Category: Software

Utility token vs. security token explained

Post author By Mickael Costache
Post date 03/07/2018
No Comments on Utility token vs. security token explained

Utility tokens and security tokens represent the two main categories of the ICO token. People easily get confused about their differences and use cases. I’ll go through a quick presentation of their key characteristics and dig deeper into the security token topic. Let’s highlight the benefits to investors and the trading aspect of those tokens.

The difference between a utility token and a security token

Utility tokens provide their holders with an access to the company’s services and/or products. Yet, they aren’t issued in the form of an investment asset. That means that the purchase of a utility token doesn’t have to comply with securities laws at this point. A utility token has a certain use case inside a project, but it isn’t designed as an investment. It ‘s not a company share. However, this can still be profitable In fact, the price of a utility tokens can grow over time if the demand for the service or product increases. So, buying a utility token that brings value may bring profit to its holder.

A security token is quite different. It gives its holder a right of ownership and is subject to securities regulations. In the US for example, the SEC has ruled that security tokens are subject to the same federal laws that regulate traditional securities. This brings a limit to the type of investors that can invest in security tokens. Therefore, their trading is also extremely limited and restricted.

The main problems for ICOs using utility tokens:

The rise of ICOs in the last 18 months has brought some major issues in the market. Investors are getting more and more cautious after numerous scams have been widely publicized in the media.

One other major issue has been brought to light when it comes to ICOs using utility tokens. Regulators all over the world (especially the SEC in the United States) are investigating tokens according to their actual usage, as opposed to how they were intended to be used. This is very important because a utility token might actually be considered as a security token. A very high number of ICO tokens are expected to rise in value over time. Therefore, investors are holding on to them as an investment, instead of actually using them within the project. This is where the regulators see a problem, and that’s why they consider those tokens as securities. The SEC chairman, Jay Clayton, even said: “I believe every ICO I’ve seen is a security” . Though, to be fair, he did also say that not all ICOs are scams.

This is why a lot of companies have decided not to let US-based investors invest in their ICO, or look into building a project with security tokens instead of utility tokens.

Why is a security token so appealing?

Issuing security tokens during an ICO is seen by a lot of industry professionals as more efficient and less expensive compared to using utility tokens. It reduces legal risks and brings safety for companies in the long term. On the other hand, a lot of ICOs still try to avoid using security tokens because as I mentioned earlier in this article, it brings about the restrictions about who can invest and trade the tokens, which limits the potential of fast and wide adoption.

Strong ICOs backed by very solid teams are using security tokens more and more often these days. The reason is simple – they don’t want to risk any issues with the regulator. What’s more, they often don’t have any problems raising funds from accredited investors. Plus they’re able to operate on the US market.

You’ve been warned

As we mentioned earlier, a company issuing utility tokens that are later considered as securities by the regulator could bring huge potential liabilities. So, it’s natural that founders are becoming more and more aware of this.

The bottom line is that if you are a company founder dedicating all your time and resources to building a massive business, you want to be sure that your ICO is compliant with ever-growing regulations. Otherwise, it leads to liabilities. On the same note, if you are an investor in an ICO, you’ll definitely want to invest in a token that brings you maximum protection. A regulated security token is often the best way to achieve this.

I’m not saying that utility tokens are good or bad. Or that security tokens are the best way to go. However, as a company founder or as an ICO investor, you’ll probably need to take the elements I’ve mentioned into account. Those two types of tokens have very different aims. As you could see above, security tokens are designed to represent shares of the company, while utility tokens represent access to the company’s product or service. It should also be noted that sometimes, a security token is the only way to go. For example, a lot of projects promise buy-backs of their tokens which makes them a security to the regulator.

The trading of security tokens is its major disadvantage:

The major issue with a security token is that only accredited investors can invest.
The requirements include the following. Only one of these elements needs to fulfilled):

An annual income of over $200,000 as an individual or $300,000 with a spouse.
Net assets of more than $1 million excluding the primary residence of the investor.
An institution with more than $5 million in assets.
An entity fully owned by accredited investors.

