And now I read this gushing mention of him by Tim O'Reilly in TechCrunch: Gov 2.0: It’s All About The Platform. Makes me feel good. Scott started what I call a 5.0 company, one about face time. (Netizen: Web 5.0: Face Time) And he has executed well. And he has a sound business model. He charges organizers, organizers charge those who show up: everyone is happy. Wishing the guy all the best.
It’s important for the idea of “government as platform” to reach well beyond the world of IT. It was Scott Heiferman, the founder of meetup.com who hammered this point home to me. Meetup is a platform for people to do whatever they want with. A lot of them are using it for citizen engagement: cleaning up parks, beaches, and roads; identifying and fixing local problems.
In this regard, there’s a CNN story from last April that I like to tell: a
road into a state park in Kauai was washed out, and the state government said it didn’t have the money to fix it. The park would be closed. Understanding the impact on the local economy, a group of businesses chipped in, organized a group of volunteers, and fixed the road themselves. I called this DIY on a civic scale. Scott Heiferman corrected me: “It’s DIO: Not ‘Do it Yourself’ but ‘Do it Ourselves.’”
Imagine if the state government were to reimagine itself not as a vending machine but an organizing engine for civic action. Might DIO help us tackle other problems that bedevil us? Can we imagine a new compact between government and the public, in which government puts in place mechanisms for services that are delivered not by government, but by private citizens? In other words, can government become a platform?
The promise of blogging is that anyone, but anyone can get published. The promise of PayCheckr is that any blogger, but any blogger can hope to make part or full time income blogging.
PayCheckr's beauty is that it economizes space. It is a button. It is small in size. It can be placed anywhere at your blog. I'd prefer to have it show at the bottom of all my blog posts, just like the Share This button.
It is so easy to create your particular PayCheckr button. Right now you don't even have to register. You pick and choose your channels, and, voila, your button is ready for you. Copy and paste your code.
I recommend the Amazon Affiliate program to all bloggers out there. I think your Amazon store has to go with the theme of your blog. If your blog is about digital cameras, your Amazon storefront will do brisk business if it displays digital cameras.
There is one bottleneck with using the PayCheckr button. You can't blame the button if yours is not a high traffic, great content blog. PayCheckr has not made me rich yet, but I think it is because my blog is not yet the high traffic, much linked to blog that I am working to make it. The onus is on me.
But you don't want to wait until you are a large traffic blogger before you put a PayCheckr button on your blog. Do it now. Do it right away. Get people into the Amazon store through your blog.
The PayCheckr button is beautiful for how little space it takes. It is so not intrusive.
I am obviously leading by example here. My blog Netizen was the very first blog to get a PayCheckr button. I want 10 million bloggers to follow my lead. That will allow you to experiment with various business models for your blog.
Every blog is a storefront. PayCheckr can turn every blog into a storefront. Take the plunge.
In a few months you should be able to have tens of revenue channels for your blog, and the button does not get fat in the process at all. Same small space, many different revenue models. You tweak to your heart's fill.
Go to PayCheckr and get your button now. In about 10 seconds, you will be in business.
Allan Hoving showed up in the comments section of this blog post: New York Times, Don't Die, Live. Maintaining my good blogger practices, I replied to his comment. We moved from the comments sections to email to the phone to a three way with someone on his team. Some of his demo round people who had gone to sleep came back from the dead.
I have ended up with an arrangement with PayCheckr that leaves plenty of room for my primary startup, and my three active blogs. There is the promise of creating major value with the button, but then there are also the learning opportunities.
Allan took me to a media conference along the L line near the Apple store. The famed NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen was the star attraction. I got up to ask a question.
The team has been telecommuting for the most part. Skype works great for conference calls. And of course there are meetings, with investors, potential partners. Allan is a big picture person. He is the visionary type.
I think PayCheckr is after something big. News, if anything, is more important than ever before. News is not dying, it is thriving like never before. But newspapers are dropping like flies. The blogosphere is expanding like the universe after the Big Bang. Somewhere in there is big money for publishers small and large. That is what PayCheckr is betting on. Money is going to be made.
PayCheckr is a good thing for me to get involved in on the side. I have three active blogs and two startups. My involvement with PayCheckr is good for my own startup: JyotiConnect Inc..
What we have out there is PayCheckr demo. We are working on PayCheckr 1.0. I am hoping PayCheckr 3.0 is a button that an entity like the New York Times would want to put on its site.
What could be PayCheckr's exit strategy? One would be to get the button on 10 million
blogs and sell it off for 10 million dollars. But then the MySpace guys sold MySpace for $500 million and Rupert Murdoch, in weeks, turned around and got Google to pay him $900 million to be allowed to serve ads on the MySpace property. Why did not the founders cut that deal?
