3 Things: Metaverse Tour Guides, Infrastructure Accelerator, Crypto CAPTCHA
Happy Sunday and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotion so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:
Metaverse Tour Guides
Infrastructure Accelerator
Crypto CAPTCHA
1. Metaverse Tour Guides
For as long as people have been traveling for pleasure and business or visiting historical sites and museums, there have been guides whose job it was to sphephard travelers. Dating all the way back to 3000 BC, the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, and Persians had “explainers” who helped assist travel across land and water. During the Middle Ages, religious pilgrims employed guides as pathfinders and escorts. During the Renaissance (1500-1700 AD), the affluent began traveling for cultural reasons and were accompanied by “cicerone” who gave them information about touristic places to go and sightsee. The first official tour company went into business in England in 1758, and is still in business today. Pleasure travel became popular in Europe during the 1840s and by the 1850s, railroad tours became common. Many modern tour operators have their roots as ticket agents for steamships and railroads where they sold tickets, developed itineraries, and handled accommodations for affluent clients. Today, many startups are betting on travel bouncing back post-pandemic and are focusing on younger demographics who care about personalization and experiential travel.
With some of the largest companies in the world placing huge bets on the Metaverse, you’re going to continue to hear more and more about this buzzy topic. The fact that it doesn’t involve getting on an airplane and staying in a hotel can dramatically expand the base of people who can “travel” both for price and logistical reason. Just like the physical world, there are a seemingly unlimited number of places and spaces to explore in the metaverse and even knowing what exists and what might pique your interest is a challenge. For the uninitiated, it will be extremely daunting to figure out how to navigate this new landscape so a new crop of “guides” could help people discover and explore. With advances in AR and VR, there will also be hardware components to learn in addition to just traversing the virtual worlds. These guides could provide a variety of offerings and serve different functions. They could be employed to take you on a timeboxed tour of a space within the virtual world, just like you’d hire someone to take you around Angkor Wat for a few hours. You could have a guide take you for a day to explore a virtual city, just like you’d do if you were traveling to Paris for the first time. The companies could also offer services and accessories like selling VR headsets, helping you with setup (both hardware and accounts), and much more.
2. Infrastructure Accelerator
On November 15th, President Biden signed a bipartisan $1 Trillion infrastructure bill that is aimed at revitalizing America’s infrastructure including roads, bridges, railways, and broadband internet coverage. There is also $73B earmarked for power infrastructure, over $100B for clean drinking water and water storage, and $21B for pollution removal. This unprecedented spending will add 1.5 million new jobs a year for the next 10 years and help deliver clean water to every American family, ensure universal access to high-speed internet, and repair the hundreds of thousands of miles of roads/railways and 45k bridges that are in disrepair. There is a large component that will be invested in public transit, ports and airports to improve our supply chain. Finally, a massive amount of money will be poured into climate change and adverse weather events touching everything from fires, floods, and droughts to increasing the number of EVs and electric buses.
Entrepreneurs should be drooling over the opportunities that this bill brings. Whether you are focused on construction, agtech, climate change, supply chain, energy, electric vehicles, water, or internet infrastructure, there is now a $1T pool of capital that will get funneled into companies solving some of the most pressing infrastructure challenges facing the US. Timing is perfect to create an incubator or accelerator focused on companies who are targeting one of the areas covered in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Creating strong relationships with entities in Washington DC as well as the old school behemoths in each industry could provide tremendous value to portfolio companies and help them access the available funding and win contracts. Cohort based programs like Y Combinator could allow founders to help each other and offer the ability to do demo days that showcase each of the companies in the batch to partners, customers, and downstream investors. The batches can be broken up by category to ensure the most relevant content and relationship building opportunities.
3. Crypto Captcha
CAPTCHA, the annoying, ubiquitous popup that is constantly trying to verify that you aren’t a bot, is actually an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". I guess that just doesn’t roll off the tongue in the same way 😂. The concept was first created in 1997 at AltaVista (though a group of engineers from Carnegie Mellon led by Luis von Ahn typically gets credited) and first started seeing commercial use in 2000 when idrive.com used it to protect it’s signup page. In 2001, Paypal used CAPTCHA tests as part of it’s fraud security system which helped popularize the concept. Pretty quickly, an underground industry of CAPTCHA farms cropped up, especially in poor countries, where workers were paid pennies to solve CAPTCHA puzzles. As a response to this, von Ahn recognized the opportunity to take advantage of millions of people’s time/energy completing CAPTCHA puzzles and launched reCAPTCHA in 2007 where users would be asked to translate images of real words and numbers from archival texts. Google acquired the company in 2009 and began using the technology to transcribe old books. In 2018, recognizing that a computer could beat almost any reCAPTCHA, Google shifted to noCAPTCHA reCAPTCHA that invisibly watches a user’s behavior and then asks you to check a box at the end saying “I am not a robot”.
In the new world of crypto, users are incentivized and compensated for doing all kinds of things such as playing games like Axie Infinity, writing on Steemit, contributing to open source projects on Gitcoin, or even just browsing the web in the Brave browser. Much of the vision of Web3 is to put the power back in the hands of individuals and appropriately compensate them for their time, data, attention, and labor. By connecting a crypto wallet and having the pseudonymous identification, you can get around the ability for bots to beat the CAPTCHAs and go back to having users complete puzzles. Whether it is helping to translate text, identifying objects for data labeling (necessary for building machine learning models), or other useful applications that require a human brain, users who are doing various activities on the internet already could help provide a layer of security, do simple work, and earn tokens in return.
That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please share with a friend or two!
~ Elaine