Meeting the criteria above is fairly hard for most investors. This is why a lot of companies go for a utility token: to attract the largest number of investors without being limited to their net worth or geographical location. Using a security token enables an organization to provide token holders with benefits like dividends, voting rights as well as profit shares. This is something a lot of investors are looking for. Also, a security token can still have a utility use case. It can be used within the project’s service or product as a native transaction value.

If you’re still not sure how to handle your ICO, write to me using the form below, or see my contact at the bottom of the page. I’m sure I can suggest something.

Entrepreneurship Software

From Idea to Working Prototype: Startup App Development Guide Initial Stage

Post author By Magdalena Brych
Post date 03/07/2018
No Comments on From Idea to Working Prototype: Startup App Development Guide Initial Stage

A new app is born every minute. Sometimes it is a gaming app, >or a social network, >or a business app developed to meet certain objectives. However, all these apps have one thing in common: the initial development stage. It all starts with an idea, which moves on to a strategy, and eventually it reaches the stage of a prototype, where the idea is fleshed out for the first time. In this article, we’re going to take a look at these first few steps of the app development process.

The idea

Calibrating with the development team

The first step of the app development process involves relaying information regarding your company, business objectives, target market and competition to your development team. This means that you will have to go through an initial calibrating stage, where you will provide the development team with relevant business documentation such as your business plan, pitch deck and business model canvas. A request-for-proposal is also very useful at this stage. We’ve covered this area of the development process in depth in this article.

Strategy

The previously mentioned documentation should cover the competition, but it would be useful to dig a little deeper. There are three main factors that should be taken into account when checking out a competing app: the number of installs, the ratings/reviews, and the history of the company behind the app. Most of this information can be accessed for free at the app store, and on the company website (where you will find case studies, white papers, and announcements on their blog).

Once you’ve found the top competitors within the market, you want to study their apps and see how well they address customer needs. This will help you find new niches and angles of attack, where you can provide more value through your app.

Next, you want to consider monetization. You will sometimes develop internal apps, which are meant to improve business processes such as HR, or they may be meant to mobilize the sales force. In other cases, you might want an e-commerce app, or a client-facing app meant to augment business services and act as a marketing tool. You also have a third kind of app which directly targets a segment of the market and which benefits from direct monetization.

Depending on the type of app that you end up developing, you have several monetization methods at your disposal, including in-app purchases, advertising, premium features, subscriptions, and selling user data.

You then want to take marketing into account. You will have to figure out a marketing strategy, preferably an iterative one that will allow you to increase app adoption, user retention, conversion rates, and other relevant metrics. This could mean adding an on-boarding process, push notifications and a variety of other features.
Finally, at this stage you want to consider the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). The main idea is to determine and understand your app’s key functionalities, and prioritize a list of features that will go into the MVP first.

This article presents a linear approach to executing the strategy. There’s also another way where the whole application scope doesn’t have to be tackled at once. The process is followed only for the functionalities within the scope of the MVP, then the app development starts immediately and further functionalities are iteratively added to the sketches, wireframes and prototype while the MVP may already be monetized.

Prototyping

Between the idea, and the MVP, you have the prototype. A prototype is a fleshed out version of the app’s UI, meant to test for functionality and user experience issues at a very low cost. Prototypes are perfect for iterative design and development, being less complex than an MVP.

Identify key functionality features

The first step of prototyping is to identify the key features of your app. If you’ve gone through your strategy in the previous development stage, you already have a prioritized list of features written for your MVP. This list will work here as well. Take the top 3-4 features from your list, and consider how they would be accessed and where they’d be in your UI.

Create user personas

User personas are a powerful design and marketing tool, and they are meant to represent the major user groups for your app. Your app can target many different user segments, but it’s important to categorize these segments in a way that translates into UI and functionality decisions.

