Experience Africa

Experience Africa

Angel Theory – Special Project 1

By Nick Ray Ball 17th December 2016

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Over the past 5 years over 150,000 elephants have been killed for their Ivory.

With populations in Western and Central Africa virtually gone, the mass killing is now spreading to East and Southern Africa. The Criminal Network smuggle the raw ivory into China where it is carved into luxury items, fuelling a multibillion dollar trade.

If the trade continues, the African Elephant could become extinct within 15 years.

The Ivory Game – A Netflix Documentary
https://theivorygame.com

Having watched the Ivory Game documentary without significant change, the Elephants don’t stand a chance. The less elephants there are, the higher the price of Ivory goes up. If one looks at Africa there has been a war against Elephants and Rhinos by poachers and farmers. The elephants can’t defend themselves against guns and they are losing. And the frontline moves with them as the poacher’s advance.

What they do not mention in any detail is another long-term threat which is the expected increase in population in Africa. Today Google says the population in Africa is 1.216. However, I have seen a well-reasoned documentary that suggests that in the future world population will rise to 12 billons with 4 billion in Africa. If that happens there will be far less or no habitat for the Elephants or any other animals to live in. This being so, even if ivory is banned and poaching is far less, the unfaltering increase in population will lead to most everywhere that is not a national park being farmed. And as the documentary shows and as I know from previous research on Cheetahs, the farmers are as big a threat as the poachers.

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As such if we can stop the poachers, I can see a future where elephants only live in national parks. However, it does need to be mentioned that some national parks are bigger than the many countries. So, looking to the future as well as the present, I will add that we need to make sure that the national parks do not get rezoned as farmland. And as suggested in the documentary they need to be fenced in places where elephants can walk to farms.

Going back to the present sources say poachers kill African Elephants every 15 minutes. The funds for protecting Africa’s elephants and other wildlife is tiny compared to the 8 to 15 billion dollars that poaching is said to generate each year.

We need to find the means to protect Africa’s Elephants, Rhino, and other endangered animals from the advance of poachers into South and West Africa.

Some wisdom from a hero of Africa…

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About me, Nick Ray Ball…

From February 2011 to March 2013 I wrote my first set of books called ‘American Butterfly.’ It is about ‘S-World,’ a virtual social network and social ecological macroeconomic hypothesis. You will find this work and more at www.AngelTheory.org.

After 2 and a half years, 24/7, and about a million words at the end of American Butterfly part 4, Experience Africa was identified as the first ‘special project’ to work on… it was to be considered the network’s loss leader.

The plan at the end of American Butterfly was to create sanctuaries attached to ecologically balanced resort developments. And this is still a fare plan. However, it was more of a ‘the war is lost’ kind of thinking. Fortunately, a much more effective and far cheaper plan has been created which I call ‘Angel Theory Project 1: Experience Africa.’

Since 2013 I have been actively creating a network prototype in the vacation rentals industry in Cape Town in preparation from quite a disruptive start-up. One can see the business plan here Network.VillaSecrets.com and in the same way we wish Villa Secrets to create hundreds of thousands of small companies. We can apply the exact same system to safaris, both agents and the safaris themselves. And in the case of safaris instead of paying royalties to Villa Secrets, that may or may not be used philanthropically, all royalties from safari owners would be directed to the fight to save elephants, rhinos, cheetahs, and wild dogs. And the agencies we create would donate half of their gross profit.

Experience Africa has had quite a journey. This history and the basics of the deal were set down in October 2016: Experience Africa – Plan 5.01

In brief, we plan to adapt the Villa Secrets ‘S-Web framework’ and TFBMS software to the safari industry in all sectors. But in particular, the individual safaris whereby the income created is used to protect the animals.

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The end game is to create an all-encompassing product that individual safaris rely on for bookings and management, travellers, and tourists use directly that most tour operators use as their first option for booking safaris. And in general, we would promote safari holidays in Africa, increasing the marketplace.

“Our target is that by 2020 or sooner is for half the safaris to use our system, each contributing 12.5% of turnover. This would generate over $100,000,000 each year and would be forever sustainable, more likely to increase than decrease.”

The math that leads to the $100,000,000 plus in funding follows…

  1. Average safari price $200 per person, ($400 per room) (R)
  2. Average amount of rooms 7 (#)
  3. Occupancy equivalent to being fully booked for 150 days (O)
    R x # x O = $420,000 per Safari
  4. x Number of Safaris = +/- 4,000 (S)
  5. x 50% enrolment = 2,000 (E)
    (R x # x O) x (S x E) = $840,000,000
  6. Licence Fee = 12.5% (amount) (L)

(R x # x O) x (S x E) x L = $105,000,000 given to fighting the poachers and breeding programs.

