[DEV UPDATE] Deegram - What's happened and what's to come

Hello everyone!

It’s been a while since we first announced the project, and it’s time to update you on what’s been going on, what we’re doing these days, and the road ahead.

Development never seems to go as quickly as you want to, and there always seems to be hiccups that limits progress at times. Issues aside, we’re making good progress and we’ve reached some of the major milestones of the Deegram alpha.

The technical stuff
We’ve been working a lot on our middle layer server solution lately, which will handle interaction between our app and Steem.

On the app side we are now posting content to Steem(it), we have the content feed, we can vote on posts, pretty much all the basic requirements are in testing. While testing functionality, we’re performing new iterations on core elements of the app to improve performance and make the experience as smooth as possible.

While we continue to work on server development, we are preparing a closed alpha release of Deegram. We aim to deliver quality, and are doing our best to give you a great experience when we launch the product.

The other stuff
We’ve had several iterations on creating a promotional video, highlighting the problem of social media and explaining the concept of Deegram. This video is almost completed, and we’re all looking forward to sharing the result with all of you.

During this process, it was really important for us to both keep the language and “jargon” understable for most people while at the same time respecting the technology and doing it justice. This is a hard balance to achieve but essential to be able to reach the masses with blockchain technology and especially Steem.

A collaboration effort by Innovation Norway (state funded organization supporting business growth and innovation) and the University of Agder led to the creation of an intensive course in crowdfunding. In this course, businesses and startups can apply to be a case for the master’s students, both national and international from the faculty of business and law. In the course they are set to develop a crowdfunding campaign while familiarizing with the case and providing tips on both marketing strategies and other aspects of a business case.

We applied to this program, and we were one of the lucky businesses that were chosen as a case. We’ve been working a lot with the students to create a marketing plan and prepare a strategy for a potential crowdfunding campaign. It’s interesting to look at a blockchain-based software project in this regard, because there are many possibilities. Is the best choice to run an SMT ICO? Equity-based crowdfunding campaign? Perhaps a reward based crowdfunding campaign like @steemmonsters did? Which was great by the way, and congratulations on the successful campaign guys!

We have invested quite some time and effort in this campaign lately, and we’re looking forward to share more information about this when the course wraps up and we have more to show you guys.

Wrapping up
In relation to this campaign preparation, the students we’re working with created a survey to gather data on social media. We hope that the ones reading this could spare a minute or two to respond to this survey, as we really want data to know more about the potential future users of Deegram and the Steem community. We thank you in advance!
http://www.survey-xact.dk/LinkCollector?key=RDRN9ZTC129P

Any questions or comments? Please let us know!
Website:
https://www.deegram.com/

Social media:
https://www.facebook.com/deegramofficial/
https://www.instagram.com/deegramofficial/

Until next time, Steem on!