Developing Communities And Economic Opportunities With Web 3.0: Nifemi Aluko’s Inspiring Journey

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In this Web3TV interview, we speak to Nifemi Aluko, the founder of Toffy’s Domes, an NFT project which seeks to empower collectors and bring more diversity and equity to Web 3.0. Nifemi is an engineer, entrepreneur, and two-time best selling author with a passion for developing communities and exploring economic opportunities with Web 3.0.

You’re the founder of Toffy’s Domes, an NFT project based on your award winning science fiction novel, Toffy’s Divide, which aims to empower your collectors to liberate themselves and their communities through storytelling and bringing more diversity and equity into Web 3.0. You’re also the founder of KPA, which helps sales and business managers navigate the African market. You’re an engineer, an entrepreneur, and a two time best selling author. So tell us, how did this incredible journey begin?

Thank you, Andrew. I think my NFT journey started in April 2021. It all started out by just to give you a background myself, right. Obviously, as you said, I’m a chemical engineer. I have a business background, I make music in my free time, and I’ve published two books. Now, in my writing journey, what takes up most of my time is Building my business, KPA, where we help global companies that are trying to expand across the African market.

So, as you can see, I have multiple interests, and I think the last decade or so is me trying to figure out how do I balance all these interests and still strive to grow while sustaining myself. So in 2021, someone I follow a lot for business advice is Gary Vaynerchuk. And I think in March 2021, he just started talking about NFT. So imagine you’re on LinkedIn just listening to business advice, and this person just switches and is like, learn everything about NFTs.

And what started as a quick Google research has taken me down this rabbit hole that I’m still in, and that’s kind of what started it off. I started participating in April or May when Gary V dropped his V friends and I purchased one. And ever since then, started off by joining the discord, following what was going on in the space. Started collecting a few music NFTs because of my interest in music. And yeah, the rest of this history, what just led down this rabbit hole just continued building.

And I decided to drop my own collection Toffy’s Domes that’s based on a book that I just published in that same year, 2021.

That’s awesome, mate. So obviously Gary Vee is a big inspiration, but I’m sort of sensing maybe the inspiration started earlier. Right? You’re obviously a very creative person. You love your music, you love writing. Can you tell us more about that writing background and probably more specifically, the science fiction sides of interest as well, for sure.

So the writing started right from when I was a child, I think, just playing music, but it was more of just a side thing. My background growing up, I’m Nigerian, so growing up in Nigeria, the education system is very you’re either a science student or art. So I was more of this science student to go through my background as an engineer. But there was always the side that wanted to explore my creativity through art and music was my main thing. So while I was working in Texas servicing mostly chemical plants, right, doing a lot of analytical work, I just found this urge to want to do more than just like the analytical side. So I started exploring a little bit more my music interest.

But that was just mainly at night. Come back home, start making music. A lot of that was YouTube education, just watching how producers make music. Mainly hip hop producers got my instruments, started making music and posting stuff on SoundCloud. And initially it just started by me just making music and sharing it with my friends. But then that became like something that was like a habit. And afterwards, after will, I say two or three years, I released about three mixtapes.

So while I was in business school getting my MBA, I released, I think, the third one. And right after I finished business school, I was like, okay, I want to release another one. But this time around I was thinking, okay, before I just my process beforehand was more make a bunch of stuff and then compile it and put it out. This time I was like, let me create a story first and then make a mixtape, right? So I sat down, I remember I sat down to write a short story for my mixtape. And that short story started off as just one day in the library, writing down a sketch of what the story could be.

But that led me down like a four to five year journey to actually writing, Toffy’s Divide. So what started off as a prompt for a story, to just put out a mixtape, ended up turning into this award winning science fiction book toffees divide. So even the writing started with the music and published the book in 2021. But along the way, one thing as I was writing is I struggled with the process of publishing. So I was writing the story, but after a while you kind of get stuck when you’re just on your own.

But then I learned through a writing class the power of writing together with authors the value of pre-ordering, doing a pre-order publishing process where I crowdfunded my book with indiegogo. And that’s how I learned how to publish a book. So I did that for my first book, which was about music and how it could be a catalyst for change in our society and organizations and communities that we live in. And then I just took what I learned from publishing my first book, Press Play, and I just repeated that to publish the science fiction book Toffy’s Divide.

Seriously inspiring, mate. So what’s interesting is there’s two things there for me. You’ve got that right brain, left brain thing happening with engineering or science and arts. So it’s great that you’re able to balance the two. And on paper appears that you started producing music and then you just naturally created a story behind it to maybe help the process. But what I’m really hearing, as you just mentioned, is it’s allowing you to be a real change maker in the world, right. And then support your community of followers, I guess, and then potentially put your message out there to the world. So what fascinates me about that is if I hear that story go, that was the A to Z of it, but the reality is there’s a deeper part of you that’s calling you underneath all of that. Did you find that was happening? Like, were you aware of that as it was happening or were you just following the process and sort of being guided as you went?

Yeah, I think when I started, I didn’t know what was behind it. It was just more of there was a need to do beyond the, what would I say, the left brain, the analytical side. There was just something that was like, okay, every day I’m going to work looking at chemical processes. I’m looking at some software code, which was necessary for a lot of the projects we were doing. I just had this need to explore more. So music is something that stuck, but I started doing different things.

I think one of the biggest things I even did was signing up for an improvisation class and learning how to do improvisation and be in the presence and learning the whole framework of yes and just going, right. And then I started sketching a bit. So when I look back, when I reflect, there was a big urge to do more than just, like, what I was doing with work. And that then eventually brought out the music part, which kind of connected me to like, oh, yeah, I used to like making music and doing that over time.

And once when I put everything back and what I say started off as just following the process helped. Now that I look back, now you can look back at all the data points and say, okay, what is happening here? And a big part of it is self-empowerment, trying to change the narrative. I’m Nigerian African, and when I moved to the US, a big part of the things that kind of robbed me the wrong way was the way Africa is depicted in the media.

