Lastly, just because you have doubts (without backed by firm evidence and without even asking us for clarification beforehand) about our project, naming it a 'scum' is not decent. Think about yourself: you believed in your idea and concept, met the right people, and really worked hard to achieve your and your team's goal, and imagine someone claiming you are a 'scum' without first trying to ask his questions, get his answers, and then basing his claim on them.
Best,
BitSchool
Let me to be more clear.
I don't want to blame you, but I don't want to give my money to a fraud project. And don't want that for other people here.
So what I see:
1. You don't have enought good developers to implement your idea. Looks like you add one to each side (end, front, blockchain). But I don't see they are real experts regarding their profiles. I can actually talk with this guys and understand it fast. So your idea is great, but without strong dev team you will fail.
2. How do you want to sell your project. I'm in this area more than 10 years. I understand that your main customers are schools, college, universities. But they won't buy just a program for e-learning. They want to buy a e-learning content. You don't have it as well.
3. Let me believe that some university would start to work with your project and hire some content managers to fill it (which is unbelivable for me). But you didn't show an authority part of your project. So even if you project would be great but without usefull oportunity to fill it with a content you will fail. Few years ago (I think 5) I asked one person who is one of the smartest in this area, and he answered to me: If you want to sell some project in this area, just create a good authority tool and anyone would buy it even without the project.
4. Our student result table in DB is 2.3 Tb (yes,yes, Tb). Could you imagine a content size? Where do you store it? In a blockchain? I don't think it is possible. But you don't think about it as well.
5. What is the essence of decentralized?
So, I'm sure your idea is great. But you still didn't think about some areas which is the most important in your project. And still didn't meet some people (I would like to see one dev with strong e-learning experience that 3 without). May be you will create what you want, but to sell it you need to do tremendous count of work what you didn't expect. That is why I wrote 'scum'. I don't believe in your project and it is not just because I don't believe. It is because I'm an expert in this area.
I wish you good luck, but try to think about my opinon and start to move in this direction before ICO.
Hi Maxbbb,
Thank you for taking the time to review and highlight several features of our project. I would like to immediately address the overarching theme of your statement, that our project is fraudulent. By definition – fraud would assume that we are not planning on delivering the project in which we say we are attempting to construct. With that definition in mind – I would like to put that to rest immediately and showcase that we fully intend to deliver the product that we’ve conceptualized and outlined in our whitepaper. That being said, the followup points seem to focus less on fraud and more on “whether or Bitschool will be a sustainable and successful business, and do we have the capacity and experience to deliver on this model”. This is a great question and I will be happy to address this – as per your points below.
1. You don't have enought good developers to implement your idea. Looks like you add one to each side (end, front, blockchain). But I don't see they are real experts regarding their profiles. I can actually talk with this guys and understand it fast. So your idea is great, but without strong dev team you will fail.
Before I start, I wanted to clarify your remark about “Also I look at your backend developer projects. E.g.
http://journalofinterest.com/ It is awefull with huge count of errors and just one page. To be honest I'm not sure you really want to develop your project.” The website that you quoted, we have since clarified with Matthew, that this was merely a side project for him and one that was abandoned. The reason you still saw the ‘warning messages’ was that it was still in progress and therefore under development. Matthew has an outstanding work experience record including working at CERN and several years at GE oil and gas. CERN is where they built one of the most revolutionary pieces of technology to discover brand new particles that were only theorized.
We have an MVP and you can check it on our webpage –
www.bitschool.io. This MVP has one topic (computer science) right now but, as I mentioned, will be expanded not only in the computer-science area, but also to other topics with the help of our members and our course admins. And if you try to use it, you will instantly know that our model is not about providing educational contents, but providing an application built upon adaptive formative AI algorithm to make an accurate proficiency assessment possible. Also, apart from our co-founder Phil, who created and is improving our MVP, we have Artificial Intelligence / Neuroscience experts with expertise in education as team members and advisors (and the list is and will be consistently growing). FYI, in AI projects, the most important assets are AI researchers and developers and they are hard to find and even harder to recruit - we started with 2 and now the list has grown to 5 within a month. These guys have done heavy research and development in their areas and will form the core brains in improving our MVP and developing our other AI-based products (you can get their information on our team and advisor section on our webpage and whitepaper). Honestly, Front/Back/Blockchain are even not the core technologies of our products, but we have very talented developers on our team who are cross-experts in these areas which is usually the case for powerful venture teams, and won’t have any trouble adapting these technologies for all of our model’s purposes. However, if you don’t trust the profiles in our team/advisor sections and can’t see the value of our MVP, you’re most likely not the investor we target.
