Non-profit & public

SHARE

Last week at the Creativity & Innovation PICNIC conference in Amsterdam a new remarkable project was being presented. The artist Christian Nold explained his concept ‘Bijlmer Euro’, a name for an alternative currency used only in a specific district of Amsterdam called Bijlmer. In this region he delivers a service towards the local ethnic community. To celebrate the variety of people he gave them their own currency by sticking RFID tags to normal and therefore legal euro bills. Thereby he’s able to track the social relations between these groups. Local shops that are willing to participate receive a RFID reader to scan these bills. Then when local residents are paying with these bills a shop owner can decide to deliver a community experience towards these clients. Examples of this could be an extra gift, special products or just an extra friendly treatment what could enforce the bonding of this community. Do notice that Christian works on this project for free. The return he receives lies simply in the positive image of the project that will enforce his own reputation as an artist. Alternative currencies are a hot topic these days. Many conference speakers like Nick Bilton, Douglas Rushkoff or Bernard Lietaer are talking about new business systems that use these alternatives. As a society we introduced tangible money due to the simple fact that we couldn’t always exchange services and goods directly in our local community. My local barber was not always pleased with me paying him with my own vegetables. As a result a form of currency came in between and I could pay my barber with a tangible bill that he could be use to buy fruits in another village. But today things have changed. Due to the internet customers can again find other people to exchange services directly. For instance I could get my website made by a German student in exchange for a translation of his homework. And when direct exchange still isn’t possible, many online communities are using other means. Credit systems, karma points and beta-invite’s (Google Wave anyone?) are being used to pay each other. Money will always be there but many new forms, both tangible and intangible will flourish in the coming decades. This real-life Bijlmer Euro is only one of them.

Entertainment & tourism

SHARE

Following our previous post on wantz.it and tweetag, two other social applications that presented during Pitch Arena were Taatu and Virtua Gym. For these two ventures we also briefly described their business model. We didn’t go in depth, but mapping out the four social applications gaves us the possibility to quickly compare them with each other. Taatu is already active for several years and relies on a more complex business model than Virtua Gym.

Taatu

Taatu relies on two big revenue loops in their business system. First of all they offer a 3D chat experience to their user base, an active crowd of youngsters. The attention of this group is sold to advertisers who can create branded content and events inside the 3D world of Taatu. Another stream of revenue comes from many small micro-payments inside their virtual world. Users can buy virtual items that will extend their community experience. Also, the users of taatu can create goods that others can buy, which leads to a virtual economy. Different to other virtual economies, the virtual currency can’t be exchanged to dollars. Money can therefore only be transferred from the users to Taatu company.

Virtua Gym

During their 8 minute pitch shown below, the two brothers behind Virtua Gym describe the different business models that they are using. Since they are still in a very early stage, it difficult to determine which part of their business concept will become their most important revenue stream. Once they have built up their service towards gym users, they will have an interesting user base to sell to niche advertisers.

This leads to a typical free advertising based business model where the basic service is offered for free in exchange for advertising. Many online services try to rely on this business concept but only a few of them manage to become sustainable. A large user base, even in a niche topic is vital to attract large advertisers. Therefor Virtua Gym is working to add an experience on top of their service where users can have an off-line but real-time sport competition against other people.