The Friend Marketplace and Store
If you have read our whitepaper, you will know that we are working on embedding a marketplace in Friend — the Friend Store. It is a central component to our business model as well as a great example of how we intend to unify the various technologies and apps that are available online. It is all about making new web based technologies and dApps easy to distribute, access, use and monetize.
The Friend Network is going to have a rich API for transactions and distribution of apps and services. Here, anyone can build their own mini stores and implement (micro) payments in their own solutions.
For most users, a central depot where they can collect and organize their software catalog is assumed as a basic feature in a desktop environment. This is why we have started building the Friend Marketplace — a precursor to our Friend Store (again, see our whitepaper).
In the Friend Marketplace, you will be able to search, install and manage your applications and services in Friend. This is a central hub for your Smartphone, Tablet and PC apps (and in the near future, VR). It is a shopping center, repository and application launch center in one package. Additionally, you will be able to connect to other users as well as the application authors, and link them to your Friend Chat contact list.
It is important for us to give users a way to participate in and help build communities around applications or services listed in the Marketplace. This way, we can facilitate for good relationships and feedback loops between developers and their users — as seen in many other open source projects. In a couple of months, we will start connecting all of this to Ethereum (in tune with our whitepaper and roadmap). And once this is completed, the Friend Store will start to come to life.
At the moment, the Friend Marketplace contains only free apps. But this is about to change. As our project is unfolding, we will start introducing payment solutions.
The Friend Marketplace app allows for merchant registrations. This enables commercial vendors to sell their apps, in FIAT (traditional money) first, then in Tokens (digital currency) later. We have collected a few fresh partners that will start offering Windows applications in the next few months. This will be the first time we start offering users access to our Remote Application technology; Liberator.
In the following months, the Friend Marketplace beta will offer applications in all software categories. Users will be able to choose from both Web applications as well as fully integrated native apps (Windows, Linux, etc..) using Liberator. This will allow us to prime the community as we prepare for the autonomous, Blockchain based Friend Store later this year. It will also allow us to transition our “demo” server (friendsky.cloud) into becoming a full-blown and international cloud solution where you can work, play, build and distribute solutions from any device, from anywhere in the world.
