Introducing Handmeon
August 31, 2007 | Arts & Culture | Life | Products & Opportunites
Okay, enough with the hints. In January I started a new company with two co-founders, and today we released the second major revision to our first product, Handmeon. To quote some draft marketing material:
Handmeon turns giving into a shared creative experience. Inspired by ancient circles of exchange, Handmeon lets people create renewable resources of expression through gifts endowed with history and trajectory, humor and thought. Rejecting material consumption and accumulation, Handmeon seeks a return to giving as a vehicle for human connection.
The basic idea is to take an objet, perhaps something small, perhaps something beautiful, perhaps something with an interesting background, and create an online presence for it. You upload a photo, write an inscription, and make blog posts regarding the object. Eventually you give it away, and the new keeper can write posts and enjoy the objet's sojourn with them. As the object moves between people, you can see the travels with integrated Google maps. After 4 hops, or 20, or 40, the object develops a rich history, accumulating stories online.
In other words, we're playing with the integration and separation of the real-world and the Internet. These objects are passed from one friend to another – when you hold an object you received it from a friend, and you'll give it to a friend, perhaps in person, perhaps by mail. And they'll give it to a friend, perhaps one you haven't yet met. The object becomes a connecting thread between a line of people, all connected one friend to another. I'm hopeful that it will expose the connections and therefore the interdependencies between people who haven't ever met.
You can take a tour, or explore the site to get a sense of what the early adopters are doing. For instance, Kathryn wants to learn more about meditation. Trippy the Frog wants to travel. The Roller just completed a sojourn with Jer. John wrote a post about a brush with celebrity. Jeff went meta, right out of the gate. And so on. You can create public, private, and secret objects.
To make money, we'll sell the permanent tags that turn objects into Handmeons and give them a URL. So the creator buys a tag, and everyone else can claim, post, and release the object for free. Speaking of free, right now the tags are free – so go register and order some! Make some Handmeons! See what it feels like to imbue something with meaning online, and then give it away. Experience the gratitude that this act of generosity engenders. You can create the online Handmeon before your tags arrive, so you can get started right away.
Eventually we'll charge money for the tags. Pricing is not set, but we want it to be affordable, maybe three tags for $12.95 or something. We have to model the object's long-term pageview cost and whatnot, and we haven't finished that yet. Three tags for $19.95 is probably the highest price we can imagine right now.
Of course, there's a blog, newly minted. We're going to try for one solid software release each week for a few weeks. Comments are on over there, and we are actively looking for feedback and enthusiastic participants. Come over and play in this new interaction space!
Oh, and, as a self-funded startup, we're looking for links! Tell your friends. ;) Thanks.
Idiomatic Learning
August 28, 2007 | Arts & Culture
Link for the day: Learn English Today. Example: Like a dog with two tails.
[N.B. Highly irritating javascript window resizing on that site. Very 1994.]
Yo! This is not cool. WTF.
August 24, 2007 | Life | Nature & Environment
I woke up about 40 minutes after falling asleep, hearing what I thought was a big moth banging against the window screen trying to get in. It went on long enough that I grabbed my flashlight to see what it was. When I turned it on, something whizzed by my head, and I realized the moth was already in the bedroom, and it was trying to get out.
So I got up and put my glasses on and hit the flashlight again to go find the lightswitch, when, lo and behold, the thing flew by me and I realized, it's a bat!!. Uh, okay. I bolted out the door to the hallway, and turned on the hall light.
So now I'm standing there, naked, dazed and confused, in the middle of some decent REM sleep, trying to figure out what to do. Do I have to deal with this now? I'm tired, can I deal with this in the morning? Well, first, let's verify it's a bat, and not just a really big moth.
So I open the door just a bit, and flip the lightswitch on, and a big grey bat comes dive-bombing at the door, which I slam shut. Yo! This is not cool. WTF.