It’s been a long time coming but I hope that soon I can find some committed citizens to assist me with this and other Angel Theory special projects.

As Nelson Mandela said, “A winner is a dreamer, who never gives up.”
But this really is not a dream. It’s an extremely well planned initiative which will work. The uncertainty is not on will it work, rather, how much will it make?

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The plan for this is to be very involved, one factor will make a big difference, and it would be a philanthropic investment.

It was not the original plan for Experience Africa to ask for assistance. Experience Africa V5.01 was virtually cost free. As we were already creating the system for S-World Villa Secrets, we only needed to adapt it to safaris. But creating the system for S-World Villa Secrets and in particular the TFBMS will take quite some time. And what with one Elephant lost every 15 minutes, time is at a premium and the smarter play is to ask for assistance now.

I have chosen two foundation to approach, The Chan Zuckerberg Foundation and The Paul G Allen Family Foundation

The Chan Zuckerberg Foundation

Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dormitory room on February 4, 2004. He married Priscilla Chan on May 19, 2012. In Dec 2015 Mark Zuckerberg announced that he and Priscilla are giving away 99% of their Facebook shares — valued today at $45 billion—during his lifetime.

Since 2011, Mark Zuckerberg has been featured many times in the plans and research for all of S-World.biz, American Butterfly & Angel Theory.org

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“At the Chan Zuckerberg initiative, we believe we can make the world better for generations to come by uniting the greatest minds to solve the toughest problems. It will take long term focus and new ways of working together.

By bringing world class engineering to the frontlines of science and education, we can build new tools and technologies that help organizations scale. We invest in the best ideas regardless of organizational structure. That includes nonprofit and for profit entities, as well as non-governmental research institutions.

Many philanthropic organizations give away money, but the Chan Zuckerberg initiative is uniquely positioned to design, build and scale software systems to help educators and scientists already working on humanity’s greatest challenges.” 

From the above we can see that The Chan Zuckerberg Foundation is very keen to solve problems via technology. Also, they like to build software systems to assist in humanities greatest challenges, which is exactly what we desire. And the idea of creating a safari system that could generate over $100,000,000 a year for conservation via mostly technology and a degree or PR and marketing seems to score a perfect 10.

In addition are the other 15 special projects presented in Angel Theory.org, that will benefit from the creation of Experience Africa, including ‘Advancing Human Potential,’ ‘Universal Knowledge’ & ‘Global Healthcare.’ Albeit, such projects are more complex.

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After Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement that he’s giving away 99% of his Facebook shares, Bill and Melinda Gates wrote…

“As for your decision to give back so generously, and to deepen your commitment now, the first word that comes to mind is: Wow. The example you’re setting today is an inspiration to us and the world. 

We can be confident of this: Max and every child born today will grow up in a world that is better than the one we know now. As you say, ‘seeds planted now will grow.’ Your work will bear fruit for many decades to come.”

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Until recently the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was chosen as one of two primary foundations for Experience Africa. The main reason for this was their foundation and the idea of a progressive & more efficient charity was a huge influence in the conception of S-World as a philanthropic network in the first place. It may even be fair to say…

“If not for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, there may not have been an S-World.”

However, while the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation does specialize in Africa, it does not specialize in conservation. Instead the fight against elephant poaching is the special project of Bill’s partner Paul G Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1975. And as such, it seems more appropriate to approach Paul for Experience Africa and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation about the other S-World special projects.

The Paul G Allen Family Foundation

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Paul G Allen co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1975. In 2010 Allen committed to giving away half of his wealth and is a champion of the fight against ivory poaching and other philanthropic initiatives.

www.pgafamilyfoundation.org

“Paul and Jody Allen believe in supporting investigators who are tackling challenging questions because that’s what leads to major discovery.”

“We look for gaps in research, knowledge and tools, that when they are filled have a large scale impact. We support those who bring innovation to solve problems. We seek to be a catalyst for new ideas and projects that are the difference between status quo and real change.”

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We support the advancement of science and technology in ways that are new, experimental, and have the power to set off ripple effects. We look for projects that promote learning, conservation, understanding and growth.