Right. And it’s just something that probably just internalized. And a lot of my music, my writing, is about bridging the economic gap, bridging the narrative gap. And me as a storyteller is me trying to contribute to changing the narrative a bit and hopefully inspiring other people to change the narrative the way the people before me inspired me to contribute. So I’ll say that what is coming out now from, let’s say, years of doing this is more of that need to empower myself creatively and economically, but also then pass it on to use storytelling as a way to empower people also that look like me.

Fantastic. And Mate, we’ll get to the connection there to Web 3.0 shortly, because I’m sure with your ability to tell stories and project that message, Web 3.0 is going to provide some amazing tools to do that on a larger scale. But tell us more about the Toffy’s divide as a story, what’s it actually about.

Yeah, so Toffy’s Divide, as I said, when the whole thing started, I was just looking for a prompt, right? It was more about trying to make this mixtape. So I sat down. I was like, okay, I need to write a story. And then the next thing that came to my mind was, okay, let me just write a story about a guy trying to write a story, because I just felt like it would be the easiest way for me to keep moving. I’ll just kind of borrow things from my life and kind of write the story.

But it’s a dystopian tale based in the year of 2049. In the novel, the main character, Toffy, pushes through self-doubt and societal constructs to write a story that liberates himself and begins to mend the divided city that is living in. A big part of that was influenced by the things I was seeing where we were in society. As, at the time, I was just finishing business school at Stanford, and I’m in the middle of Silicon Valley, but at the same time, I’m trying to go back to Nigeria to start a business.

And then I was traveling between the two places, between San Francisco and Lagos. And then immediately you see the differences between these two places. And then when you go into these cities, you start seeing the differences within the cities. Right? So even though San Francisco is one of the richest cities in the world, there’s still a lot of economic divide within the city. So a lot of that came from what I was experiencing.

And I just kind of put that through Toffy’s story of he was an engineer trying to break away from this societal construct to write his own story. And there are all these forces trying to hold him back from writing a story, and he pushes through to finish, and that story liberates himself and the city that he lives in. So that’s what I say. The big inspiration for that.

So cool, right? Because, let’s be honest, it’s an internal inspiration that’s come from you, right? It’s just all about you and your manifestation of life and observation of life and everything else. Just a side thing too, Nifemi, is how does someone access your book if they want to read it? Because I’m already feeling inspired and I’m an avid Kindle downloader. So we go and get it.

Yeah, if you go to Amazon, I think that’ll be the easiest place. Just go on Amazon. Just type in Toffy’s Divide. So that’s T-O-F-F-Y-S Divide and buy Nifemi Aluko, and you’ll find it right there. You could get the hardcover, paperback or ebook.

Fantastic, mate. And so obviously from the let’s call it the left brain side of things, there’s the business side of what you’re trying to do. And we’ll come back to the storytelling part shortly. But tell us about KPA and how that’s helping people in Africa.

For sure. So KPA is a business development advisory agency and we have consultants in 20 countries across West and East Africa. And what we do is we help international companies that are trying to expand across the African continents with a focus on industrial and automation companies. And what we do is we help them understand the markets. We help them come up with their sales strategy, we help them identify their customers, and then we also facilitate some strategic partnerships between those businesses and local businesses. What we find is that most of our clients are industrial companies.

They are trying to sell mainly to manufacturing companies. So there’s a lot of B to B. So as you can imagine, there’s a lot of face to face conversations. The challenges a lot of people face when they are trying to expand across Africa is like they put Africa as like just one thing. That is just one thing I have to figure out. In Africa, there are 54 countries, I believe, the most diverse continent in terms of language, culture. So you have to understand all the different nuances.

One of the biggest challenges we have on the continent is trust because of the institutions are not as well, I say developed as some of the Western countries. So a lot of trust comes more from the community, you know, someone you can trust to do business with them. So things don’t scale as fast as what someone in the US will be used to. So we come in as well, I say currently as an intermediary that bridges the gap and helps people move faster.

And it all started out as a website that I created just before I went to business school as an information resource. And then it turned into this business development agency. And it’s something it’s still tied back to some of my goals in terms of utilizing my engineering background. I really believe industrialization and automation would be a big part in the development across the African continent.

And one of the big things for Africa is we have so many young people, so many I don’t know the stats. I think it’s about 60% to 65% of the population is still younger than 25. So in terms of opportunities, when I look at that as one of our unique assets globally is more of how do we empower the creative youth to kind of use their mind and believe in themselves so that we can kind of move things faster and build the economies within the African continents faster. So those are things that we’re focusing on, but right now it’s mainly B, two B, helping global companies partner up with local companies to build our economies.

I love it, man. So again, they look like two separate things from what you’re doing with your storytelling, your book and KPA. But I’m already sensing that they’re not, right? There’s a bigger purpose there with 65% under 24. Got to empower those people to obviously make successful businesses for themselves as well. As obviously, as I also heard, was the trust element, increasing trust. So in regards to that, and I guess this is our segue into web three is, do you see that NFTs are that way to create more trust, or what’s the connection there for you in relation to.

So in relation to that, definitely, I believe one of the big things for us to build is trust, right, globally. And I believe we’re being pulled in different directions. They’re the people that want to build trust, and there are all these tools that is actually working against us in terms of building trust, where there’s now a lot of divide, a lot of divides in people sitting in their own echo chambers believing whatever information they want to believe.

I think NFTs, and just the blockchain in general, is going to help in that aspect. When I tie it back to what is happening across Africa, I think what I’m inspired by is when I really go into the space and I get on Twitter spaces, I was so impressed by the number of Nigerians that were on in the space already. And when I say they were already selling NFTs, these are young university students that are just in there already. And I was kind of surprised, like, oh, this is amazing to see that there are already all these young people that are getting economically empowered, finding ways around the institution that is kind of, in my opinion, holding them back and working and selling the NFTs to people in South Korea, in the US. Whatever it is. So I think it’s going to build a lot of trust.

