Arcona: Empowering Augmented Reality with Blockchain

We have already had a chance to come across several projects where blockchain helps unleash the potential of other new, as well as less recent, technologies. Arcona is another project in this row aiming to get the most of augmented reality (AR).

Arcona aims to provide businesses and individuals with the opportunity to use popular spots for advertising and showcasing their work, products, and suggested changes to the real world. These hip locations are typically already overloaded with real-world ads and objects, and advertising cost is very high. Arcona promises to solve this problem by marrying blockchain and AR.

Key Features

Arcona Ecosystem

The Arcona ecosystem is based on the platform built to emulate the landscape and create Digital Land, which can be accessed remotely from any spot on Earth by content creators, advertisers, and businesses. Together with land owners and end-users, they form the engagement system — the marketplace.

Digital Land

Arcona creates a layer of virtual reality on the top of the real world, thus mixing the two into augmented reality. This layer named “Digital Land” breaks down into plots associated with real-world locations. As long as these real-world locations have real-world owners, and as long as the end-users are real people that engage with the real-world locations, the proprietors can rent their land out to content creators, advertisers, businesses, and all interested parties — via smart contracts, of course.

Marketplace

The Arcona platform will provide a marketplace for several types of clients: land owners, content creators, marketers, and advertisers. In a nutshell, the marketplace acts as a virtual extension of the real-world advertising market, with all of its entities and opportunities. This means that, for example, there could be a creative agency that builds completely new digital plots and sells them to advertisers.

Roadmap

Background

The Roadmap on the Arcona website starts in 2014, when the IT-company behind the project, Piligrim XXI, presented their first AR spot. It was the visualization of the Ludza Castle in Lithuania, which had been destroyed long ago, allowing tourists to see what it used to look like in its better days. Since then, Piligrim XXI has built around 14 AR-parks like this, which have, as they claim, attracted more visitors to the spots.

The Piligrim team received a Microsoft Seed Fund grant and was part of accelerators like Intel, Google, and Faber Novel. They also made it to the top 50 Russian startups with the highest rating, AAA.

At the end of 2017, Arcona started their token sale.

2018

The Arcona ICO is still live. The launch of the marketplace is scheduled for the first half of the year. As they claim, content creators are currently welcome to build their projects based on the Arcona platform. Later this year, Arcona plans to launch the AR Viewer Prototype, develop a user acquisition system, and see partner projects go live. The AR GRID prototype is scheduled to launch by the end of the year, alongside remote positioning tools tests, launch of the AR Viewer with basic functionality, and content placement in test locations.

2019

The AR GRID positioning system is expected to cover the 10 largest metropolitan areas of the planet next year, followed by the sale of Digital Plots, making a total area of 1500 km².

2020

Arcona expects Georeferenced AR territories to expand up to 40,000 km² by 2020, which should end up in the creation of the World Wide Augmented Reality Grid.

Team

The Arcona team is headquartered in St. Petersburg, Russia. It is comprised of:
Ilya Korguzalov, CEO & founder. He also founded the IT-company behind Arcona, Piligrim XXI, in 2013. Ilya features thirty years of experience in art, tourism, and design.
Diana Sorina, CMO & co-founder. Alongside her role at Arcona, Diana acts as a CMO of Piligrim XXI, where she is also a co-founder.
Aleks Zaulichnyy, CTO. His LinkedIn profile features only a similar position at Piligrim XXI.
Tania Cherniсk, CCO & co-founder of Arcona and CEO of Piligrim XXI since 2014.
Daniel Girdea, CBO & co-founder. Daniel is also a co-founder of another AR/VR project, Way2Wow. According to his LinkedIn profile, Daniel’s previous experiences include founding My Way LLC and GDK Imobil LLC, as well as working as a sales representative for several companies from 2004 until 2010.
Dr. Alex Emelianov, R&D Team lead of Arcona and Piligrim XXI.
Dr. Igor Rozdestvensky, CSO & co-founder of Arcona and CEO of Martal SPb. He has 30 years of experience in IT, marketing, and sales.
Ivan Mushavets, marketing team lead. Igor has been working as a digital marketing analyst since 2015.
Ekaterina Rumiantseva, CFO of Arcona and project manager at Piligrim XXI. Her previous experiences include working as a Head of Strategy and Business Planning at Vnesheconombank and Head of Sales and Marketing at Sun Gard.
Mikhail Afremov, project team lead at Arcona and Head of Strategic Development at Piligrim XXI.
Vlad Stoica, IR and ICO Analyst. His previous experiences include creating content for YouTube, selling a private label on Amazon, and the role of a cyclist at HC Cycling Team.

