Hi Guys! I know it's been awhile since I last posted. Things are going really well for us, and I want to reassure you that we are doing all that we can to promote the benefits of building your business on BitShares. We actually had world famous blogger Robert Scoble visit our offices earlier this week and do a livestream video with Nathan and I. We deservedly pushed BitShares pretty heavily during the livestream. It's received 5k+ views in the past couple days and has created a wave of contact requests via our website from companies interested in partnering with us and reporters wanting to interview us to more about our project.

Check out our recent blog post to learn more about the event and watch the livestream video!

https://followmyvote.com/silicon-valley-has-new-competition-and-its-not-who-you-think/

At this point, we are actually having some challenges in working with BitShares that I'm hoping you guys can help me with. My goal is to be able to approve a proposed transaction from another BTS user that has shared account permissions over one of our accounts. I've talked to some of the core devs and they stated that this isn't something that is supported in the GUI yet, and that someone was considering submitting a worker proposal to get this feature added in. If that does happen, I would really appreciate it if you would all vote to approve that proposal. And, in the meantime, I was hoping that someone could point me to some documentation that covers how to get the CLI wallet up and running, export the necessary private keys from my BitShares 2.0.160106 light wallet, import the keys into my CLI wallet, and then approve the proposed transaction. I have access to a Mac, PC, and Linux (Ubuntu) workstations if that helps at all.

Could/would someone please help a brother out?

I promised the community that we would send out a recap of my recent visit to Norway to introduce our voting solution to the Pirate Party of Norway. To this end, we've just published a story on the Follow My Vote website that covers the event! So, be sure to check out the link below:

https://followmyvote.com/follow-my-vote-and-the-pirate-party-make-plans-for-the-future-of-voting/

We've also published another story on the BitShares Blog to maximize coverage: http://bitshares.org/blog/. As an fyi, we will be promoting these blog posts, as well as the youtube video throughout the web over this week and next and will keep the community updated on how many people we reach/views we get. We'd love your help in spreading the word as well.

We'd also like to connect with someone at CoinDesk and/or CoinTelegraph to see if they'd be interested in running a story on this, as well. Does anyone have any contacts that could help us make it happen?

I’m excited to be working with the rest of the BitShares community to make BitShares a success in 2015.

Recently, there have been comments made on the BitShares forum about me and that it seems like my involvement with BitShares is eerily reminiscent of the former BitShares Marketing Director, Brian Page. I know that it’s no secret that many of the members of the community were not impressed with his performance as the BitShares Marketing Director; however, what seems to be unclear to members on the BitShares community is exactly what my role is supposed to be within the BitShares community. Thus, I’d like to take this opportunity to clarify.

Since Brian’s departure, the community decided that it would be in its best interest to decentralize our marketing efforts, which means that I am not the BitShares Marketing Director. I have never been the BitShares Marketing Director, nor will I ever be the BitShares Marketing Director.

With last year’s merger between BitSharesX, DNS, and VOTE, due to my marketing expertise, extreme passion for politics, and deep desire to make a major difference in the world, I was brought on specifically to work with BitShares to develop a blockchain based voting solution that could be integrated with the BitShares blockchain. In just a few short months, I have successfully promoted the idea of developing a blockchain-based voting solution, creating awareness of and interest in the innovative approach, here in the United States and abroad.

I have spent a considerable amount of effort researching the voting industry, reviewing voting legislation, and networking with legislators and election officials at all levels of government within the United States, in an attempt to assess the current landscape, gain support for our innovative solution, and identify opportunities for its implementation in the public sector.

Upon developing our proof of concept voting system and demonstrating the technology at an industry conference in California (CA) this past December, we received an official endorsement from a well-respected Registrar of Voters, which is prominently featured on the home page of the Follow My Vote website (https://followmyvote.com). Legislators and election officials in Virginia (VA), our home state, have also been very supportive.

Despite the overwhelming support, the reality of the situation is that each state in the United States has laws governing what types of voting systems can be certified for use in elections, which are extremely outdated due to a false paradigm. This means that certain laws will need to be changed in various states, in order to allow for our voting system to be piloted, certified, and adopted.