So, I'm thinking, where's my sleeping bag? I don't think it's in the bedroom. It's not in the spare bedroom, but hey, there's the futon Kathryn moved over here when Rob and Sarah lived here last fall. I can sleep there. Kinda cold, nice to have a blanket or something. So I head downstairs to find the sleeping bag. Not in the closets. Basement maybe? I'm down there rooting around and can't find it. Ugg.
Well, maybe I can catch the bat and get it out of here and just go back to bed. And then I realize I'll be chasing after this thing barefoot in my birthday suit, and that just seems crazy. Too many bad things could happen. I just want it to go away, a particular instance of my pacifist "tuck into a fetal position, roll out of the way, and hope for the best" approach to physical conflict.
So I go back upstairs to the bedroom hallway. I listen closely. Maybe it has left? Then, schnit, squeal, bang into the screen. Nope, it's still flailing. I'm going to sleep in the spare bedroom. In some sort of weird bat-mind theorizing, I leave the bedroom and hallway lights on, figuring he wants to get out, and he'll be less likely to head for the bottom of the door if it's light on the other side.
I find the winter comforter, and pull it onto the futon, and bunch some of it up at the head for a pillow, and crash sometime after midnight.
I wake up and don't want to get up. Eventually I get up and listen at the door. Nothing. I peek inside. No apparent danger. I quickly put on sweats and a t-shirt, and get out of there. I spend an hour wondering about my approach to the search. I eat a banana. I check email. I check my morning blogs. I call Kathryn. Finally, I get my Tilly hat, my leather garden gloves, and my capture implements: a 3 gallon paint bucket, and an 11 x 17 sheet of photo-mount backing board.
I carefully head into the bedroom, searching on the floor, walls, and ceiling. Nothing. Corners? Under the bed? On the slats up under the bottom of the bed? Behind the curtains? Behind the pillows on the floor? In the closet? I can't find him. Maybe he really did find his way out under the air conditioner, the likely way he got in. I tape up the A/C slot, and hope he really got out, leaving my bucket and backing board handy in case I need them tonight.
It all feels like a weird dream, kind of like the fiction I wrote in 2002. But amplified, since it was, in fact, real. Six or eight hours from now we'll be headed to bed. I wonder what will happen....
Shipped
August 8, 2007 | Life | Products & Opportunites
Our project went live an hour ago.
I'll tell you all about it in a couple of weeks, after vacations. For now, just marking the date.
Raising Frame at Faerie Camp Destiny
August 2, 2007 | Arts & Culture | People & Society
I am in awe of this side project Matt is doing. It's all there, design discussions, preliminary renderings of the frame, photos from logging and clearing, and today, this fantastic human-powered frame-raising movie. (4:00)
Delete and Design
August 1, 2007 | Life | People & Society
So today Jeff came in for a meeting and after we settled in I asked him, "Should we try to do anything about the Explore page, or just wait until after launch?"
Jeff said (I paraphrase), "That tour page has got to go." We then launched into an hour-long discussion, starting with the presumption of this one particular page that we're going to rip out, and moved on to making bumper stickers with a two-word tag line on them, as an expression of the opposite of what the egregious Tour page expresses. Compared bumper stickers to domed labels in social field impact. This tangented into some lengthy discussion on the desirability of choosing a focused market segment and not trying to please everyone, concluding the best approach is that sometimes less is more. We considered the differing impact of an elite right-wing education or an elite left-wing education on one's stance toward economics and activism. Eventually we agreed that I would delete the offending Tour page and also design a bumper sticker for the tag line.
Then I said, making a few to-do notes, "Okay, cool. Do you think we should try to do anything about the Explore page, or just wait until after launch?"
And Jeff replied, "Oh, wow; you asked that an hour ago, and I heard the wrong word, and I went off on that Tour page, and everything else, and you were so nice, you didn't even say anything...."
Well, it all had to be discussed, and we had fun along the way.
Bunny Emoticons
August 1, 2007 | Arts & Culture
This Explains Everything
August 1, 2007 | Software
Well, all those IE problems are a lot clearer now. via cboone.
