If Facebook was the Blackberry, HowAbout is the iPhone’

19 Dec 2020 ~ Peter T'Sas ~ Leave a comment

The idea for HowAbout sprouted back in 2014. I understood where the world was heading and that confidence in governments would fade. Today, there is no question that I was right. Fraudulent elections in the US covered up by the powerful tech corporations that work together with politicians and the mainstream media press, European countries all working together to install fear among the people through a minor pandemic as a means to install an insane plan called ‘The Great Reset’ to rebuild the world – but in fact suppress people and control them similar to communist China, people in the commonwealth countries being terrorised by draconian measures presumably to stop an ex-pandemic that is actually systematically upheld by fake tests results from a test that isn’t ever made for this purpose and where the creator of the test has confirmed it is not a tool to discover contagion by a virus.
The people’s freedom is under siege. In most western countries, freedom of speech is also under attack, for which there are shocking examples that have gone viral of cases in Australia, Germany, and plenty in the UK and the US.
Finally, where censorship once was a tool for repressive regimes of both left and right, today it is also standard practice in all western countries. Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and Google all use their power and money to push a political agenda they will participate in once their president has taken his position. Technology has become the prior means for corruption.

Freedom of Speech

There is so much to say on HowAbout that it will take far too much explanation to explain all it’s facets but here are some features that matter TODAY :

– free and private speech on all levels

– private sharing on your personal timeline with selected friends

– public sharing on your personal timeline is still only visible by all your friends and nobody else

– next level sharing only in moderated topic groups including corporate and ngo groups and more, so no worldwide public sharing, and no trouble about it.

The only possible censorship is done by you on your own timeline or in a group by the moderator of that group. Feeling more relaxed yet?

Easy and intuitive sharing on all levels

Main question is ‘how complicated is it’? Well it is quite intuitive and a lot easier than making a private group on facebook, and a lot more private since facebook basically checks everything you post. Just like the iPhone, you have to rethink your behaviour when you use HowAbout the first couple of times, but very soon you will find it makes a lot more sense in many ways.

Be in charge of what you share

So how come we don’t need to read your data and sell it to companies to offer them leads and run ads on your page about stuff you were talking about with a friend – stuff you may not need at all? Because you are in charge on what you share. Once companies start to create a presence on HowAbout, you can follow them, and in return, you will allow them a to place ads on your timeline. We think it makes a lot more sense for you to have ads of stuff you like on your page. Moreover, this way your friends can see your interests and you may create a conversation this way, or even get encouraged to join you in your hobby. After all, the best advertising is still through a friend. Much better than ads for stuff you never asked for.

And just to remind you, Google and Yahoo are also reading your emails. I remember seeing ads on Facebook about a topic I sent an email on to my brother just minutes before. Frankly I was in shock. They may see it as a service, but I felt it like an intrusion in my private life. How about you?
That is why we developed a web version and a download version for professionals. HowAbout can perfectly replace email and you won’t ever get spam any more since you control who can reach you.

How come it has been quiet on HowAbout for a long time?

I tried for years to make investors understand the world needs this app. You may even wonder how a 6 year old concept still has not been out of date up to today. Well that happens when a product is not understood, when what it offers is not ‘yet’ an issue. Well it is now, and I’m ready. The other problem was there just is no simple way to explain this application in less than twenty minutes, whereas they expect you to do it in five.
Only just a few months ago I finally came up with a fitting pitch line : ‘If Facebook was the Blackberry, HowAbout is the iPhone’ : it simply just makes a lot more sense and is adapted to the society we live in today. The only ones that are not going to like it are the governments and big tech, because they will lose power over the people and money. Like it already?

Sure, the prototype needs to be updated to todays standards, and some elements may need to be added, but the final version will also have options that nobody else is offering, simply because the concept has not been copied so far, and that concept is what offers unique capabilities. So yes, a redesign is needed, but we don’t need to rethink the product. And yeah, we may have to rebrand it, but let’s face it, that is the least of our concerns. If you have a great idea for a name, let us know.

So I am looking for people who want to invest. Finishing the current design and having a fully operational product will need about 100.000 USD with launch within a year. A complete redesign and rebranding will take a more time and money, estimated 250.000 USD and release 2022. Feel free to get in touch with me.

Social Media : The Glue of Contemporary Society?

1 Aug 20183 Aug 2018 ~ Peter T'Sas ~ Leave a comment

We are all connected. Facebook looks like the glue the world needed to connect us all. Alternatives like Twitter and Linked-in and Instagram connect people in a similar way. But social media also have an ugly downside.

Facebook has taught us to like and unfriend. It has taught us to be rude or unscrupulous towards both strangers and acquaintances. It has taught us to express our political opinions and to unfriend people because of these opinions. It has even pushed teenagers to suicide. It also has helped us to retrace old friends and stay in touch over long distances, to buy or sell second hand items, to view lots of cool videos we would never have seen otherwise. To hear the latest about people you know but rarely see or to help capture a criminal. Facebook is both a threat and a blessing.