But I think there’s still a very long way, a very long way to go. It might happen faster than I think, but a lot of governments are still kind of scared of the whole thing. They don’t want to get dis-intermediated in terms of control, right? So they still want to stay in there. For instance, in Nigeria, it’s not so easy to buy ethereum. It’s not so easy to start up a Coinbase account. You have to know someone that maybe can help you buy it and send it to your wallet.

So there’s still all those things in there. But I really believe that what the blockchain technology offers is a way for us to kind of come together and say, okay, I trust that this is from you, and I trust you as an individual, so we can continue to exchange value between one another without some big entity between the two of us.

That’s awesome. Obviously, there’s many countries out there repressed, right, with institutions and governments and everything else, and they don’t want to lose control. Do you see those NFTs as a way of getting around that? And the other thing for me, Nifemi, is if someone’s new to this conversation and they’re wondering, first of all, what is an NFT? And then what the hell are they talking about? How’s that going to help the youth of Nigeria? Do you want to just fill us in a little bit on that from a business perspective?

Yeah. NFT, obviously from the definition, is the non fungible tokens, right? Towards the end of last year, I started just boiling it down to like, okay, I call them digital collectibles, right? That act as a store of value. And that value can mean anything to anybody. It can mean a sense of identity. It could give access to exclusive communities that you want to be part of. It can mean access to exclusive experiences, whatever that means.

And it could also just be a sense of giving you this empowerment that you can make some kind of financial reward from making the right decisions, right. Buying low and selling high, basically. So in terms of business, when I think about it, I got into the space to almost experiment, just to see, okay, what was the space about what works and what doesn’t work. And when I think of it in terms of my actual business, like KPA, I kind of keep it separate because I haven’t figured out what type of value it brings to, for instance, my clients. Right? And the reason I say this is a lot of my clients are in big corporations, so they don’t want it to be honest.

Starting last year, nobody wanted to hear anything called NFT, right? It sounded like the biggest not scam, but it’s just like, no, let’s just focus on the regular business. Right? So I found that as I kept doing this, I had to find ways to talk about it where it doesn’t become a sticky point in a conversation and just more focus on, even for me, trying to figure out what’s the true value of using an NFT as opposed to just using a website, as opposed to just writing down a contract on paper and sending it and getting someone to sign it by PDF and sending it back, which is what we do with our business.

But I truly believe that it creates value by bringing people together on this exchange that we can all trust, this decentralized exchange. And that’s the main thing that drives me in terms of, okay, let me keep going. Let me keep experimenting and see what can be built here.

And I suppose for those young Nigerians, too, that’s the attraction with Web 3.0, right? It gives them a pathway outside of the system that allows them to, I guess, monetize their own IP, their own creativity, their own community or whatever, but also on a global scale. So it’s empowering entrepreneurship, really, isn’t it?

Yes, definitely. And some of these things that’s fascinating, and especially with will I say the Nigerian or African community in NFT space, I’m really just on the sideline watching, like, wow, this is happening. I’m not as plugged in. But what is fascinating is the switch from when the person I was just maybe drawing on their iPad, right, doing this digital art, to now saying, oh, I can sell this. And the switch to becoming an entrepreneur, that’s the part that is very interesting.

The artist no longer has to be that suffering artist. That is like, eventually my parents wanted me to be an engineer or a banker, but I love drawing. And now there’s this path where you can use your creativity directly to empower yourself economically. Absolutely.

And again, like, I look at your scenario. You are chemical engineer, you’re at university, you are using your left brain, and you start to unfold the right brain or unleash the right brain with more creativity. You create a book that’s inspired by your own journey, which then leads to Toffy’s Dome. So Toffy’s Divide is the book. Toffee’s Domes is the NFT collection. Tell us more about that. What is toffee’s Domes. And tell us I just love hearing the connection here with your backstory. And then the bigger part of it was the Nigerian African connection and how you’re doing the same in your business. So Toffy’s Domes is that to me? Tell us about that.

All right, so, yeah, Toffy’s Domes is a collection of 405 tokens. It was inspired by, as you mentioned, the Toffy’s Divide, which is a dystopian science fiction story about an aspiring writer who battles all the tech forces to get his story heard in the year of 2049. Book was published in 2021. And because of my interest at the same time with NFTs, starting in April right. I’m writing a story. I’m running my business. I’m making music.

As soon as I see the NFT thing, it was almost like a light bulb moment for me, like, oh, wow, all my interests can kind of come. I can combine everything. My interest in music, technology, business, art, writing. I was like, this is perfect. This is for me. That’s how I felt. And I started looking around in different communities, and I’m personally, someone that learns by doing, I can research all I want, I can look around and see. But for me, to really understand something, I have to start doing it.

So I just told myself, okay, I’ve been collecting a few. Let me go create a collection. So what I did was there are 405 pages in Toffy’s Divide. So what? We converted the 405 pages into 405 unique tokens to inspire and empower the storyteller in everyone that has the token. So the token gives you access to what I call story merch, both in forms of physical and digital collectibles. And those collectibles are books.

My book, a signed copy of Toffy’s Divide. And my book that’s coming in summer of 2023, every token holder gets access to that. Also the Audiobook, which I’m currently publishing to be published in a few months here. The token also gives you access to something I started earlier last year called Storytellers Lounge. Now, Storytellers Lounge is a community of multifaceted professionals, entrepreneurs. We come together to write together and improve our will, I say, creative confidence and live more meaningful lives.

