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.

Blogged with Flock

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…)

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.

Along with Todd, I’ve struggled over the past few months to explain to people WHY, if BountyUp is such a good idea, it doesn’t already exist. And the answer seems to be “Market Coordination”. I found a great quote this evening (from “How to Change the World”, by David Bornstein) that illustrates this well, in the context of sending children from low-income backgrounds to college:

“Imagine that it costs $1000 to privde the guidance for a kid to get into college who currently has a 2.5 GPA and would otherwise become a parking lot attendant, which is fine, but does not fulfill her potential,” explains Furbush. “Say the kid goes to college and that $1000 investment yields a $500 net benefit for the firm which, five years from now, she’s going to end up working for; but, of course, we don’t know which firm that will be. Say $100 accrues to the high school which can brag about getting kids into college. Say $400 accrues to the city that wouldn’t have to pay to assist her and another $200 accrues to the college that’s paying people to find her, and so on, including tax collections, indirect effects on her peers, and most of all, the benefit to her wealth and well-being.

“What if it turns out that all those smaller amounts add up to a return to society well in excess of the $1000 that changed her life, but any single one of them wouldn’t be enough to economically justify paying to change her path? It’s hard for markets to arise when that coordination is difficult.”

In the context of this example, of course, it’s a leap of faith for any of those mentioned (organizations, the city, the future employers, etc) to contribute to such a program - since they have no way of knowing ahead of time if it will work. But in the case of a Bounty, no such faith is required. If it doesn’t work out - you get your money back. All that’s required is a temporary suspension of doubt.

Imagine that your pet project, is a donkey. Ornery, stubborn, and just way too used to being hit.How do you get a donkey to move? Folklore would suggest that you tie a carrot on the end of a stick, and dangle it in front of the donkey.

Your cash, is a carrot. It makes the donkey move.

If one carrot is good, more are better.

The Bounty is a piggybank, filled with carrots. (Okay, we’re dangerously mixing metaphors, here.)

And for some bounties, we crowd-source the donkey.

BountyUp is essentially a tool that facilitates collaborative commerce. Traditionally we have had private goods, which have a subjective value to us and to which we can also ascribe some sort of monetary value. Examples of this would be: an ice cream cone, a car, a plane, or a building; all of which we can define a value for, and then determine if we want to buy it or not.

On the other side of the spectrum of goods have been the public goods, for which we also have a subjective value, but which are too large or nebulous for us to accurately attribute a monetary value. Examples of these would be: clean air, a legal system, space exploration and parks. All of these are goods that we want, but nothing to which, as individuals, we are able to ascribe a monetary value. Traditionally, again, we have paid taxes and elected people who, presumably, know where these funds should be directed in order to meet the needs of the general population.

BountyUp has created one of the first tools for a marketplace that addresses what I’d like to refer to as “a semi-public” (or semi-private) good. An organization such as NASA that can define the success metrics of any particular task (in the form of a Bounty) and put money on the table, allowing any other organization to add to the Bounty. If NASA, for example, starts a Bounty for setting up a station on the moon, then anybody could contribute towards that particular success metric (designing a particular type of rover, or engine, or camera) and individuals or institutions can contribute, knowing that if the Bounty is not completed by a particular deadline, everybody gets their money back.

Or say you want a park with a place for your children to play. You might want to put 50 bucks down for a park with certain dimensions and a swing set. Well, people with children in your city might also feel that they would like to, essentially buy a park for 50 dollars. Get 10,000 people together, and you have a half-million dollar Bounty. A real estate developer can buy a piece of property, plant some grass, put in a swing-set - and collect the Bounty. What if the city put in the park, and collected the Bounty? They could even put some money towards a Bounty for a mass-transit system, or a sewage treatment plant, or anything else - and the people that value that, can contribute towards that Bounty. Crowdfunding as a fully distributed, decentralized method of acquiring semi-public goods - that, themselves, are crowdsourced for delivery? Yes, governments of the world… you too can evolve.

It’s finally time to announce it - we have several facebook apps in beta. Hurray!

The most fully-featured, by far, is one called “Real Gifts“. It’s intended to be the simplest, most digestible example of collaborative commerce possible - a bunch of friends working together to buy each other really cool birthday gifts.

Today I finished some integration with the Amazon API, so that users can pick the gifts they want out of the Amazon store. I used Facebook’s “Mock AJAX” features, and I learned a few things very quickly.

• Put your dummy forms at the top of the page. Why? I had attempted to put my dummy form inside the content that gets refreshed via AJAX call - which doesn’t work the second time.
• Tricks for the “Loading…” message - while the instructions on the wiki are pretty good, there is a delicate art to the placement of the loading div itself. It needs to be within the content that’s being refreshed. For some reason, I’m still getting orphaned “Loading…” divs occasionally - not sure why. (I’ve put a clicktotoggle on the same link as the clicktorewrite attributes.)
• It seems obvious, but make sure you’re not using apps.facebook.com-based URLs for your AJAX calls. The frame, etc. that gets packed onto the content will DEFINITELY get in your way.
• Nesting of AJAX-returned content works fine - as long as all the fake forms you’ll ever need are outside of that content.

Oh, and a final tip - if you write a form that submits file content (multipart), don’t try and post it to an apps.facebook.com-based URL. It won’t work. Simply post it to your own server directly, and make sure you handle the form content before calling require_frame() or require_login().

Inconvenience - Life Racing to Zero Impact

I wrote this as a personal blog, simply because I wanted to cast it around for feedback before making it any sort of official BountyUp project. Of course, I quickly realized I’ve got a lot more subscribers HERE than I do at my personal blog, so we might as well garner feedback here. What do you think - a reasonable idea?

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Tags: liferace, environment, inconvenience, carbon, bountyup

I often ask myself the same question…”What is a bounty?” The answer I usually come up with is, “hell I don’t know…what ever you want it to be!” The problem that I find is lack of imagination. Maybe it’s my own problem or maybe everyone else suffers from it as well. I’m not sure yet so I’ll have to get back to you on that one.

But where I lack imagination at times it seems Amity Records does not; they are an independent record label with no more than a handful of artists and they have created a bounty for MimosA their flagship artist. MimosA is an interesting mix of nylon-flamenco guitar mixed with loud crushing electric guitar and great rock vocals. I listen to them often and I highly recomend that you do as well.

They bounty offers $10,000.00 to any one that creates a Youtube video and gets 500,000 views, As an owner of BountyUp I never really thought about contesting as a means to an end and where it goes against the basic formula of collaborative commerce it does tap the power of crowd sourcing.