AsalReviews

Innovation Tagline:   Trust More, Buy More

Project Keywords:  #onlinereview #blockchain #revivingreview #reviewstore #not-so-fake-reviews #hyperledger

Project Members

1. Nidhi Singh Nidhi Singh
2. Priyanka Manda PRIYANKA MANDA
3. Risabh Sharma risabh sharma
4. Saurabh Singh Saurabh Singh
5. Minakshi Raul minakshi raul

Project Description

The world is getting more digital with each passing day, everything is available to us at the tips of our fingers. However, purchasing online for many customers is not that convenient as they have to go through the online reviews which do not provide them assurance/clarity about the product/service. This leaves them with doing more research, reading reviews for the same product on multiple platforms, coming up with our analysis, and then purchasing the product/service.

Most of the time the customers feel that the end product/service which they received and the product/service which were described in reviews have stark differences. To overcome this feeling of misguidance/skepticism and no other alternative for the customer to rely on we have come up with our product "AsalReviews".

a. Describe the problem

Online reviews play a major role in our digital world. Customer takes online reviews very seriously before purchasing any kind of product/service. Keeping this in mind, many parties try to take advantage of this fact by generating fake/biased reviews on their platform. Whether it's consumers' fake positive reviews or businesses editing their negative reviews, trust and legitimacy are short in supply.

Being a customer, now I have to spend a hell of a lot of my time verifying the authenticity of the review and the reviewer. Another problem is all these reviews are being stored on the centralized system, so a single entity is having the whole control and it provides no transparency to the end consumer as there is no way of tracking and tracing the reviews.

Most existing systems don't display the entire buying history of the customer which makes it even tougher to check the authenticity of the reviewers. Customers are not getting any incentive for providing reviews so they don't feel motivated to invest their time and effort in doing so. As these reviews don't provide a clear picture of the product/service to the customer, they hesitate in purchasing it or they spend up most of their time doing research, even after that, they experience significant variations between the expected and the actual product, resulting in not so pleasant experience for them.

b. Explain why existing solutions are inadequate

The existing solutions are inadequate as they are centralized, not transparent, data is under control of a single authority, no traceability is provided. Rating for a single product varies adversely across different platforms making it difficult for the customer to decide on what to rely on. Customers are not motivated to become reviewers. They usually don't participate in reviewing unless they have a very good or bad experience, which provides not so clear picture about any product/service. Some customers feel that even after giving detailed and genuine reviews, their reviews get deleted or manipulated on the platform without any information to them. Some of the conventional platforms allow the customer to post reviews instantly without doing any form of validation/verification.

c. Describe the competitive landscape

There are a couple of competitors in the market today for online review systems on the blockchain such as Revain and Lina.review. 

Lina.review stores the review content in their private blockchain. As a result, the platform is under control by the Lina team.

Revain is focusing more on crypto business reviews. There is no purchasing verification before posting a review in the Revain platform, anyone can still generate a review without having the real consuming experience. 

Solution

a. Describe the solution

AsalReviews - is a blockchain-based review system that provides transparency, trust, self-regulated, and distributed systems by providing immutable data stores for reviews where the opinions of every customer are valued and noticed. Asalreview can be beneficial to the service provider to maintain their reputation and build a better relationship with customers by winning over their trust that would help them in their business growth eventually. We would be using artificial intelligence(AI) to detect and eliminate fake/biased reviews and to provide credit scores to consumers. AsalReview provides a feature to report/flag reviews if the customers find the reviews abusive/fake in any sense.

In AsalReviews - one of the stakeholders would be a group of moderators/auditors to identify fake reviews to maintain the integrity of the system. There could be two sets of users - Reviewers and Moderators. Reviewers will be promoted to Moderators after meeting a certain set of expectations.

