ICO Alert Report: PodOne

cryptocurrency February 11, 2018

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ICO Alert Quick Facts

PodOne is a decentralized contact center network connecting businesses together
Qubicle tokens (QBE) are used for every transaction on the platform
1 Ether = 3000 QBE during pre-ICO; ends February 15, 2018 at 12 a.m. EST
1 Ether = 1500 QBE during ICO; ends March 31, 2018 at 12 a.m. EST
Recommended by John Mcafee

What is PodOne?

We’re a virtual network of on-demand contact center professionals that exists for the sole purposes of reducing labor costs and optimizing staff time, providing self-employment opportunities to individuals world-wide, and increasing the quality of service provided to customers in a call/contact center environment. We are truly ushering in the next evolution of contact centers as we know them today.

— Marlon Williams, CEO of PodOne

Q&A

ICO Alert: How does the Qubicle token (QBE) function within the platform and why is it needed?

Marlon Williams, CEO: As anyone working in a call center will tell you, keeping customer service agents motivated via incentives is a key function of delivering quality customer care. Of course, there are key performance metrics that must be met such as first call resolution (was the call handled on the first try?), average handle time (how long is it taking for calls to be handled?), conversions and upsells, and more. In PodOne, top performers will be rewarded with Qubicles for meeting their performance goals. To help foster an environment of accountability, however, the inverse is also true — negative performers will be penalized for having sub-par stats. In theory, agents could end up with negative Qubicle balances on their profiles as a result.

Qubicles will also be used to pay agents for completing their work and provide a means in the PodOne Wallet to allow immediate withdrawals to fiat. Additionally, when courses are created or taken in PodOne University, or profiles are published in the marketplace, users will be charged a transaction fee in Qubicles to complete their transaction.

ICO Alert: What competition does PodOne have? What makes PodOne better than its competitors?

Marlon Williams, CEO: In its current form and industry, PodOne has no direct competition. The traditional work-at-home call centers such as the brick-and-mortar LiveOps are the closest thing to a PodOne competitor, although they stand to benefit from utilizing a platform like ours.

ICO Alert: What is the context of the call center business and what does PodOne stand to gain for disrupting it?

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Marlon Williams, CEO: Call centers are responsible for handling customer support, sales, and service issues in most organizations — they are the lifeblood of many organizations and play a critical role in customer acquisition, retention, and success. As more and more of purchases move online, however, this translates into higher interaction volume (calls, chats, etc) for the call center. PodOne is in a unique position to become the virtual contact center of the future for every sales, support and customer service organization in the world.

ICO Alert: What is Idle Time in relation to this project and the Idle Time Resource Pool? How are companies incentivized to have their employees to do this, and how easy is it for employees to hop in and out of the Idle Time Pool?

Marlon Williams, CEO: Idle time occurs when customer service agents are sitting at their desks in a capacity to handle customer interactions, whether that’s responding to a support email, accepting an incoming call, or responding to a live chat request, but isn’t doing so. In most cases, it’s due to a lack of interaction volume; in many others, it’s due to the agents themselves. The Idle Time Resource Pool is a function of PodOne that allows employers to continue generating revenue by systematically accepting work on behalf of other customers. It’s extremely flexible too — agents can go in and out of the Resource Pool after every call, email, or chat.

ICO Alert: What is the Fenero cloud-based contact center software within PodOne and why is it important?

Marlon Williams, CEO: Every call center needs its underlying infrastructure technology in order to function. This typically consists of incoming call routing and queueing, outbound dialers, interactive voice response (IVR), live chat, reporting and analytics, call recording and much more. Fenero is such a platform — it’s a 100% cloud-based contact center platform that’s at the core of many call centers worldwide.

PodOne will be tightly integrated into the Fenero platform for real-time statistical and performance data. The PodOne/Fenero integration will allow questions and decisions such as the following to take form: is Bob on a call right now for Company A? If not, send him a call from Company B; did Alice meet her first call resolution and average handle time performance goals for Week 1? If so, award her a 0.01QBE reward and increase her profile’s quality ratings.