For example, you’re building a productivity app that targets both 20-something young adults in college, and 40-something soccer moms looking to set a schedule for their children. The key differentiating factor between these two user groups may be the level of technological competence, or it may be the desired functionality features. By understanding your user personas, you are able to make important design decisions early on, where you have very low costs of implementation.

Sketch out the primary screens

Once the conceptual work is out of the way, it’s time to put something on paper (digital or otherwise). This is where the sketch comes in. The sketch is a perfect tool if you want to understand how elements will be positioned on the screen. Sketches are dirt cheap to create, and they can be used to get buy-ins from stakeholders, before moving forward with the app.

Turn the sketches into wireframes

Once the sketches have been approved by the stakeholders, it’s time to start the wireframing process. Wireframing is a low-fidelity representation of the UI, but it still lacks functionality. Some companies will skip the sketches and dive straight into the wireframe. However, fixing a wireframe is slightly more time consuming than fixing a sketch.

Create the prototype

Wireframes can be easily transformed into a prototype by adding basic functionality and interactivity. A prototype will help you calibrate the UI and improve the user journey. The main advantage of taking this route, instead of jumping straight into the MVP is cost saving. Each step of the way allows you to calibrate the fundamental elements of your app for a very low cost, a process which could otherwise be very expensive if complex code and design is added to the app ahead of time.

User testing and recalibrating the prototype

Once the prototype is up and running, it can be shared with stakeholders, users and investors. This is also the point where you can start the initial user testing, and calibrate the prototype to perfection. Based on user feedback, you will be able to go into the MVP with a market tested UI and UX, and start adding core functionality to your app.

Prototyping tools

There are several prototyping tools out there, which allow your team of designers to create prototypes in an expedient manner. In some cases, some of these tools are so accessible that they eliminate the need to use sketches before designing the actual prototype. Here are 5 of the most popular tools today:

Balsamiq

Balsamiq is a tool designed to build wireframes, but it has a feature which allows you to create interactive prototypes that can be used for testing and demos. The main strength of Balsamiq comes from the community, which generates a ton of content that can be used to speed up the design process. You will find assets, templates and other elements online for Android, iOS and BlackBerry.

Justinmind

Justinmind also works with wireframes, and the great thing is that any change you make on the wireframe is reflected on the prototype immediately. This tool also includes simulations for various gestures such as swipe, tap and hold, and others. To top it all off, you have access to a large library of user-generated pre-built widgets to speed up the design process.

Moqups

A free to use tool, Moqups is one of the most accessible items on this list. It has an easy-to-use interface that comes with a lot of pre-built materials such as image placeholders, sliders, and others. You will also have access to numerous templates that come with platform-specific UI elements. The only downside to this tool is that it only produces wireframes, which then have to be transferred to another tool, in order to add functionality.

Proto.io

Proto.io is a prototyping tool designed specifically for mobile applications. This tool allows you to create prototypes without any code, and it has a great feature that allows testers to add feedback as they are using the prototype. It is also very accessible. The entire prototype can be developed from a single screen, where designers add the various elements of the app and determine the interaction between them.

UXPin

UXPin is available for multiple platforms, and a wide range of resolutions. The main advantage of this tool is that it has strong version control, which makes iterative work easy. On top of that, it has useful features such as real-time commenting and editing. UXPin is the tool to use if you want an emphasis on rapid UX development.

Conclusion

In order to ensure maximum cost efficiency, and a perfect market fit, it’s best to have an initial development stage that includes prototyping and an MVP. If the development process starts with a laser focus on the target market and its needs, augmented by iterative development, the resulting app will be much cheaper to develop, and it will be much more effective at achieving business objectives.

Blockchain Software Technology

Blockchain education: Meet our meetup!

Post author By Natalia Brzozowska
Post date 18/06/2018
No Comments on Blockchain education: Meet our meetup!

We’re just wrapped up the second edition of Poznań Blockchain Meetup. While the first edition was strictly technical, this time speakers focused on more varied blockchain matters. These included legal considerations, token types and the wider perspective on blockchain design. We’re glad to promote a more well-rounded approach to blockchain education. Here are some presentations and pics from the meetup.

