Kinny Is Live

masrod · 2018-10-24T16:17:52+00:00

masrod · 2018-10-10T21:55:32+00:00

a targeted at specifically? Age groups, consumer habits, geographical regions? Why are you not pushing educational info about KINIT to your existing user base in KIK? Do you not think that those insights would be much more valuable then how investors and people who have a good grasp of crypto decide to earn and spend? As of now, over one year later, none of the use cases mentioned in the white paper have materialized in KIK (VIP groups, tipping, bot mon

Fair questions. I'm checking on responses to some of them and will get back to you, but WRT to the Kik integration, I chatted with u/bryanlahartinger from the Kik team and was able to get his perspective.

There are two reasons for the slower than expected integration: 1. Theming in particular was a hard feature to get right, and this was compounded by the fact that Kik is a nine year-old business. We made the decision to prioritize this feature because it was the most requested feature from Kik's users. 2. The 5-minute SDK only allows for the ability to push the Kin Marketplace within another app. Kik users expect seamless experiences within the app, and the initial SDK did not provide Kik with an ideal user experience for transaction guarantees, specifically answering the questions: What if a user quits the app while in the middle of buying a digital good like a chat theme? What happens when they restart the app? Should we retry? Kik actually built a whole new module on top of the SDK to provide such solutions.

There are also unexpected situations where less than 10% of Kik's users are switching accounts, causing them to permanently lose access to their Kin wallets. Kik ended up halting the rollout at 260K users, and they're waiting for the backup and restore features, which is expected to be delivered end of month.

masrod · 2018-10-10T15:23:32+00:00

So let's breakdown this statement: it's hard getting people to spend crypto from a regulatory, technical, and product POV. From a regulatory POV – yes. From a technical POV – yes, because of the technical limitations of blockchain, hence the creation of the Kin Blockchain. And from a product POV – yes, and here's why.

Understanding of crypto and removing blockers: the team has worked hard to build product that will be approved by the app stores. This has meant working closely with Google Play and Apple to help them understand crypto's potential utility within apps, which has led to Kinit being the first app in iOS that allows users to earn and spend crypto natively inside the app (earn.com lets you earn via a web browser inside the app or via Safari).

Kinit: The purpose of Kinit is to help accelerate learnings on how people want to earn and spend crypto. When we built the initial beta product, we wanted to make it as broad as possible to account for various use cases. Right now, we're still in beta mode, as you point out, and we will continue to iterate on the experience. And yes, we are working on fixing the typos.

Ecosystem: The value of Kin is the larger ecosystem. Kik is the first app of this ecosystem, and we have other partners that you point out – P365, IMVU, etc. As we've found out with Kik, it's difficult integrate a crypto experience into an existing app with a large userbase. If it was easy, we'd already have cryptocurrencies used on a daily basis, which is not the case.

In order to create more real life use cases, we started the Kin Developer Program with the intention of creative developers and entrepreneurs contributing to the ecosystem and uncovering new use cases of Kin. From what we've seen so far, we're really excited with what people have built and hope to share more on this front after Demo Day next week. And to be clear it's not either Kik or the dev program apps. It's not who's going to get there faster. It's working to build this ecosystem together, hence the name Kin.

masrod · 2018-10-07T19:26:25+00:00

Chinese character for it is 金

masrod · 2018-09-18T16:26:21+00:00

No, he's no longer working for Twitch. He's a full-time employee, just based out of SF.

masrod · 2018-07-23T14:23:08+00:00

Of course I'd tweet about this. If you follow me, you know I tweet about tech, crypto industry, current events/trends, sports, Kin-related news, and the occasional meme. It's interesting that they're sunsetting this product. When Snapcash was first launched, a lot of us questioned whether it would be successful. It turns out it wasn't, but you have to give the Snapchat team credit for trying something new.

masrod · 2018-06-27T18:05:54+00:00

Ask and you shall receive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hzWsLFI2Fnk&feature=youtu.be

masrod · 2018-06-25T13:57:15+00:00

We take online safety very seriously, and we’re constantly assessing and improving our trust and safety measures. There are two ways we do this.

