Idea: I’ll pay you to answer this question…

Do you prefer red or blue?

You’ve probably already answered it in your head. Now would you share that answer with me if I offered you 1 cent? I’m guessing you would considering (a) you’re already here anyway, and (b) well, it’s an easy one – why not? During idle moments (like reading blogs) a person’s resistance to menial tasks are lowered because the mind is searching for something, anything interesting to lock on to.

How much idleness do you experience in an average day? I’m not talking about the moments where you’re consciously choosing to relax, but the occasions where you’re forced to do nothing because you’re stuck on public transport or in a traffic jam, waiting for a doctor’s appointment, or any number of other things that tax our time and test our patience. What if you were given the opportunity during your idleness to perform some small, quick tasks in return for a small reward?

I believe there’s huge untapped potential here, which is the driving force behind this idea: harness the potential of people who are interested in being rewarded during idle moments for performing small, simple tasks.

In execution, the idea is to build a smartphone application whereby users get given basic tasks to perform: answer a survey question, vote on a poll, view an ad, play a short game, etc. for which they earn points. When enough points are accumulated these can then be redeemed for shopping vouchers.

How will this make money?
The business model behind this idea is the rapid accumulation of useful data. Core to the success of this venture will be the ability to package this up with analysis and insights, in a format that’s easy to digest. Potential clients are many and varied, from product designers looking to test new concepts, to political parties looking to gauge constituent sentiment on policy issues.

With a large member base, it also becomes possible to start selling advertising space directly to businesses instead of using a prepackaged service such as Apple iAd or Google Mobile Ads (although you could still use those as a springboard at the start).

Why smartphones?
Take a look around you. Do a quick poll of your friends. How many don’t have smartphones? Exactly. The other point is that people always carry their phones around with them.

Why points?
Psychologically speaking, the satisfaction of earning 100 points is much greater than the satisfaction of earning 1 cent, even if one knows the exchange rate. People are willing to do stupid things to accumulate points – e.g. on Facebook, over 2,700 people follow iReward (including me). Each weekday they publish an “iCode”, which when entered into their Website earns you a princely sum of 5 points – equivalent to 0.5 cents. If you do the math it’s an hourly rate of roughly $1.80 an hour, yet thousands of people spend, cumulatively, several hours doing this each and every day.

Why shopping vouchers?
Again, it’s a psychological thing. Shopping vouchers give a much greater impression of worth than cash, which always seems to come and go. I’m a member of several sites that offer cashback paid directly into your bank account, but that money just ends up being added to (and in good times, dwarfed by) the existing pool of funds, whereas with shopping vouchers I can always remember what I used them to buy.

What kinds of tasks?
Ideally every task would be interesting or fun in some kind of way: a vox pop style quiz question, a brand-sponsored interactive game, or a plain old banner click – none should take more than a few seconds to complete. Most tasks will be driven by client requests, but to keep the mix of tasks interesting, and to tide members over during gaps with sourcing, some low-value fluff could be offered, like “who’d win in a battle between The Terminator and Robocop?” etc.

Why such small rewards?
The first thing that occurs to some people when I shared this idea with them was “it’s not worth it. Why would I waste my time if the reward is only 1 cent?” But going back the question of “why points” there’s a psychological predisposition amongst many people to want to accumulate things, an observation I’ve made about myself, and which I’m sure is shared amongst a significantly large number of people.

There are a host of sites that offer incentives for completing marketing surveys: RewardCentral, iReward, My Opinions, PureProfile, AC Nielsen, That’s What I Think, Lightspeed Research, etc. etc. But let’s look specifically at RewardsCentral, one of the larger and more established players, boasting over half a million members. Like most of the consumer research panels above, they offer members the opportunity to take surveys for up to 250 reward points (equivalent to $2.50) depending on its length, which on average takes around 15 – 20 minutes to complete. Each day they also offer “Web clicks” (click on an advertising link) which pays 3 points, and a “Web survey” that pays 2 – a grand total of 5 cents per day. Yet this still earns me enough to “cash out” $60 a year.

