ListenUp! A MEOW DAO cometh.

Welcome to ListenUp’s Notion!

Hi, 👋 Let me tell you a story. Do you like stories? This story is actually about one of my favorite people. It’s about you. Well, not about you, but about where you are. What’s special about where you are? Do you even know? Would you believe me if I said that where you are, right now, has a fascinating story? Perhaps it may be a story you’ll remember forever. One you will tell for generations to come…

How can I be so confident? I don’t even know you, or where you even are. It’s because every place on earth has an interesting story. Someone knows that story. Probably not you - but that’s ok, because you have your own stories to tell about the places you’ve been. As you know, stories are what inspire people and keep humans motivated. And stories about places help us connect with them, others, and the one planet we all (currently) have in common.

So, I think you would agree with me that stories all have value. Some more than others. For instance, many people travel to Jerusalem and pay $100 each to hear a story about Jesus and walk in his footsteps. The same goes for stories about towns and historic accounts of people all over the world. In fact, 16 Billion Dollars a year was spent (pre-covid) on just those stories. But some stories don’t get sold (or told) at all. Their audience is too small to charge $100. Not enough people would pay that amount to hear about how your Aunt Millie climbed that scaffold to save the cat that was reincarnated as your neighbor’s dog. But maybe some folks would enjoy the story if they happened to pass by that scaffold. Maybe your great-grandchildren would really enjoy it. Point is... we all have stories, and they all have value.

What if we could tap into that value? What if we were to build a platform for sharing not just stories - but also information of various types - and built it with a blockchain so that we could easily reward contributions. What if we built this as a MEOW DAO and empowered the community to tap into that $16B market, plus some others. Are you not familiar with the concept? Perhaps you didn’t read the other paper. Go ahead - we’ll wait.

Now that we’re on the same page… a MEOW DAO would allow us to build a mutually beneficial business on the blockchain, and reward contributors with tokens. The basis for this new business is a technology startup that delivers GeoSpatial Audio content in any language via an app called “ListenUp!”, in addition to the development of numerous creator apps and supplemental services to support the business. The stated mission of ListenUp Community is to…

Offer a free(mium) global platform for geographically-based short-form audio tours and immersive AR stories - consumable in any language - for recreational, educational, motivational, professional and social uses. Crowd-sourced (user-improved) and API content will be translated and delivered hyper-locally based on GPS and local beacons.

Basically, it’s an audio app that tells you stories about where you are… wherever you are!

While ListenUp has a robust business model based on consumption (beyond the scope of this article), the fundamentals are not possible to achieve without substantive content contributions from the community. To foster this model, at the heart of the program are GeoSpatial Audio Tokens (GATs), which are custom digital tokens minted in order to build and evolve the ecosystem by soliciting and rewarding contributions, and allowing token holders to partake in governance. Tokens will be minted in fungible and non-fungible (NFT) forms, with different amounts and denominations disbursed to individuals and teams for achieving different milestones (or perhaps just for being part of the community). There will be a number of token sales and open bounties, as well as hackathons/guideathons, organized to maximize the impact of the community and achieve maximum scale and value.

The standard disciplines in software production (such as designers and developers) and blockchain will be obvious beneficiaries of GAT economics, but it is imperative that marketers, investors/speculators, business operators and municipalities also benefit from the opportunity. Most importantly, content contributors (i.e., copywriters) should be among those to reap significant benefit from the ecosystems that they help establish. To encourage this, we envision a number of roles in the GAT ecosystem. To understand these roles, we’ll employ the simple use-case of a voice-guided walking audio tour through the town of Telluride, CO.

Click on the image, playlist or map icons to see details.