There's less than 16 days until the BitClave ICO starts, after a succesful pre sale raising over $16 million they look set to become one of the best selling ICOs of the year.

What is BitClave?

They plan to launch the worlds first decentralized search engine with the goal of cutting out the middleman in the online advertising industry, doing so should create better profitability for businesses which in turn will result in better prices for customers.
With the new platform users will have complete control over their own data and will be given the option of revealing this data to online companies. Only businesses will have the option to respond to the searches with advertisements, users will be paid for viewing any ads.
The new platform will initially be launched on the Ethereum blockchain.

What's the problem with the current market?

There's a variety of platforms that have made billions of dollars by providing a 'free service'. By attracting users with their free service companies such as Google and Facebook have been able to collect a huge amount of data.
Using this data they're able to offer businesses the chance to target their ads at the users who are mostly likely to buy their products. Facebook allows businesses to target ads at their users based on a vriety of factors, anything from your wage bracket, age or even what sort of food you like.
The problem with this for businesses is that these ad services charge a huge amount of money, Google can charge over $50 for just 1 click for high paying keywords such a legal search terms or insurance searches. This has made it very hard for most businesses to see any sort of ROI with most having to hope that they see a return on their investment from gaining recurring customers.
Ofcourse when businesses spend a lot of money on advertising they have to keep their prices higher which is bad for their customers.

How will BitClave solve these problems?

Blockchain technology will prove to be revolutionary in many different industries. The online advertising industry is an ideal place for a platform using this new technology to flourish.
The new technology will be able to save businesses a lot of money, rather than wasting money on ads that actually end up hitting the wrong demographic, the blockchain will make it possible for businesses to target users who are genuinely interested in purchasing what they're selling.
The blockchain will allow customers data to be stored on a public blockchain whilst still providing anonymity for the user.
Rather than 'free' platforms collecting data without users understanding what's going on BitClave will allow them to earn tokens from their own data or choose to keep their data private.

How will it work?

The new platform will allow users and businesses to post activities to the ledger. Bitclave state in their Whitepaper that they may introduce more activities in the future but initially there'll be these options:

• REQUEST: Customer facing software can publish a shopping preference, item they're interested in or a personal preference which will give businesses data on the goods or services they're likely to be interested in.

• OFFER: This will allow businesses to post short term offers, they can do this publicly or use the data entered in the REQUESTs to target their request at users more likely to be interested in their OFFER.

• VIEW: This will be used to verify that a customer has viewed an offer, once the retailer verifies this the user will be rewarded with CAT tokens.

• BUY: This will allow users to show that they have completed a purchase from one of the businesses on the platform.

• SELL: This will allow businesses to show that a sale has been made

The CAT (Consumer Activity Token)

The new CAT token will be used on the platform to give rewards for different services in BASE (BitClave Active Search Ecosystem). Rewarding businesses and users with these tokens aims to give the power back to them rather than third party advertising networks.

Search Service

The new search service will be an independent service that matches REQUESTs with OFFERs. The goal of the service is to maximize the amount of transactions on the platform by matching retailers and users together as well as possible using the data that has been stored and the REQUESTs and OFFERs being posted. Many different search services could be launched on BASE with their own different goals, from trying to maximize business value to optimizing customer experience.

ICO Details

• Dates: Starts on November the 8th and runs for 60 days or until the $50 million hard cap is reached.
• Token type: ERC-20

Conclusion

The team behind the project looks solid and they're obviously targeting a huge market that looks ripe for blockchain technology to enter. The platform does sound like it may be fairly complicated however with a large amount of funds already raised during the pre sale they'll have a large marketing budget to get users and businesses on board from the start.