Although official government elections are proving to be a long-lead opportunity for us in the U.S., the good news is that legislation seems to be the only barrier to entry. With this in mind, we intend to shift this paradigm and bring this legislation up to date by educating legislators and election officials in the U.S. about the advantages of leveraging 21st century technology to improve the democratic process. We have also begun to look outside the U.S. to seek opportunities for adoption.

We were recently invited to Oslo, Norway to speak about our voting solution at a national summit. According to this study (http://bradblog.com/Docs/YearInElections-2014-Final_021115.pdf), Norway is the world’s leader when it comes to electoral integrity, whereas the U.S. currently ranks 45th. Hopefully, once our ideas our introduced there on a national stage, we’ll be able to gain entry to government sponsored elections much quicker. In the meantime, we’ll be focusing on building grassroots movements in both countries in an effort to expedite the process.

We’ve also started to look into ways to implement our voting solution in the private sector. We’re actively exploring alternative use cases for our voting solution, such as market research/opinion polling, online petitions, people’s choice awards, and proxy voting. We will be sure to keep the community updated on the outcome of our efforts here in the days ahead.

Follow My Vote has just gained access to a small portion of the vested stake that was allocated to us as part of the merger, which we have yet to spend. To ensure we are all on the same page, these funds were specifically allocated to Follow My Vote to ensure my commitment to this joint venture and to support the development of a voting system that will be integrated with the BitShares blockchain.

It goes without saying that I have a vested interest in ensuring the BitShares market cap continues to grow, as it will increase the value of our development fund and allow us to accomplish more with our allocation. With this in mind, I’ve agreed to get involved in directly marketing BitShares and lend my expertise in any way I can. However, being that my time is extremely limited, my involvement in directly marketing BitShares has been limited to the BitShares website and social media.

I was directly involved in getting our new website updated, with Cass leading the charge. My main goal was to ensure that the content was developed and site, as a whole, was transitioned with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Analytics tracking in mind. Now that this has been accomplished, we have yielded to Cass and other members of the BitShares marketing community that are closer to the BitShares brand and more familiar with the core product (BitAssets) to ensure that the user experience and messaging appeals to our customer base. However, we will continue to keep an eye on analytics, implement tracking, and provide performance reports, as needed, to ensure that the BitShares marketing community, as a whole, continues to drive results.

On that note, now that a full month has passed since the launch of our new website, I’d like to provide the community with some monthly performance statistics for Feb. 2015, which are as follows:

Website    

Unique Visitors    10,978
Top Landing Page    bitshares.org/
BitAsset Whitepaper Views    6,639
BitAsset Whitepaper Downloads   253
BitAsset Whitepaper Readers    1,673
BitShares Client Downloads   1352
Github BitShares Client Downloads   165

In addition to helping out with the website, my team and I have also been managing our social media accounts. rgcrypto and I met earlier in the year, at which point we discussed his marketing expertise. I gave him the opportunity to take over the management of our Facebook account; and, after demonstrating his ability to drive results via Facebook, we worked to get him elected as a 100% delegate. Aside from Facebook, we’re also managing our Twitter, Google+, and YouTube profiles and have provided performance statistics for all of our social media channels for Feb. 2015 below:

Facebook

Total Fans    6,685
Average Likes    263
Average Comments   2
Average Shares    3
Average Total Reach (Organic)    421
Average Total Reach (Paid)   10,051
Fan Base Growth   17%

Twitter

Followers    4,533
Impressions   40,100
Engagement Rate    2.60%
Link Clicks   393
Retweets    179
Favorites    156
Replies    13

Google+

Total Fans    150
Views   1,287
Actions on Posts   88
New Followers    11

YouTube

Subscribers    256
Views   628
Minutes Watched   3,682
Likes   18
Top Video   What is DPOS - Delegated Proof of Stake?

An affiliate referral program is another thing that I have been working with valzav to get off the ground. Although we’ve already got some solid tracking capabilities in place, after an internal discussion, we are hesitant to launch an incentivized program until we have true identity verification capabilities in place to prevent would be bad actors from gaming the system. To this end, I’m in talks with representatives from Jumio, a leading identity verification company, to discuss potential partnership opportunities. We are in the process of gaining developer access to their platform to begin exploring their API in an attempt to determine the level of work involved in order to integrate with BitShares.