When we consider the above there are many synergies. There is no project created that if seen to fruition will have a large-scale impact. We have challenging questions such as can M-Theory be reverse engineered into an economic system? And in terms of creating ripple effects, the word ‘Butterfly’ in ‘American Butterfly’ is from the Butterfly Effect, and the science of creating ripple effects, see Angel Theory’s: M-System 2. ‘The M&B String.’

Like Priscilla Chan & Mark Zuckerberg, there are other special projects from Angel Theory that will be assisted by any contribution to the technology of Experience Africa. Albeit it needs to be said that for these projects to come to fruition we need my work on M-Theory considered and assisted to become a digital age economic science.

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I’m looking forward to the Christmas and New Year holidays. These are the days that I have allocated to completing (to a fashion) my presentation of the S-World Virtual Network in Angel Theory book 1. M-Systems which looks at the S-World network through the eyes of M-Theory, which was recently described by professor Stephan Hawking as;

“M-Theory is the only candidate for a complete theory of the everything, it is the unified theory Einstein was hoping to find.”

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As one would imagine an economic system that was powered by the same mathematics as the Theory of Everything would be a whole lot more efficient…but we need not get into this here, other than to say…

Should M-Theory specialists such as professors Edward Witten and Lenard Susskind accept the ‘M-Systems’ framework as an application of M-Theory, then all Angel Theory special projects become credible.
Here are some other S-World special projects Paul G Allen would likely see interest in: ‘Angel POP’ (addresses the poverty gap and many other problems), Sienna’s Forests (preserves forests) and ‘Global Cooling’ (create more forests, and popularize electronic cars and alternate energies such as solar power).

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Unlike the other 15 special projects that require a good dose of M-Theory and a digital economic revolution to manifest, Experience Africa needs people to embrace some smart thinking, some engineers, programmers, and designers. The operations will pay for itself, the system does most of the work.

END OF CHAPTER.

Chapter 2. The four system pillars of Experience Africa

By Nick Ray Ball 17th December 2016

Elephants are among the most intelligent creatures on the planet. Their complex social relationships, kinship bonds, and capacity for emotions makes them unique in the animal kingdom. They are the gardeners of the forest and the keepers of the savannas.

Without them the biodiversity in these ecosystems would collapse. In the past 100 years African elephant populations have been reduced by 97%. More than 50% of Africa’s remaining elephants could be killed in the next 10 years if illegal poaching continues at the current rate.

The truth is…the fewer elephants left on our planet, the higher the price for ivory. Throughout Asia, ivory has long been seen as a symbol of wealth. With China’s booming middle class, demand for it has skyrocketed.

The Ivory Game – A Netflix Documentary
https://theivorygame.com

The four system pillars of Experience Africa

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  1. Safaris CMS, S-Web Content Management
  2. S-Web creates thousands of tour operator websites.
  3. TFBMS for Safaris
  4. Villas Cloud connects to receive data from all distribution systems and connect to individual safaris inventory systems

1. Safaris CMS, S-Web Content Management

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Few would argue that ‘S-Web’ the Villa Secrets CMS is Villa Secrets most important attribute. It’s certainly the first thing we currently present on the Villa Secrets Network homepage.

Here is the article…

The S-World Villa Secrets Network has created a prototype web framework seen on Villa Secrets.com. This web framework can be described as ‘WordPress for Dummies,’ as it takes complex themed WordPress pages that take specialists a few hours to make (like this), improves upon them and creates a super simple CMS (content management system) that allows the improved version of the page (like this) to be created in a tenth of the time by a non-specialist.

The entire Villa secrets website is created as a series of CMS, so that out the box, a new user can build a great looking website with excellent mobile responsive design in no time at all. (See video S-Web CMS)

The main two points are simplicity of use. In that a child of 7 years of age could use even its most advanced functions and beauty of presentation. And I guess we could throw in great responsive design soon enough, only a little way to go on that.

The CMS has been designed so that we can send it to property owners and they could create or update their own pages. An action that would be hard to complete if not for its simplicity.

I have specked out some updates needed for Safaris. Such as that of what the other attractions are on, or near any given safari, and how far is it from other popular accommodations for multi leg trips. Plus, a detailed CMS on all the different animals and birds that one is likely to see and the probability of seeing one particular animal or bird during a two-night stay? And of course, which times of the year are best to visit, using points basses and cross matching algorithms to even out all scores so one safari can’t just say, its great every month.

Making the CMS super simple and having a small team dedicated to helping safaris to fill it in will enable us to get thousands of safaris on line in a short time with greater content and more useful information than other systems. In addition, in comparison to most tour operator systems, we will be able to offer exact pricing, not just a minimum price.

