October 2018
Dear Blue Whale Fan-mily,
Our strong team of seasoned in-house developers is happy to announce the upcoming release of the Blue Whale Network’s Alpha products in October of this year.
We have two products lined up for release: a SaaS solution for small businesses, and an offline-to-online (O2O) marketplace.
Payroll & Payment
Freelancers and the self-employed often go on to run small businesses. These small businesses form the backbone of most economies; accounting in most cases for nearly half of GDP, and the lion’s share of employment.
Our goal at Blue Whale is help the self-employed. We’ve developed a revolutionary new suite of software-as-a-service (SaaS) tools — we call it “Splash”. The new SaaS suite consists of two key components:
- Payroll
- Payment
Payroll. When we talked to our customers, we found that one of the major challenges that small business owners struggled with was human resource management. Hiring a bunch of friends to help out isn’t quite as easy as it seems. Taxes have to be filed, workdays have to be counted, employee records have to be kept meticulously, itemized payslips have to be generated and sent to employees, and compulsory contributions to social security funds or other employee pension funds have to be made. These all differ according to state and national labor laws.
Splash takes care of all that.
When small businesses, and the self-employed use Splash, the system manages all of those functions automatically for them. Every quarter, they deposit a certain amount of money budgeted for salary payouts, and we take care of the rest.
What’s more, after we pay out their employees, the Blue Whale Foundation also rewards these small businesses and self-employed individuals in Blue Points — which are convertible to BWX tokens.
Payment. Point-of-Sales (POS) solutions are also incredibly important to small businesses and the self-employed. To date, we haven’t had significant adoption of cryptocurrencies in the real economy. Part of the reason for that is the sheer hassle of setting up digital wallets, checking transaction statuses and account balances.
With Splash, small businesses and the self-employed now have a POS system that seamlessly integrates with secure wallets to accept and disburse payments in crypto, as well as fiat currencies.
Not only that, Splash will enable them to run in-store promotions, and track daily revenue through the app.
We’re planning to test out the Alpha version of the payment system with vendors at various events we’ll be co-hosting with Design House — Korea’s leading design publication. Vendors and customers will be able to transact through Splash’s POS and Payment solutions.
O2O Marketplace
Not only do we take care of payroll management, and POS for small businesses and the self employed, but we also help to bring all of these largely offline businesses onto a common online marketplace.
All small businesses and individual sellers who use Splash to manage their Payroll and Payment needs will be also on-boarded onto this online marketplace, which helps to improve their discoverability.
This also provides us with the platform with which we can test out our Decentralized Ad Network (DAN), where people are rewarded in cryptocurrency for driving traffic and sales to individual sellers and small businesses on the marketplace.
For instance, a bakery who uses Splash to manage its payroll and also for its POS system will also be listed on the Splash Marketplace. Say I visit that bakery, and purchase a Truffle Cheese Scone which I really like. I post a review on my Instagram, letting all my followers and friends know about this undiscovered gem. I get rewarded in Blue Points — which are convertible to BWX, for driving traffic to that bakery. I get to spend those points the next time I go back to the store for more scones.
We’re excited for the Alpha Release of Splash’s SaaS suite for small businesses, and the setting up of the O2O marketplace. We’re aiming to introduce and test these at the end of the year with our partners, and with real-life users.
We thank each and every one of our contributors who’ve made this project possible so far, and we hope you’ll stay with us for the exciting months to come!
