GetGems update #21 — January 25, 2016
Hello Everyone,
As we mentioned in the last update GetGems is taking off. Early testers are now exploring exciting new features with the latest web version presenting our interoperation of the Attention Economy. There are updates for all operating systems, some available now and others coming shortly.
Advertising
Advertising channels are another way to get Gems. Testing is underway for those using the web client. Go to web.getgems.org to log in.
An ad consumer is a GetGems user who reads the advertisements once inside the GetGems app.
Advertisers post advertisements with the GetGems web client to the advertising channels, while offering Gems to potential ad consumers who are using the GetGems application. Every 24 hours we add the number of ad consumers, the number of ads consumed and we distribute the Gems paid by the advertiser amongst the ad consumers.
A user can choose to opt in or out of any or all advertising channels, by toggling “Advertisement Settings” in the main menu
A little jump … 60,000 plus users — 10K added in 20 Days
With over 50,000 signups on iOS, Android and now the web version of GetGems, the Attention Economy is preparing to take off. Watch for announcements. It is worth noting that as the number of users rise, there are 1,090 reviews on the Google Play Store and we are very close to moving to a 4.7 rating!
Telegram 3.4 Gif Revolution and Inline Bots(Android)
This coming version adds the awesome features Telegram presented in their last release:
Gifs will load and run 20 times faster, celebrating the fact that we added a brand new GIF button at the chat screen, making the gif send option easy and intuitive. Moreover, there are many bots integrated inside the chat input line, go ahead and try them out! just type @wiki, @pic,@vid, @bold and see what happens.
Educating about Airdrops
It seems that many new users aren’t familiar with the Airdrop functionality. To make it more visible we have decided to make the “Airdrop” button the center of attention in the “Earn” screen. This will help to spread the word about AirDrops better and faster!
Referral Mechanism
We want everybody to enjoy GetGems as much as possible, so apart of our auto referral mechanism, which couples a referring user to the user which installed the app, we will allow anyone without an already defined inviter, to choose a friend from their contact list as the inviter. The selection will be only available once and can not be changed, so pick your inviter wisely.
Stability and More
With each version we learn more and more about the app’s usability and identify our weakest points. These last two weeks we have done our best to squash bugs, and increased efforts to optimise the code base to make it lighter and smarter. Some of the improvements included integrating Google’s Vision API as the QR scanner and smarter data caching.
Funding Update — 75% of Milestones Met
The remaining funds (25%) of the last milestone (advertising platform) are still held in a 2 of 3 multi-sig wallet with keys held by Koinify, GetGems and Adam Krellenstein (arbitrator) — we’re working hard on completing this last milestone.
50% of the total bitcoins were converted to dollars on March 2015 and held by Circle with contractual obligation to release the funds only upon Adam’s approval. This was done to hedge against the bitcoin volatility (bitcoin price fell to 152$ on January 14, 2015) in order to be able to plan a budget for the company.
We have been asked why we did not make the annoucement of reaching these milestones and receiving the money earlier, and the honest truth is that we are concentrating on executing many different things, which is also the reason we didn’t push for the funds to be released earlier, even after the milestones were completed some time ago.
Summary of published milestone details
“We have built a full-featured web interface at Web.GetGems.org which allows our GetGems users the comfort of using our fintech-chat application from their desktop or laptop computer. We based our code on Telegram’s codebase and we designed our code’s architecture to support continuous upgrades. This means our web interface is always synced with the latest Telegram version and offers our users advanced chat features.
“We redesigned GetGems Web from the ground up, to suit our colour scheme for a cross-device unified user experience. We added a new GetGems bar that shows the user his current Gems balance and refreshes after every transaction.
“We have enabled 3 different types of transactions: P2P payment of GEMS, P2P with user selection for in-group payments and a fixed-tip transaction. Each transaction type was designed to suit the context of the web interface, making the experience of transferring GEMS easy and intuitive. We built a 128bit authentication process which happens in the background and is thus seamless to the user. The user’s device identifier and Telegram identifier is encrypted and sent to an authentication server we built. The authentication server utilizes Telegram’s Bot API to ensure secure login.
“We have introduced an advertising platform which includes an advertising wizard and an advertising server. This allows users to post short textual and referral ads that will be shown to other GetGems users. The advertising configuration is tweakable, including the price of an ad and the max number of characters and is controlled by our advertising server. During the wizard process the user is requested to fill in his ad (currently 255 chars max.) which may include a hypertext link. He is required to agree to the terms of use. After submission the user is charged according to the current advertising price and his ad is published in the GetGems Ads channel. In the settings of the GetGems Web a user can opt in and out from the advertising network. New users are automatically opted-in. This means they will be targeted for ads. Our webclient counts ad views and notifies the advertising server.
iOS Prepares for Big Upgrade.
GetGems for iOS is going into new beta testing shortly, based on updated iOS open source for Telegram so we can catch up to the Android version. Attention Economy updates and changes to the User Interface will now be in keeping with Android.
Gems Keyboard (iOS)
iOS Gems Keyboard for iOS is waiting for approval in the app store.
Gems Keyboard (Android)
We have now added payment limits to the Android Gems Keyboard in “Settings”.
Marketing Teamwork
If you are interested in helping the GetGems with social media and awareness please send an email to david@getgems.org as we explore many ways to get the word out about GetGems.
See you on GetGems!
Daniel Peled — peled1986 — daniel@getgems.org
