Topic: [ANN][GEMZ] GetGems - Social Messaging App That Pays - Live on Android, iOS, Web - page 222. (Read 597190 times)

I just saw Epicenter Bitcoin talking on Gems, thought i would share it.

Yeah, because I see the Chinese OP is post by him, so I thought he can speak Chinese

From Israel, I don't speak Chinese.

we have people helping us promote Gems in China:
http://www.bite01.com/headlines/based-bitcoin-protocol    宝石–基于比特币协议的“微信”推出iphone内测版本  
http://zl.yibite.com/point/2014/1117/24963.shtml   GEMS – 第一个社交货币应用
http://www.8btc.com/gems-bitcoin-app-lets-users-earn-money-social-messaging  Gems：建立于加密货币技术之上的社交网络‍
https://bter.com/article/3056  GEMS 与新一代比特币技术对接的社交聊天工具
https://bter.com/article/3325  Gems: 回归社交网络

Because it's a wrong address.
Try https://koinify.com/#/


I don't think he speaks Chinese...

Peled, you can speak Chinese?  Where are you from?

http://earlybird.koinify.com/

Why I can not open it?

people love free shit

Cheers for the reply, I'm warming to the then project BUT the issue is going to be numbers, you could have the best app in the world but until you get at least 1m users no one in the mainstream will care cause no one will care about an app that has 100,000 users, good luck.


That SnapChat ad made me sick up a bit in my mouth.

We haven't found the right word for "unsolicited messages", advertising is just one of the uses. I try to explain the attention economy in GEMZ here: http://shoutengine.com/BitcoinNewsWeekly/dollars-to-bitcoins-banks-hate-bitcoin-the-gold-5231

You can also read here regarding the unsolicited messages logic: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9758926

One of the main problems of the internet is spam. The fact that communication is constantly becoming cheaper enables spammers to send bulk messages to unwilling recipients. People care about their privacy, thus they are not comfortable writing their mobile number / email publicly because it will make them a target for spam, leading them to hiding their personal information.

Gems Hashtag effectively solves the spam problem in communication networks and allows users to finally publish their username openly without fear of receiving uncontrolled amounts of unsolicited messages. By placing a Gemz price tag on sending personal unsolicited messages, we can guarantee that users pay for the right to contact you. With Gems you will be able to write your hashtag in your signature / blog / anywhere over the internet.

You can read about personal unsolicited messages here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9904527


additional advantages over Telegram are:

- Reward and Airdrop system to reward users: to enable users to profit from using and promoting the application.

GEMS is aimed towards the common user who doesn’t have a crypto currency background. Since GEMS are rewarded for network contribution, these users will own GEMS just from operating within the network. The value of social networks is tied directly to the number of active users. In a fair model, if users bring the value to the network, they should also be rewarded according to their contribution.

- built in counterparty mobile wallet: to enable transfer of value in addition to communications.

would you prefer to use Snapchat or SnapChat with the new SnapCash function (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBwjxBmMszQ) ?  
you can read about SnapCash limitations here: http://www.nextadvisor.com/blog/2014/12/03/snapchat-snapcash-peer-peer-payment-safe/, blockchain technology is superior to fiat.

note: user acquisition is never an easy task, the success of the project will depend on marketing effort (media exposure) and even more on the Gems/Bitcoin community (word to mouth education/referrals).

Gems is a gateway to cryptocurrency, encrypted social messaging and the ability to transmit value via txt message. we think Gems is in a very good spot to get a foothold in one of the most sought after spaces in the crypto market.

It's called having a balanced view and not letting your emotions run amoke which is common on these forums.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_advocate

Gems has this feature.

We're getting totally out of topic but that's probably what you want.
You are wrong on this idea. Any average Joe is obsessed with collecting tokens even when it has no value which is NOT the case here but I'll try to make you realize.
Look at all the Internet games, for example poker games with tokens. Let's take one in particular : Texas HoldEm Poker on Facebook.
Some people play years to collect crazy amount of tokens that will never be redeemed for real money. You can check it, in your friends there are probably people with billions of coins. They just like to have a lot of virtual money.
You said "Monopoly" and that's a good example. When you play Monopoly, there is nothing more important in your head that getting more of this fake money.

To sum up :
 - The average Joe love to collect any tokens
 - The average Joe will be amazed when he realize that GEMZ can be exchanged to Bitcoin which can be exchanged to USD



What is the common reason everyone came on this forum ? Greed (among other reasons).
Betting on the greed of people is always the best solution.
Give people some tokens first, then they'll be interested in the rest.



