Your Public Profile Page Is Now Live!

It has been a very exciting couple of weeks for us and our first group of early players here at Armchair Revolutionary. We love seeing everyone playing and sending us all of their detailed feedback, much of which we have already integrated into the site.

We are constantly rolling out many new features and improvements on a daily basis but today we are releasing a future so important that it deserves a special mention: Public Profiles.

Public Profiles: Each player will now have a public profile page that allows you to share all of your achievements with the rest of the world. This is the first major feature focusing on social integration and in the future we will also give you the ability to share your achievements with Facebook and Twitter. Coming soon, you will also be able to find your friends on other social networks who are also on Armchair Revolutionary so that you can see how your community of friends are progressing along on their various revolutions. There is great strength in numbers!

To view your profile, go to your Dashboard "My Status" box and click on "View Full Stats"

Although we don't yet have automatic integration with external sites, don't let that stop you from tweeting, blogging and Facebooking your glorious achievements on your own! Not only are you one of the select few early revolutionaries, you also happen to have a handy public profile page with all of your live stats that you can link to! So get out there and do a little self-promotion because after all, what's the point of your revolution if no one notices?

We are still in beta: parts of the profile are so new that we haven't yet had the chance to hook up some of the features but we placed them there anyway so that you can see what everything will look like together. For example: you will be able to buy artwork from an international roster of artists to customize your public profile page (just think of how pretty you'll look).

Privacy settings: along with these new public profile pages we have added an item in your settings that allows you to turn the public profile off if you don't want to share your progress with the world (although we really can't think of a reason you would want to hide that). We look forward to hearing your feedback on your shiny new profile pages.

Can 99-cent Donations Create Social Change?

This past week, we were invited by the editors of Harvard Business Review to guest blog about Armchair Revolutionary's 99¢ business model.  Here's the post just published this morning at HBR...

On April 6th, my partners and I launched Armchair Revolutionary, a web-based social game that harnesses the power of crowdsourcing to support worldchanging science and technology projects. Our website combines several marketplace models into one platform, addressing what we consider to be key flaws in online social activism: the lack of experiential projects, engaging activities, and more enhanced progress reports.

In the run up to our beta-launch, we thought about many different payment models, but in the end, we're going with what we think is a unique donor approach. We're limiting financial gifts to 99¢ increments. We're pretty optimistic that this somewhat counter-intuitive approach to fundraising is actually what's needed.

Here's why: The web is finally reaching a level of donation and payment scalability that micro-transactions can really add up. We've all witnessed the crowdsourcing fundraising successes of Moveon.org and the recent Haiti effort. Armchair Revolutionary takes this model to extremes, by limiting gifts to 99¢ per project (or project phase) for each user, thus reducing the risk-per-donor to a near-zero level per project. At this level, we've also eliminated any financial barriers to participants, tapping into a whole new marketplace for funding. It also supports a high-volume of projects per year as each donor is more capable of contributing to a full "portfolio" of projects as they roll-out per week. We anticipate scaling up from 20 projects in our first year to around 250 in the coming years.
With the popularity of iTunes, the public is now very comfortable with 99¢ transactions and that acceptance and conversion rate is a key component. Several recent trends have also made this 99¢ level more practical. The first trend is lower processing fees on micro-payments, led by Paypal's recent introduction of its "Micro-Payments" vendor classification for online game companies, etc. We've seen a drop from 33¢ to 10¢ on a 99¢ transaction. Another trend helping to streamline the user experience of giving such small amounts is virtual currency. Our users can purchase ArmRev's virtual currency in bulk and allocate micro-amounts to specific projects with the click of a mouse, eliminating tedious multi-step (shopping cart) checkouts. We expect these trends to change the landscape of social giving dramatically.

Our focus is on social problems as varied as global warming and education. There are several key areas where these pioneering scientists and technologists need assistance, such as development of their solution (financial, strategy) and deployment into the business and consumer marketplace (financial, strategy, marketing/communication). ArmRev looks for projects that usually need a minimum of $500K- $1M to reach the tipping point in their 12 to 15 month development/prototype phase.