And if you have the Token, it gives you access to that online community, and it also gives you access to some of my behind the scenes of my process of writing a book. There are a lot of people that tell me they want to write books, and it’s just like, I don’t know where to start. So what we’re also creating within Storytellers Lounge is a Scribe program. And Scribe is just a manuscript development program where you go through this program where we help you write a very good first draft of your book within four to five months.

You have to have two tokens to get access to the Scribe program. And we’re also trying to base  off every sale of our 405 Tokens, 10% to either donate to an organization that is trying to bridge the divide within their communities or even use it, give it to an artist that is using their art to bridge the divide. I think a big theme in Toffy’s Divide is bridging the divide, right? So if you look at the COVID art for the book, it’s a silhouette of Toffy and like a split between his right and left brain, where that split also depicts the city that he is in. A very divided city.

On one side is the most technologically advanced city in High Town, but in Low Town is one of the most deplorable places to live. And he uses a story and storytelling to kind of go between those two worlds and bring them together. So I do really believe that we are increasing our capacity to be more human, right, the more human beings evolve. But at the same time, I think a lot of things that we’re building is causing more divides within our communities. And those divides could be anything from wealth to digital to narrative divides.

So even the artwork has all the different rarities of using three things, self-awareness, curiosity and empathy to bridge the economic, digital and narrative divide. And the combination of those traits is what makes each token unique in the 405 collection in Toffy’s Domes collection and then gives you access to story merchandise, Storytellers Lounge and Describe program to write your own story. So yeah, that’s mainly how it came about.

We launched the project in September 2021 and we’ve been minting ever since then.

That sounds incredible, mate. So like, for anyone listening who sort of thinks they know what NFTs are and it looks like an investment. You buy low, you sell high, and you might make it rich by buying an image of an ape. It’s not about that, is it? Like, I’m hearing so much more than that. It’s like you’re mentioning inspiring creativity, you’re bridging the divide, you’re becoming a member of an amazing community. And I’m assuming that 405 people or NFT owners, and I guess you can own more than one, is an exclusive group. Right? That group is never going to ever happen again because that was the 405 and then beautiful benefits that go with that. So it’s just a really awesome way that you’ve just described the power of NFTs to me. I’m pretty new to them myself, but every day I meet people, like unify, I feel more and more like it’s like a really different way of doing a membership program. Right, but what exactly people are really doing, they’re buying into you and your values and what you stand for because they also stand for that and they want a piece of that as well. Not just for themselves, but to be part of a community like that. So just such a great depiction of the power, I guess, of how to build value in NFT.

Yeah, I think what I’m learning for a lot of projects I’m a part of is I’ve collected a bunch of NFTs and apart from my project that is minting, I’ve never sold any NFT that I bought. So they’re different type of collectors. They’re the ones that flip, which is also a cool thing for people that flip. Almost like buying and selling baseball cards or anything. But for me it’s more about what I’ve found. The biggest value is meeting other people that are within the community.

So I’ll use an example as V friends, right? So the biggest sell for me then, when I was about to purchase literally a picture that Gary V drew, there’s a video of him drawing this with a pen. I never thought Garvey is like this artist, right? He literally drew it with a marker, changed it to a digital thing and sold it. Right. And when I was about to make the purchase, which I thought was not, I was on the fence, I was like, this might not be the best thing to do with my income right now, but the biggest sale for me was he provided this utility where if you had the token, you get access. To three years of this NFT entrepreneurship conference called VCon.

And when I just did the calculation, like, okay, I get three years for how much it is, okay? I used to live in Austin before, and I know how much South by Southwest tickets used to go. I know how much Austin City Limits tickets used to go. So once I looked it out, like, you know what? Even if I don’t sell this stuff, it makes sense. I get three years ticket to this event. And going to the event, I’ve met so many people, so many entrepreneurs, artists, people that are just curious.

They’re not even thinking of building anything. They’re just like, what is going on? And just meeting all those people, the value has already paid off just in a year. Right? And some of those people have become very good friends, people that were working together, building stuff together. And I just believe that access to this diverse community of people that have come from different fields is something that is very valuable.

Absolutely, mate. It just sounds incredible. Like, I’ve noticed that with us, with Web3TV, the community that we’re creating and becoming part of, they all tend to be very open minded, and I call them freedom fighters, but they’re up for all possibilities, right? And most of them well, I’d say all of them so far have been not just up for any possibility, but making a difference. Right? It’s not just take take or win lose scenarios. It’s all about the win win and making the world a better place. And I know that sounds maybe a little fluffy for some people, but it’s true, right? That’s how it feels, your community.

Definitely. And it’s almost like the last five months, maybe six, have been tough in the space, right? Maybe even seven have been very tough. We’ve gone all the way down. It wasn’t as cool as it was in 2021. And then the whole FTX thing happened, which just threw everybody that was even on the fence just jumped off the fence. I was just like, no, I don’t want to deal with this crypto thing.

Which kind of slowed things down for someone like myself that started a project. But the blessing that that brought was it kind of weeded out a lot of bad will, I say bad actors. So the people that are still in the space now that are building right now, I find, are people that are really driven to actually use the technology to do what we believe it could do, which was decentralization. Which was we believe that our data is going to be more and more important the more we get into this digital world to supplement the fiscal world.

We believe that that data is going to be segmented into metadata. And we know that ownership of this data is going to be more and more important as we go on, especially what we’ve seen in the last ten years, fifteen years with all the big technology companies. And a lot of us want to disintermediate some of that ownership and bring the ownership back to the people. So I think that’s what drives me a lot, and that’s what’s driving a lot of people that I interact with, that I see in the space.

And to be honest, they’re just some people that they just want to put some positive vibes into the world. And those are the people I find that I am interested in connecting with and following.

Absolutely. Again, it’s sovereign individuality, right? Instead of being controlled by someone or something else, an entity really has not necessarily everyone’s best wishes at heart. If we look at Toffy’s Domes, I can feel people just hearing you talk. They’re going to know they’re attracted to it anyway. But if you were to, say, do the marketing pitch and who you’re looking for to either buy the collection or become part of the community, who is it and how would they go about that?

