The first week of contests like these are always a bit hard to judge. Some contestants have to familiarize with the platform before being able to produce actual progress, servers must be set up, core architecture thought through and generally, the idea must start to materialize.

Therefore, we are happy that there has already been 3 progress reports made so early on in the contest. We will of course comment on them and try to provide useful tips and feedback to the developers based on their reports.

The absolute core of a project in this contest, is the idea. Creativity is extremely hard to force. If it was as easy as sitting down and thinking hard for 2 hours, everyone would have brilliant ideas all the time. But that's just not how it works.

Ideas are often the result of inspiration and the ability to transfer knowledge of one domain to another in a structured way. Most great inventions and innovative ideas originate from the ability to apply one's knowledge of one domain to other contexts. An example could be if someone spots an existing use case that requires a certain degree of trust between parties to work. The knowledge that Byteball's smart contracts can provide a way to remove the need for trust can possibly be applied to use cases that require trust to some extent.

And the ideas displayed by the three progress reports show such ability in that they all take a current real-world problem or need, and propose a solution by the use of the Byteball Platform. Before announcing this week's winner, let's take a further look at the three reports and the ideas proposed.

The general concept is to make a donation bot, that allows users of websites or services, to make a donation.

It is still very early in the competition and from the speed at which he is able to realize his ideas it is very likely that the concept will be expanded with even more functionality during the contest. The system in itself is rather simple, and the initial idea can actually be carried out without the use of a bot. To make a donation-link that opens a user's wallet with a predefined send screen is possible through the use of URLs.

We therefore look forward to following the project over the next weeks and seeing whether it introduces features where a bot will be required.

The entry is an interesting approach to a phenomenon that all social media platforms are familiar with: a user’s desire for more visibility, votes, thumbs up or likes. The Social Boost bot aims to provide a single gateway to fulfill exactly that need.

By the use of a Byteball bot, users can ask other users to support their blog post, video or article and set a reward that will be paid to users able to prove they provided it. The project report sets up realistic goals and takes the rather limited time into account as well, aiming to provide the minimum viable product that effectively proves that the system works.

The token-issuing capability of the Byteball platform might prove to be extremely useful to this particular use case, as it will allow introduction of points or tokens that can have arbitrary value. This will of course require the bot to be able to exchange between Bytes and this token, and token holders would need Bytes for the transaction fee. But we believe it could be a really interesting approach to the use of social reward tokens with an actual underlying value in the form of Bytes.

This concept, like the Social Boost, also encourages user engagement and interaction. By creating a Know-it-all Bot users will be able to ask questions that other users can then answer.

The reward for the answering users can come in the form of bounties that the one asking can set if they need a fast answer, or to create incentive for higher quality answers.

The concept is interesting, and will definitely yield a lot of potential for future features to be introduced. The bot itself would have to keep track of potentially huge amounts of data and it would be necessary to figure out ways to structure questions and answers in a way that makes it easy to navigate for users. The rather limited text interface bots currently offer might create a need for an external website where things can be structured, made searchable etc. The website could then simply provide links for users to perform the actual actions.