SendSocial - The plan and the free shares!

Okay so if you check out the post here http://benwaynow.blogspot.com/2009/03/twitter-idea.html you will see a lot more detail on the idea and how the thing actually operates and the security aspects.

 

So first of all what is SendSocial?

Send social is a way to send real physical items to people with virtual identities without the recipient having to disclose their physical address.

 

But surely people will send weird stuff to people they are obsessed with?

The service work in a way that this could not happen, either the recipient has to know you, or if they do not the package is checked before being forwarded onto the recipient.

 

But I don’t want to be sent something from somebody I don’t know?

To receive something both parties have to agree before the item is sent, its a bit like an escrow account for physical items.

 

Wait I have heard of things like this, is this not just a twitter givereal?

No, it will incorporate aspects of givereal, but with givereal you have to choose from their gifts, with send social you can go out and buy the gift if you want, or if retailers want to join in you can send from their selection of products.

 

Who would use this service?

Lets look at some scenarios:

1) Its valentines you fancy somebody on twit or fit, you go out you buy them chocolates, you send them anonymously using sendsocial, the important thing here is that if something is sent anonymously it is opened and checked by sendsocial, and remember we know who the sender is because we take thier credit card details, and the recipient has actually made the choice to accept the package.

2) You love @wossy and have had some interaction with him and you buy him a small meaningful gift to do with your twitter conversation, this time @wossy can see who you are and decide to accept or decline the gift based on what he knows about you, he can also pay a little bit extra if he wants it checked before it gets there.

3) You are a product manufacturer and want to get your product to guru @Scobleizer again you send the package and @Scobleizer knows who you are so accepts it.

 

What sites will this work for?

Well we will have to build a small simple automated system for each site but initially it would be very easy to build it for FaceBook, Twitter and Email Addresses

 

But how would it work, I don’t want to disclose my address?

Thats the whole point of the service! So looking at scenario number one this is how it would work:

Okay so user @inloveboy wants to send chocolates to @sheissosexy

 

1) @inloveboy comes to the site and decides that none of the items from our approved suppliers match what he wants to send this girl.

2) @inloveboy signs up pays the fee, chooses send anonymously, enters @shesosexy username

3) @shesosexy gets a tweet saying that she has received a gift and to follow @sendsocial

4) @shesosexy follows @sendsocial

5) @shesosexy gets a DM with a unique code and our website

6) @shesosexy goes to our website can see the details of the package and can accept or decline

7) @shesosexy accepts and enters her address

8) @inloveboy recives an email with instructions to send the item to @sendsocial shipping address

9) @inloveboy sends item

10) @sendsocial receives package, checks its contents, then we put @shesosexy address on it and send it FEDEX.

11) @shesosexy recives package and it brings a big smile to her face, after suspecting that it was @inloveboy that sent it, she asks him, he confesses, she has really really hot sex with him and they get married and live happily ever after.

 

What countries will it work in:

Well I can provide shipping addresses and infrastructure in the UK and the US but open to ideas if anybody wants a franchise in another country.

 

What's all this I hear about free shares?

Right well I have about a million ideas a year, most of them are shite, and a few are fucking amazing, I use my network as a sounding board, those who give me good feedback I usually give shares too in the company they helped. So seeing as this is a twitter idea I thought I would ask the Twitter community for feedback to see if it is what the community wants, and because that feedback is valuable and does not waste my money if it is a shit idea I am prepared to give up 10% pool of the shares in the company to anybody who either gets this message out there by RT this message:

 

RT @benpbway IS GIVING AWAY 10% POOL OF SHARES IN SENDSOCIAL.COM TO ANYBODY WHO RE-TWITTERS THIS MESSAGE GOTO SENDSOCIAL.COM FOR DETAILS

 

Please please try and send this more than once, remember having already done this you have a personal stake in the future of the company so the more people you can get to RT the more chance of us actually doing this business.

 

Okay whats the catch? Well there are no catches but the following rules apply:

 

1) Firstly this is just a concept it may never reach the light of day, for any reason should we not do SendSocial you have no rights to refunds, compensation; you agree that there is no liability on our part whatsoever.

2) This is going to have be partly done on trust, trying to come up with rights, shareholders agreements articles of association at this stage is impossible, we don’t even know if it will be a US or UK company. So until we know exactly what the structure is and we have worked out the issues then you are just going to have to trust me on this; oh yeah I hear you say that sounds like a scam, all I can say is that I have been in business for 15 years I have never fucked anybody over and a lot of the people who are retweeting the message are my friends; can you imagine the damage I would do myself and the business if I don’t not hold true to my word? The way I look at it is like this; should we become successful and we sell the company for a $20m I would make sure that the  $2m is split between the people that got the message out in the first place, we may not even issues shares until we sell the company for tax reasons. The bottom line will be if it is a success and we sell you will get a cheque!

3) We take no responsibility for any tax or legal issues that may arise from acquiring these shares.

4) Duration initially we will be doing this for 7 days 05 March 2009, but may extend depending on success, please check back.