As the organizers, we have to say this first. Blockchain education is something important to us. And we’re so proud that our meetup is seeing such interest. We’re hopefully on the way to creating a real local ecosystem, considering that not only devs are turning up to listen to the talks. So we’re encouraging non-experts in tech to come and join us in September for #3, both as speakers and as audience.

Let’s talk about #2 first, shall we? Here’s a quick summary of the three presentations.

Blockchain education – technology

The first talk Trustless off-chain computing in DApps, was a more advanced technological tutorial. But what else can we expect from our Head of Blockchain? Only top-notch blockchain education. By the way, he’s written some great articles for our blog (about blockchain regulation or the benefits of a decentralized organization). Check them out if you’d rather read than listen. He’s also one of our blockchain training experts. Marcin demonstrated how you can retain trustlessness and data immutability while implementing applications that need a lot of computing power. Ordinarily, blockchain tends to be slow as it wasn’t designed to handle massive amounts of operations. See how he deals with those limitations here:

Trustless off chain computing on the blockchain from Espeo Software

Blockchain education – legal

The second presentation handled some legal matters. Adam Polanowski, a practicing lawyer, showed the meetup crowd how to differentiate between various types of tokens. He also spoke about the legal requirements behind ICOs. Of course, this segment of blockchain education works best in direct contact with your lawyer, however, Adam’s remarks were very helpful, and a good starting point for more in-depth considerations. Legal matters around blockchain are worth keeping up to date with, considering how much in trouble one can be in this rapidly evolving ICO landscape.

Initial Coin Offerings – legal requirements and types of tokens from Espeo Software

Back to basics

Software dev Michał Chatłas offered a wider look at blockchain design and the reasons behind using blockchain. The gist of his talk ‘Distributed, immutable, secure…’ is that there is a lot to consider before deciding on blockchain as a solution. Blockchain offers a lot – but the implementation has to be well thought-out. Take a look at his presentation – the flowcharts should be particularly helpful. Is blockchain the future? We think so. Is blockchain the future for you? See the presentation first.

Distributed, immutable, secure… from Espeo Software

Poznań Blockchain Meetup #3 plans

Make sure you don’t miss our third meetup. We’re planning it for early/mid September. Oh, by the way, you can become a speaker too – if you’ve got what it takes. Interested? Drop an email to blockchain.meetup@espeo.eu. If you’re looking for more personalized blockchain education, just so you know – we’re offering tailored blockchain training.

Software Technology

Product Design in Agile Methodology

Post author By Ariel Hajbos
Post date 06/06/2018
No Comments on Product Design in Agile Methodology

The standard design process divides the product preparation period into various phases, which (depending on what methodology was adopted) separate interface design and its implementation. The combination of both phases and the creation of the one team working in Agile methodology allows us to save time, speed up the implementation process and improve the quality of a product’s usability. This occurs when the collaborative team is competent in both design and implementation.

Not sharing either knowledge and/or experience during the completion of tasks in both these categories may result in the preparation of an interface whose implementation will cause unnecessary problems for programmers — this is the most likely and easy to avoid the problem. Similarly, the need to modify the accepted requirements of a project (due to the change in the scope or mode of application operation) increases the number of iterations and corrections at every stage of the process.

After identifying such issues in previous projects, the importance to include people with project competencies and experience in Agile methodology in the development team is obvious. Working on UX and UI applications in the scrum formula and its appropriate synchronization with the ongoing implementation at that time guarantees an immediate increase in the success of implementation and improved quality control in the visual layer.

Scrum methodology in product design — how it looks in practice

The length of the product design sprint is usually adjusted to the length of the standard development sprint. Using the same tools to manage tasks, each planning session defines project goals, their priority and amount in a given sprint for a given number of people in the project team (usually there are one to three teams, depending on the complexity and development of the project, with competences in analysis, UX and UI design and independent work organization).