2. How do you want to sell your project. I'm in this area more than 10 years. I understand that your main customers are schools, college, universities. But they won't buy just a program for e-learning. They want to buy a e-learning content. You don't have it as well.
3. Let me believe that some university would start to work with your project and hire some content managers to fill it (which is unbelivable for me). But you didn't show an authority part of your project. So even if you project would be great but without usefull oportunity to fill it with a content you will fail. Few years ago (I think 5) I asked one person who is one of the smartest in this area, and he answered to me: If you want to sell some project in this area, just create a good authority tool and anyone would buy it even without the project.
We’ve already started to sell our MVP to schools in the UK and will start implementing it even before our presale, and we will be able to provide potential investors with real user traffic data and feedbacks. So prospective investors will not only assess our concept and idea, but also a real product that is up and running. What’s better than experiencing the product before you buy it! About the contents, like I mentioned in my previous response, we are more concentrating on building the ideal AI infrastructure that would help teachers and tutors deliver personalized learning to their learners. Also our prospective client base is not confined to schools (university less) and will mostly be teachers, tutors, students and learners with various learning needs. But I agree, when we sell our Adaptive Video Contents (our main contents eLearning tool) to Schools and maybe Universities, we will need the authority part that you mentioned and that is included in our plan of course. But these parts will take place in the latter phase of our development as we will first have to build and perfect our AI products focusing on assessing the learners’ proficiency levels and providing them with instant, effective, and fitting educational feedbacks that match their learning needs, style and pathway. Also we are part of a network of over 3000 teachers, most of whom have known us for many years. We have been in contact with a few of them and every single one of them has been positive about providing us with content. In terms of ensuring high quality content, we plan on firstly hiring the highest quality teachers to help create this (with the help of our course admins). Secondly, all content will be quality checked between the network and rated by students and other teachers to ensure that only the highest quality content will get through. Lastly, using our AI expertise, we plan on creating an AI algorithm that is able to score newly created content based on quality, effectiveness and engagement to further maximize the efficiency of our validation process.
4. Our student result table in DB is 2.3 Tb (yes,yes, Tb). Could you imagine a content size? Where do you store it? In a blockchain? I don't think it is possible. But you don't think about it as well.
5. What is the essence of decentralized?
About the DB, of course we know that we would need immense space for data storage, we have factored this into our costings and we have plans to use amazon web services as our data warehousing provider. This provides us elasticity in both memory storage capacity and data processing. Just for preparing the data for our Adaptive AI Assessments and the intelligent feedback capabilities, the data requirement is enormous and of course we are aware of this aspect. This is why we have set aside 50% of our public fund distribution to the AI technology alone, and a huge database requirement is included in that sheer amount. And blockchain for AI data storage is totally out of question and doesn’t fit the purpose as you will be well aware of. We only use blockchain for our ICO, token utility/reward, and to drive our GoGreenFund; and the core of BitSchool is Artificial Intelligence. So our transactions will be decentralized but our AI database not.
Lastly, your concern of having not the right people or not having the right infrastructure on day one stems from your misunderstanding of the venture startup process. We have a small team of developers at this point, this is correct, however, they are all exceptionally talented and more than capable of creating this project in the timeframe. However, I would like to remind you that this is the reason start-up companies get investment (through the ICO in our case) in order to expand their operations and hire more professionals and develop the infrastructure. From what you said, you are most probably working for a very established entity like McGraw-Hill and the major difference between established entities and ventures is that ventures have to continuously evolve and this is why investing in ventures could be risky but at the same time, very lucrative. So again, totally agree to your point that investors should challenge their prospective investees as much as they can and make sure to cover every aspects that would help them mitigate their investment risk and thereby realize huge returns.
Hope this would address your concern and thanks for your interest and thoughtful advices. Hope we can continue this discussions as they will benefit both you and us.
Best,
BitSchool
