ago This proposal has been approved.
0x349126992f8abeb38f85598beacbb82113ed9c20
Putting consumptions on the blockchain
Purpose
Bibendum aspires to improve the purchase of consumptions during events for the customers, but also improve consumption revenue for event organisors without leaving the attendee feeling scammed.
Description
The problem
Admit it, you've probably enjoyed a beer or a bit of wine or a little snack while you were watching your favorite band play or while supporting for a sportsteam. As a matter of fact, more than 40% of the people at a sports event tend to buy a drink or consume other food [1]. Consumptions are also a great stream of revenue for events, especially benefit concerts. Unfortunately, both the attendees and the organizer can experience problems while buying or selling consumptions. It can be a hassle to find the correct change for the snacks, both for the attendee as for the cashier. Of course, a lot of events have tried to modernise their paying system by introducing solutions like electronic bracelets, on which you can load money to make paying easier during the event. Although this is a great step ahead, I can tell from my own experience that these solutions have their downsides as well. The companies behind these bracelets charge you money for them and it is often a tedious process, or even impossible, to get the money back if there's still credit left on it after the event. Often times you don't even know how much money is on the bracelet and there's no way to see how much you're actually charged. For event creators that still use cash payments, they have to deal with a lot of small change at the end, and money often carries germs and other dirt, which you don't want in an environment with food and drinks. Another issue while planning an event is to decide how much of each type of consumption will be needed during the event. Events don't want to end up with an oversupply of consumptions. Furthermore, Bibendum introduces a way to prevent alcohol abuse and prevent extreme alcohol intoxication.
Introducing Bibendum
Bibendum makes the entire consumption process easier by creating consumption payments on the blockchain in a similar way that tickets are sold, but without a secondary market. By utilising a mobile app and the Aventus protocol for payments, attendees would only need their smartphone and AVT tokens to purchase a drink or a snack. Because this data is stored on the blockchain, several useful things can be done with it.
The Customer App
The mobile Bibendum app is easy to use and can be linked to an AVT wallet. By providing users with a simple interface, there's no doubt about the prices. To make the prices and data of these consumptions reliable, they are stored on the blockchain and can not be manipulated. Relevant assets for the consumptions can then be stored using IPFS. Even the locations of the stands for a certain product can be saved so that a geo-map of consumptions can be created. This allows the attendees to easily find the place to buy a specific product, even on large locations like festivals. On top of regular static prices for consumptions, the Bibendum app can easily allow for certain promotions to be made. If you want to create a promotion where you can buy for example both a beer and a snack for a discounted price, this would be very hard to manage in a cash event where both stands are not close to eachother. Because with the Bibendum app and blockchain, all data is stored and can be checked, promotions with separate products from separate locations are easy to manage and can be tracked in the app. All of this can be built on top of the AVT protocol.
To make it easier for users to adapt to the Bibendum app, a built-in gateway has to be made to easily allow customers to top up their wallets with new AVT tokens using other payment methods and even a local cash-to-AVT stand for new users can be useful. Because the Bibendum app works globally, there's no need to make a separate wallet for every event. Because of this, the attendees never lose money because of credit left on bracelets or cards provided by the event. To check the consumptions for a certain event, the user can search the event by name or use a unique event code provided by the event. The user is then greeted with multiple categories of consumptions to choose from, and a promotions tab. To pay at the cashier, you could swipe your phone above the cash desk to issue a payment and use another authentication method like a pin or fingerprint to confirm a payment. This can be done with RFID, which is built-in on a lot of modern phones, or manually in the app for older phones. The payment is confirmed by a dapp which runs on the cash desk. This can be done using any microcontroller and no fancy hardware is needed. This could be combined with a visual confirmation for the cashier.
Here are some samples for the Bibendum app interface.
NOTE: this is just a sample interface. The point of this is not to show a fancy interface, but rather show how the consumer should be able to easily select his consumption, find it and pay for it. On top of that, when clicking on a certain promotion, the user should be able to see for which promotions he's eligible and which products he needs to buy to finish a promotion.
