Just came across this post at The Tao of Mac, here’s an excerpt:

After all, why bother coding overly complex solutions that will never work when you can get people to scratch your itch and have fun in the process?

I’ve been playing around with the iPod Touch quite a bit, and have built a little Ajax UI that:

• Lets you navigate my entire collection of Dilbert comics by date (or pick a random comic)
• Lets you tag a comic using jQuery goodness
• Lets you browse by tag

Two things, in particular, stood out for me on this one:

1. Using the iTouch is a great example of mobile crowdsourcing, something that we’ve been investigating at BountyUp for a while.
2. Dilbert is “FUN”. Browsing Dilbert on your iTouch is “FUN”. Tagging Dilbert so you can find it again later, is “FUN” - and also provides great value for everyone else. Voila Collaboration, Voila Crowdsourcing.

Like all the rest of the companies working in collaboration tools, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding or any of the other “Social Commerce” domains, the biggest challenge at BountyUp seems to be “Cognition Friction”. Which is a fancy way of saying that people have no idea what we’re talking about.

The best way to address this seems to be by analogy - unfortunately, we’ve yet to find a sufficiently universal analogy, to which all of our current (and future) users can relate. But as I hinted at in a previous post, we’ve been considering the Stock Market.

Why? Whether the participants realize it or not, it’s a massively collaborative experiment in Social Commerce - with literally MILLIONS of strangers pooling their funds to support (and capitalize on) companies around the world. In fact, it’s the closest thing to BountyUp that exists.

Here are the gaps:

1. In the stock market, you invest in companies as a whole. With BountyUp, you invest directly in the project or product you’re interested in.
2. The stock market can only be used for investing - BountyUp can be used for investing, purchasing, or donating.
3. Investments in the stock market are immediately at risk - BountyUp pledges are actually incentives, not true investments. The upside is that they’re never at risk - if the product or project is not completed, you get your funds back. The downside - you have no claim to company returns that are outside of the Bounty contracts.
4.  There’s no “tool” (outside of the Annual General Meeting) to chat with other investors in the Stock Market. BountyUp provides a forum as well as a marketplace.

On second thought, perhaps this analogy is reaching a bit. What do think? Can you think of a simpler, better way to explain what crowdfunding and crowdsourcing is, and how to do it?

I’ll be attending the Northern Voice conference in Vancouver this weekend - if you’d like to chat about BountyUp, Social Commerce, or anything Collaboration related, feel free to track me down! I’ll look something like this:

Except probably without the burger.

BountyUp fees will be going up shortly, to 2.5% on charitable bounties and 5.0% on standard bounties. (Current fees are 0.5% charitable / 2.0% standard). While a seemingly big jump, this still keeps us way below other comparable sites (look at eBay or eLance’s prices, for instance), and it’ll give us the luxury of investing a lot of time and attention in supporting each bounty, especially in their infancy.

As always, feel free to drop me a line with any questions or comments (assuming you’re too shy to simply post them here.)

In other words, I’m soliciting constructive criticism. For the most part, I’ll be excerpting the more analytical, expository bits. The places in which I make arguments to which some, perhaps many, will take exception. At least I hope that’s the case. Today’s a bit more of a lark: A story.

Jeff Howe is soliciting feedback in advance of the release of his new book (titled, aptly enough, “Crowdsourcing”). I’m a little disappointed by his description of the structure of the book - he’s chosen to focus on what, in my mind, is a fairly narrow view of the “power of the crowd”, specifically around amateurism. This is ignoring entirely the power of projects such as Idea Crossing and Innocentive, which focus on crowdsourcing the most qualified experts, as well as the range of crowdfunding activities (ChipIn, BountyUp, Crowdfunder, etc.)

But the quality of his prose is fantastic, and he’s really captured the “insider’s feel”. What’s ironic is that, as he tells it, successful crowdsourcing always focuses on a strong sense of community, of belonging - which is not the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word “crowd”. Maybe he should have called it tribesourcing instead.

Tags: crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, bountyup, jeffhowe, tribesourcing

There’s a lot going on in the crowdfunding / crowdsourcing world, from our very own “One Human Family” recording bounty, to a cutting edge british filmmaker who’s using the ideas (and the cash) of his fans to produce a feature film - which he’ll then give away under a Creative Commons license.

Check it out: http://aSwarmOfAngels.com/ .