With the exception of the team that would present the system and assist safaris to use it, there is very little work needed to upgrade what we have now for Villa Secrets to what we need for Experience Africa.

2. Experience Africa creates thousands of S-Web tour operator websites.

This may sound a bit excessive but it’s very important that before we try to get Safaris to use our systems that we give them a reason to want to. The only reason for using any booking system is to get more bookings. And so, we need to generate as many bookings as we can to encourage them. So, we may choose to create 64 such websites from the current Villa Secrets framework in the summer of 2017. Another 192 using the updated framework in late 2017 and 784 more throughout 2018 with the capacity to create a great many more…

To deal with bookings and customer service ‘the Sienna-Bot AI’ takes most of the strain, where after there would need to be deal done with either an existing tour operator, or we would need to create a central reservations office manned 24/7 in various languages. However, as the ‘Sienna Bot AI’ is doing most of the heavy lifting, we can mostly use a very young and inexperienced team, motivated mostly or solely by commission. Indeed, it would be nice to make such a team from the residents of Mandela Park, the township in my old home in Hout Bay, Cape Town. (ticks off another box…)

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There would be a number of different scenarios for those who received the licenses and the deal would most often be that commission was split 50%/50% (company / Anti-Poaching fund). And so, the more ‘tour operator websites making money, the better.

Ten different types of owners for the tour operator websites

  1. Travel Individuals wishing to start their own small business
  2. Safari Companies who have lost out in recent years due to a poor internet presence
  3. Safari’s themselves
  4. International tour operators and travel agencies
  5. African tour operators and travel agencies
  6. Franchises opportunists
  7. Villa Rental Companies
  8. Individual High-End Villas and Private Islands in Africa
  9. Mandela Park Achievers
  10. Conservation Charities

Google Grants

Note the last set, Conservation Charities, such charities can apply for Google Grants.

Now I wish to be completely upfront about this and will present this or a similar communication to Google Grants, Google.org & if possible the foundations of Google’s founders Larry Page & Sergey Brin. I’m sure the method I present would not be exactly what Google Grants had in mind, but at the end of the day seeing the good that will come of it, I hope they will allow our initiative.

Maybe Google will approve, or maybe they will not.

However, this is the plan…

For Conservation Charities, we would normally see them as licensors. However, 99% of the running of the businesses will be conducted from the operations base, which is now likely to be in Hout Bay staffed mainly by the township folk .

In the case of Conservation Charities S-Web websites would work on a 25%/75% split (operations/fund for stopping poaching).

The Conservation Charities would set up a new nonprofit company receiving 75% of all commissions. And it would apply for Google Grants which offers $10,000 a month in free advertising limited to $2 per click.

Should we create a 2nd tier network (64 different companies) receiving $10,000 each per month, that equates to $7,680,000 in free ads, that should return at least double being $15,360,000 in commission, which would be split 25% = $3,840,000 for operations and 75% = $11,520,000 for the fight against poaching.

I’ll not hazard a guess on how much the other thousands of websites will make, as in part this is a book all to itself and in addition this income is bonus income. The point is to control enough market share to make the individual safaris want to use our bookings system. This is due to the number of clients that are using it and that each booking made from the websites increased the desirability of the system for safaris to use in the first place.

This is the creation of ripple effects, American Butterfly style… or as may be better put… African Butterfly.

3. TFBMS for Safaris

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4. Villas Cloud connects to receive data from all distribution systems and connect to individual safaris inventory systems

Chapter 3.

The Four Marketing & PR Pillars of Experience Africa

  1. Public figures and celebrities
  2. Top10Safari.com SafariAwards.org & Quality TV Shows
  3. S-World VSN
  4. Affiliate, Content Marketing, SEM & SEO

“Sadly, Africa continues to face unprecedented challenges in terms of poaching, driven by the flourishing illegal trade in wildlife parts. Africa’s Elephant population has crashed from 1,3000,000 in 1979 to approximately just 400,000 today.

The rangers face grave danger every day. Over the last 10 years over 1000 rangers have given their lives in the name of conservation.

We live in a sorry world where an Elephant requires the sacrifice of a human being for its own survival. But these people cannot face the bullets and the threats alone, it is up to governments and international bodies to unite behind them, to ensure that their efforts on the ground are fruitful.”

HRH The Duke of Cambridge
The Ivory Game – A Netflix Documentary

Investment Strategy

Logistics

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