With its API, PodOne will also, eventually, be integrated with Fenero competitors.

ICO Alert: Are there baseline skills, etc. that exist for people to participate in the PodOne network, or can anyone join? If anyone can join, is there risk of bad actors or unprofessional help on the platform?

Marlon Williams, CEO: Anyone can join. However, in order for them to actively participate and accept work, they must go through the qualification process established by each employer via PodOne University. The Qubicles Ratings Engine is our method of enforcing accountability within the network, rewarding great performers and penalizing underperformers or bad actors.

ICO Alert: How is PodOne making a difference for individual users and how is the community being created? With such a business to business focus is there risk that a community will be difficult to build?

Marlon Williams, CEO: A reliable technology infrastructure, skilled workforce, and client campaigns are the three core things required in order to launch a call center. PodOne is giving individual users the opportunity to become their own call center, and the autonomous nature of the platform facilitates payments for work completed or performance goals met without the traditional one-sided dispute resolution commonly found in many centers.

Our QBE user growth pool will be used to help foster growth within the customer service agent community, incentivizing them to join the network. However, we must first focus on our low hanging fruit by addressing the idle time issue for businesses. This will be an excellent demonstration of the capabilities of the PodOne product, which we believe will further attract the community.

ICO Alert: How far along is the project today and when can contributors expect to use the platform? What does the roadmap look like for the rest of 2018 and 2019?

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Marlon Williams, CEO: We’re in the design phase for the user experience component of the platform, while our private Ethereum-based blockchain and custom API have already been completed. By the end of 2018, we expect to have PodOne in a beta production capacity within the operations of several existing Fenero clients — three of which has already agreed to be early adopters. In 2019, expect a much larger rollout and consumer-focused push for PodOne.

ICO Alert: As a non-PodOne question, we like to ask for unique predictions for the ICO and cryptocurrency space in the future. Where do you see both in the next 3–5 years?

Marlon Williams, CEO: We expect regulation to further tighten for ICOs while cryptocurrencies in general will continue to flourish with little fear, uncertainty, and doubt around a U.S. government-led shutdown campaign. Within the next 3–5 years, ICOs will be fully regulated and, as such, much more formalized and defined in their processes; more countries will create their own digital currencies; and exchanges will also see an increase in class action lawsuits and tighter scrutiny overall.

Pre-ICO Information
The first phase of the ICO began on January 15, 2018 and ends on February 15, 2018 at 12 a.m. EST. For every one Ether contributed, participants will receive 3,000 Qubicle tokens (QBE) for an equivalent of a 100% bonus.

In order to participate, users must agree to terms of the sale. At this point, the contribution address will be presented with purchase instructions. There is a minimum contribution amount of .10 Ether and a minimum gas limit of 200,000. There is a target contribution amount of 45,000 Ether and a soft cap (minimum sale goal) of 1,000 Ether.

ICO Information
The ICO phase (Phase 2) begins on March 1, 2018 at 12 a.m. EST and ends March 31, 2018 at 12 a.m. EST. For every one Ether contributed during this phase, participants will receive 1,500 QBE tokens.

QBE tokens are ERC-20 tokens so a compatible ERC-20 wallet must be used during contribution. Ether is the only form of contribution accepted, and should only be sent from an ERC-20 compatible Ethereum wallet.

Token Distribution Information
According to the PodOne whitepaper, “Qubicles are used as the native token for the PodOne network’s protocol and allow holders to post requests for assistance, receive payments and rewards for work performed, and create, use, or receive payment for content courses.”

QBE tokens are ERC-20 and there are a total of 100,000,000 QBE tokens being created.

The full token allocation is as follows:

70% — Token Sale
20% — Reserve held by the company
10% — Bounties and user growth/reward pools

Use of ICO Proceeds
According to the PodOne whitepaper, proceeds from the two ICO phases will be used to fund the development of the PodOne network. Specifically, proceeds will be used to recruit software developers to execute the vision of PodOne and to hire growth marketers to promote PodOne to the contact center and freelancing industries. A further breakdown can be seen below: