After having played around with some Swing it when you’re winning stuff, we got bored with it and set out for something new.
The something was getting together once a week, recording while having a good time and during the rest of the week, trying to put a song together from the recordings.
The result was put on 1000 CDs and give to friends as a present.
It is also available on jamendo:
This is an idea of how to redesign the financial system. Currently the main aspect of all offical financial systems is interest.
On top of interest people have built a range of financial products, all of which follow the same goal: making money from having money.
By accepting this, we quietly accept money to be a production factor just like land ownership or personal skills.
For parts of our social and economic system this is a valid idea. But only for a certain amount of time.
Due to the exponential growth of the overall sum of any currency induced by interest rates, after time most people owe money to a few.
These people cannot participate in the economic circle which is needed to keep the system running.
When this happens, we get a meltdown, just like recently.
Most probably there are many ways to renovate the way we make business, exchange goods, skills, time and ownership but there is one i would like to propose here.
In 1980 Dr. Edgar Cahn came up with the idea that every persons time is of equal worth and people therefore could be used a basic good for exchanging services.
Now timebanks.org is the starting point for everyone who wants who likes the idea. This and similar approaches are discussed in a variety of books, especially by Bernard Lietaer and Margit Kennedy.
I strongly believe in the timebank approach, it’s just not 21st century enough.
It is not efficient, having people download a bunch of Excel-Sheets to build their local bank upon.
Nowadays this has to be an open platform approach, accessible through all channels of connectivity.
What do you need to set up a bank?
- A dedicated person
- with the skills of adapting the concept to a neighborhood and
- with strong persuasive skills.
- Who is prepared to invest time in organizing and
- maintaining a community
Most of these points can be incorporated into a web-platform and thereby using the leverage of asynchronous and centralized communication of the internet.
What will go missing is the trust people have in each other when being organized by a known person and being in direct touch with the other members of the community.
Since several methods of building trust with and within web-platforms have been established and proven, this should not present a real obstacle.
Here is how it works:
It is an online “swap stop for time”.
The trust level of a user is measured by an algorithm that incorporates the amount of directly associated users, selling, buying, transaction, average time between transactions, and more.
Everyone may offer services. Services are measured in minutes.
Everyone may buy services.
Both parties are responsible for their transactions.
Both parties can rate each other.
The project will start in 2011.
Everyone is invited to join – preparations have begun.
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My belief is that we will use a variety of different currencies with different designs for different purposes, just like we use different tools to accomplish different things.(You wouldn’t trust a dentist with a 8mm drill, would you? – But that’s exactly what we’ve been doing up to now)
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Examples are:
http://kroonos.com
http://www.thewhuffiebank.org/
Some copycats became big. Some didn’t. This one didn’t. About two weeks after twitter became visible in Europe we started a german version called dasbeep.de
Right from the beginning it had an open API and we got some developers interested. The most interesting app was something called copyandbeep.
Basically it was a small button floating atop all applications on your screen. By clicking the button it would publish all text in your current clipboard to dasbeep.de.
Very useful and i still miss something like this for twitter.
In December 2009 i came across a slogan on a flyer saying “Unfuck the planet”. Being a nerd, i immediately tried to register the domain but unfortunately and obviously it was taken.
On whois request and a phone call later, a new project was born.
On 1st of March 2010 we will open an online store on unfucktheplanet.com whose profits will be donated fully to projects that make the world a good place.
In order to make sure the money is actually used for good things, we will make all money-flow completely transparent on unfucktheplanet.org.
But that’s not all on the .org site. It will be a full community of people wanting to get involved. Fortunately our friends at mixxt.com are so generous as to support this platform!
For a start we will only sell t-shirts and from there expand the portfolio of goods we’re selling. So for the first step we partnered with spreadshirt.de who gave us maximum support in this.
Currently (Feb, 12th) we’re still looking for a logo and just started a competition at 99designs.com
This is a story of how things really go wrong when teaming up with the wrong people.
In the beginning it looked very promising with a Co-Founder who had a track record at IBM for a decade and who is a brilliant sales person.
But if that same sales person later switches course after every meeting, forcing the development team to bend until they or the software cracks and at the same time not signing any contract in 2 years! And then turns out to be too narcissistic to see that he is standing in the way of any and all success and even forcing the investor to resign from the investment-plans by inadequate communication, that’s when you should pack and get out!
It is also interesting to see how someone doesn’t learn from one team leaving and instead, burning the next team and then….we’ll see.
yoose.com is quite straight-forward: It is a mobile couponing platform. When it started out, there was hardly anyone else in the german market doing the same thing. Now things have changed.
It is depressing to see that, knowing that the first version of YOOSE was up and running in August 2008. And now its February 2010.
Being obsessed with TED ever since they launched the global website, it was an absolute honor, being part of the board for the TEDxBerlin Conference. http://tedxberlin.de
The actual event was organized by the great people at http://www.redonion.de/
We are all very proud to see Peter Eigen, founder of transparency international and of the speakers in Berlin on the global website!
http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_eigen_how_to_expose_the_corrupt.html
It’s more than time again to revive this.
Ideenweitwerfen is a one day think-tank workshop for making the world a good place.
It works like this:
1 Someone defines a topic, picks a place and invites 10-20 people
2 Everybody presents their first ideas about the topic in 1-2 minutes
3 The ideas get placed on a board
4 Afterwards everybody gets to give 5 votes across all ideas
5 The top x ideas get chosen and a owner is chosen and the group is split up into teams
6 The teams revolve through all ideas and do a 10 minute brainstorming session
7 Everyone picks her favorite idea and starts working on a solution with the rest of the team
8 Every team presents their solution
The ideas need to meet the following criteria:
- It needs to be a specific product
- It needs to have a business case, in order to be sustainable
A really good idea of an idea like that is http://www.betterplace.com/
In 2007 we created a platform called menschheit.org (mankind.org).
Its goal was to create a social network of people, connected via internet, meeting and communicating in the world by leveraging some of the main assets of the internet: asynchronous communication, low cost presentation, and geographical independency.
It was set up as a game:
We came up with something people should do during the course of a week and then present their results online. The important thing was, that people would only be able to set a location and time to meet and could not communicate otherwise online.
The tasks were chosen from the fields: social interaction, economy, ecology, politics
We started with the task of planting as many trees as possible and had a couple of hundred people throughout the country following.
Obsessed with all the aspects of the new world offered by mobile internet, in early 2007 we set out to build a QR-Code Shop.
In its first version it was supposed to (and still does) allow to order QR-Codes on stickers.
Of course, we had planned to add more products over time and especially adding more integration into other platforms as they were going more and more mobile, offering them complete fulfillment in giving their users real-world links to their virtual homes.
http://kyouare.com
At the moment we are busy working on a new album. We’re basically doing this to continue our quest for finding a way of creating music while having fun, being time and cost efficient, being in three different geographic regions and being occupied with our individual lives.
And of, course we already know the name of the album, but we won’t disclose it here. ;-}
You’ll have to wait for 2011.
For the second album we took a new approach:
We rented a cellar, set up a studio, met once a week with new concrete ideas for songs. We wanted to take a more structured approach and you can hear it in some of the songs.
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