I'm now convinced the whole thing is a prank.

i really don't see how you got that from gabriel's post. Can you explain?

Maybe because i speak with him a lot for the events we do with the ASR i can feel the enthusiasm and determination more.

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admin of the ASR league and KGS admin

I get a really weird feeling from the whole thread so far. I refer you to CSamurai's posts which are quite thorough. What bothers me most is withholding relevant information and asking for donations at the same time, saying they want to "reward a leap of faith", and avoiding known sites such as kickstarter that have a refunding mechanism - well, I don't want to use the S word, but it looks alarming to me. Also, quitting your day jobs before ensuring funding? Filming a backstage documentary? Srsly?

The technical page is a string of buzzwords, but elsewhere there are some indications of cluelessness (calling Thunderbird a "Java client").

The most positive interpretation I can come up with is of some guys with too much enthusiasm and not enough grounding in reality. OTOH, maybe it's simply because I prefer "forsaken technology" over web apps.

They explained why they can't use kickstarter.

Hey crux. I refer you to the answer to CSamurai's post viewtopic.php?p=76722#p76722

I had the feeling you would raise some techincal & software project-related concerns when i saw your venkman nickname.

If showing up in a crowd-sourcing site gives you confidence you can see http://idea.me/proyecto/21/kayagselservidorsocialdego . Its of course barely funded as we went through the payment issues on the first day. You can read CSamurais post about that.

Regarding quitting jobs before ensuring funding, its a long subject where we can agree or not. We have dealt and deal with investors regularly and they also ask things like a demo or working software. Working o nit part time means that instead of achieving such a milestone in 2 months, it takes 5 months or more. To work on a daring project requires confidence and commitment, and hanging on to your job drains resources, time and motivation. This is not the first time i quit to pursue a venture , and i certainly didnt invent the situation.

And regarding the backstage footage, you can like or not like what we are doing. Honestly we are thrilled of taping events like the Kim Seung-jun 9p event, the gatherings with other software developers to talk about the project, the presentations on investor callings, and we plan to tape as many events as we can. We have a video editor guy that gave us a hand to do the idea.me video (which is the one shown in the website) and we can do a much better one without the time constraints we had for that site.
Then again, we are not the first nor the last to make footage out of a venture like this, you can checkout kickstarter.org for some video projects that have similar things.

We do plan on adding a little text to the site, making it clear that supporters get to be on the credits.

You can dislike web-clients as much as you wish. We will likely have an API so native clients can be made or used, but as i have responded to a Feedback comment in the site, native clients will not have some features that can be very powerful thanks to a browser. Then again clients could use the browser internally. That will be decided by the community as a whole.

You can also second-guess our ability to make a technical solution on this aspect. I invite you to see http://phonetag.com/, http://www.unsubscribe.com, http://www.poketypoke.com which are projects i was involved with. phonetag is a service that translates voice messsages to text, and i worked in the application that was able to process thousands of hours of audio into sms, working on scalability to sustain enormous phone carriers. In unsubscribe i worked (and still do until this friday) working on browse rextensions and enormous usability concerns, and connecting to services like facebook and twitter to control which applications track your personal information.

Well, thats kind of a short resume. You can also check my LinkedIn profile if you look for me.
The reason why we explain the techonolgies and why we are using them, but i dont show the code or the architectural documentation we have(which i think is what you are asking when you say you want more technical information) is because today that is still propietary information. How open we will be regarding how we solve this problem is yet to be decided.


I cannot even imagine how someone can consider this to be dishonest. I have a high profile, talk to everyone and answer every doubt i can do. I even respond to those that ask questions i dont want to answer publicly in the most open and polite manner. I show my face, my name, what im working on, and im easily contactable, and also a great number of people know me internationally , having shaken hands and shared time.

So if you have concerns , voice them! i am here to answer them, even if they are not compelling to you.

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Founder of Kaya.gs

I just read the "geek" page, and it seems reasonable to me.

Once (if?) you guys get a little further along, I will definitely be looking to see if there's any useful way for dailyjoseki.com to make use of your api. If your webclient takes plugins, I'll consider writing one to display my joseki data for it.

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

I just registered. I loved the idea of joseki-study! i will take a deeper look later today. I would love a widget of this study on the site, would be awesome for idlers.

I'm making a mental note on this, to contact you later.

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Founder of Kaya.gs

I have no problem supporting this project, and admire what you (appear) to be doing--I'm not one of your critics.

With that said, a piece of advice: Do I read this right that you're going to to (or are) looking for investors in addition to donors? Before you do any investor calls or presentations, you absolutely must have a clear explanation for ROI (return on investment), and you'll need to show them more than I've seen so far.

