From: Logan Streondj To: Speakable Programming for Every Language Cc: Bcc: Subject: Business Plan Reply-To: In-Reply-To: One of the main issues with Libre Software projects is that they aren't monetized. For instance until recently SSL the encryption that powers the internet was done full time by one guy, and a few other part-time contributors, similarly GPG or the main public encryption in emails available for Windows, MacOSX and Linux was being maintained by one guy on a survival sallary. Obviously that is not sustainable. Thus there needs to be a business plan right from the start, of how this will be monetized. It is a powerful technology, with much potential, but if not applied as a business it wont succeed. After doing some Industry Analysis I've come up with several options. BTW, this is a non-profit, so gross-profit is margin, and net-profit is surplus, which can be fed into expansion, savings or charity. 1. Translation Services 2. Computer Training 3. Management Software 4. Crypto Coin, Distributed Autonomous Corporation 5. Fabless Semiconductor Company 1. Translation Services NAICS 541930 Translation and Interpretation Services NAICS 561410 Document Preparation Services Mostly I think of this as one thing people can do with their certificate, which is help companies prepare documents to be very precise and be available in many languages. Though we could also do it to start with. Administrative Support Services gross margin 65%, net surplus 6-10%, admins 0.5-8%, sallary/wages per translator 20-30%. (bizstats.com) Translation services is a 5 billion dollar market and growing, due to an increasing number of international companies and immigrants. The biggest clients are Government and Legal, which need high precision translation to and from those they do business with. http://www_ibisworld.com/industry/default_aspx?indid=1446 Assuming we manage to achieve a passable level for the naturalized output, we could start by offering translation for small businesses product labels, instructions and policy documents. Eventually as quality improves can do legal and government translation services. 2. Computer Training NAICS 611420 Computer Training It would be a MOOC (Massively Online Open Courseware), offering courses online, main revenues through: supervised-testing, official-certificates, and live-tutoring. Education has gross margins of around 90% net surplus around 11%. Officers (admins) are paid 2-12%, and sallary(teachers) 18-30% from-source bizstats.com (note includes public education). Business and IT certification is a 3 billion dollar market, however due to increased college enrollment, it is shrinking. http://www_ibisworld.com/industry/default_aspx?indid=1536 so we'd have to focus on legitimizing MOOC in foreign-language and developing countries without access to easy education, their funds are limited so would need mass numbers, via mobile apps and micro payments. Also, current MOOC offerings are largely from esteemed universities, so we'd either have to integrate them or offer something better. For instance offering life skills rather than academic ones. Current issues with MOOC include low completion rates, so need to offer micro-courses, socializing, practical application or other incentives. 3. Management Software NAICS 511210 Software Publishers such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Red Hat have gross margins of 90%, net surplus of 16-35%, admins 1-11% wages are 20-40%. Market revenue is 196 billion, with 5% annual growth. The target market would be 551114 Corporate, Subsidiary, and Regional Managing Offices AKA Holding Companies that Manage, such as Berkshire Hathaway. Holding Companies are the most lucrative business, with gross profits of over 99%, net profits between 180%-10,000%. Typically they have at least millions, or billions of dollars, and are sometimes valued in trillions. So they have a lot of money to spend on products to make their lives easier. The buying of companies is now automated by AI's, but the managing is still done by flesh and blood. The goal would be to make software to automte company officers. The easiest once the translation software, and language training is up and running would be the main function of the chair/presidint-officer/president/speaker-of-the-house who typically just follows Robert's Rules or another parlimentary authority to manage a meeting. Next would be the Secretary, who makes notes of the meetings, gives summaries to shareholders or board of directors, and possibly posts policies or other things online or for employees. Hardest would probably be the treasurer, a semi-autonomous accounting software. Benefits of using automated officers include: lack of self-interest, smaller or no bonoses, ability to quickly check policy conformance, absolute loyalty and more profit for shareholders. While the software core would be libre software to insure that security bugs are patched immediately, the bulk of the cost of setting up and maintaining the officers will be the data that drives them. Such as the particular rules and policies of the organization and country, which could eventually be data-mined to remove human data entry. 4. Crypto Coin, Distributed Autonomous Corporations In the open source world, much like the real world, those with the most money are the bankers, in this case the cryptoCoin-bankers. 522110 Commercial Banking The world Global Commerical Bank market is 2 trillion, growing at 4.5%. Most of their business consists of loans with interest. though Crypto-Currency markets generally do very little lending, are more of a speculators market, like stocks, and hedge funds. Global Investment Banking market is 279 billion, shrinking at 2.6%. Bitcoin, by far the largest cryptocurrency market is about 7 billion. I say it is like a stock or share, because people tend to buy them in bulk when a cryptocoin goes public, as an investment, in case they become more expensive later on, and thus they'd be able to sell at a gain. Cryptocurrency projects with little more than a whitepaper can raise millions. For instance MaidSafe raised 5 million in 2006 and they are still in pre-alpha or something, raised another 5.5 million last spring. More recently in 2014 Ethereum (a contract language cryptocurrency) generated a lot of hype and did some funding: " The sale lasted for 42 days, and resulted in the Ethereum project receiving 31,591 BTC of revenue" equal to about 7.4 million USD. Ethereum has some proof-of-concept code at this time. So if we somehow make SPEL into a cryptocurrency, we could get some pretty serious funding. The new buzzword that has been going around the cryptocurrency world is DAC and DAO (Distributed Autonomous Organization or Corporation). "is a decentralized network of narrow-AI autonomous agents which perform an output-maximizing production function and which divides its labor into computationally intractable tasks (which it incentivizes humans to do) and tasks which it performs itself" from-source wikipedia. the ideal network for it would be one that offers cloud services, such as storage and processing, along with web hosting and a marketplace. That way an autonomous agent could live and work within the network. Similarly so could a distributed autonomous organization, which could also pay dividends to it's share holders, in this case it may be the hosters or peers giving it storage and processing power.