Advisory Board

The advisory board of Arcona includes eight experts:

Lyubov Simonova, Head of Department at Rostelecom, VC, and angel investor.

Kairat Kaliev, Managing Director at Astana International Finance Centre, economist, and expert in business development.

George Popescu, CEO & co-founder of the AR company Lampix, founder and editor-in-chief of Lending Times, and serial entrepreneur.

James Haft, co-founder of CryptoOracle, serial entrepreneur, and advisor to several ICOs.

Sergey Khitrov, Head of Adwad Group, CPA Adwad.ru, RA JetMedia.pro, organizer of CPA Life, Blockchain Life and a number of other projects, mentor and blockchain expert.

Sergei Chmel, advisor in ICORATING Rating Agency. Managing Partner at ICOSHARK Hedge Fund, and founder of several startups.

Alexey Strogov, Head of R&D units, software development, system integration, business development in information technology, Internet, telecommunications in companies like Siemens, T-Systems, and DataArt.

Dmitriy Lyamenkov, cryptocurrency trader and advisor to several successful ICOs including ICOS, Sponsy, Cubomania, and BCSHOP.

Token Sale Summary

Project name: Arcona
Token ticker: ARCONA
Type: ERC20
Website: https://www.arcona.io
Whitepaper: https://www.arcona.io/doc/arcona_white_paper_en_4.pdf
Requirements: everyone interested
Presale dates: N/A
Public sale start: now live
Public sale end: N/A
Soft cap: 2,746 ETH
Hard cap: 25,000,000 USD
Total token supply: will depend on the ICO results but will not exceed 135 000 000 ARCONA tokens
Minimum contribution: 0.025 ETH
Conversion rate: 1 ARCONA = 0.0025 ETH
Collected to date: 6,714 ETH

Arcona Token Allocation

Use of Proceeds

Following and Media Coverage

The “Articles about us” section on the Arcona website features several publications, most of which are the media focusing on cryptocurrencies, ICOs, and VR/AR. The project has also been covered by Huffington Post.

The Arcona Twitter account has 7,330 followers, their Telegram group has 15,127 members, and their Facebook page is followed by 6,449 users.

Competition

There are actually several projects that combine blockchain with AR. The Arcona whitepaper does not provide an analysis of the competition. The “What sets Arcona apart from the crowd?” section of their homepage says that the main reason the project is different from similar ones is that it was created by Piligrim XXI, an AR company that has previously demonstrated success.

Whitepaper and other documents

The Arcona whitepaper is a detailed document explaining the idea, business, strategy, team, and technology sides of the project on 50 pages. Four pages are dedicated to possible risks.

Conclusion

Arcona is led by a team experienced in the project’s target industry, AR. The project has already been spotted by some authoritative media. They claim to already have earned 6,714 ETH through their token sales reaching their soft cap which is a sign of interest by the community. Nevertheless, they seem to have a long road to climb persuading end-users, businesses, and landowners to use their product. We had a chance to learn about augmented reality previously, yet it took us time to get a grasp of the idea behind Arcona. Thinking of targeting an even less tech savvy audience raises certain concerns.

Website: https://www.arcona.io
Whitepaper: https://www.arcona.io/doc/arcona_white_paper_en_4.pdf
Telegram: https://t.me/arcona_ico
Twitter: https://twitter.com/arconaico
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/arconaecosystem/
Medium: https://medium.com/@arcona
ANN: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2324174.0
Author: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=980049

ETH: 0x2b9c29C57D073Eb47D6ded8C516984979a4E6085

ETH: 0x2b9c29C57D073Eb47D6ded8C516984979a4E6085

Disclaimer:

This review by Bonanza Kreep is all opinion and analysis, not investment advice.