We also have some requirements of the projects we're considering:

• They must be nationally or globally scalable in their results.
• They must be unable to attain traditional funding which often equates to being moderate to high risk projects.
• The budget and funding timelines must match the capabilities of raising funds through online crowdsourcing.
• They must be able to 'tell a story' and be marketable to the public on the ArmRev website.

The micro-donation model allows the portfolio of projects to absorb a significant failure rate in both original funding and in project success. If the project fails to meet its threshold funding raise, the proceeds are either transferred to another project (usually voted on by the users) or if already expended by the project, the business model is either revamped, the project partners are freed to find other funding sources or the project is shut down. These decisions are made with full disclosure to the users through the projects media section and email communications. We're confident that the failure rate will be balanced by the success rate of a significant number of the projects through their national and global roll-out phase.

Today we are launching and everyone is invited

Today is the official launch day of Armchair Revolutionary! (armrev.org)

We've been working on this a long time, and it's finally here. Today we go live to a national audience and we begin to scale up our projects, activities, and feature roll-outs.

Beautifully explained today by CNET's Daniel Terdiman, Armchair Revolutionary is...

"a Web-based social activism platform designed to harness large-scale crowdsourcing and the boom in social gaming in a bid to support a wide variety of science and technology ventures that could benefit the world at large."

Today's Press

You can currently find us online (links below) on the homepage of USA Today, CNET, Variety, and ReadWriteWeb, as well as the national Print editions of USA Today and Variety.

USAToday
"Digital Download: Join The Armchair Revolutionaries"
http://bit.ly/al0brQ

CNET
"Crowdsourcing Start-Up Aims To Change The World"
http://bit.ly/awghsv

Variety
"Activism Website Targets Gamers:  Armchair Revolutionary Merges Doing Good With Playing"
http://bit.ly/9jT6Ka

ReadWriteWeb
"ArmRev: Hollywood Games The Web For Social Good"
http://bit.ly/a36Cmo

Useful Links

If you haven't already signed up for a beta invite, do so here:
http://www.armrev.org (use invite code "armrev")

If you know a brilliant scientist, technologist or innovator with a great idea to the change the world, send them here:
http://www.armrev.org/submit-a-project

If you know a talented illustrator, photographer, or animator who'd like to create artwork, send them here:
http://www.armrev.org/artists

Thank you for your support in getting us here.  We're looking forward to your creative input, ideas, and suggestions as we move this exciting venture forward attempt to shape the future, one revolution at a time!

For additional details on Armchair Revolutionary's unique business models, as well as howThe Hollywood Hill and the Play4Change Lab (The Hollywood Hill's new game lab collaboration with USC's Game Institute) fit in, you can visit our press page for some helpful bullet points:
www.armrev.org/press

Redefining "Social Awareness"

The emerging world of embedded sensor networks presents a huge opportunity for Armchair Revolutionaries.  With sensors we can gather real-time information from the field and use it to give users real-time reporting on the progress of our projects.  Here's an exciting example we started to explore this past summer…

The U.N. World Food Program (UNWFP) is one of the largest NGOs in the world, dedicated to making sure that the world's 3 billion people living without basic food, water, and medical treatment are given a chance to survive.  With a vast infrastructure of global depots and offices, the WFP employs cargo planes, helicopters, ships, trucks, and in-the-field operatives to move their supplies around the globe and reach those in need.  They also take on several natural disaster/crisis situations a year such as tsunamis and earthquakes.

As we discussed how Armchair Revolutionaries might assist them, we explored the creation of a video game that would pull real-time data from sensors embedded in their infrastructure (webcams mounted to their planes and ships, twitter feeds from their helicopter pilots flying into crisis zones, gps and RFID tags embedded in pallates of food in transport) and layer that real-time data on top of a battleship-like video game, giving it a layer of real-time integrated rich media - the ultimate experience.

We're continuing to explore ideas like these with forward-thinking partners looking to connect the public to their projects.