Yeah, I think this is a very interesting question, because obviously this is something marketing and building a community is actually the hardest part of doing this. Beyond minting and everything, who we are looking for, we’re looking for collectors that believe that storytelling can be used to empower ourselves and bridge gaps in our community, where we looking for collectors that are interested in identifying as storytellers that can change the world.

We’re also looking for aspiring writers that want to actually get frameworks and support to actually write their own stories, and also people that just want to believe in the diversity and inclusion that could be brought, one by storytelling and by being participating in the space. Right? I think that the trend in Web 3.0 is that it could be the next wave of, let’s say, economic empowerment, right?

And when I look at that, I think, like, okay, I don’t want to miss out on that. I don’t want my family to miss out on that. I don’t want my friends and people that look like me to miss out on that. So even when I went to ZCon, as much as it’s diverse, I was looking around. We’re like 10,000 people in this stadium. I’m looking around like, oh, man, I’m not seeing a lot of people like me around here.

And to an extent, I’m a little bit used to that because I’ve gone to a lot of schools where I’m a minority, or whether it was a Stanford as well, I was in Texas or Chicago, so I’m familiar with these spaces. But this was one thing that I was like, I remember leaving VCon thinking, we need to get into the space, right? And I was telling all my family members, I convinced my mom in Nigeria to get a wallet.

I think part of the mission is to try to get more people to participate so that we don’t feel left behind. Also, from a digital and economic perspective.

Sounds incredible, mate. And what it really sounds like, as you mentioned, the word is mission, right? It’s not a book, even though there is a book, it’s not an NFT, even though the NFT, it is a community, but it’s empowered by an incredible mission to bridge the divide between let’s call it the High Town, Low Town, the have nots exactly, et cetera, mate. It’s just truly inspiring and it’s so good to talk to someone like yourself and I wish you all the best with it. Guys, if you haven’t watched it yet, and this is the first time you’ve met Nifemi, we’ve actually done another interview which is about it’s a bit more how to stuff, but it’s how to build what are NFTs and how to build value in them.

It’s very inspirational and obviously it’s like if you’ve been inspired by Nifemi’s story, it’s a way of going, well, what do I do about it next? Other than obviously going to Toffy’s Domes website and connecting with Nifemi, it’s another way of learning more in the space. So I’ll put the link for that. Again, I’ll put that here for you. And if anyone has any questions for Nifemi or they have anything, they’d love to talk to him about Nifemi, if they could put those in the comments, would you be happy to answer those on an ongoing basis for them and obviously help connect them to your community?

Definitely. I think once that is shared, I can jump in the comments to discuss with anybody, especially when with the NFT project, I’m very active on Twitter, so that would be a good way to connect with me. It’s just Nifemi Aluko. That’s how you find me. And, yeah, each token is 0.15 Eth right now and you can mint it directly from the Toffy’s Domes website, which is toffysdomes.com.

Shea Richburg of Future Wise Group Talks About the Future of Web3 2023

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In today’s Web3TV interview, we’re talking with Shea Richburg, the Founder and COO of Future Wise Group.  Shea is a female futurist and metaverse thought leader, focused on top organizations, start-ups and mid size corporations, is the executive producer and co-host of Metaverse-ology and is a certified metaverse expert.

Shea Richburg, How Did Your Journey Begin

This journey began around 2017 when I created the Future Wise Group. I am a futurist and I’ve always tended to look at a work mobility trends. I’ve worked with huge corporations, educational institutions and policy makers and always try to bridge the gap between the three, and really try to think ahead and stay afloat of societal changes that are taking place.

So I’ll give you example, one of the things we did in about 2019, we had an open symposium and we were talking to colleges and stakeholders and we were trying to figure out why there’s such a gap between college graduates not being able to get adequate paying jobs after they graduate and ultimately it’s because they’re not going into the right fields.

We’ve learned that it’s apprenticeships that are actually helping people get higher paying jobs here in America, and so this was something that we really had to dissect and look at because I ultimately feel like that’s a real issue, we’re having people having degrees and not being able to use them and being in tremendous amounts of debt.

So that was one trend that we looked at and then at the end of 2020 and early 2021, we started to focus mainly on the metaverse. We knew there wasn’t a hotter trend and we jumped head first into that arena. I’m certified as a metaverse consultant so I love talking to people and essentially what Future Wise Group does is work with big corporations and help them understand and implement emerging trends in their organizations.

That happens through trainings and workshops that are centered around the metaverse and AI and sometimes blockchain, depending on their needs. So that’s my story. I mean honestly, I’m a woman that always wants the masses to be involved in the decision making. I want them to be aware of all the information and make the best decisions for themselves. So, as a futurist, that’s how I started out.

How did you become a futurist? 

I’ve always had a sixth sense but this doesn’t necessarily mean I’ve always been a futurist. Before I started the Future Wise Group I had a company called ‘Family Con’, it was like ‘Comic Con’, with its purpose to bring the latest and greatest ideas which all centered around family. I’m very family orientatated and I’m all about children and understanding all their options.

That could be schooling, it could be standardized tests and could also be going to College.  I have always been an advocate that everybody fairly understand the trends and, what’s going on and whether these things are the right option for your child. I don’t like to see people forcefully placed in a situation where they have to be involved in something society decided for them. I want them to understand the process and understand the changes that’s happening and all over the world today there’s so many changes. People really need to understand everything, so they can make the best decisions for themselves and not simply leave it to other people to make that decision for them.

So What Is Your Underlying Passion For Children Having Choices and Opportunities?