But ask yourself : How many people on facebook do you talk to and how does that compare to your total number of facebook friends. How many of your friends posts do you actually pay attention to? How many have you hidden?

Although Facebook changes its algorithm regularly you get to see about 35 percent of your friends post. In some cases that is a good thing because you don’t really want to know every meal of the day some people still post. And those who are lonely do tend trying to gain attention by posting a lot of irrelevant things. Yet surely sometimes you want to read more from valuable friends.

But that is not really what this article is about. What we are after is more protection from the negative feelings and harassment. So I want to look in into the question if there is a way to reduce the threat of social media. To create a social medium that is more protective but that still keeps you in touch with the world. It may lose a few features but if people feel a lot safer that may well be worth the while.

How do you create such a social app?

I believe the primary condition is to make it an opt-in system where you automatically select who views what every time you share something. A system where it is easy to block people but where it is unlikely that you would given the nature of the app. The people that would end up in your friend list would be those in your phonebook. That means people you actually meet up with physically or that you value enough for a personal conversation. People who respect you.

Opt-in means that you would select who you share your post with. Best way to do this would be to have groups where you can add or remove people or create new groups to your liking and just select a group to share something with. Mostly the group you shared an activity with and some people whom you want to share it with. But you are in charge. Is that technically feasible? No doubt. It is just a matter of combining functions that reduces selection processes so that the user is not bothered too much with picking who sees what and still has a feeling of control.

Another obvious question would be ‘is this commercially viable?’. Well think about it. What will drive you most to buy an item : a friend or an add? That means there is room for advertising for what a people like on their timeline so that their friends can see what they are following. I guess that answers the question mostly. Find out what they like and get their friends to see it.

Online Sales

17 Jul 201817 Jul 2018 ~ Peter T'Sas ~ Leave a comment

Ecommerce News Europe recently published an article that states that Ebay and Amazon together account for 66% of all online sales in Germany. A staggering amount although it did not surprise me since I was recently looking into Ebay’s marketshare in Europe by country and Amazon’s success in Europe is well known.

But what should we conclude from this? One might think that these giants simply have acquired a huge market share through efficient marketing but honestly that is not how I look at it. I am more inclined to think that the demand for online purchasing is there but local businesses are not involved enough in this potentially much bigger market.

The main reason for their lack of initiative is that setting up an online store is a considerable investment and it takes at least a year to achieve reasonable sales. To launch an online store brick and mortar stores need to adapt their storage facilities to small order picking and packaging. The web store may require an additional investment depending on what a company sells. Then there is the cost of marketing to draw buyers. Obviously more staff should be hired for all this and maintaining the webstore is a big job which requires an experienced manager. In Europe hiring people is quite expensive due to high taxes. Bottom line it comes as no surprise that online sales are dominated by a few big players since it really comes down to starting up a whole new department of a business.

But does that mean there is no easy and low cost way for a business to build up a marketshare online? Given the fact that 90% of all online purchases are impulse buy there sure must be. I’m thinking of an ‘easy to reach – quick to buy’ kinda system that does not offer a wide range but just the spearpoints of a range. It should be a mobile app with one product per page and a buy button and it should be easily accessible. Obviously the software should be managed externally so sellers would only need to have an account and post products but the site should be personalised to the seller.

Such a system would reduce the overall investment dramatically and make the step to achieving online sales a lot smaller for any size company without much hassle. Creating such an app may not be too hard but getting consumers to use it is quite another matter if it is not supported. How many apps on your mobile do you use at least a few times a week? Because that would be a condition to keep it alive. So companies should promote this access point to the customers and a joint marketing effort would be necessary to get such a thing going.

We have seen plenty of social media efforts but I find them mostly chaotic and more focussed on advertising than on direct sales. Communication between the user and the company also tends to be slow and very limited. And if any of those social media products would have hit a big buyers market we surely would already have heard of it by now.

So until such a product finally hits the market I foresee little change in the current state of e-commerce.

source
https://ecommercenews.eu/amazon-and-ebay-account-for-66-of-german-ecommerce/

Timing is of the Essence

19 Jun 201823 Jun 2018 ~ Peter T'Sas ~ Leave a comment

Since its conception I have been struggling to find a way to present HowAbout to investors. Or actually to everyone. For as long as I was facing this problem I didn’t go actively looking for investors but used my own money. I read that investors only give you one chance and if you are not ready, you fail and it’s gone. Therefor there was no point in trying.

One would imagine that this would have put me under strain but the truth is I never doubted that I would find investors for HowAbout. I even felt I could permit myself to put down my pen and the whole project for a year and focus on priorities in my personal life. I was stuck anyway because the product at itself is way too extensive to explain in the usual five or ten minutes that you get for your pitch. I can only refer to a previous article posted here where I rebelled against ‘contemporary pitching’.