Risks are inherent in any project or investment, but risky investments are acceptable because they offer a higher return. Kaya is just not a project with the hope of a high return. That's not a criticism, it's just the nature of this kind of project. But because it is low-return project (assuming there is ever any return), you must offer an investment that is very low risk, meaning you must show you have a very high chance of success--not just at launching a go server, but also at making a profit. Very, very few start-up projects are capable of doing that, so I wouldn't count on it. Donations are one thing, but investments are another: you are asking people to risk money on your project. So I wouldn't approach investors without a clear explanation for all of this, otherwise they'll just shut you down and ignore you later (even if you have a better plan).

If you believe in the project but are having trouble convincing others of its value, then take the risk yourself rather than putting it on investors: personally guarantee a loan (perhaps someone generous will offer it with low interest or interest free, who knows?).

Again--I'm kind of a fan of your project, so I'm not attacking you--just trying to offer some real advice.

Very nice project you have there! I already use it, and I'm looking forward to use it on Kaya between games.

Hey Judicata. There is a business plan written behind this, with estimates, ROI , schedules, team-building and all elements pertinent for a serious investor presentation. We have this covered.

And i have written before what will happen if we dont find investors.

Thanks for your concern!

This thread is getting really long and information is starting to get repeated. Might be time to make a new one.

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Founder of Kaya.gs

A new server will only benefit the game. Whether it is profitable for you remains to be seen. I was on the eurogo server earlier to register and see what it was about and there was no other player besides me on it. What is nice about the many go servers is that go as a game is widely reflected by who plays it. This means that a persons culture, language as well as where they live and what they do are reflected in their game play. This is partly why I stopped going to the Calgary go club, as I was one of a few non asian persons there and asians were largely seen as the experts of the game. I dont agree with this view of prejudice or superiority based on any culture and instead endorse having many different types of persons to play and learn from.

By all means establish a new server. The go community will thank you for it.

Go servers are really just feedback about whether the training away from the computer with books and problems is really working. I read once that a high dan player actually got worse after the intervention of the internet-more non focused play time rather than doing the hard work necessary to progress: Understanding openings, shape, best move problems, and life and death.

I did have a fear that the internet might die and I would have no one to play and I would be left to reading problem books written by someone in some faraway country, but at this point I think that is unfounded. Generally the problem now is too much information to handle, rather than not enough.

This project is a great idea, though much of the community doesn't seem to know what they're missing yet. I proposed a similar idea on these forums sometime back, not necessarily for a server, but a collaborative go site, based on similar ideas and goals. (See here.) Nobody really took me seriously, partly because I did a bad job of explaining the concept, and partly because I did not have the ability to act on my ideas at the time, and probably won't be able to for another year or so. If you find any of my ideas interesting and would like to discuss it, feel free to PM me. You seem to be one of the few to see the future of online Go. I wish you luck in your efforts, and hope the project succeeds.

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"Those who calculate greatly will win; those who calculate only a little will lose, but what of those who don't make any calculations at all!? This is why everything must be calculated, in order to foresee victory and defeat."-The Art of War

Hello, I'm the someone. I'm still reading through this thread, but let me give you an answer to this question yet: I earn enough to require complete and absolute trust in this project to donate. I talked and discussed with Gabriel a lot before making this decision, and I am certain that I chose the right option.

I understand that people are unsure or even downright negative on Kaya's prospects since other servers provide a decent experience and userbase already, but I firmly believe that what we have right now is not the final solution. Personally, I spent not only a (for my standards) very large amount of money, but also an insane amount of time on Go server development and related issues due to being unsatisfied with the current solutions. The experience I gained made me feel save about Kaya, and I'm going to contribute as much as possible.

I obviously welcome everyone to contribute as well. Besides donating (hurry while it's still open to get a founder account!) you can also add comments and ideas. One place to do so is http://kaya.uservoice.com (sorry if this was posted already, I did not read everything yet). Be assured that no other Go server ever listened to the community as closely as Kaya does.