I think I’ve always loved children. When I worked on my master’s, I used to teach and before I had my own children I always said, I really want children to have the best capability in knowledge for themselves. No matter what socioeconomic group they are, I just want fair opportunity for everybody right, and we are living in a world where everything is changing. I mean to the point that there’s rewiring going on, and so, as you can tell, I am passionate about this and people can see how passionate I am.

The first speech I gave was about GMOs and foods and it really did kick up a notch when I had my first child and as I said, I love children, so I feel as though there was a lot going on with foods and a lot of other situations amongst children, and I really want people to understand what’s happening, don’t just sit by the wayside. No matter who you are and it’s everybody, I really have this love for everybody.

I just want it to be a fair playing field for everyone all over the world. So many people are really at a paradigm shift. They’re going to be left behind or they’re going to be eons ahead of other people.

What was it the drew you to Web 3.0 when you first heard about it? 

The first thing that drew me to Web 3.0 was the endless possibilities. I honestly feel as though we live in an overly saturated world meaning you can find hundreds of the same type of business, the same ideas that are being regurgitated over and over again.

I feel a lot of business owners are now looking for the new trend, something that’s going to set them apart. So when I learned about this metaverse, it really sparked interest because it was a breath of fresh air. This is a new virtual environment where people can be creative and really put their stamp on who they are and what they are building and adding to this world.

If you’re a creator, if you can draw, I mean so many skills can add to the metaverse and it’s endless and I just said, oh my goodness, this is something that so many people need to know about. This is not something that just a small group of people know about and then create, and then it’s too late and then you’re just thrown into this environment.

I personally would like the metaverse to be a better place than the real world meaning I don’t want to see the same stresses and division that we have in the real world taken into this metaverse and I am passionate about that. This is our chance to try and change things and do things a bit differently and better. So that’s what drew me to it.

What Is The Meaning Of Metaverse To You?

There’s so many different personal definitions of the metaverse but ultimately to me, it’s a virtual environment where humans will be interacting with one another and that’s either financially, socially or even educationally. It is a new world that will be able to connect people from all over and it will give us the chance of going on trips that we couldn’t do physically.

The futurist in me is saying we’re not going back to work in the office Monday through Friday. I feel as though there needs to be other options to connect us and get the job done and the metaverse is it. As adults, it is our children who really will be fuelling this metaverse as adult and we’re only going to get our feet wet within our lifetime. Let me tell you, it’s really the children who are already in there as they play Roblox with one another that are going to develop this space and really be working in there.

I’m just trying my best to do my part, to educate people to embrace it and figure out their stance on it and what they can do to make it a better environment.

What Is The Future Wise Group and What Does It Do?

Ultimately, the Future Wise Group do a lot but people generally seek us out for our trainings. That can be traditional training such as a workshop or educational curriculum.

Our ideal client is an organization or a person open to embracing this new technology into their lives, someone who is open to understanding the need for it and then how they can use it to assist them in their day-to-day activities. Someone who understands that it’s not to replace human to human contact because there are rumors out there, people think it’s going to be some dystopia and we’re never going to see each other again. The purpose is really to enhance human experiences.

At Future Wise Groups, we really sit down and paint a clear, understandable picture on where the client fits into this entire technological equation and how it can help that company or individual connect with others and most importantly, stay safe while they build or they are in there for themselves and their clients.

We’ve had schools ask us about creating curriculum, so we also do that. That is a strong demand right now. Colleges reach out to me personally to create courses surrounding the metaverse or AI and that’s exciting. That means that the students are learning about this new technology.

Aside from that I also co-produce two podcasts.

In terms of what we have actually built for clients in the metaverse, we actually have had smaller non-profits who want to protect their intellectual property and so upload it in to this digital world.

We have clients who are interested in NFTs and I’ve worked with producers before and we have a couple of projects on the table to create NFTs and develop the marketing strategy behind it.

I know my company can’t do it all which is why I have these podcasts and talk to leaders like you and other people to see how everyone is working together in creating this whole metaverse and Web 3.0 space.

So As A Futurist and Being Ahead Of The Crowd, How Do You Explain To People What They Should be Focussing On?

Typically, I start out speaking to policy makers and stakeholders. I talk to the people who explain to me what the problem is and why we have Web 3.0 being developed to answer a need within society. So right now we just came out of a pandemic. We have a climate issues going on and a plethora of other issues that a lot of governments are tackling right now.

I show them problems and issues and I show them how it can be resolved. You know it’s funny because I actually even go back in time, and I show them an issue or a problem that was possibly in a movie or on television and they get amazed and they’re like oh my gosh, this is something we’re dealing with today. These are issues that people knew about years ago, but we’re now having to face them and this is what we have to do to really stay afloat, be successful and really lead our next generation into success.

You know on large levels, if people do not understand what Web 3.0 is, embrace it and honestly be creative and add value to it.

What Will Happen If We Don’t Embrace Web 3 Technology?

Well, some of the biggest challenge I can tell you is if a person finds themselves being forced to go into the metaverse, to pay a bill or to work a job and not understanding how to navigate themselves in a virtual world, for example, because they don’t understand the technology behind it.

This is a major issue with older clients and bricks and mortar business owners business owners who really haven’t had to implement a lot of technology to make money. But we’re living in a new age in a new era, and I’m trying to explain to them it is just like when the internet was being developed. We’re going from an age of information to an era of experience, and so this experience is really going to guide us into new information, new education experiences and really set people apart.

We’ve just lived through this pandemic, and if a child didn’t do well with their online learning, we have to take this by the horn. We really have to understand your child needs to know how to be responsible and navigate them through the internet, as when we get into Web 3.0, it’s one step even further with our avatars and work from home experiences.

Everything shut down and then people had to log in and go to meetings via zoom and virtual backgrounds and people had to understand this is the wave of the next generation and there’s no getting around this. I mean, even if you turn around and you look at self-driving cars, things are changing in our real world every day, so just letting people understand that this is continual learning and things are not staying the same.