There is no such thing as "devil" or "truth" and this is not the place to philosophy about that.

I believe the value to dollars will be in the app, so that can create interest because people can relate to fiat, even an average joe would get it. You can choose to not receives adds, but i can imagine i would allow it to be rewarded. With Telegram you can just send messages and files, that's pretty much it. Innovation wise Gems is superior to Whatsapp and Telegram. I believe marketing is one of the most important aspects and in Gems case it's easier to market than other Cryptos because it's more consumer friendly and something people can relate too, it's just an app and easy to get. So the team should take advantage of the edge they have here.

I'm looking at this from a purely average Joe user who has no real interest in abitcoin or collecting some digital Monopoly money but having a great chat app they can use. You've got to play Devils advocate to get to the truth on this forum.

Because you get rewarded by inviting your friends to the app.
Plus, you get a Bitcoin and Gems wallet inside. You can send and receive Bitcoins/Gems without any technical knowledge because user-names are used as alias for Bitcoin addresses.
Gems could bring Bitcoin to the masses.

Don't know about that but i do know both iOS & Android will be released December 30th.

You are spot on i actually overlooked the details of the advertising model. These are amazing features, as a regular user for me the personal unsolicited, priority and sponsored messaging are awesome.



One of the main problems of any communication platform is spam. The fact that communication is constantly becoming cheaper enables spammers to send bulk messages to unwilling recipients. The common approach to spam is heuristics-based flagging and filtering (this is how gmail works). The problem is that this method is extremely inaccurate and only works well if the same exact spam message is duplicated thousands of times. Users resort to hiding their personal address in order to avoid spam. Consider what would happen if a celebrity like Oprah would publicly share her personal email - no spam prevention algorithm would be able to handle that.

In a world where the spam problem has been solved, there would be no need to hide your address. Everybody’s personal address will be public and we will no longer rely on secrecy to stop abuse. If you think about it, every major personal communication platform - such as email, phone, SMS, WhatsApp - fails at this point.

Why do we hate spam so much? The answer is basic economics. Reading incoming messages is time consuming, and our time is a very valuable resource. The straightforward solution is therefore basic economics as well. If consuming messages is expensive, sending them should be expensive as well.

By placing a gem price tag on sending personal unsolicited messages, we can guarantee that users pay for the right to contact you. It’s important to emphasize that sending messages between friends (approved contacts) is not considered unsolicited since the recipient has explicitly agreed to receive messages from the sender. This means that within the Gems network, sending messages between friends will always be free.

How expensive should sending a message be? The natural answer should also rely on basic economic principles. The more popular the recipient, the more expensive contacting them should be. This concept is found in the bidding system employed by Google for their adwords platforms. Every advertiser enters a bid of how much they agree to pay for a click. Roughly speaking, the system displays the highest bids, making popular keywords more expensive because people are willing to pay more for them. Borrowing this principle to our model, we can decide on the number of unsolicited messages a recipient will receive in a period of time, and take the highest bids from competing senders.

It might be a good idea to make this mechanism opt out. If a user is willing to receive unsolicited messages, they should be able to allow strangers to message them for free.

Another interesting feature of this mechanism can be read receipts. The sender of an unsolicited message is probably interested in whether the recipient has read the message or not.


Unlike unsolicited messages which are personal in nature (like introducing yourself to a beautiful girl and asking if she’s single), ads are commercial in nature.

The central distribution channel in Gems is instant messaging. Private message ads are messages that will appear in the incoming message screen next to messages you receive from your contacts. These messages will be marked as promotions so recipients could differentiate between them and regular personal messages. A popular similar advertising channel is the promotion tab in gmail - where users receive promotional emails from advertisers directly into their inbox.

The key for maximizing the effectiveness of ads is targeted advertising. Keeping ads relevant makes both the viewer and the advertiser happy. Advertisers will not choose a specific list of recipients to receive their ads, but define some relevancy criteria for the target audience. Criteria can be based on content, similar to how Google adwords works - ie. show this ad to users interested in buying an engagement ring. Criteria can also be based on an audience profile, similar to how Facebook ads work - ie. show this ad to single males in the age of 20-25.

Employing content based targeting within Gems is mostly a privacy issue. Platforms such as gmail analyze (anonymously) the content of read messages and try to match a relevant ad based on keyword similarity. This can be performed automatically within Gems, but only on non-secure messages. Secure messages are encrypted client-client end to end and cannot be deciphered by the Gems infrastructure. In addition, content analysis should be opt out to protect user privacy upon request.

