Life In 19x19

tapir wrote:The question of monetizing was raised earlier in this thread and while it is encouraging to hear there are plans I am not particularly convinced they will work, especially as playing itself will be free. (And there are ample opportunities to play online free of cost, so you won't convince people to join if you start a server with a fee to play.)

If the whole traffic is on a website advertisements may work, but I am not sure how much money this is supposed to earn. You may imagine "plus-accounts" (or another way to monetize possibly unique bonus features) as is practice elsewhere, but again they are not creating a particular impressive revenue stream judging from KGS. You may try to monetize on side bets on ongoing games, but you are heading for trouble as betting business is highly regulated / taxed etc. You may want to take a fee on all those teachers utilising the superior teaching facilities offered there. You may want to sell rank certificates when you finally settled for the best rating system in town - but I doubt online players are eager to pay for a paper (however nicely it looks). You can sell the player data to the highest bidder (no don't do that.) And here I am out of "monetizing" ideas, to me it looks the main idea is make Koreans, Chinese, Japanese play on the server in high numbers, then it may work out.

However, making presentations in Korea isn't enough - even if you find some people who like the idea and like to support you, even if you have a unique product. I am told e.g. that when the Western community had study software w/ game databases to offer sth. at that time not available in CJK (I don't know about now) there was about zero enthusiasm for the whole thing and no market in CJK and evidently the study cum database software had a no sizeable return on investment. Surely not MasterGo, surely not GoGoD (just imagine the time TMark spent in going over all those games again), maybe SmartGo is earning a little now with iPhone apps but it is like a big software package w/ reasonably strong computer opponent, study opportunities, database all incl., maybe MoyoGo did earn a little when new on the market, but surely they didn't earn much. Surely not GoBase or BiGo either.

Well this is a reason why we dont go out in public with the business model. We have plans, but they can change.
The presentation in korea is to set a milestone to future users, and to talk to pros to gather information. What all western ventures probably didn't do was talk to the asians and find out what they want. Thats what my prolonged stay in korea is about: what do pros want on a server.

That said i do not fancy a business model discussion like this, less in a forum. I could present you with the business/finantial model of twitter, facebook, wikipedia, kickstarter, groupon and many other's more and they probably wouldnt survive scrutiny neither here nor there. And we have a definite successful business with a name we are modeling ourselves after to.
Giving anyone satisfaction and confidence about whatever we model we pick is too high a standard, and it requires personal meetings , hours of talk and demonstrations to do so. That amount of energy and effort is obviously reserved for investors.

Kaya.gs wrote:And if we dont find any investor, becuase they are all stupid and think we suck

I hope you don't regret this joke.

Mr. Mormon wrote:

Kaya.gs wrote:And if we dont find any investor, becuase they are all stupid and think we suck

I hope you don't regret this joke.

Why would he ? Notice the word ''if''... I'm pretty sure it applies to the rest of the sentence .

It's still unprofessional to imply, even jokingly, that anyone who refuses to invest is a moron. Ironically, many people, when they are insulted, or even criticized constructively, stupidly make the irrational decision to refuse to listen anymore, a.k.a. not invest. Does kaya.gs seriously think investors with human biases are going to miss this page?

We have uploaded a quick-dirt geek section at last.

We just touch on the particular architectural details of the application and the main tools.

We will be improving that information over the course of the following weeks.

A terrible question.... have you any plans to monetize through gambling on outcomes or performance?

BobC wrote:A terrible question.... have you any plans to monetize through gambling on outcomes or performance?

Although gambling in the future might be a possibility we explore, definitely not something we are relying or planning to.

So the answer is no, definitely not right now.

Kaya.gs wrote:We have uploaded a quick-dirt geek section at last.

We just touch on the particular architectural details of the application and the main tools.

We will be improving that information over the course of the following weeks.

Excellent! Thanks . Good stuff right there .

The geek section is great! When can we expect the backstage section?

JeansebL wrote:The geek section is great! When can we expect the backstage section?

The backstage footage & documentary are being filmed. The whole idea is to make a neat video once the server goes live ,showing all the progress and big events since we launched the call for support.

Right now we have over an hour of footage, but of course it is only the beginning of the Documentary. So when will it be finished? probably a few weeks after the server goes live.

You guys will have to wait to see it . There is no way around it, the grand finale is the server going live.

Kaya.gs wrote:The backstage footage & documentary are being filmed. The whole idea is to make a neat video once the server goes live, showing all the progress and big events since we launched the call for support.

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

crux wrote:

Kaya.gs wrote:The backstage footage & documentary are being filmed. The whole idea is to make a neat video once the server goes live, showing all the progress and big events since we launched the call for support.

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.

stalkor wrote:

crux wrote:

Kaya.gs wrote:The backstage footage & documentary are being filmed. The whole idea is to make a neat video once the server goes live, showing all the progress and big events since we launched the call for support.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.