Although we have yet to start a formal incentivized affiliate referral program at this time, I want to reassure the community that we are tracking referral activity. As such, I have provided referral statistics with respect to new BitShares accounts that were registered through faucet.bitshares.org in Feb. 2015:

Referrer   Total
www.minebitshares-com   28
rgcrypto   18
bitshares [social media]   9
cass   7
marketing.methodx   7
www-paycoin-ws   7
bitsharesblog   5
bts_traderx   5
index-html   5
beyondbitcoin   4
follow-my-vote   3
stan   3
bitsharesblocks   2
clayop   2
methodx   2
page01   2
bytemaster   1
home1   1
mf-tzo   1
paycoinws   1
refer-o-matic   1
test123   1
whiskey   1
Grand Total   116

I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank all of the affiliates listed above for all of their hard work in February. The community should know that this is a tremendous improvement over January. We had 42 referrals in Jan. 2015, which means we’ve seen nearly a 300% increase in performance.

As a final update, when taking into consideration that I won’t be able to dedicate as much time to directly marketing for BitShares as I originally intended, I’d like to take this opportunity to formally pledge 1M BTS in contributions to a development fund that I will control, which will be setup to sponsor BitShares related marketing initiatives that I consider to be worthwhile. On that note, I will be accepting proposals from members of the BitShares community on an ongoing basis and will work directly with marketers to ensure approved proposals are properly funded.

Let’s get to work!

ak

It is with great pleasure that I announce the launch of the new bitshares.org website! It's now live!

We really came together as a community on this one. We received a lot of great feedback from people on the forums, as many of our community members ideas and suggestions were incorporated into the new site. It's important to point out that nothing is set in stone here and that this website will always be a work in progress, as we will continue to seek ways to modify the site over time to improve the user experience and increase new user acquisition conversion rates.

When it comes to acknowledging individual efforts, there were so many people involved in the project, I almost don't know where to start…

BIG THANKS to cass (whom I know first-hand worked on this project day and night in order to see it through to completion), nikolai and prometheus for creating some really awesome content, the NullStreet Marketing team, and anyone else that was involved whom I might be leaving out!!!

2015 is going to be a great year for BitShares!!

I've been working with the crew this week to get analytics tracking in place on our various web properties...

bitshares.org
bytmaster.bitshares.org
faucet.bitshares.org
bitshares.tv

Once we have these websites tagged, I'd like to ensure that we can setup event tracking and add custom code as needed in order to track the various events that take place on these sites that are important to us.

I'll also be working closely with bytemaster and other members of the team to draft new messaging for the bitshares.org website and see that it gets updated as soon as possible.

Once tracking is in place and we have solid messaging and a layout of the site we feel comfortable moving forward with, I'd like to begin running a few small test Pay-Per-Click campaigns and/or some Display campaigns on crypto-currency related websites to test various advertising channels and marketing messages that result in new client downloads, installs, and account registrations.

In the meantime, I'm looking to establish partnerships with other marketers in the BitShares community with experience that can help out in this area. We'll be setting up a referral program where we can track and reward performance, which looks promising.

I am also considering sponsoring and/or rewarding marketers that can prove themselves capable of driving results. On that note, if you're interested in this opportunity, please send me a direct message so that we can discuss further.

Announcing the VOTE DAC (SNAPSHOT DATE: 8-21-14)

In democratic societies throughout the world, elections are plagued with accusations of illegitimacy stemming from all sorts of issues, such as flawed registration processes, inconsistent voter ID laws, cases of widespread voter fraud, non-sensible restrictions, vulnerable voting machine technology, and a general lack of transparency.

We must acknowledge that the key issue that needs to be solved is the lack of transparency in government run elections, in the Unites States and across the globe. If we can properly address this singular issue, we’d essentially solve all the other problems that plague the industry and would have the opportunity to begin hosting accurate elections that result in an agreeable consensus.

With the 2016 U.S. Presidential and Congressional Elections right around the corner, it seems that the time has finally come to leverage the latest technology to develop a voting system that permits the hosting of secure and transparent elections with agreeable outcomes that makes efficient use of taxpayer money.

