A Message from Andy Tian, CEO and co-founder of Uplive

Hi everyone,

Welcome to our third weekly update. As you know, we have started our GIFTO Angel program, calling for volunteers around the world to help us grow a healthy community. Please ping one of our admin’s for more information if you haven’t seen our Angel application form.

For this week, I’d like to give everyone a bit of history on our company behind the GIFTO project, Asia Innovations Group (AIG). As always, the future of a project is defined by the background and capability of the team behind it, and we are no exception.

Our history of innovation

We are very much unlike most of the project teams that are currently ongoing. AIG was started back at the end of 2013, in order to capitalize on the mobile innovations that we saw rising in Asian countries such as China, Korea, and Japan. Due to our team’s background in the biggest Eastern (Tencent) and Western companies (Google, Zynga), we saw a unique opportunity to build mobile social products that would be cross cultural and cross national.

Our first product, PengPeng, was a hit. It was the first “gamified” social app that allowed users to play games with each other directly in the chat window, like how FB Messenger now allows you to do the same, except we did it back in 2014. PengPeng went to 40 million users in 1 year, and was one of the most popular apps for young people at the time.

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/09/16/business/inside-china-social-media-landscape/index.html

Our current flagship product, Uplive, was born out of the experience and technology which we developed at PengPeng. In particular, HTML5 technology was one of our specialties. At PengPeng, we were one of world’s biggest HTML5 developers by user volume. Our viral HTML5 games in 2015 hit as high as 180 million page views in 1 day. These viral games drove new users and traffic to PengPeng.

Some of you might have seen our live streaming directly within Telegram. Yes, our Uplive live streaming has one of the best HTML5 front ends in the industry, due to our long history with HTML5. And our Universal Gifting Platform is based on HTML5, and draws from this same long history.

Furthermore, Uplive itself contains many innovations that may not first be apparent to the casual user. Uplive was the first live streaming app to offer real time translation. For example, when on Uplive, you can turn on our translation feature based on Google Translate, so that when a broadcaster who speaks in Korean, the English translation will be displayed as subtitles in REAL TIME. When you type in your comments in English, it will be translated back into Korean, for a two-way conversation. Go ahead and try it out in the Uplive app, the translation quality is about 50%-70% accurate, depending on the language pair.

This took us and Google more than 9 months to fine tune into its current state, and we are still improving. Google always tells me that this is the best implementation of Google Translate they have ever seen.

In addition, Uplive is also the first live video app to integrate beautiful, full-featured HTML5 games directly in the live streaming experience. Go ahead and try them out.

Blockchain is our latest innovation in technology, and now, our biggest. Previously, all of our innovations improved our product experiences, but the improvements were still confined to within Uplive. Now with GIFTO, we can bring our virtual gifts OUT of Uplive, and make them available to all the users outside of the platform.

Based on our experience deploying new technologies such as HTML5, Google Translate, etc, we have several learnings

New technology takes time to actually generate real value for consumers

The right product experience must be iterated rapidly and many times before it’s usable

Existing users must be educated and ramped up gradually to get used to a new product experience

Part of the key infrastructure we are building for GIFTO is the in-app wallet that will be deployed in late Feb withinn Uplive. Some of you might have seen this from our meetup in Seoul. We will be using this wallet to expose our 30 million users to GIFTO tokens. But it will take time to educate them. On the plus side, cryptocurrencies have received so much hype that many of our users already know about them.

Our overall goal in 2018 remains the same: to create the biggest consumer application for blockchain technology, measured not by hype, but by the actual number of users. And that takes time, but hopefully you understand more of our history and how we have executed projects in the past. Successful product in hands of millions of users, is all about execution.

Until next week!

Andy and the GIFTO Team

Uplive, Gifto, and our partners in the news

1.GIFTO announces partnership with Nebulas to organize millions of blockchain virtual gifts

The partnership will provide millions of users on the GIFTO platform and live-streaming mobile app Uplive, a “framework” for easily discovering and sharing millions of blockchain virtual gifts.

2. What is GIFTO?

Our GIFTO Universal Gifting Protocol was given an in-depth feature on The Merkle. The article dives deep into how the protocol works, and its potential to :offer a peer-driven solution to the inequitable revenue sharing model that digital advertising creates.”

3. Binance receives 5000 new crypto coin applications in 6 months

Our partner, Binance, had CEO Changpeng Zhao provide a rare behind-the-scenes look at the operational structure of a major cryptocurrency exchange in an appearance at the Blockchain Revolution conference in South Korea.

4. What is Binance Coin?

The Merkle provides an in-depth feature on our partner Binance’s new project, Binance Coin/

GIFTO Korea

GIFTO Korea participated in 2 Block-chain meetups in Korea this week!

A monthly blockchain meetup ‘Blockchain January @ Seoul’ hosted by Tokenpost was held in Jan 18th. Gifto, NEM, and Fintrux was introduced in this meetup, and HMP Law firm also talked about the regulation of Blockchain industry in Korea.

2. ‘Kyber Network Developers Competition’, a meetup hosted by Kyber Network, was held in Jan 20th. Gifto, Hashed, and WAX was introduced in this meetup.