If you’ve been using the passion of your fans to drive forward your own creative projects, why not share your story with us, by leaving a comment below.

Tags: crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, fanfunding, filmmaking, bountyup

Gradually I’ve had to accept a simple fact - I am not the norm. “Ordinary” people don’t sit around in the early morning, drinking organic earl-grey tea and thinking about the impossible things they’d like to accomplish, by pooling the funds of millions of strangers around the world. Or do they?I had a simple epiphany last week - what’s the largest example of social finance on the planet?(Hint: you’ll never guess.)

The stock market.

Oh, sure, no one thinks about it that way. But it’s true - millions of strangers, of disparate backgrounds and resources, pooling funds to drive forward the projects that they believe in. Now, their belief is a simple, one-sided thing: they believe the projects will make money. But that’s a good start, don’t you think?

What lessons could we draw upon from the history of the stock market, that might prove useful in moving forward the World’s first open “stake market”? According to wikipedia, trading was first institutionalized to manage the debts of agricultural communities, and then later extended to government debts as well. However, it was not until the Dutch East India Company issued the first corporate stocks and bonds in 1602, that the current form of the stock market was established, whereby common shareholders had interest in a share of the profits (or losses) of the business venture.

IANAH (I am not a historian), but this looks to me like a simple pattern of trust and reputation, extending from transactions with known and trusted locals, to the implicitly trusted “government” and then eventually to the anonymous “corporations”, lured by possibilities of greater returns.

Now here’s a subtlety that I may have been mistaken about when we first set out on this grand adventure - the Stock Market is driven by the sellers. In fact, the reality is that any newly launched security needs a “market maker” to create demand for it - literally, manufacturing interest. And so far, this has been proven out at BountyUp as well - our most active and successful early bounties have all been reverse bounties, started by those who intend to close them - in essence, driven by the sellers.

As much as this disappoints my philosophical desire to see buyers rise up and draw from the market, the goods that they truly want, I’m pragmatic enough to call a spade a spade. Expect to see more robust support for reverse bounties in the near future.

The Cheap Revolution: Top 20 Entrepreneurial Quotes

It’s always good to have that late-night reminder - that it was as hard as this for everyone else, too.

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Tags: inspiration, entrepreneurship

As part of our marketing efforts at BountyUp, I’ve been combing the net looking for ongoing discussions of Social Commerce, Crowdsourcing, Crowdfunding, etc. But it wasn’t until yesterday, when I rewrote the wikipedia article on the topic, that I finally accepted the fact that it’s just not happening yet. So I’m going to kick it off with my own (obviously subjective) ‘Ontology of Social Commerce’. But first, a random metaphor:

Imagine any market transaction, as a ride across a stony field, on the back of a donkey.

The donkey is the seller, and, as every buyer will tell you, he needs to be motivated. So we’ve got a carrot, on a stick. The carrot represents our buyer (or his motivation), and the distance across the field, the product itself.

Crowdfunding, is using more than one carrot.

Crowdsourcing, is taking your carrots and walking through a barn full of donkeys, waiting for a promising donkey to come forward.

And the Community (or Crowdcasting, if you like) is everything else in the story - how the donkeys got into the barn in the first place, whether the carrots are all the same size and shape, who gets the leftover carrots if there ARE any leftovers, etc. You get the picture. (more…)

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There are a few slightly pernicious bugs that have cropped up recently.

Firstly, some of the time (which, of course, is why it’s hard to fix) new pledges aren’t showing up on the Bounty page. Our callback to PayPal seems to be error-ing out. I’m on it, and I’ll let you know when we’ve posted a fix. (We’re not losing any pledge data, btw. It’s the approval status check - which I’m reconciling by hand every few hours.)

Second, yesterday’s fix on the “Real Gifts” facebook app (for the next/prev buttons) has broken Amazon Search. I know what’s happened there, and I’ll patch it as soon as I finish up the PayPal one.

Finally, I’ve put together a primitive single-sign-on solution between the Blog, the Forums, and the Main Site. Which is cool. But you’ll probably notice two side effects: 1. You can’t register for an account at the Blog or Forum sites, you need to register at the Main site and then come back. 2. You can’t log out without closing your browser. (Sub-domain vs. parent-domain cookie issues, I think). This seems low-priority to me at the moment, so it’ll probably be a day or two before I get to this one.