With only the basic offer of paying 1 cent per question, assuming one completes 10 every weekday for a year (5 on the way to work, 5 on the way back) that works out to be $26. Make that 5 cents per task and now you’re talking about $130. Now consider that Google charges some advertisers several dollars per click through their keyword bidding system, if you were to pass most of that profit to the user… (this is a rabbit hole that I don’t have time to explorer here, but think about the sites like MoneybackCo and Buckscoop, which pay users the referral or affiliate fees offered by merchants, after pocketing a small cut. Take that concept and apply it to advertising – paying users for the privilege of advertising to them… that could be a Google slayer).

Where to after this?
Congratulations if you’ve made it this far – this is a long post even by my standards, and still only represents a fraction of the total idea. To give you a sense of where this could go though, the next evolution of this idea is to take the model of small tasks/small rewards, and apply it to big tasks/big rewards, in essence creating a freelance network encompassing not only digital work, but also manual jobs. But that’s another post for another day!

The socialisation of search and state

While reading an article about Larry Page in Wired magazine this morning, it occurred to me that Google is essentially one, big, global experiment in socialism. At it’s core, Google’s business model is simple: you give them your money (indirectly, by viewing advertising), and in return they give you tools that you use to do good (i.e. for the betterment of society, the flip side of their “do no evil” mantra).

Here’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on Socialism:

As a form of social organization, socialism is based on relatively equal-power relations, self-management and a reduction or elimination of hierarchical forms of management in the economic structure of society.

Now read this paragraph from the Wired article:

As early as 2001, as the company reached 400 employees, Page worried that a growing layer of middle managers would bog it down. So he and Brin came up with a radical solution: They decided to do away with managers entirely. The HR team begged them not to, but the founders went ahead with the plan.

See any similarities?

Then there’s stuff like their support for open-source software, and the free food for staff, which are signs of socialist idealism. If the Wired article paints an accurate picture, Page – who recently took over from Eric Schmidt as CEO – would like everybody to give Google their money so that the company can “fix” all the “problems” with the world (like Chinese censorship, although their plan backfired badly).

A little while ago I began to wonder whether I really want to live in a world defined by Google’s values. Yes, I was mocked in the comments about our dependence on Google, and it’s true that I won’t (can’t) stop using Google Search any time soon, but I am becoming increasingly wary of all the other free toys – i.e. the rapidly  multiplying number of Google Apps.

Am I the only one concerned about the rise of a new kind of corporate communism?

The Bampyre

Here’s one that’s a little left-field. It’s an idea I had for a children’s story called The Bampyre. The basic premise deals with a little vampire who trips and breaks his fangs, so he can’t dvink ze bluhd (nor pronounce “vampire”). While failing miserably at nibbling on a friendly cow, said bovine sympathises and takes Bampyre on a journey to find something else to fill his stomach.

Yeah, the story is a little bit morbid, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. What I have yet to decide is whether the writing will take the form of poetry or prose.

Here are some attempts at character design and a mock layout:

Some general sketches. Trying to make sure it works in 3D.

A more cartoony look, although it's clearly drifting into South Park territory.

It's gonna be fun -and- educational!

What do you think? Does this have the makings of a children’s classic?

For what we are about to receive

A quick update about me: after being retrenched by IBM at the end of March, I did a short project with Access Testing, which finished up yesterday. Now that I’m officially unemployed again, I thought I might as well make an effort to try and catch up on blogging, and seeing as I haven’t done an Atheist In God’s Kingdom post in a while here’s one to kick things off.

(As a reminder for those of you who are new to the series, my aim is to try to speak against the militant anti-religious brand of atheism championed by Dawkins, Hitchens and their ilk, and point to a more tolerant, moderate form of atheism that embraces and welcomes the wonderful things that religion continues to bring to the human experience.)