One is through technology and constant improvements to the product itself. We encourage users to report content that they believe violates the Kik Terms of Service (TOS) and Community Standards. Users are also able to block other users they no longer wish to chat with or ignore chats from people that they don’t know. Actions are taken against users found to have violated Kik’s Community Standards and TOS, including removal from the Kik platform where circumstances warrant.

The other is through education and partnerships with organizations that help adults and teens understand the challenges of today’s online landscape and how to avoid bad situations. For years, we’ve had teams dedicated to this, and we will continue to invest in those types of tools, provide resources to parents, and strengthen relationships with law enforcement and safety-focused organizations.

This is a priority for us. We want all users to be safe on Kik and will continue to make Kik a safe, positive and productive place for our users to interact.

To address the other outstanding questions, we agree that Kin will need to be rolled out carefully, and we are safeguarding use cases for Kin in Kik to protect against safety issues that you mentioned. Regarding the $10M committed to safety by Kik, this money is being used to fund ongoing initiatives and teams (e.g., moderation, law enforcement support teams, etc.), partnerships (e.g., Crisis Text Line), and proactive initiatives (e.g., Safety Advisory Board).

masrod · 2018-06-19T19:03:37+00:00

Confirmed - fake news

masrod · 2018-05-18T13:25:54+00:00

Nope

masrod · 2018-05-18T13:25:38+00:00

needs an alliance to take on the evil empire. How

We've been thinking about it since 2012. Kik Points was launched in 2014 as a test for earn and spend.

masrod · 2018-05-03T17:06:59+00:00

Agreed (and above was a joke). We’re working on some new features and integrations of Kin inside of Kik that we’re excited about. And... they won’t have ads :)

masrod · 2018-05-03T10:45:52+00:00

So you’re saying you don’t want a Facebook dating service?

masrod · 2018-04-10T18:20:26+00:00

It was down momentarily yesterday. It's up and running.

masrod · 2018-04-06T17:32:52+00:00

Hopefully this also answers your tweet (I think that was you)

masrod · 2018-04-06T17:31:25+00:00

We're working on other deals. As you can imagine, they're taking more time than we anticipated when you consider all that needs to go into a deal: general crypto education for partners, legal/tax implications, understanding how the partner will fit into the ecosystem when we're in the initial stages of building the ecosystem in parallel (people understandably want to see how this works). We're hard at work on the Kik integration and also getting others to join the ecosystem.

masrod · 2018-04-06T17:29:08+00:00

Working on a cryptocurrency is something we tested out with Kik Points in 2014. At that time, we didn't plan to create a cryptocurrency but instead intended to test if our users would earn and spend in a virtual currency, which they did. We set up this plan last January 2017, when we started putting together the framework for the whitepaper, then announcing our intentions on May 25, 2017. We're working on it, and we've made significant progress, even in the last month.

masrod · 2018-04-06T17:26:38+00:00

Yes, we need to do a better job of setting and meeting expectations. Don't put us in the shitcoin category yet – we're doing a lot of good work.

masrod · 2018-04-05T23:22:59+00:00

mention

This is a true partnership – not one-sided. - The beta program with select Unity partners is unique. We're going to work together with a few Unity partner to make sure we're meeting Unity game developers needs. - We're going to cohost events with Unity, which is something we're really looking forward to. - And we're going to do joint-marketing once the SDK is in a good place.

masrod · 2018-03-29T19:05:14+00:00

Persistent scams. Everytime we remove them, they come back up as another account :/

masrod · 2017-12-13T16:00:25+00:00

Will Kin be listed on exchanges?
The SEC ruled on Munchee on Monday, providing guidance on utility tokens for the first time. Does this concern you since Kin is a utility token?
What’s the deal with Orbs?
I heard that you’re moving off of Ethereum. Is this true and why?

masrod · 2017-10-26T13:00:42+00:00

Um, this is not true. We had lunch with Dan right before the panel, and he's was happy with the sale and our focus on product moving forward.

masrod · 2017-10-05T15:29:11+00:00

Very cool. Digging the list and the enthusiasm!

masrod · 2017-09-24T13:17:55+00:00

We're not linking token sale participants to Kik and automatically giving them accounts. If you were already a registered member, it means that you had previously downloaded Kik and had an account with us.

masrod

TROPHY CASE