5) Tracking I am going to track it from my@ replies however if you want to double make sure you are on the list send your details to sendsocial@gmail.com

6)Again I just want to reiterate myself or sendsocial or any connected companies don't take any responsibity or liability for anything(okay its direct but its better than having pages of T&C that you cant fucking understand anyway)

7) By RT the message above you agree to be bound by these terms and conditions.

8) 10% of the value of the company will be put into the pot not more not less.

9) That pot will be divided by the number of users(not the number of times you retweet) who retweet the message above.

10) These terms are subject to change, modification, adaption without permission.

11) Because of investment the share pool may get dilluted but I will always try and protect these shares and try and leave them as undillutable, but this may mean we cannot aquirer further investment in the future; at some point we may have to dilute the share pool but only if the belief is that the share pool becomes more valuble because of it(i.e. it is better to have a small part of a much bigger pie)

 

Management Team, Investment, and tech stuff

So do I want to run this, no fucking way I have enough companies to run without another one to add to the list!

So I am prepared to give up more of the company to the management team, any investors and anybody who can build the technology. I try and end up with about 30% of a company by the time it launches so there is a good 60%(remembering the 10% above) to split.

I will provide infrastructure, two distribution locations(UK and US) and seed investment, but it would be nice for somebody to come in and match my investment or invest further.

If you know anybody who would be good for the management team  or think you would please contact me at info@makingrain.com

You know me always open to suggestions.

Im sure I have left out stuff, please comment below and I will try my best to modify, this is a moving target as business always is.....

-----UPDATE-----

@simonlhill made a great point and I cant believe I did not see it myself, which is that if we provide a unique code that the shipping partner has access to(or even use their internal tracking code) through their systems a package could be shipped to an address by using this unique code without it being disclosed to the sender and without shipping having to be paid twice. THIS WOULD ONLY WORK FOR NON-ANNOMYNOUS PACKAGES - ANNOMYNOUS WOULD STILL NEED TO BE OPENED AT THE SENDSOCIAL SHIPPING ADDRESS

-----Warning-----

If you have protected updates you MUST email sendsocial@gmail.com as I cannot see your RT in a public search!!!!

Collapsecon Level 1 – The beginning of the end

WARNING : I DO NOT THINK THIS IS GOING TO HAPPEN IT IS JUST FOR INTERLECTUAL INTREST PLEASE READ ALL PREVIOUS BLOGS BEFORE COMMENTING

So what would the  start of our civilisations collapse look like, well like every complicated system we would start to see warning signs around the edges before failure, but what would these failures look like and how fast would they occur?

Well let me talk to you about two concepts that have been very important to my intellectual understanding over the years, the first is occam's razor which simply states that “all things being equal the simplest explanation is normally the correct one”; this rings true in so many areas of life and science its not even funny; the reason why this is important is that in a failure situation a system(i.e. civilisation) will not function at a high level(i.e. rationally) it will function at a very simple level(basic instincts), and failures in the system will not be caused by complicated issues but very basic issues, such as non access to food or communication.

The second is that complicated systems fail in a cascade formation, cascading is actually again a very simple concept it just means that a bunch of small failures can lead into a catastrophic failure, a good example of this is in plane crashes; plains have many many backup and redundant systems; but a number of small failures normally lead to a big one.

So what do these have to do with the failure of our civilisation, well primarily if our civilisation fails I believe it will fail because a few very simple disruptions could cause cascade event that could bring down civilisation far more rapidly than most people can imagine.

So what are these simple factors that keep a civilisation running?

Well you can split the fundamental requirements of our civilisation into the following main areas of need:

-Food
-Water
-Transport
-Communication
-Broadcast Communication
-Security
-Electricity
-Access to money

These main factors(I am sure I have left one or two out but you get the idea) keep our civilisation together; and any one failure in itself would not cause a wider failure of civilisation. The problem stems with this simple belief I have:

The more complex a civilisation becomes the more likely and the more quickly it will fail.

The internet could be the single most destructive force in our civilisation by the very fact we rely on it so much, not just as users but the very systems we rely on to keep us functioning everyday. So you only need a few pieces of the puzzle to fail to cause a catastrophic failure.

So lets take an example lets take out for instance transport; maybe a big oil company goes bust, or drivers go on strike because one of the transport companies goes bust; but anyway suddenly(and we have seen this to some level) people start panicking about fuel, start panic buying and before long access to fuel becomes impossible, at this stage it is fine there are still many things that can be done to resolve it but lets just say this is un-resolvable within a short time span say 7 days.

The first thing is that many cars and trucks start failing on roads and highways, initially the police will clear them but it will hit a critical mass where you cannot drive and transport comes to a halt, this causes two major problems first even if a resolution is found to the initial problem, the distribution becomes impossible in its own right because the fuel cant move anywhere.

The second and more serious problem is firstly food cannot be distributed and nor can some  energy products(such as coal as trains rely on diesel) even though food will cause civil unrest in days(supermarkets have something like only 3 days of food before they become empty) the energy product distribution is far more troublesome.

