Project Appleseed

OceanDAO Round 3
#1

Key Project Data

  • Mission: To introduce Ocean Protocol and the decentralized Ocean Data market to students, universities, and local hospitals linked with the universities in the USA and to onboard them to the Decentralized Data Economy.
  • Name of the project: Project Appleseed
  • Website: (coming soon)
  • Proposal Wallet Address: 0x07cb12A11b67407b3Ac90B3989AB5281d0B3Ee73
  • The proposal in just one sentence: By grabbing just a share of the large university admissions data niche, Ocean Protocol would not only generate millions in revenue annually, but it would also be spreading awareness to incoming freshmen [with their entire financial futures ahead of them] and to Universities [many of which have working relationships with local hospitals].
  • Proposal Category: Outreach, Spread Awareness

Project Overview
The admissions data niche alone is estimated to be worth around one hundred million dollars annually with many analysts expecting this number to rise in the coming years. This is a perfect market to target with an outreach effort because we are introducing ocean protocol to universities and young college students. High school students would publish their grades, test scores, age, demographic information, race, ethnicity, and anything else they want. These data can then be collected into larger databases that are searchable by gender, GPA, location, ethnicity, etc. The more data the students publish, presumably the more valuable their reward. Now the student can get paid for their data. For the student, if a data pool you are a part of gets purchased, you get a part of sale. This will prove to be a superior outreach device for universities compared with the junk mail approach. As a student wouldn’t you be more likely to research a college that used your data because they were interested in students like you. Or a school that paid you $5 in a cryptocurrency that has gone up 20% in the past month instead of sending junk mail like hundreds of other colleges? For the colleges, the very act of buying the same data they already buy will now double as targeted outreach.

What problem is your project solving? and How does this project drive value to the Ocean ecosystem?

  • The absence of incentives to students as well as universities to share their important (and sometimes private) data on public platforms. One student fills out the same tedious application on at least 15 universities websites and pays application fees. In return, the student gets nothing but a thousand emails from random universities and hence, struggles to find the best-fit university. We will help these students realize that their data is worth some money. They can also find their best-fit universities through Ocean Protocol.
  • Universities spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on buying random lists of students, on hiring people to filter out the list, on hunting for top-notch students, and keeping their profile high and well-rounded. They also fill out long and tedious surveys to different websites every year to show their profile. They spend a huge amount of money in buying data (and struggle to buy private data) from different platforms for their research departments and Ph.D. students. Instead of buying a large amount of random data, they can buy only the specific data that they need from the Ocean data market, saving time and money.
  • Universities can be the data supplier too. They can upload their data coming from their different departments including financial, loan, admission, medical, grades and more.
  • University Data Science departments can work with partnering Hospitals to train Ai models on private patient data without violating the patients’ privacy.
  • With the data they will find in the Ocean market, admissions can better understand the digital breadcrumbs students follow during the college search process. The pinpoint accuracy of data-driven marketing might shove aside old-fashioned name-buying among colleges.
  • Why should we target universities? According to The New York Times, in 2010, 1200 universities in the USA bought 80 million names. Now, it is 2021! They should use the big data in the Ocean data market to target and personalize their outreach. Higher ed is just a few years behind other businesses that discovered years ago that direct marketing is expensive.

ROI:

Each year, there are around 2 million freshmen students across American universities. If just 4% sold their data on the ocean, that is 80,000 students. These student profiles average 50 cents each on current markets. If 60 universities purchased these data sets, that is $2,400,000 annually. I would like to stress that it is only the American market.

2,000,000 OCEAN * .02 = 40,000 OCEAN; 4.0 ROI
Annual Chance of success: 35%
ROI = 1.4

Project Deliverables - Category

Advocate for adoption through internet marketing and through personal contacts at universities.

Project Deliverables - Roadmap

Q2 2021 - Create Digital Assets such as whiteboard video and a 5 second YouTube ad video.
Q3 2021 - Run social media ads as well as getting crypto media to cover this push.
What happens beyond this is a result of the success of the initial market push and
the state of the markets.

Team Members:

Shruti Gupta

Danny Kosco

2 Likes
#2

Johnny Appleseed spent his days walking through the Ohio Valley planting seeds which would bear fruit for decades to come. With project appleseed, Shruti and I (Danny) will use our contacts in higher education in the area as well as produce content targeted at prospective college student to encourage admissions data to be bought and sold on Ocean Protocol.

Vote for Project Appleseed and start getting colleges and students on Ocean Protocol!