Profile based targeting within Gems is a little more tricky. The Gems network does not require users to fill any profile information. An interesting potential solution is to let users provide a voluntary profile by answering questions that will help Gems deliver relevant content more effectively and personally (ie. what is your age). To encourage users to give as much details as possible, the network can compensate users using gems for doing so. A natural way to implement this is by taking part of the cost paid by the advertiser and giving it to the ad recipient. We can even make the payout proportional to the amount of provided profile data. Some profile data can also be generated automatically, but usually at the expense of privacy. A good example is geo-location. As long as the user agrees to share his location with the app, we will be to use this data in order to show local ads. It’s important to emphasize that profile data will never be shared with the advertisers and will only be used by the network anonymously to deliver relevant ads.

The cost of advertising should probably be based on bids as well. The size of the target audience is limited (the number of participating users that fit the ad criteria), so only the ads with the highest bids will be shown. Another interesting question is whether these ads will be paid per exposure or per click (an advertiser only pays if a user opens their message and reads it). If we choose the latter, the natural approach would be to maximize the network profit from ads by factoring both the amount of the bid and the success click-through rate of previous exposures, and choosing which ads to display accordingly.


Quality of service (QoS) is an interesting factor worth exploring for monetization purposes. Consider the real world example of shipping packages. The free shipping method is usually a standard service such as USPS, which takes a little longer to deliver and offers less control over tracking and delivery status. The shipper can pay extra for a premium shipping service such as FedEx, which arrives much faster and is generally more reliable.

Borrowing from this example to the Gems ecosystem, users will pay for sending messages with a higher priority. Delivery speed and reliability are probably not the aspects to play with, because the standard free messages on Gems always arrive virtually immediately and are extremely reliable.

So what aspects can we use instead? One option is the sort order of incoming messages. Normally, incoming messages are sorted according to arrival time. It makes sense that high priority messages will always appear first regardless of arrival time. Another option is to highlight high priority messages and mark them for special consideration. This can be achieved by using a more prominent notification sound or by using bolder colors / urgency icons for the message in the incoming message list. Another option is to send several push notifications regarding a high priority message if it hasn’t been opened by the recipient (instead of just a single one like we do with normal messages). Another option is to provide tighter control over delivery indication and notify the sender more prominently immediately when the recipient has opened the message. Another option is to display priority message inline in the incoming message list, meaning the recipient will not have to click on them in order to read their content.

Generally speaking, if recipients are aware that an incoming message was paid for, they will be more inclined to open and handle it in a timely fashion.


The Gems user profile will potentially include a status message. Every user can choose their own status line - which is very similar in concept to a Facebook status or WhatsApp status. This status line will appear below every username in the contact list / user directory.

The status line is an excellent platform for a quick 1-line advertisement. Consider the following use case - a startup looking for new developers. A member in the startup will set their status to “looking for talented ios/android developers” and invite any of their contacts to message them about potential applicants they know.

It makes sense to make these appearances sponsored as well. A sponsored result will probably appear first in the list of contacts (and probably be labeled as a sponsored result). In addition, we might also show sponsored results in user contact lists which aren’t related as direct contacts. For example, even if I don’t personally know the startup member looking for a developer, I will still see their sponsored result when I enter my contacts screen or when I search in the user directory.

Keeping advertisements relevant is similar in nature to previous channels, such as targeting by content and targeting by profile. In addition, another interesting criteria is the distance between users (hop count or connection degree - 1st degree are immediate friends, 2nd degree are friends of friends, etc). It makes sense to show sponsored statuses from users who travel in similar circles.



The traditional entities within the Gems network are private individuals. Any user can join Gems and connect with their friends. Just like how Facebook grew to accommodate businesses as an entity within the network, Gems might make the same decision as well. Registering a new user as a commercial entity / business is a good candidate for a paid action.

How will company / business users be different from regular users? First of all, the profile page will have a commercial orientation and show relevant details about the business - such as an address / map location, website, logo, phone number, email, link to mobile app, opening hours, etc. In addition, business users will be geared towards e-commerce. Since the Gems network allows for easy fund transfers between users, it will be convenient to use for light e-commerce (1-click purchases).

Deeper e-commerce capabilities will allow businesses to present a goods/services catalog, support checkout with Gems and provide light order management.