As author of this blog, I’d love to have lots of options for readers to send a few cents (or dollars!) my way if they like my writing or find value in it. But this blog could easily get overwhelmed with donation graphics from all the different services! ........ I’ve been looking for the solution, which is an obvious one: a ShareThis-like widget that aggregates all the solutions for payment and/or donation. The first such solution appears to be PayCheckr........ I’ve been looking for someone to come up with something like this, and PayCheckr founder Allan Hoving appears to be the first. Somehow he evaded my radar, since minOnline gave the fledgling service a write-up in late July.
“We have customized everything else [online], why not let us choose how to pay for it?” Hoving says. ...... the button is designed to aggregate the monetization opportunities a site already uses and let the visitor decide how they want to
remunerate the owner. ....... “We may be the delightful, easy-to-use interface between the publisher and the reader,” Hoving says. “We make the introduction and then get out of the way. Another way is to get more involved in transactions and perhaps fulfillments.” ....... At the very least, PayCheckr could be a clearinghouse and analytics engine for monetization opportunities. ...... Hoving has worked in a variety of magazine positions over the years at New York, Rolling Stone and Thomson Financial.
Netizen is the very first blog that put the PayCheckr button on. Let that be noted. History got made.
The PayCheckr button is a piece of real estate that will increase in value as online publishing steps up to the plate, and as the button itself morphs and makes itself valuable and easy to use for publishers and bloggers in general. The challenge is to benefit from the first mover advantage but also spring forth the muscle and finesse of latecomers. It is going to be a wild ride, that's for sure.
The September 2009 NY Tech MeetUp was really something. You had some NYU and Columbia folks demonstrate some cutting edge stuff - taking image and video search to a whole new level - and you had the inventor of the spreadsheet show up: Dan Bricklin.
Dan was introduced by Anil Dash. Anil is a Desi like me. He has been blogging for 10 years now. He started blogging when the word blog did not exist yet, and is friends with the guy who coined the term: blog.
I showed up half an hour early and saw the point in showing up early. I bumped into Mark Peter Davis on the way up. We briefly chatted about our mutual friend Adam Carson. Adam and I met first through the NYTM mailing list.
As I walked into the hall, Nate Westheimer walked up and out.
I lingered afterwards until they kicked us out. Then I got to hang out with two members from ScienceHouse on the sidewalk. Gabi was officially the last person to vacate the premises an
I guess they did not announce a bar for the after party for this one. Usually they do.
It was a relief to experience a long presentation by Bricklin. Usually the demo people get five minutes. Next you know Nate is breathing down your neck. I guess that is how he creates spots for many presenters.
Towards the end I met a Desi, a Pakistani, who had moved from Dubai only a week or so ago: Adnan Rafik. He claimed to have visited my blog. He recognized me from my picture. "Robert De Niro has only one of these!" It helped that I left a comment on the NYTM page of MeetUp that had my blog's web address.
If you have a startup, you likely have a small team. You need to show up once a month for the tech meetup to imbibe the energy of the hundreds in attendance.
I had the honor of asking the first question to Bricklin. MeetUp CEO, Founder Scott asked the second. This was my first question ever at a tech meetup. It helped that I had got to know Anil right before the show started. He spotted me and handed me the mic.
"With HTML 5 and beyond, do you think the online spreadsheets will end up with much richer functionalities and features than the desktop versions?"
He said they already have. People get to collaborate online. Many people can be working on the same spreadsheet.
"Hi, I am Paramendra with JyotiConnect Incorporated," I began.
For me personally the most touching part of Bricklin's presentation was when someone from the audience asked him if because of the One Laptop Per Child people are getting smarter everywhere.
"People are smart everywhere before the laptop," he said. "They are human." This was the utter, matter of fact non-racism of an extraordinary mind.
Before the show began, and I positioned myself behind Anil's seat and did not realize I was sitting only two seats from Bricklin - at one point I was about to ask him, excuse me, but are you someone famous - and I got into small talk with Bricklin and realized here was a guy who knew Bill Gates and Bill Gates knew before Bill Gates became Bill Gates.
"What was he like?" I asked.
"Oh. He was and is the same guy you see on Charlie Rose," he said.
I found the answer so very disarming. Bill Gates is just human.
who hammered this point home to me. Meetup is a platform for people to do whatever they want with. A lot of them are using it for citizen engagement: cleaning up parks, beaches, and roads; identifying and fixing local problems.
Image via CrunchBase
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