AsalReviews can provide major online platforms a way to integrate with our system so that customers can have trust in what they are reading as reviews. This project has huge potential in various domains - Tourism, health care, lifestyle, e-commerce, and other areas of life. To start with, we would be targeting the tourism category.

b. Explain why your solution is better than current state-of-the-art or existing solutions

 1) Non-blockchain solution: The issue with existing non-blockchain solutions is centralization,non-transparency, central authority is under control, guidelines for reviews are not shared publicly, filtration of fake reviews is not disclosed to the consumers. 

 2) Blockchain solution: A prominent issue in all the existing blockchain solutions is the storage of the reviews. Storing the reviews on the Ethereum blockchain is very expensive, and is infeasible. Our solution is better as we are using a blockchain framework other than Ethereum, which would be less expensive and more performant.

c. Define the minimum viable product and what you anticipate will be developed during the prototype phase

AsalReview would be a blockchain-based system for the tourism industry where any customer can provide detailed reviews about their experience related to travel, hotel etc, can read reviews provided by others, can upvote/downvote the reviews, can view the history of the reviewer, can see the overall rating of the product/service. 

To begin with, to attract the consumer base we would be providing incentives in the form of tokens to customers who will use our platform "AsalReview". 

Accomplishment and Team

Our Team is the blockchain team at Jio Platforms Ltd which built blockchain for the telecom sector impacting 1.3 billion Indian telecom users and other entities. Our Team is truly passionate about blockchain technology and believes that it can solve many real-world problems.

• Winner of HyperHack 2021 organized by Hyperledger India Chapter
• Contributed to Hyperledger Tooling project in the open-source community
• Winner of WIT Hackathon - Women CO(vi)DE warriors 2020 which was organized by WiT India Forum in partnership with IBM.
• Contributed to MAHA-SHRINKALA sandbox project for Govt. of Maharastra's blockchain initiative 2020. 
• Among Top 15 finalists in TechGig Code Gladiators Hackathon 2019 and 2018

• Runner-up in Smart India Hackathon 2018

• Finalist in UAE hackathon 2018 Ajman

• 1st runner-up India blockchain week 2018

• Mumbai fintech 2017 festival where we showcased document management system to then Cheif minister of Maharastra (India) Sh. Devendra Fadnavis and Principal secretary to the CM sh. Shrinivas

b. Identify talent/resource gaps and needs 

  1. Need Support in the Business model to make it self-sustainable.

  2. Artificial intelligence expertise need for data modeling and prediction.

  3. Need guidance from domain experts to make a market fit solution.

Project Plan

a. Define the goals for prototype and launch phases and a one-year goal

PHASE: PROTOTYPE (1.5 Months)

      Phase 1 - Blockchain Network Infrastructure setup.

      Phase 2 - Developing chaincode.

      Phase 3 - Implementing back-end and front-end for CRUD operations.

      Phase 4 -Testing End to End.

PHASE: LAUNCH (2.25 Months)

      Phase 5 - Create off-chain DB for analytics.

      Phase 6 - Populate off-chain DB with background batch processing for Rich queries.

      Phase 7 - Implement Artificial Intelligence(AI) for detection of fake reviews

      Phase 8 - Training and validating model

      Phase 9 - Product launch - Beta-testing

      Phase 10 - Pitch the idea to different service providers for pilot implementation.

PHASE: GO LIVE (TBD)

      Phase 11 - Deploy to production for customer use.

      Phase 12 - Onboard different service providers onto AsalReview as part of a consortium.

b. Describe development risks and mitigation strategies

   I: Need an S.M.E.(Subject Matter Expert) for A.I. development, as our team doesn't have expertise in it.

   A: Onboard an S.M.E. for the same.

   II: Unavailability of full-time resources that would be required to complete the project.

  A: Partner with experts in the community that could facilitate in delivering the solution in different phases of the project.

  III: Need data set to begin with A.I. model to detect fraud or fake reviews

  A: Find an open-source alternative where we can use those data sets to train our model.

  IV: Enhancement in implementation design in the future if any bottlenecks are faced. 

  A: Design the base system modular so that changes won't have a major impact on timelines.