The most important assumption is to plan the work of the product design team at least 1 sprint in advance to that of the development team – to which the planning and backlog grooming is most often used. Thanks to this, everyone gains a wider perspective than just their current tasks, developers gain the possibility to take an active part in the process of usability and interface design, while designers get clear feedback in the context of the feasibility of the developed projects and their usability.

Depending on the complexity of the project, the demo takes place with the help of a clickable prototype or presentation of individual components or views in the presence of the whole team. Tasks that have not been accomplished pass to the next sprint. The main goal is always to provide developers with the materials to work well in advance, including usability testing and gathering feedback from users and customers.

Client-centric design process

Synchronizing the adaptation of Agile methodology to the design process and collaborative work with the development team (but with appropriate methodologies), automatically changes the perception of the entire project. The common definition of a backlog, a lively discussion about functionality and people with different competencies focused on achieving the same goal – providing the best possible quality of implementation – is definitely a recipe for success. This unusual approach allows us to focus on details and individual components of the project at hand, and also ensures that throughout the implementation the main assumptions are remembered and a wider perspective maintained.

The use of Agile methodology in the Product Design process also has one additional advantage, which is the need for close cooperation and frequent testing of the prototype with target users. This is due to the fact that we mainly work on the creation of a UI system that will be easily adaptable for different functional scenarios, and that concentrates on understanding users to solve and satisfy their problems and needs. This approach that focuses on users guarantees that the system we develop will also be easily adaptable in other, alternative applications should there be a need to develop them (a good example here is LindaAI).

One of the interesting and most effective exercises that should be used in the analysis phase is User Story Mapping – this is regardless of whether we are working on a new product, where we focus on solving real problems of users, or we are working on a new instance of an existing project, where our goal is to make sure that our changes and introduced features have a positive impact on business indicators and user behavior.

This exercise allows us to define:

Who is the intended user/recipient of the product?
What needs to be done with the product that is being worked on?
What is the implementation of key scenarios?

The whole is done with the help of whiteboard, sticky notes and the joint work of the entire team. The actions performed by the user of our application are divided into the next steps of the project so that we get accurately mapped functional paths in the product, with selected MVP, the division into releases and the ability to easily transfer data from the analysis phase to the backlog. What is more, the effects of our work can also be used to determine the conversion hopper (by identifying the most important activities on the site), control before extending the scope during work (thanks to easy migration to the backlog) and guarantees clarity in the common understanding of the product throughout the team.

Cross-functional teams

It is worth noting that project competencies between the development and design teams are purposely reiterated throughout the duration of the project. In the phase of analysis and research, the technical insight of developers is undoubtedly a great value, which at the start limits the number of potential problems. Most often, immediately after the analysis phase, the level of project work increases, so that the development team has already started with a specific number of ready and tested design solutions and that thanks to the aforementioned synchronization throughout the implementation, the designers can deliver further modules and components for implementation. The intensity of design work usually decreases at the final stage of implementation, where designers can take care of quality control. The whole cycle is repeated for each subsequent release of the product.

We must always be ready to change priorities. The ability to analyze the visual layer and support in improving usability often requires additions to the standard scope of work in a given sprint of time, which will be used to help the development team solve current problems during implementation. Designers and analysts very often have the widest view of the project, so their competences can naturally expand – but we should always be focused on the goals defined within the sprint.

In Espeo we use the following set of tools:

• Slack as a basic communication channel inside the team (except for project meetings)

• inVision as the main tool for building prototypes of interfaces and testing them with users

• Zeplin as the main tool for the transfer of materials for the implementation of the development team

Summing up

The adaptation of the project team to Agile methodology and the creation of a collaborative work environment, where there is the smooth exchange of information, had a positive impact on the quality of implementation (not only in the visual layer).

Improving this process is the key to building a complete set of competencies in a team that is able to efficiently deliver well-prepared solutions, focused on meeting the goals set by business and solving problems faced by users.