I think it is not that people are negative, but more so realistic. The fact of the matter is, the western go community is not a large, or lucrative market, and most projects strive to break even. What I believe judicata is saying is not necessarily that this server technically cannot be created, or that it shouldn't be created, but that one must realistically manage investor expectations. There have been a couple high profile examples of people unfamiliar with the go world jumping right in and anticipating there to be a large market for their new/revolutionary/buzzword-of-the-week products, but typically that just is not so. Even highly polished products developed by established people in the community may see only meager returns, and typically have a terrible ROI when you consider the amount of time and effort actually put into them by the creators. While this is all well and good for people developing labors of love for the go community, or people who are donating out of desire to see the toolbox of options available for go players enriched, it is a dangerous strategy if you have outside investors unfamiliar with the go community who have unreasonable expectations for the kinds of returns they are going to see. Typically the correct expectation for an investor in a go project in the West is "Break even on cost, maybe be compensated a little for my time." (judicata feel free to correct me if I misread your post)

You have it pretty much right. Note that I do not want to discourage people from donating to the project--as I mentioned, I have no hesitations in doing so at this point. I also don't know whether the project can or will make money (maybe it will)--I'm just saying that, given the market (as you describe), they better have a pretty convincing explanation of how it is going to turn a profit before they present it to potential investors.

Great news guys . I'm now oficially unemployed, and working 100% on Kaya.gs.

On thursday we secured ourselves office space within a local gaming company that has space to spare. This very monday we are starting the first full official day of work, which we are obviously taping for the documentary.

We are veeery close to our first goal, 4000U$S. Only 500 dollars short! And we havent been featured in the Aga E-J and EurogoTv news. (they dont seem to enjoy answering emails). Regardless of that timing we are confident we are going to achieve the milestone.

That said, our Kisei has been given some images already. He has seen the board we have, which i used to make an "I QUIT" message to my employers. He has seen some parts of the server, but only screenshots as the server is not deployed yet.

We are going to pull up two new prizes to make up for the ones that run out this weekend. One of them involves the ASR League!

Lastly but not least, this week we presented ourselves to an investor contest and we are crossing our fingers to get through the pre-selection which is the hardest part: im confident that if we go through the first screening , we will have an awesome case to battle the final positions.

Whatever happens to that, community support is of great help. It not only gives us time to work on this without the pressure of running out of resources soon, and it gives us something very important to show in the table in front of an investor: that people really want something new. Each new contributor adds the whole project more credibility to them, that usually dont know what Go is and dont know if people even like it.

Im still around to answer any doubts! If you cant get some candy or dont want to, you can still give us a helping hand by telling your friends about Kaya.gs.

Thanks a lot of for the awesome support so far!

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Founder of Kaya.gs

Im looking forward to see your new server.

Can you give a rough estimate when kaya.gs is ready for public usage?

I look forward to several months from now, when I'll finally have an opinion on whether this go server is a good idea.

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Occupy Babel!

I dunno, I still like this project, in spite of having some reservations.
As many have said - another server cannot be bad to the community, unless the community lets it.
And the worst that can happen is that the project will fizzle out, which I hope it won't.

Still, what goes through my mind is - how will Kaya.go compete?
I mean... I don't mind supporting it because it is a good idea, but why should I play there? I bet I am not alone asking this.
Go servers are like bars. Nobody wants to sit in a bar alone, so people go where people are. But how to get the initial people in?

The really different thing I have seen is the embedded (streaming?) video capability. But videos are easy these days, and if this is to be the differentiator, pretty soon each server will have streaming video. Plus - videos have an overhead - somebody needs to shoot them. And for that to work, the shooting needs to be consistent and dependable, which usually means money involved, contracts, sending people to events, etc. If nobody at the next Congress videotapes the top games, this capability is meaningless.

What else? A kick-off tournament with good prizes can only get you so far before people go back to where they were before, and you need cash to do that. Luring in some friendly pros would be the best ticket, but I am not sure I have heard any plans for that. But this would certainly work... although it would also cost, probably.

The other good thing about Kaya.go I hear is that it will be web-based, rather than forcing the user to download a dedicated client. I like this idea, sort of like Yahoo!Go with better rating system and nicer interface. Is that enough?

When I look at the successful servers, there seems to be a pattern of filling in a void, a need. NNGS filled the need to people unhappy with IGS. KGS filled the void after NNGS folded. Other servers filled their respective niches and so they succeeded. But usually they already had a player base waiting before they started.

Then there are the other servers - all the less-than-successful ones. They usually tried to break off a chunk of somebody else's pie, compete within a market that is already pretty satisfied. This is what I see Kaya.go will be doing. And it is not clear to me why people should go play there rather than stay on KGS/IGS/wherever.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Well, I believe that being able to give video/audio teaching games, with any account, is more than enough to convince most teachers out there to use Kaya. Some teachers have many students, and these students have friends...

Moreover, there are 65 contributors right now, and they will definitely play on the server. It's also possible to imagine that these contributors will invite their friends etc... Some of them (like me) are tournament organizers, and they will definitely broadcast on kaya when it becomes available.

Finally, did you look at the feedback section? There are many new planned features, and many of them are not available on any other server.

There will be players on the server, a lot of players.