Well known website builder, uKit, is planning on entering the red-hot ICO market by adding AI to any website with machine learning and blockchain-based data mining services. They have partnered up with ICOBox, a leading supplier of package solutions for companies that are interested in carrying out an ICO but don't have the resources or experience to do so. Their ICO is slated for January 2018, with a soft cap of $2.5 million and a hard cap of $10 million.
The uKit Group is a long-established developer, with a history stretching back 12 years, and serves more than 3.5 million active websites and 3 million users. The uKit website builder for business has proved wildly popular, with more than a million users in two years on the global market. They are now aiming higher by looking to create an ecosystem that combines website and landing page building, artificial intelligence, and blockchain based data mining to empower businesses to create websites that are tailored to different audience. As a result, the effectiveness of ordinary business' sites can approach the effectiveness of Fortune 500 companies', with much lower barriers to entry than were previously possible.
uKit CEO Evgeny Kurt explains: "Our upcoming uKit AI 2.0 will be a system that creates personal landing pages for visitors, with the aim of increasing the conversion rate for business websites. And this is definitely the first time you'll see a blockchain component in such a service."
The system has four major components:
Artificial intelligence - Machine learning and data-mining algorithms make it possible to determine with a high probability what kind of site the visitor will like.
Generative design - Neural networks take the AI recommendations and instantly create various site designs arranged to suit visitors' color preferences and other habits.
Blockchain database - Build datasets on site visitors and allow trafic owners to earn money through AI training.
Website builder - Hosting, modern CMS, and so on.
Pavel Kudinov, uKit's CTO, expects this all-in-one approach to be the next big thing on the Web. "The blockchain component of the project is the opportunity to supplement the overall database of people's behavior on websites, receiving in exchange tokens from the project's reserve fund. The system distributes tokens from the reserve in proportion to the share of data added by the specific participant in the overall volume of data in the system. In this way, the more a participant contributes to training the AI, the greater its compensation."
uKit may be of special interest to those who prefer integrated solutions. In many respects the product is unique for the mass market. In related but more niche markets there are already examples of successful, integrated implementation of machine learning and data mining in marketing and design. For example, Adobe's Sensei technology for web professionals and large online stores that use Amazon's experience and actively implement in-house or off-the-shelf solutions to create personalized product recommendations. However, implementing similar integrated solutions is frequently accompanied by the need to have your own array of data and the capacity to process it. The uKit AI 2.0 platform removes this limitation, substantially lowering the entry barrier for implementation.
Irina Cherepanova, Product and Marketing Director for uKit Group, sees uKit's new product as a competitor for products in many different sectors. "We'll be a headache for a wide range of competitors," she says. "Product recommendation and segmentation systems, dynamic content services – all of these and more are challenged by our all-in-one solution. Most importantly, the uKit platform addresses one big shortcoming for business – they don't have enough high-quality data on consumers."
"In contrast to the many other ICOs, uKit has a potential of becoming blockchain technology landmark," says Mike Raitsyn, co-founder of ICOBox. "The peak for ICOs in 2017 came in June, when average collected funds per ICO reached $33.17 million. Average figures in November were a still-healthy $16 million. We expect the ICO potential for established IT companies that are actively implementing blockchain and machine learning technologies to be significantly higher than this corridor. This is the world's first generative site design platform to hold an ICO."
The project's business model combines two major sources of monetization. The first is fee-based usage of AI-personalization technology for non-token holders: fees will be collected only for volume of traffic actually used (much like in the "cloud hosting model" used by Amazon AWS). At the same time, uKit Group company will retain the traditional subscription model - it already generates profits for the uKit website builder, and will be implemented in the uLanding landing-page builder when it comes out of beta in 2018.
Both uKit and uLanding will be part of the uKit AI 2.0 platform. This will ensure that tokens can be used from the very beginning, and token holders will automatically receive the right to use either builder for free. If you don't use it for personalizations of website, the token does not burn up, and the owner retains the right to rent it out through the internal marketplace.
"In addition to the internal marketplace, the token can be sold on the exchange. There are approximately 100 million businesses with websites worldwide, and personalization can help them win the battle for customers. Tokens will be issued in limited numbers, and this is why we're forecasting stable demand and a rise in their value over time," concludes Evgeny Kurt, CEO of the project.
uKit's ICO will sell 55,000 ERC20 tokens out of a total 100,000. Another 25,000 will be kept as a reserve fund to reward users that supply data to train the AI, sharing depersonalized data on traffic through their sites. The Pre-Sale of UKT tokens start December 11th, with a 25% bonus for the first 5,000 UKT tokens.