Phase 2: Web2 Scale-up (Arun)
It is a few months later. Arun now gets many emails from various brands in his inbox with µ in the Subject. There is a suffix with a number – his Mu Count. This lets him identify the real emails with Atomic Rewards from the spurious ones. One of the first things Arun had done after accumulating some µ was to activate his account. It was a breeze. All he had to do was confirm his mobile number in the email itself. This gave him access to the Mu Marketplace with a lot more goodies. (More on that soon.)
The incoming “microns” (as the emails with rewards are called) have made Arun look forward to opening his Gmail inbox on a regular basis. In fact, a few of his friends switched from the Apple default mail client on their iPhones to Gmail because AMP was not supported by Apple and they were missing out on the rewards!
Arun now knows the typical format of the microns. The Subject has µ followed by the Mu Count. The body of the email has the main email message – it could be a transaction confirmation or a promotional message. In either case, he is seeing brands work to make the message interactive. The transactional emails now have NPS feedback in-place – and he has started responding to them, since he doesn’t have to clickthrough to a different page. Many marketing emails from email companies offer much more product information in-place with expansion links. Increasingly, he is seeing payment integration so the purchase friction has reduced. Finance companies are offering calculators and real-time stock updates, travel companies offer search, media companies offer the latest headlines every time he opens the email; many offer chat (as a push towards conversational commerce).
He thinks of the footers like the comics and puzzles page in a newspaper; the “real thing” as he likes to call it. There are three containers of AMPlets in the footer: what the brand offers, what MuCo offers, and the Ad. The brand footer helps him earn µ, the MuCo footer lets him redeem µ with its casual games, and the ad’s personalised content makes him not want to miss it.
What Arun has been most excited about has been the recent launch of the Mu Marketplace. Brands have started offering many “priceless experiences” which he can redeem for his µ. Just recently, he signed up for an online interaction with the author of a bestseller by purchasing a ticket with µ from A1 Books.
Of late, Arun has also been seeing µ in some of his other push channels: SMS, push notifications and WhatsApp. He has been paying attention to messages which he otherwise would just ignore! While the µ still doesn’t have a trading price attached to it, he has heard that there is a Web3 Mu token coming soon. The gamification and fun element the Mu have brought in his life has been great; could asset appreciation be next?
