A blockchain use case: Unlocking ‘Dead Capital’

Dead capital is made up of assets that are not recognized in the financial economy. It is an economic term used to describe property which has no legal recognition.

It is a world where the ownership of assets is difficult to trace
and validate. It is governed by no legally recognizable set of
rules; where the assets’ potentially useful economic attributes
have not been described or organized; where they cannot be used
to obtain surplus value through multiple transactions because
their unfixed nature and uncertainty leave too much room for
misunderstanding, faulty recollection and reversal of agreement.
Where most assets, in short, are dead capital.

Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital

Agriculture is not just a food-producing industry. It is the backbone of the
rural livelihood system and a major source of employment. Moreover, smallholder farmers fill the major share of the global food production.

But, many rural farmers may not even have a savings account. They are located in remote areas and are not high income earners. Banks find it inconvenient and costly to provide services to those unbanked.

Sharing Economy

We know that people have been sharing and bartering since the earliest civilizations began. So, there is nothing innovative about farmers sharing their tools and we letting our friends to stay over at our place for a night or two. These have more to do with sharing and nothing in terms of business.

It’s different when people do similar things with strangers for a fee. Technology has delivered ease of use and convenience for organizing a wide range of peer-to-peer commercial exchange that has given birth to Airbnb, Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit and many more.

Uber and Lyft, for example, enable individuals to turn their own cars into taxis. These individuals have the liberty to decide when to drive and for how long. For some of them it’s a gig and for many others it’s the main source of income. Airbnb enables residential property owners to turn their properties into hotels and TaskRabbit is your errand boy.

OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap is an open initiative to create and provide free geographic data such as street maps to anyone who wants them.
– OpenStreetMap Foundation

Maps and location data has become big business. GPS equipped consumer products such as cars and mobile phones are ubiquitous. The company that has the most complete geographic data becomes the sought after source of location based information. That company has been Google with it’s Google Maps service. There is also no lack of competitors to it’s maps business.

Lean Start-Up and Lean UX Design

Lately I’ve been coming across the terms “Lean Start-Up” and “Lean UX”. It seems like these are a set of concepts and tool sets that have been developed as a result of experiences in the fast phased tech start-up world. Generally the core idea in these is to rapidly iterate and re-iterate development of an application, UX design or a business model to make improvements based on customer feedback. This is to speed up the delivery of the end product that meets the customer needs or fine tune a business model to succeed while actively improvising. It looks like even an automotive company like Tesla has adopted such ideas. Two leaders of these ideas are Steve Blank and Jeff Gothelf.

Steve Blank

• Steve Blank introducing “Lean Start-Up”
• His article on Harvard Business Review

Jeff Gothelf

• His talk on “Lean UX”