You cannot be combative to what you see today, because ten years from now, everything will look different, and it’s really up to you, your organization, your staff members, to really understand this. There’s no getting around this and it’s if you learn early enough and embrace it and understand how you can benefit from this, you will flourish and do fine in the next generation.

How Is Future Wise Group Helping People Understand Web 3.0 Technology?

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of people really stand-offish and saying I don’t need this and that’s the problem Future Wise Group is addressing. I think the biggest difference between Future Wise Group and some other organizations who provide training is we don’t work for anybody so we don’t push agenda on anyone. We take a holistic approach. We teach people because this is information to survive. Honestly, this is what’s happening and this needs to be embraced for financial reasons, for educational reasons.

What really makes people feel comfortable in learning through Future Wise Group and working with us is we genuinely want to help people and they feel that and I feel obviously the making a difference part is your really futureproofing them so they will embrace the new technology and not get left behind.

How do people find out more about the Future Wise Group?

Typically, people reach out to me via LinkedIn or find me when they hear me speak. I’ve actually been part of lots of conferences and seminars. I was recently asked to do a training in the United Arab Emirates for their government officials and so I was quite honored. So I’m going back and forth there and I believe they found me on LinkedIn.

When you hear me speak, typically you hear me talk about what Future Wise Group does, our trainings, and then we do the marketing for NFTs and strategy for transitioning in the metaverse.

I am equally interested in educating children as well as adults because they are the ones who are going to be really fuelling this machine, and I want our kids safe. I want them to understand how they need to connect with one another in this virtual world and how they can really thrive, learning new hands on experiences, with positive energy.

You can also find more about Future Wise Group at https://futurewisegroup.com.

Threedium | The Future Of Augmented Reality In E-Commerce 2023

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In today’s Web3tv interview, we’re with Mike Charalambous, the CEO of Threedium, and we’re going to discuss how in 2023, Threedium are building the most automated infrastructure for any brand to scale 3-D commerce so they can increase their sales and delight their customers and the future of augmented reality in e-commerce.

Mike is a passionate entrepreneur with international experience and the launch and development growth of new innovative businesses skills which are now being or bringing across to envision and shape the future of three dimensional internet.

Mike Charalambous, CEO of Threedium Backstory

After beginning his professional career as part of the tech team and then joining Moody’s as a risk analyst, he then moved back into providing product launch strategies for consumer electronic brands and it was about that time that he started exploring and seeing how consumer behaviors were becoming ever more immune into traditional media formats.

He then started his own company called Frenzy Media which ultimately created a SaaS platform for brands to introduce gamified ad formats so instead of just seeing a boring static banner you could actually interact with it and could play a game which if you won would allow you to claim a specific discount or a reward.

Then when he went to a large tech event in London in he met some guys that said they could get real time 3-D on the web and fast forward to 2023 we’re now sitting um as one of the leading 3-D Augmented Reality commerce engines providing full digital transformation and empowerment to all major brands within luxury fashion, jewelry, and consumer electronics and gone from a five people team to a thirty five people team with offices in in in the UK, Paris and Serbia.

What Drew You To 3-D?

I was not born within the 3-D world so I just organically got into it but the more you dig deeper the more you explore the possibilities of 3-D it is quite fascinating because if you think about it, it’s almost like a living organism within the web and therefore gives you a plethora of utilities once you’re able to extract its full power and allows you to have real time and dynamic displays on a product. It can allow you to connect it with different consumer behavior data so it can again in real time interact and correlate with specific consumer behaviors on the web which enables you to create so many new content generation techniques from using the same model.

So with the same 3-D model a brand can generate static renders, it can generate cgi, they can generate real-time 3-D and AR product displays and configure 3-D ad formats and with the same ad and with the same 3-D format as well you can even convert it and optimize it so you can create gaming assets so all of a sudden you can also be gaming ready. So it’s such a fantastic world and what really excites me is the ability to create the next generation content factory with 3-D being the backbone of all that and I think we’re still in day one so there’s so many more frontier technologies coming in tying nicely with 3-D from AI to VR to blockchain.

The fact that we are so early on and we are right in the middle of all this, we wake up every morning and we’re like okay what’s going to happen today and how are we pushing boundaries. What great ideas do our are brands and partners have so that we can go and innovate together and really there’s no stopping and it can never get boring.

Tell us more about um Threedium and then tell us more about your elevator pitch to your ideal client 

Threedium is all about trying to make 3-D accessible and inter-operable and give the ability for brands to generate huge benefits in their value chain using our technology.

We have built a huge tech stack within our ecosystem of 3-D technologies ranging from 3-D compression algorithms so you can compress very heavy 3-D models into super lightweight 3-D models that they can go and render and we have created an AI that allows you to turn images or videos into 3-D stills.  It’s a great foundation and it allows us to do a lot of cool things also shortern lead creation times.

We have also launched our patent pending 3-D ad formats which basically are being used by biggest publishers in the world and we’ve generated this gaming bridge that ultimately allows you to take the same 3-D format that a brand is using within our ecosystem to power their e-commerce solutions and optimize it and convert it and massage it automatically so it can become a gaming asset and they can consider ways start selling the same kind of product within a gaming world.

This is our most ambitious product to date because it’s an infrastructure that ultimately connects e-commerce with gaming commerce for brands at scale and on top of all these things because we are embedding everything into a very robust and agile infrastructure we allow the brands to connect this with any kind of data analytics software that they’re using so that they’re able to extract very precise user behavior data as to how users interact with their 3-D displays on e-commerce or avatars interact with their products within games.

This then synthesizes into a much more accurate data center that will enable them to either predict future trends or understand exactly how they can optimize engagement within their channels once people coming in interact with their product and so our goal is basically to build the world’s most scalable and easy to use integrated 3-D infrastructure and to be become the backbone of 3-D for any of these large enterprises that we work with.