In today’s world, it is finally possible to host verified and transparent elections in an end-to-end voting system encoded within a Decentralized Autonomous Company (DAC). A voting DAC is the key to solving the transparency problem current electronic voting systems face today, as it provides a valuable service that allows people to vote in elections that are secure, transparent, and free from corruption.

In the near future, Follow My Vote will releasing the first voting DAC in history using the BitShares Toolkit for building DACs, which will be called the VOTE DAC. Development will happen in stages, with the first stage being the development of a proto-DAC, as it will be released with limited features. We will refer to the partial ownership of the VOTE DAC as a VOTE or VOTES, similar to how one would refer to owning shares of a traditional company. Launching initially as a proto-DAC will allow for the trading of VOTES while the remaining features are under development.

The VOTE allocation of Follow My Vote’s VOTE DAC will include 10 billion VOTES. Half (50%) of the VOTES (5 billion to be exact) will be allocated over time to delegates that will be responsible for maintaining the blockchain throughout the life of the company, starting with 50% allocated within the first year of operations and 50% of the remaining VOTES thereafter, year over year. The other 5 billion VOTES will be allocated up front to, among other things, cover the cost of the development of the DAC itself and marketing necessary to acquire its initial user base. The breakdown of the initial VOTE allocation will be as follows:

4.2.2) BitShares PTS: 1.5 billion VOTES

BitShares PTS, is a simple minable crypto-currency (similar to Bitcoin) that was created to allow people to advertise their interest in receiving free token samples in future DACs.  Per the BitShares social consensus, 30% of VOTES that are initially allocated will be distributed to those who have supported the BitShares industry by owning its BitShares PTS tokens.

Anybody who owns BitShares PTS on that snapshot date is given a proportional stake in the new DAC. Thus, those interested in supporting Follow My Vote should invest in BitShares PTS prior to the VOTE DAC snapshot date.

4.2.3) BitShares AGS: 1.5 billion VOTES

BitShares AGS is similar to BitShares PTS in that both were ways of volunteering to receive free promotional samples from the developers of new DACs. The difference is that BitShares AGS can no longer be bought or sold, as the owners are those whom contributed into an industry development fund while the industry was still in its infancy. Per the social consensus, 30% of VOTES that are initially allocated will be distributed to BitShares AGS owners in proportion to their ownership of AGS.

4.2.4) Follow My Vote: 1.5 billion VOTES

Follow My Vote will be spending a considerable amount of resources to develop the VOTE DAC and acquire new account holders upon its release. Thus, 30% of VOTES that are initially allocated will be distributed to Follow My Vote to cover these costs.

4.2.5) NuSpark: 50 million VOTES

NuSpark is a startup incubator in Blacksburg, VA, that has supported Follow My Vote in since their early stages of development by providing them with dedicated office space to conduct business operations. NuSpark will continue to support Follow My Vote by further educating the Blacksburg community and surrounding areas about cryptography and blockchain technology in an effort to encourage the use of the VOTE DAC. For their continued support, NuSpark will receive 1% of the initial allocation of VOTES.

4.2.6) Virginia Tech: 50 million VOTES

Virginia Tech is also located in Blacksburg, VA. Similar to NuSpark, Virginia Tech will be supporting Follow My Vote by further educating the Blacksburg community and surrounding areas (in addition to the Virginia Tech faculty and student body) about cryptography and blockchain technology in an effort to encourage the use of the VOTE DAC. For their support, Virginia Tech will receive 1% of the initial allocation of VOTES.

4.2.7) New River Valley: 400 million VOTES

Follow My Vote will be promoting the emergence of the cryptography and blockchain technology to the U.S. citizens living in New River Valley. Residents of Blacksburg, Christiansburg, and Roanoke, VA, will have an opportunity to claim VOTES during a series of promotions to encourage the use of the VOTE DAC. A total of 8% of VOTES that are initially allocated will be distributed in this way.

The official snapshot date of the VOTE DAC is August 21, 2014. Therefore, by holding BitShares PTS on the VOTE DAC snapshot date, you have an opportunity to get in on the ground floor and own an initial stake in the VOTE DAC.

The VOTE DAC is a game-changing technology that has the potential to become the voting platform of the future!

Seize this moment. The time is now.

Check Out Follow My Vote’s Whitepaper For More Info!