How ICOs Are Replacing IPOs - The uKit Example And Their Unusual ICO
As a programmer, I want to stay updated with all the trends and tools that could be useful in my job. So I am signed up to a bunch of newsletters for various products, from software platforms to libraries. One of them is uKit, which is a website builder. You know, like Wix, or similar.
They monetize their business by selling premium plans. So far, nothing unusual.
But in a recent email I got from their CEO, I learned that they are planning to launch their own ICO. Huh? Say again? An ICO for what?
Well, apparently, if you buy the uKit token, you may be able to (copy & pasted from the email):
Get a lifetime premium plan for just $100
Influence the development of uKit and decide what features will be implemented into the builder next. The voting results cannot be faked thanks to the blockchain
Resell your token on a cryptocurrency exchange
If you look at their ico page you will learn that they aim to significantly switch their business model and to introduce two new services: one about optimization pages (which seems to be in beta) and another one about conversion improvement using AI. Seems like the token will be somehow related to these new services, but for me is not yet clear how (I confess I didn't read the white paper, yet).
It's the first example of a traditional web services company which switches towards a new way to finance itself, using ICO and tokens. Although it looks a bit strange, and inappropriate, my opinion is that this is just the beginning of a very disruptive trend.
One in which tokenizing stuff will become the new norm, just like having all the information available instantly, on the web, became the new norm 25 years ago.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
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Most of these ico's seem to have very ambiguous reasons to own. Wild west at the moment
Wild wild west was often mentioned in the early days of world wide web :)
The time has come to monetize the whole internet....
Let us just wait patiently for SMTS in early 2018.
I can see tokens replacing "shares" in more ways than one!
The future of business has been commenced and as with every new concept it shall take time to kick in and kick out the "old obsolete" way of doing things.
SMTs are definitely going to change things too, step by step!
I agree on 2 points:
This is not appropriate, they are just looking for extra money.
We are at the very beginning, decentralized tech will become more accessible and then everything will be tokenized. This is not harmful persay, as most of these tokens will rather take advantage of the immutable accounting system that is the blockchain, and won't be used for financial value.
This is reminiscent of the sudden adoption rate, that happened when the internet became accessible through a browser and not just a geeky CLI.
Nick, let me disagree.
Money is blood for business, that's right, and there're plenty of options how to get them. Previously our company had experience of venture capital with DST fund, and this was a good experience, but today when you have a mass solution, and especially if you want to build more effective and modern infrastructure - tokenazing looks to be the smartest way.
How it will be done in uKit AI? We're building an ecosystem where every website owner can share depersonalized data about traffic behavior to help faster learn AI he and everybody else are using. If he gives, he gets a part of token from reserve fund and can exchange it for additional % of AI system capabilities.
Such thing should be transparent, so that's how we came to blockchain. You can get detailed tech info on our special page, and if interested - take part in battle of comments about it in our Bitcointalk topic.
There're also minior blockchain-backed features - like voting for what's comming next in websitebuilder, but the main reason is mining. Guess in past few month you've already seen both startups and existing SaaS businesses adding blockchain to manage crowd data properly. Would love to hear what're you thinking about them all)
Holy cow, you are actually from uKit.
You have to agree that with this rapid expansion of ICO space the dilution is very real. There are absolutely valid projects that are buried between piles of scams. At first glance, my impression was that the tokens are a gimmick, not a valid contribution to the blockchain ecosystem.
This does seem similar to what BAT is doing. Why are you not working with them or using their Token? Do you need to create a new token?
Thank you for giving us some more information to back it up. To make any further judgements I would have to read your whitepaper.
Nick, feedback's always appreciated - so here's our WP
Guess, BAT is a bit different. It's about advertising. We're about marketing. We have only one party - site owners: they contribute to a database that uKit AI connects to, and then use uKit AI to create multiple data-oriented designs of pages for their visitors.
Agree and I really remember those times :)
What a time to be alive, what a time to be in the crypto space. It feels like living on the fast lane, waiting for the whole world to catch on. I have a dream, and I dream that Steemit will eat Facebook's marketcap :D
Nice post bro @dragosroua
Great news,thanks for share
The tokenisation is starting to catch on and all this change is happening fast, amazing really
Invention over inventions now what's gonna be next after ico's ;)
Dragroshrua, hi, I'm Alex from uKit Group, company developing uKit and other our web building services. Thnx for featuring us here and making me finish steemit registration)
And thnx for sharing our vision: we either believe such things will disrupt classic IT/web market. And go ICO not only to give people $100 timeless access to uKit and voting feature (you know, we tested messages, you got one with such key points) - people will be able to share data to teach AI they'll be using for their websites and get reward for it.
In the world where marketing becomes more data-driven and almost everyone owns a piece of data - it looks logical to make crowd-powered data banks for marketing purposes. We include one in our new platform for site owners. And token thing will help us maintain logical and transparent calculation of reward baesd on volumes of the whole system and each data contribution.
If you still hadn't time to read our WP, hope, things became clearer)
I also wanted to give comment to one post extract to make everything 100% clear about token. Here's the special page with full explanation about it, but your quote is mostly about how it's shown at our landing page, I guess:
Actually, we're going to introduce 3-elements-as-one service: website builder (uKit for company sites and small stores, uLanding for dynamic landing pages - you choose) and a combination of machine learning and data mining tools on the backend - they're called uKit AI and uData and you can use 'em on demand. They're all parts of our upcoming ecosystem.
So, you can still use uKit (even without token, subscription stays), and you can make site better with a kind of AI-assistant that works both like designer and marketer. If you're a tokenholder, you also own 0,001% of AI-part capabilities - and get more personalizations alongside with system progress.