Vuulr Update #02 — An exhilarating & busy January
The Vuulr team have been busy boys and girls since my last post and we feel like we’re in a really good place for an ICO going public in mid-Q2.
Here are some of the milestones we’ve accomplished since the New Year:
Funding
· Main effort of seed round completed Oct — Dec 2017; almost 2x our original targets
· Now entering ICO Private Pre-Sale phase, inviting institutional investors and family offices (please buzz us if you are interested)
Appointments
We are happy to have made the following appointments since the year started. This will greatly help us propel the ICO in the right direction and speed
· Legal (OC Queen Street LLP) and Tax advisors (BDO) for our ICO
· Accountants/auditors (Thong & Lim)
· FinTech PR firm to push industry announcements (Bowlah PR. See below)
· Brand and UI/UX design agency (UltraSuperNew)
· Staff: new appointment of David Holloway. As a former music & entertainment lawyer and company director, David is helping us with company processes, compliance etc… and the important job of keeping the lawyers/tax advisors on their toes. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes…!
Advisors
We are blessed to have a great team of advisors behind us, I’ll be introducing some of them in every post. Here are two of our early ambassadors!
Rob has recently left his position as Managing Director of the Walt Disney Company SEA and brings 20+ years of broadcaster experience. He is also a Board Member of the iMDA, Singapore’s Infocomm Media Development Authority) and the Chair of the Singapore Media Festival, which includes the Asia TV Forum, Asia’s leading content rights trading fair. As an active adviser, Rob’s insights have already added tremendous value to many aspects of the business and he has offered to work with us in-house more and more to help us accelerate the business.
Andras is our Blockchain Architect and ICO Advisor. He is working closely with Chris, our CTO, to design and build our token ecosystem and smart contracts on Ethereum. Andras is an early Blockchain developer investor and adopter, his Blockchain experience encompasses Yojee (as CTO), COSS (ICO Advisor), HelloGold, DDF and Change Bank. Needless to say he’s a fantastic asset to the Vuulr team.
Tech
I’m happy to share that we are on our 3rd development sprint for the Vuulr marketplace MVP! We will be sharing the prototype soon (exciting!) once we get the frontend UI/UX designs worked on. You’ll definitely get to see it as our ICO goes live.
Business Partnerships
We are now partners with the 3 key players that will form the Vuulr Foundation (our Supply Chain that will oil the marketplace engine):
EIDR (Entertainment ID Registry)
We have joined EIDR as an official member! We will now be able to assist content owners in Asia to get an EIDR registration… and thereafter get standardised unique identifiers for film and TV assets, in turn sync-ing Asian content owners with a global marketplace (EIDR numbers are being mandated by the likes of Google and Amazon for their stores… with these 2 behind standards too, adoption will follow very quickly!)
EMA (Entertainment Merchant’s Association)
We are now also the official partners of EMA, whose standard specifications are currently used by major Hollywood players. Vuulr will be representing them to form EMA Asia across China, Japan, South Korea, South Asia and Southeast Asia. This piece of news has been publicised on EMA channels. We will be making an official announcement in Asia very soon too! (Industry partners, sign up now! We’ll be sharing the full plan after our ICO).
The EMA partnership was concluded during a trip — to Los Angeles and Las Vegas — at the EMA Digital Forum and the vast tech show, CES. 150 key players from the industry attended, including senior management from Apple, Amazon, Google Play*, Disney and Lionsgate etc. They all gave us a thumbs up to the Vuulr business and their doors are now wide open for us.
* Google mentioned the pain points they experienced in managing Avails Data and that they would love a “single, international, shared document” for this purpose… this was before we explained the Vuulr proposition. They’re converted!
All for now. Thanks for reading and we’ll come back to you with more updates at the end of February.
As we near Chinese New Year, from our desks in the heart of the festivities in Chinatown and multi-cultural Singapore, we wish you…
Cheers/Ben
Ben Flint is the Chief Operating Officer of Vuulr. Connect with Ben on his Linkedin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/benheyhoeflint/
