Software company Blockheads Development brings a rare combination of creativity, technical prowess and marketing experience to ICON’s P-Rep campaign.

And they’re not shy about it, either.

“I don’t think there’s anyone in the P-Rep campaign with as much marketing experience as I have,” says team member Jennifer Kim. “It’s an unusual situation where we can do the tech, but we can also be creative and evangelize for ICON.”

Small country, big progress

Created to build “a more transparent and decentralized tomorrow,” Blockheads is a three-person outfit based in the up-and-coming tech hub of Fresno, California. Kim, the team founder, has two decades of experience in marketing and sales; she’s a blockchain investor and evangelist as well. The team’s engineer, Fresno native Shaun Hallier, boasts proficiency in about 20 programming languages. Designer Morgan Smith has put together around 900 websites over the last decade.

Blockheads started working with ICON last summer, when the company did marketing for ICON entertainment DApp STAYGE at KCON LA, the Los Angeles edition of the Korean pop culture convention. The team has been impressed with ICON’s networking. I like that they are making more progress politically than other projects in this space,” says Kim. ICON seems to have more new articles about working in conjunction with local governments and the Korean government. Other projects don’t seem to get that far.”

As a Korean-American, ICON also gives Kim a certain sense of pride. She says, I’m always impressed with how much progress this little country can make in a short amount of time.”

Something in the water

Kim can point to a long list of happy clients from her 20 years of marketing. Still, she’d like to drop her other work and focus exclusively on creating marketing campaigns for ICON.

She points to her team’s tangibility as a selling point. We’re actually identifiable,” she says. There was another person in Fresno who was a holder and he wanted to come to our office and see what we were working on. We said yes, please.”

She adds, We’re a verifiable business. We’re not hiding behind some nickname or veil. We’re going to share everything we do.”

And they’re already doing things to share. They’ve begun work on a project that would help improve water quality in the West African nation of Cabo Verde. This project would use IoT devices to measure water quality characteristics such as turbidity, pH, temperature, dissolved oxygen and electrical conductivity. The data collected would be saved on ICON’s blockchain. Discussions have already begun with Cabo Verdean officials, including diplomats in the United States.

Not that Cabo Verde is the only country with water issues. In fact, the idea for the project began in 2015 when news broke that water in Blockhead’s hometown of Fresno had been contaminated by uranium. They would put these crazy signs out saying, ‘We suggest you not drink the water because it may cause cancer,” she recalls. I felt that was unacceptable.”

Kim believes blockchain can help solve the problem. My hope is, one day, we’ll be able to see the quality of our water just like I can control my thermostat at home,” she says. That’s what our goal is here.”

Made in Korea

Blockheads hopes that we’ll soon see more DApps that are fun and easy to use. By way of example, she points to the karaoke service SOMESING. She says, Maybe underneath it’s a blockchain DApp, but to the common person, it’s just a fun app.”

She also encourages ICON to embrace its identity as a Korean product. She says Korean culture is big right now, noting that 90,000 people attended the last KCON LA over three days. Blockhead’s office receptionist may not know Huey Lewis, but she knows the hanbok — Korea’s traditional clothing. By pushing Korean culture, ICON can win itself more devotees beyond Korea’s shores, she says.

Of course, they’ve already got some devotees in Fresno. We’re hard workers and big fans of ICON,” says Kim. “We can’t wait to devote most of our resources to ICON.”