Telescopia ICO in 10 points
Description
Telescopia is developing a telescope streaming platform to help school students, astronomy researchers, and general public, to control a telescope and observe the universe at low prices with full AI assisted telescope control.
The Raise
We are raising a total of $4.8 million USD. A significant portion of this will be spent on developing the first telescope streaming platform, with advanced features like virtual reality telescope stream, AI controlled sky tour and astrophotography. Nearly one million dollars will be spent for the exchange registrations, legal work to become compliant and licensed in Egypt, Malta, Australia and ICO. Another large portion of the raise is dedicated to marketing efforts to build a massive network of users around the world.
Traction
There appears to be significant interest in our project domestically and internationally, through the astronomical society, multiple universities and schools. Based on the reviews we get people are very excited about a telescope streaming platform.
The Competition
Telescopia is distinguishable from our competitors from a number of standpoints. We are the first telescope streaming platform to support: live video feed, full AI assisted telescope control, live narrating and tour guiding within the stream, decentralized astrophotography image stacking, live VR with control telescope experience, lecture room feature for teachers and peer-to-peer telescope platform that opens a new and big revenue stream for telescope owners with payback period of 6 months. We focus on a the wider online education market instead of focusing on professionals only like all of the current competitors. From a business standpoint, we are unique because we will have at least two revenue streams ready within the next 6–12 months. From an ICO standpoint, we are distinguishable because we are raising only what we need to grow the business, and no more, which in turn gives the token room to grow rather than drop when it is listed on an exchange.
The Team
Our team comes from Pylux Solutions it’s a tech company sides in Alexandria, Egypt. We have proven our selves in the regional market by developing and selling ERP solutions, Web Apps and cloud infrastructure. Internationally we have outsourced different types of software projects including CAD/CAM Kernels, AI and Deep learning projects and big data analysis. As for astronomical team we are a group of amateur and professional astronomers including one who is participating in the Mars one program.
MVP
Currently we have developed a proof of concept to control the telescope mount and open the telescope mounted camera feed. And we have started the development of the MVP on 1–11–2018. The planned alpha release is on 1–2–2019.
The Blockchain
The main problem that faces the streaming of a telescope is how computational intense the image processing workload is. That is why there are a handful of companies offering such a service, the blockchain solves this problem with ease, by decentralizing the computational workload on the provider’s computers. by adapting this technology we lower the cost of the infrastructure significantly, offer much cheaper services and actually allow a live stream of the telescopes. The Cyrus Token will ensure quality of service from the providers by holding an amount for every telescope added by them to the service and ease the transaction process for them.
Investors
We are still in the early stages of the seed round, but as of now our main investors are IBM and Facebook.
Partners
We have announced a partnership with QHYCCD, which designs and manufactures world-leading telescope cameras, they will integrate Telescopia API in their camera software. And we are about to announce another partnership with the Egyptian National Research Institute of Astronomy and Geophysics (NRIAG), which will build 2020 curriculum for their students based on Telescopia.
Roadmap
A detailed version of the roadmap can be found on our site: https://telescopia.io/ but the most important upcoming events will be the launch of the object observation with provider integration in 2019, release of SkyTour and control sessions in 2020, release of decentralized astrophotography in 2021, release of VR support in 2022, professional astronomy services in 2023.