How does this benefit humanity? You do know that we're facing some very serious issues with the destruction of the environment, largely due to the needless excess of capitalism and consumerism, yes? Do we really need more self-absorbed individuals taking selfies while they wear the latest fashion to boost their egos gaining likes on social media? We need to find ways to slow down the consumption, not fuel it.

Sorry, my turn to disagree now. Lots of people I know have abandoned social media because it sucks. It wastes your time and messes with your psyche, making you more concerned with what other people think about you, rather than paying attention to what's important. It detaches you from real relationships, and causes you to become more introverted. You idea plays upon the worst aspects of all that.

You could have chosen to make a better type of social media than the ones we already have, but you didn't. And when people point out that your idea isn't very good, you don't take it on board as constructive criticism, you choose to see it as opposition to your lifestyle choices.

Kind of reinforces my point that focusing on the wrong thing means you don't see the big picture.

I have simple words to say about that matter, Even we say that lots of people has abandoned social media but do you think they will don't use it again, the truth is social media as of now is the effective ways in expressing ourselves our skills or talents to be recognize. We all habe different opinions and scope of limitations in our minds but the fact the most of us the people thinks can't live, have a beautiful.day without opening any social media sites. IMO.

HI,

TRENDS will be used in 4 ways on trending.me
1. To reward users for their participation in the community, for posting photos and curating the best content and making content "trending"
2. These rewards can be used to buy attire and clothing from trend stores, trend stores are eCommerce stores
3. Trend Stores advertise to the community using TRENDS as a payment method.
4. Users can send or tip each other Trends directly (This can be done via wallet directly also)

Trend Pool is a module that serves a critical function of automating payout to the users, a couple of points to note,
- Initially 26 Million Trends will be in the Trend Pool where half million TRENDS per week will be paid out to users in the first year
- All advertising revenue earned from Trend Stores and other advertisers on the Trending.me network will be circulated back to the Trend Pool
- In time as more users are onboarded, more orders are placed across trend stores, the value of TRENDS will appreciate

During ICO TRENDS can be purchased at 3000 TRENDS = 1ETH (price excluding bonus). With a limited supply of 61 Million TRENDS our market cap would be ~20000 ETH after the ICO.

With 15 Million TRENDS available in ICO, we are looking at funding of ~5000 ETH (approximation due to bonuses involved), for ICO to be successful we need to raise 25% - 40% of the amount, the renaming 75% - 60% can be raised during a next round after we have our BETA launch in January. Raising 25% to 40% in this ICO will be enough to expand the team and carry our project forward into the next few months.

I hope this answers your questions regarding TRENDS, Trend Pool and Value of TRENDS

What we mean is, by raising 25% - 40% of the amount we are seeking, we would be able to expand our dev and marketing teams and be able to build our beta quicker and also bring in users through marketing effort.
After this release, the remaining 75% - 60% TRENDS can be used for a second ICO, however the price would from be 3 to 10 times more based on success of our Beta Launch.

Social networking plays into our daily lives, trending.me is more than just social networking.

We have identified several types of users, trendsetters, merchants, investors, content creators, advertisers, service providers. All can benefit from being on this platform.

Read our whitepaper to learn how these types of users fit into the project : http://www.trending.me/concept.pdf

Thanks, Hard work is the prerequisite for any project to succeed.

With that being said, the fundamentals trending.me is based on are different from RDD. Trending.me is an entire platform while RDD is looking at integrating into several networks like reddit and youtube etc.

The two worlds can come together with ease of use,
1. For a regular user trending.me is another website where they would post photos and get paid, they do not need to know everything about crypto, they just need to understand TRENDS, how to earn it(by uploading photos) and how to buy it.
2. For merchants we are already using direct marketing to get in touch with them, hence we are educating them as part of the onboarding process.

It all depends on presentation of the project, this is something we are good at and will keep getting better at so the hard work is built in, more than a tech startup, we are a design startup. We predict majority of our users will be women. You can checkout a blog post written on steemit, some few points have been made regarding this : https://steemit.com/trends/@efsane/earn-trends-with-your-fashion-style-and-attire-trending-me

I loved this project and its concept, also total amount to raise is very low and this is a very good thing.
An idea that could bring women to Trending.me and increase their familiarity to cryptocoins - I hope it will be a successful project.

These are good questions,

Let me start with merchants,
We want to release our BETA by end of this year, our discussed marketing strategy to bring in users on trending.me is to go to colleges/streets in cities like Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and Delhi. These are metro cities in India and a perfect market for us to start with.
We aim to bring in some style bloggers and influences as well. Hence, before we on boarding eCommerce stores, our phase 1 involves getting our beta out and getting users on the platform. Once the users have earned TRENDS and trends are paid out for at least 6 - 10 weeks we will then enable stores.

Soon after BETA launches while we on board users we will also on board at least 3 stores to start with. We did test visit to around 15 stores who already sell on amazon, they liked the idea and the visits gave us a lot of feedback. We would build an app that can aid right form uploading products to looking at and fulfilling orders. Some logistics questions did come up and we would tie up with a third party to start with. Also some of them did say they would like to be on a marketplace rather than be a "store" so we are looking at a marketplace model rather than a "stores" model. Some questions about taxes also did come up and we are researching these solutions. There is interest from merchants and we have to go through phase 1 to get there.

Did you mean escrow during ICO?
We do not have any escrow, my devs are exploring creating a smart contract, but we might not be going that route as we want to entertain contributions in BTC, LTC, XMR and few other currencies as well.
We are approaching for funding locally also, In fact with an initial local funding we were able to invest in a cool domain name to get this project going.

As for getting on exchanges we have not discussed internally as yet, this is on our to do list, it will be easier to get on an exchange once we have a BETA product out.

Also our complete roadmap can be found at : http://www.trending.me/ICO/#roadmap