Bullish on Crowdsourcing

This posting is part of our ongoing series: What A Crowd Can Do With 99¢.

Our team is constantly exploring ways to push the envelope of what an online or mobile-based crowd can do with 99¢.  This is an extraordinary example of a project model we're planning using crowdsourcing to access the highly-rewarding world of Wall Street-esque financial instruments…

Crowdsourcing meets Wall Street

Micro-loans in the developing world are given out to the poor by small and medium sized banks (called MFIs).  These developing world banks don't have enough capital for all of the loans that are needed so they borrow additional capital.  Unfortunately many of them don't have stellar credit ratings (for a wide range of reasons) so it's hard for them to borrow as much capital as they really need.  This is where things get interesting…

In a model that we've come across over the past year, a wealthy U.S. donor decides to assist, but rather than giving a donation, the donor has a major U.S. bank write a letter of credit against millions of dollars worth of the donor's assets.  The smaller, less credit worthy banks in the developing world then use this letter of credit as collateral when they go to borrow additional capital.  Because of the high credit rating of the major U.S. bank and its respective letter of credit, the smaller banks are allowed to borrow 3-5 times the amount of the letter of credit.  So if the letter of credit is written against $10M worth of the donor's assets, the developing world banks are allowed to borrow $30-50M.  This ends up being an extremely rewarding scenario for both the donor and the MFIs - the donor doesn't have to contribute cash and the MFIs can borrow 3-5x the donor's asset value.

Now imagine if the wealthy U.S. donor was replaced with millions of Armchair Revolutionary users.  Each user would loan Armchair Revolutionary 99¢ for a period of 3 years.  Once our 'asset fund' reaches $1 million or more, we would park it in a stateside bank account for the 3 year period.  We would of course earn interest on the full amount each year, and at the same time, a major U.S. bank would write a letter of credit against it.  Then we'd give our choice of developing world micro-finance banks an invitation to use the letter of credit as collateral for their borrowing purposes, enabling them to borrow $3-5 million for use as micro-loans in the developing world.

At the end of the 3 year period, Armchair Revolutionary has…

• Converted $1 million in user loans into $3-5 million in micro-finance loans for developing world entrepreneurs
• Returned the 99¢ to its users who are then asked to reallocate it to a new asset fund of their choosing
• Earned an income from the interest on the asset fund

Is that an amazing scenario or what!?!

Virtual Goods As Our Revenue Model

Designing our business plan took us several years.  Creating a financially sustainable social venture is not easy.

Facebook Causes for instance takes a slice off of the transaction fee for each donation a user makes to a cause.  The more causes users post, the more donations, the more they make.

IfWeRanTheWorld.com encourages individuals to voice their interests online and then invites nonprofits and corporations interested in looking socially responsible to pursue them.  The team behind IfWeRanTheWorld sells themselves as private consultants to these corporations and their multi-million dollar marketing departments.

Every social change venture has its own revenue model.  For our revenue model, we're doing something that has not yet been tried in the social change space - inviting users to purchase (virtual) digital art submitted by professional artists around the globe (armrev.org/artists) for personalizing their Dashboard and Public Profile pages.  The virtual goods sector of the online gaming industry is exploding. Games like Mafia Wars, Farmville, Maple Story, etc. are making extraordinary sales numbers with transactions in the $1-$5 range.  Our artwork will sell in the same range.

Reaching 'Sustainable' Social Activism: Games vs Guilt

There's really two kinds of social "causes":

1. reactionary causes that target a specific crisis (ex. Haiti)
2. forward-thinking causes that target a sustainable solution (ex. Architecture for Humanity)

Up until now, the main motivation to give time and money to reactionary causes is guilt.  But guilt is not a sustainable nor productive motivator.  That's why most crisis causes come and go like fads. They're hot, then they're not. No one wants to feel guilty all the time, so users will go elsewhere for their daily activities.