Taking at a step further, while we are currently working with the big brands, our goal is to our make our technology accessible to smaller brands.

What Are The Main Industries Threedium Is Currently Working With?

Right now the majority of the enterprises that we work with are sitting within the sectors of luxury such as jewelry, fashion, consumer electronics while we’re also slowly seeing kitchenware becoming a very interesting category that is benefiting a lot from 3-D.

The reason we’re focusing on these industries is because from our own personal understanding of friction in the market, we’re seeing these industries tend to see the biggest benefits while implementing 3-D into their workflows and commercial strategies because they can see straightaway a bigger uplift on their conversions, a bigger increase in the amount of time and engagement a user has with their products, larger potential drops in product returns and also it helps them alleviate a lot of their supply chain struggles and logistics.

So we help them with the use of 3-D to communicate dependencies on shipping products back and forth, for product prototyping or for inventory management purposes so it gives us a very strong business presence.

What Are The Types Of Challenges Threedium Is Helping Organisations Overcome?

As an example, one of out biggest customer’s challenges was that they wanted to stay relevant and create a hyper personalized experience for their high-end customers but at the same time meet their very aggressive sustainability quotas.

So we licensed them our infrastructure and were able to configurate for them a 3-D experience that would enable either the shopper or shop assistant or visitor to their e-commerce website to be able to see the product in real- time 3-D, and be able to customize it with their own colors or personalize the label with their names.

The goal was to see whether their community would engage and support something like this because it was a huge transition going from fully seeing a product physically and touching it and exploring it versus going fully digital and exploring it and seeing it on a 3-D avatar without having being able to touch or feel the texture of the product.

Because of our high fidelity 3-D viewers, we were able to replicate a one to one look and almost feel and this enabled the brand to actually have a very successful launch and they were able then to introduce this 3-D configurator of their new collection across all of their flagship stores in different jurisdictions and they didn’t even have to ship the physical products.

So you can imagine how much money they saved on supply chain around logistics, around inventory management and on top of that they sold out so it really allowed them to have a much bigger gross margin on the collection.

We are also now integrating blockchain technology into the configurators so brands can authenticate and certify their whatever they created is one to one.

What Was The Initial Customer Reaction To This New Experience?

Before we launched, we were very conscious that when it comes to these super high in luxury brands, their customers are not really avid users of this technology so we wanted to ensure that the experience was going to be easily comprehendible but at the same time it was going to be smoothly adopted and accepted. So we spent a significant amount of time training the in-store shop assistants to understand how to use it and how to explain it to customers and the benefits that it had it versus actually seeing the real product.

Our first line of defence was to bring down the barriers of resistance from the in-store shop assistant so once they understood it, it was much easier to have these advocates to go around and start introducing the story about why do it is this way and what are the benefits for the users. We first rolled it out into physical stores so that people could familiarize with it better and then we introduced it online and this actually generated nice word of mouth and actually there was a lot of user-generated content as well with people taking videos and photos and saying how amazingly innovative a brand was.

So What Differences Are You Seeing In Terms Of Brand Spend As A Result Of 3-D Technology

In general we are seeing the average budget spend on brands we are working with increase on online commerce compared to physical commerce.  E-commerce is becoming an increasingly important revenue stream, especially post-pandemic and it is important that visitors to their e-commerce store have a great experience straightaway.

What Do You See As The Future Of Avatars In E-Commerce?

While avatar technology is still in its infancy, brands are now looking into different possibilities as to how they kind of generate new engagement points with those digital identities. Ultimately it would be great for a person’s avatar to be try on a piece of jewelry or item of clothing for looks and sizing purposes or even to purchase in both the physical world and digital world.

What Is The Interaction Between 3-D And The Metaverse?

What we are preaching as a company is that the whole notion of metaverse to brands is not a gamified world necessarily but rather a moment in time where we’re seeing a shift in consumer behaviors, a moment in time where users are not just willing to spend on physical products but they’re also willing to spend on digital products. It’s at  that moment we as humans are actually placing almost equal value of ownership on digital collectibles as we put on the physical collection.

The moment we see mainstream consumers willing to spend a hundred thousand dollars on something that is purely digital that’s when we’ll see the formation of a dual economy for the brands because right now they can generate products that they can sell directly to consumers but they can’t now generate products that they can sell directly to avatars or to consumers that want to build a digital collection for whatever purpose.

So what we are building with the brands basically is a whole new notion of gaming commerce irrespective of where this is going to be carried out whether it be within Sandbox, Decentraland, Fortnite, Roblox or any other desktop game build. The important aspect for the brands is that they understand that right now they have this amazing opportunity shaping up for them with the same 3-D model that they’ve designed. They now have a physical product they can repurpose and then start selling it as a product that has superpowers within the game.

Our goal is to actually build this amazing very scalable, automated infrastructure that connects a brand’s products with gaming commerce across all these different game development studios and they can then synthesize really good strategies as to how they sell or use their products to inspire gamers in those different environments.

If I Am A Brand Approaching The Use Of Web 3.0 Technology For The First Time, What Would Be Your Advice?

The answer will not be the same for everybody and reason being is that the first thing that any brand regardless of which sector they come from, they need to understand their target audience and the purpose for using the new technology.

I’m tired of seeing companies spending thousands to create an AR filter where you put your phone on their products and you have volcano or a dancing peak coming out of it. You’ve added zero value, people forget about it and it has zero return on investment.

Whatever you are using the new technology for has to provide value and have tremendous utility and they need to understand as well that if they want to go down the path of digital transformation and this notion of Web 3.0 is that their customers are no longer customers but a community.

They no longer expect to be treated as customers but rather brand campaign protagonists if you like so this is the first thing that the brands need to embrace and understand that if they’re going to go down this path.

For more information, go to https://www.threedium.io/