Don't forget the first step "Do you not really care about the technology and just want to write a webapp that gets mad investor money?" and an arrow that goes straight to "Yes"
That said, I've also seen a bunch of "X, but with blockchain! Can we have money now?" startups looking for funding.
Also, dig your username, lol.
Bitcoin and Namecoin are the only really compelling use cases I've ever seen. Even Ethereum kind of falters because there's not much you can really accomplish with a purely digital contract.
Ethereum falters not because you can't do much with a purely digital contract, but because people typically want the guarantees of a digital contract except when they don't. There is so much value (if only from inertia), of being able to fall back onto negotiation, or in a more negative circumstance litigation, around an existing contract.
The digital contract is too rigid for how contracts are typically executed in the real world.
"Smart contracts" aren't necessarily analagous to actual contracts. They can also be programmed with configurability.
There doesn't seem much too much hysteria going on there. He's hoping to be a leader in STOs which are a less scammy more regulated version of ICOs.
I was chatting to a blockchain enthusiast friend about building something along those lines myself for recording which ingredients came from where but the whole blockchain bit seems a bit tacked on to be trendy. I mean the more obvious way to record the data would be in a regular database but I guess you could write it to a chain as well so people could be sure it hadn't been altered. Dunno.
Watching the video at the end of the techcrunch article there's an IBM guy saying a problem is people record what's gone where with all sorts of incompatible systems - paper, local computers etc which makes it slow to figure which farm did it when you get food poisoning. I guess saying they have to write to data to an open blockchain rather than a Walmart database might be an easier sell?