The Side of the Event
For the event creators, it should be easy to manage the consumptions for their events. The event creator can simply create an event on the blockchain, create categories and add consumptions or products. In the previous part, we've talked about consumptions, but this could even be extended to various other products such as merchandise and other supplies. Because the price of the AVT token is not fixed, the event creator should have the ability to chose to set a fixed price based on the local currency (e.g USD). The AVT cost of the product should automatically adjust to the current trade price then. After or even during an event, the event creator can sell the AVT that is gained, so it gets re-distributed to the people.
On top of creating and managing products, the event creator should be able to track the purchases in real-time. Thanks to the blockchain, this is possible. The consumption statistics can be used afterwards to look back at the results of the event and consider taking adjustments for next editions.
Using Modern Technology to Analyze Consumption Data
Because all consumption and purchase data is immutably saved on the blockchain, we can use machine learning on this data to improve certain aspects of the event. Data is the most valuable and important thing an event has to improve their event and should not be underestimated [2].
Avoiding Oversupply and Adjusting to User's Preference by Analyzing Past Data
A lot of events have annual editions. By combining the consumption data from past events with other conditions such as weather, number of attendees and even artists, events can predict to a certain degree which consumptions will be purchased the most and which ones will be less popular. This can help the organizers when buying their consumption stock and to limit over-supply. Here's an example: when the humidity is low or temperature is high, people prefer to buy a soda instead of a beer. By combining the weather report with past data, an event could have predicted this and bought more soda instead of beer. Of course this is just an easy example and it's something a human could easily figure out, but when organizing an event on a large scale, machine learning is much stronger at analyzing patterns.
Creating User-Adapted Promotions and Interfaces
The Bibendum app can integrate an algorithm that analyzes user purchases on a personal level. This can allow the event creator to create automated personal promotions for users. When a user buys for example a lot of hotdogs separately, the app could automatically create a promotions which offers multiple hotdogs for a discounted price. On top of this, the app interface could also automatically adjust itself to display the consumptions in order based on the user's purchase history.
Limiting Alcohol Consumption
Alcohol abuse [3] and alcohol intoxication [4] are important issues in the event industry. Bibendum tries to solve and prevent this by limiting the purchase of alcoholic consumptions in an automated way. When an event creator adds a consumption to the event, he can provide an alcohol percentage or static timeout for the consumption. When the alcohol percentage is given, Bibendum then uses an integrated algorithm to calculate the approximate alcohol percentage of a certain user. When this goes over a configurable limit, the app can temporarily stop this individual from buying other alcohol consumptions and the interface could even adjust itself to recommend non-alcoholic consumptions such as water to cool down. On top of this, the Bibendum app could allow you to link your ID, so that alcoholic purchases can be made without having to provide an ID every time. This can also help an event to prevent underaged attendees from drinking alcoholic beverages. Of course this doesn't avoid people sharing drinks with other people, but this is a great step forward in restricting alcohol usage.
Dynamic Prices
During an event, certain conditions could change which could make certain consumptions less popular. Certain consumptions have to be thrown away if they aren't sold during the day, which decreases the revenue for the event organizer. A solution to this is to dynamically and automatically adjust certain prices of products. Because 1 AVT can be divided in very small parts, their should be no problem in paying non-integer amounts of AVT for certain products. When the algorithm notices that there's too much of a certain product left at a certain stage in the event, the price could automatically lower itself to encourage users to purchase the product. On the other hand, products that are too popular could automatically become more expensive to increase revenue. Of course not all event organizers want this to happen so all of this should be completely configurable.
Happy Hours
Event organizers can define certain periods of time when there's a discount on one or more specific items, much in a way like happy hours work. This can improve revenue and general attendee satisfaction.
Monetisation
Bibendum has multiple sources of revenue:
References
[1] "Can We Assess Blood Alcohol Levels of Attendees Leaving Professional Sporting Events?" http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1530-0277.2010.01386.x/abstract [2] "The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data" https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21721656-data-economy-demands-new-approach-antitrust-rules-worlds-most-valuable-resource [3] "The Event Industry’s Problem with Alcohol" http://www.eventmanagerblog.com/the-event-industry-problem-with-alcohol [4] "Alcohol Overdose: The Dangers of Drinking Too Much" https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/alcoholoverdosefactsheet/overdosefact.htm