But one thing I always have believed in is ‘time’ or better ‘timing’. Complicated as it may be to explain, I do know very well that every product has its time. There comes a day where you no longer need to do too much explaining, a day where the market calls for a your product. I can situate this with a real life example. I used to be in the Fantasy games industry and a friend of mine had created a collectible card game. We went to a few game companies but it was new and complicated and nobody wanted to stick out their neck and produce it. And since in those days there was no Kickstarter we didn’t pursue the product. But six or seven year later a few guys in Seattle came up with a collectible card game called Magic : The Gathering. The gaming world had evolved and at the moment it was released there was real need for something new. It was the right time for a collectible card game and a few years later they were all millionaires.

I strongly believe now is the time for HowAbout to take it’s next step. It is the time for investors to step in and get his thing going and make money. There are many reasons. In a previous article I wrote about privacy. That was september 2016. Look how important it is now and how Facebook is struggling to keep its customers happy with their app. They desperately try to create false security but as long as their system is opt-out it will never be private. And so HowAbout is an opt-in system. It is based on privacy yet it still offers great opportunities for companies to do marketing and get sales. HowAbout is a completely valid alternative and a much better concept for the consumer.

But there is much more. Ebay is struggling to obtain growth because their business model stands in their way and they have no idea how to address emerging markets where their concept is just a rock in a pond. Google has overstretched itself and nobody sees it or has found a way to take advantage of this. Real improvement in professional software like Outlook is nowhere to be seen. Other professional software companies don’t bother to make a mobile version of their application. It is as if half of the world’s software development is standing still due to lack of real innovative ideas. HowAbout has an answer to each of these.

Because of all this we obviously have thrown around our release schedule. We are now aiming at two big releases next year iso five spread over five years. When the market is ready you have to be ready as well.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road

29 Aug 201613 Sep 2016 ~ Peter T'Sas ~ Leave a comment

HowAbout has been a work in progress since May 2014. Although it has developed, the basic concept is still prominently there. Some parts got to play a more important role, some got a more intuitive approach, or have been given a better, more interesting functionality, like the interactive calendar and the Powwow function, which takes the possibilities of what is known as ‘a doodle’ way across its current limitations. The application has also been broken up into segments. We are now releasing MVP, with new functions to be added in the coming years, and we hope to arrive at the original full blown concept by 2020. After that; more new additions are already being investigated.

Fact is that nobody ever asks about the money. It is assumed that someone takes care of it. The shareholders, the investors, or of course the designer of the whole thing. Now frankly, it is a fact that the founders of HowAbout never really worried about money, and we honestly still don’t. The product will likely launch in November with all bills paid and as only debtor one of the founders, and we can continue this path for at least another year.

In the same context, the attentive follower of our project will have noticed that we are not following what we call the ‘Yellow Brick Road’. We have not been talking early to market representatives or investors about our project, neither have we been telling the press what we are building and how it will work, nor did we join any incubator or other start-up program. Everything has been relatively confined. Only the last couple of months, we have been quietly lifting the curtain a little on our Facebook page and now in this blog. One reason is that we are using a new intuitive interface that we don’t want other companies to introduce before we do. That by itself should be enough reason. But also, we have long time been unsure about the final design and functionalities of HowAbout, and only with the start of the programming phase itself, we were reassured that it will look great, and overall work out as planned.

At this moment we can not tell if this will end up as a problem. We sure have the experts against us, who say you can’t talk early enough about your project : awareness is key. The good side is that our open beta test phase may go relatively unnoticed, which would give us an advantage because possible competition will need some time to catch up with us. Also, HowAbout’s consumer version is free of charge, so there is a very low step-in barrier. That means a good press release could already create a large user-base if the product is good enough, so we have work to do.

On the other hand without any sizeable exposure, we are unlikely to gain explosive growth and will need a great marketing effort and convention presence to get an amount of attention worth the while. We are running the risk that by the time we are getting somewhere, a big player could release a similar product to ours with a lot more marketing, and dilute our chances of becoming a sizable market player. Fortunately however, HowAbout is not a simple concept -even though it may look like one. I guess it will depend if they estimate our product as a threat or an opportunity. If neither of them, we will stand a good chance. If any of them, in best case we get bought, in worst case our product will remain on the sidelines. Still, most importantly, nobody can stop us from making HowAbout.

Bottom line is, that we know what we are doing, and why we are doing it. We believe HowAbout is a great product that will spread by word of mouth, because it is quite unique, well designed and totally useful for everyone, with a very intuitive interface. That should be a good enough explanation for any potential investor to gain confidence, no matter we follow the Yellow Brick Road or not. Sometimes it is wiser not to follow the money in the beginning. Which application has made money the first year of its launch anyway?

Does that mean there will be ways to monetise HowAbout? Sure there are. We will tell you more when version 2.0 releases. Unless you want to become an investor of course.