Last week I asked you to get your friends involved in our campaign to stop global warming and you responded: more than 70,000 people have joined in the last week alone. That’s simply amazing and shows that there is immense support behind our call for solutions to the climate crisis. Today we are just 76,000 short of reaching our goal of 1,000,000 members by April.
You can help put us over the top. Right now I need you to forward the email below to everyone you know and ask them to get involved.
More than 924,000 people have already joined us, but if we are going to succeed we need to reach 1,000,000 by April.
With your help, we’ll reach this goal and send a powerful message to the world. Please ask your friends to get involved today: http://wecansolveit.org/invitealliance
We had 45 minutes left to upload our business plan to the website of the Senkrechtstarter business plan competition. I had to leave our office 10 minutes before, because I had to get the last train to Augsburg, where I live. So I’m blogging out of the train – thanks to my UMTS card from Vodafone (no, it doesn’t work very well; just GPRS and a lot of blue screens). We all (Andi, Sebastian and myself) had a hard work day; thirteen hours or so. Tomorrow there is another deadline: we have to send in our presentation for Monday (start2grow competition).
Btw: thanks Lenz, Mark and Olivia for giving us feedback! We appreciate that very much!
My second contact with Social Software was with Wikis. My first was with Blogs btw. I used MediaWiki, the software that runs the Wikipedia, to build up a site for my open source / bachelor / scientific project BioWeka (an extension to the data mining Weka for bioinformatics). Wikis are a great tool for collaborative working, especially in open projects with distributed team members with different software configurations. However, in my opinion Wikis are not ideal for companies. Most Wiki software lacks of essential tools: user-right-management, file-management and especially Office Software integration. Of course, there are products which call themselves Wikis and offer these features, but they are more than a Wiki: they are document and collaboration management tools with a Wiki feature.
Selling virtual goods within a virtual economy isn’t a trivial accounting task – that’s why we seek for a snart CFO. This blog posting explains the problems with accounting virtual goods:
Last week’s Game Developer’s Conference put the limelight on the rapidly growing game industry, but it also highlighted a significant pain point – virtual good sales create very real accounting issues for successful virtual worlds and MMORPGs.
I love XING: yesterday Andreas visited my profile after stumbling upon this blog. I recognized it, contacted him (to inform him about the Startup-Day) and he told me about job watchr, a joblog, a blog posting job offers. And here we are:
Another interesting post on why people buy virtual goods (or digital goods; in Thailand you would say “same same”):
Although Facebook has primarily focused its monetization efforts on advertising, it has also experimented with digital goods. There are three typical use cases for digital goods; (i) increased functionality (ii) self expression and (iii) communication. Facebook’s Gifts fall into the third category, whereby a particular communication is emphasized because a gift has a price associated with it, thereby creating some scarcity value.
Menschen wollen besitzen. Besitz bedeutet Ansehen. Besitz bedeutet Sicherheit. Besitz bedeutet Verfügbarkeit. Es muss nicht der Porsche sein. Manch einem genügt bereits ein virtuelles Stück Land. Ein Beispiel: Second Life. Hier besitzt man virtuelles Land real. Ein anderes Beispiel: WhatsYourPlace.de. Hier besitzt man reales Land virtuell.
Fascinating question “Why do people spend money on virtual goods?” and a profound answer:
Its a case of straightforward economics. The marginal utility attributed to the virtual good by its consumer is higher than the marginal utility of an extra dollar, five dollars, or whatever the price of the good. In other words, the girl on Facebook who can’t be there for her best friend’s birthday would rather spend a $1 to send her friend a Birthday Cupcake Facebook Gift (that will arrive on the exact day and be seen by everyone who visits her friend’s profile) than spend a $1 (or more) on a greeting card (that will be seen only by her friend and likely go into the trash a few days later). Both Susan Wu and Jeremy Liew have excellent posts that describe, in more detail, the ways that virtual goods deliver value to their consumers.