Having a game is more interactive and sustainable for user bases over time.  It gives them a "structure" to fit into, it educates the users on how the projects will unfold, and it lets users plan with long-term motivations how to use limited resources to benefit projects.

Roleplaying in itself is invaluable as users can experience different viewpoints and avenues for resolving problem.  The long-term engagement in projects lead to deeper education.  And an opportunity to  bravidachio on user profile pages leads to a successful social model of viral promotion and a sense of reward.

That's why we've incorporated game design into Armchair Revolutionary. There are almost no limits on how far you can take this experience - we plan to push it as far as we can.  Our mission is all about building a long-term commitment to our experience and sustain motivation over years.

World of Warcraft (WoW), and the Sims franchise are shining examples of long-term roleplaying games that have hit this out of the park.  We're certainly excited to have advisors who continue to work on both of those games.

Projects That Shape The Future, One Revolution At A Time

There are many terrific organizations in the world tackling the world's problems. Armchair Revolutionary is most productive at aiding projects that pioneer innovative solutions.  Here's why...

Innovative projects are usually a new idea, a new science, a new technology, or a new business model - and usually they are unproven.  That means there's a whole lot of risk associated with funding them.  Which is why traditional institutions (govts, foundations, nonprofits, venture capitalists) usually shy away from them.  That's where Armchair Revolutionary can come in to save the day.  By reversing the funding model from one donor giving a million dollars to a million donors giving one dollar, we distribute the financial risk so such an extent that it literally evaporates. If the project fails, the users who gave just a buck will not lose sleep versus the large donors who would lose a million dollars.

With this model, Armchair Revolutionary can take on highly-experimental projects - hundreds of them in fact - that are high-risk, simply because they have not been proven.  We can get them through their prototype stage so they can do a proof of concept, and then they can attract a more traditional donor base for their next stage. Our non-financial tasks also help these projects get executed and launched into the marketplace.

Filtering The Noise

The third area ripe for innovation is curation.  Now that we're in the information age, it's all about filtering the firehouse of information coming through our tubes - and identifying the most high value content you're interested in.  We've all watched the success of Google and the rise in importance of search technologies over the last few years.

This issue couldn't apply more to the social change space where tens of thousands of projects compete against each other for public attention.  In our view, the nonprofit world has not yet risen to this challenge - it's still in "database" mode.  A handful of nonprofits and databases have been created to store information on a vast amount of projects, but they require users to sift through that information using inefficient methods which is utterly impossible considering the sheer volume of it.

Ultimately, users need a better experience, a personalized one that's intuitive and served up to them based on their needs, wants, and what they should know about.  Armchair Revolutionary is designed to provide this experience.  Every user has their own private Dashboard page where every type of content we provide is customized towards the user's profile and history. And our projects are tightly curated so that we're ensuring each is in fact a "revolution" in its own right.

Let's Visualize Transparency

The second area ripe for innovation is transparency.  We view transparency in three forms - transparency of cash flow, transparency of strategy, and transparency of progress.  Most social causes are not transparent.  They ask you for money, but they don't work overtime to show you where exactly it's going, why it's going there, when it's going there, and most importantly, if it helped the cause.  Even if they do tell you some of that information, it's really only valuable if you have the whole picture.  We see opportunities to change this.

Being more transparent about project strategies and budgets is pretty straightforward - posting them online in easy-to-read layouts is an obvious first step, but so much more can be done and should be. How about video tutorials further explaining that content and how those decisions were reached? Even more exciting is visualizing their progress - and that's where new (and inexpensive) technologies can play a major role - tapping into the data revolution.

You can now make a video for free on your cell phone.  And that video can be uploaded and shared with the rest of the world in seconds.  You can even stream live video from your cell phone onto the internet (Qik.com).  You can also take photos from your cell phone.  You can set up inexpensive webcams connected to wifi hubs and stream onto the internet.  You can embed sensor networks and gather data that streams straight into the internet where charts and line graphs automatically update with it in real-time.

Armchair Revolutionary is working to use these game-changing technologies in exciting new ways to shape a completely real-time progress report online.