But we have many sources of energy I hear you say, nuclear, gas – yes but lets look at coal, an energy source that accounts for 50% of the energy production in the US, the problem is as we will see with the internet later on, is that these systems are intrinsically connected, a failure of a few coal plants puts so much strain on the electricity grid the whole grid will collapse, even if parts of it collapse the ripple effects will be huge especially with communication.

Ah communication this is where we were leading, for those unlikely few that don’t know our internet communication system was built by the military just for a failure like the one we are talking about, if parts of the internet protocol(TCP/IP for us techies) fail the system is suppose to redirect through any other node automatically, therefore the failure of one part of the system will still let the rest of the system work. And it would have done, if we did not use it for everything; you see what will really happen if a few major nodes(because of power failures) go down is we will effectively launch a massive denial of service on ourselves, the system will get so clogged up with people and systems trying to pass information through it that it will become so slow that no meaningful data will be able to be transferred.

At this point we have a real problem, you see most people these days cannot work without access to the internet, but more worryingly most critical systems cannot work, a major failure in the communication structure would probably bring to their knee’s  everything from mobile networks to banks.

I believe this could happen in less than 21 days from a major failure of one or two parts of the sytem.

What happens now? I will tell you in my next post....

BTW I have not talked about things like military, government, police, civil unrest, differences between urban and country as I will cover those aspects in later posts.

 

Okay here is another simple idea that I will never get around too

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/03/03/missing.boaters/index.html

Okay it would be very easy to create 'capsise' airbags, when the boat rolls over a certain angle on either side, the corrisponding airbag deploys...they could be easily retrofitted, cheap, and the insurance companies could lower premiums because of them....

Its yours, I just want 10% ;-)

Twitter idea

Okay so I had an idea a few days ago for a Twitter(and other scocial networks and email) business and I want to know if it has got any legs?

So the idea is simple we are now starting to have online identities but sometimes we want to interact with those online identities in the real world.....for instance if i fancy a twitterer I may want to send her a valentines gifty in the real world - but I am not going to ask her for her address as the twitter relationships are genreally very weak....

So the idea is simple - if you want to send something to a twitter or email or other scocial network user and you dont want to ask them for their address you come to our site and the following is the process:

You come to the site enter your identity and whether you want to remain anonymous or not(we still need to know who they are for safty)

The person is then sent a twitter or email asking them to confirm if they want to accept the package

If they accept they enter their address

The sender is informed and payment infomation entered

The sender sends us the package

We send it to the recipient

So no address or identity are ever disclosed to the other party, you would make a stright 10% on the re-shipping costs to the end user.

The disadvantage is that obvously you have to pay two shipping costs but thats the cost of privicy.

I can see this working for users wanting to say thank you, or maybe companies wanting to send bloggers real products.

Looking for feedback - it could be done very easily - We can do the US and UK on day one as I have two locations for shipping we could use.

I am not looking to do this myself I would just like to put it together.

If its shit idea tell me if not help me!

The end is neigh

Oh its easy with highndsight to say I predicted what is happening now, but honestly the people closest to me will tell you that I have been banging on about a major downturn for years, and I actually did something about it, around three years ago I sold all my property and shares, okay I was a little bit early but better that than late.

You see I consider things in terms of risk and impact; so something like getting drunk and kissing an ugly girl is high risk(as it has been known to happen) but low impact(im so drunk im unlikly to remember in the morning) so for years I have been banging on about something that is very low risk(the colapse of our civilisation) but high impact(it would change my world compleatly) so it is something I have always thought about a lot.

Oh god I hear you say, Ben the world is not going to collapse; and I agree with you I dont think it is, but I also dont think it is impossible either.

When I was a kid I used to believe that there was a secreat underlevel running our world, that the polliticians, DOD, FBI the president were somehow special people; who had some kind of special power or understanding that I would never have access too; but as I have grown older and started to move in the same circles and meet the people I always thought were chosen to lead us I have realised something very fucking scary; they are just falible human beings with no more skill or understanding than anybody else!

So what does it mean? We are probably buggered.

I really dont believe anybody really knows what is going on in the market's today or how to solve them; ecominists that missed the single biggest downturn maybe in history failed to spot it coming and they are now the people trying to solve the issue; but if they knew how to solve the issue they would have seen it coming.....

So over the next few weeks I am going to explore what would happen if this was the beggening of the end.........

Twitter

By the way did I mention I dont get twitter, I mean I get it, but it just annoys the crap out of me a little like blogging, im just like who cares....the thing about facebook is at least you get to choose which of your friends status updates you get...twitter just rams it down your throat....

Maybe im just getting to old for this technology shit; oh the irony

Oh God

Okay so here it is, dont read this; I am a terrible blogger I have tried before for the telegraph I was about as entaintating as a pedophile on parents evening.

But the thing is I just cant get it all done in twitter, those bloody 140 char, I like writing, I like expressing ideas, its hard in twitter you have to like think carfully about taking grammer out, when most people are having trouble grasping the basic's of grammer....

And im not one to talk, i am as dyslexic as they come; and hell no im not going to spell check, not because I cant I just really cannot be bothered to be shown how crap I am; do I sound grouchy? Im not im just hungover; oh god what to start this.....