The practice of saying grace before meals comes from the biblical references to Jesus giving thanks to God before taking a meal.  Take God out of the equation, and you’re left with an act of thoughtful consideration towards the food in front of you. Here are a few things to think about when your Christian friends are saying grace, or even if you want to make a habit of pausing to think about your breakfast/lunch/dinner before you scoff it down (might be a good diet tip!):

What you are eating
This isn’t about counting calories or suffering buyers’ remorse over picking the (large) Big Mac Meal instead of the McSalad. Look at what you’re eating – really look at it: how it’s been prepared, and what ingredients are in it. Have a think about where those ingredients might have come from, especially if you’ve got a green bent and are interested in things like food miles, slow food, food security and sustainability. It’s amazing how little we think about what we eat considering that it’s critical to our survival – I know when I’m hungry and tired, I’ll just cram anything even remotely edible into my mouth, and I can recall many occasions where a little deliberation might’ve saved a lot of pain and suffering.

The person who prepared it
Putting together three square meals a day is no easy ask, and unless you’re lazy and eat out regularly, you’ll appreciate the effort that goes into planning and preparing meals. It’s not just the cooking, it’s also the shopping, preparing and washing up afterwards. If you cook for yourself it’s a good time to think about your own skills – be they good or bad – and reflect on what you’ve just achieved.

Those without
I know this is wandering dangerously close to moral high ground turf, and I appreciate that some are turned off by the idea of taking a guilt trip with each mouthful. Still, I believe there is such thing as a healthy dose of rationalism, especially when it comes to food waste. Check out this recent CNN article that reports up to 30% of all food is wasted. So in thinking about those without, it doesn’t have to be “oh won’t anybody think of the starving orphans!” so much as having a respectful attitude towards our ability to obtain food easily and cheaply, and not treating it as an endless resource magically created by supermarkets.

Feeling hungry? Remember to “say grace” before your next meal!

The future of manufacturing

OK, probably not the best image to represent manufacturing in outer space, but I couldn't think of anything else

You may have seen my earlier post on the future of shopping. One interesting element about the retail debate is how retailers have forgotten about the globalisation of manufacturing and the loss of local jobs around a decade ago, which they were largely quite happy about because it meant cheaper products (and higher margins).

The bulk of what we buy today is now “Made in China” or some other low-labour cost country. Global logistics is at a level of maturity where this doesn’t have any negative impact on customers’ ability to get things fast. For example last year I ordered an iMac from the Apple Store, and it was assembled in China, despatched within 24 hours, and on my doorstep in a matter of days. It wasn’t so long ago that you had to rely on local retailers to bring over stock in bulk, or wait for a shipping container to be filled.

So what’s next for manufacturing? I reckon the answer lies in space.

It’s clean up there
Many kinds of product require an uber-clean environment to manufacture. Computer chips for instance, require a completely clean, dust-free atmosphere – any impurities in the silicon wafer and the resulting chip is useless. Terrestrial facilities have to deal with atmospheric impurities, but I reckon – although I could be wrong about this – dust would be less of a problem in outer space.

Heavy lifting? No problem!
Weightlessness is a boon if the manufacturing task involves large, heavy materials. You’d no longer have to deal with gravity, although this only improves manoeveurability – it’d still require a sufficiently strong force to move the object.

Space does weird (but cool) things
There’s probably a lot about the physics of space that we have yet to discover. One thing that we do know of however is cold welding, where metals in a vacuum fuse together simply by touching. The convenience of doing this in space is that you don’t have to create the vacuum. Who knows what other weird and useful effects might be possible!

How do we get it up there, and then back down?
So the question remains of how we get stuff up and down from space. At the beginning of this post I mentioned how global logistics allows items to be sent around the world at great speed, but we don’t yet have the same infrastructure for space, and rely on rockets and the like, which are expensive because they’re moving a large quantity of fuel required by the launching process as well as the payload.

We (human beings) have already had an answer to this since the late 19th Century – in the form of a space elevator designed by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1895! Basically, space elevators work by having an satellite in space held aloft in geo-stationery orbit, anchored to the ground via a large cable of sorts. The whole shebang is held up by centripetal force, like the hammer toss at the Olympics, where the circular motion of an object, combined with its weight, results in a net outwards force. The payload is then carried up and down this structure.

Imagine looking at the tag of a future product and seeing “Made in Space” :-) Wouldn’t that be cool?