The Ingenesist Project

The Next Economic Paradigm

Fungible Coupons And Collaborative Production

When we think of coupons, we imagine that most contradictory statement “Buy now and save money”.  Obviously most people recognize that spending is NOT saving but the objective of this apparent contradiction is to project the idea of “value”.  So what is value and exactly how valuable is someone’s the idea of value?  Is Value Fungible?

Inventory management tools

A coupon is a powerful inventory management tool that is made up of several parts.  The first part is the face value, often called “retail price” – this is the price that the retail market is willing to bear. The second part is the discount value which is the actual price of the offering based on a vendor’s need to move inventory.  The difference between the two numbers is the “Value Proposition”.

Public Stock Exchange

Alone, that would be a very simple form of currency creation.  By limiting the number of coupons precisely to the amount of inventory that is subject to liquidation, the coupon becomes a fungible instrument.  If the supply is limited, then people will trade the coupon value that they hold (but don’t need) with people who hold coupon value for other items (that they do need).  Or, since the value proposition is denominated in dollars, they can trade the coupon for dollars up to, but not exceeding, the retail price.  After a while, people will literally form a “stock” exchange out of the community inventory of goods and services represented by coupons.

Most enterprise can expect to spend 10% – 30% of their revenue on advertising.

The third and often misunderstood component of a coupon the friction value – a negative number.  This is the cost of producing the coupon campaign (marketers and printers) as well as the cost of advertising, distributing, and processing the coupon. Finally, there is a certain amount of social friction associated with redeeming a coupon such as clipping, organizing, and presenting the coupon to the vendor.  Rebate schemes will often introduce so much friction that the buyer gives up or forgets the expiration date, etc. On the other end of the spectrum, Groupon often exceeds the inventory intended to liquidate and increases cost of liquidation.

Social Currency

In a coupon economy, we can initially define social currency as the absence of an “anti-social” currency.  We can say that social currency is equal to the coupon’s original value proposition (denominated in dollars) minus advertising friction.  We can make this assumption based on the fact that social capital can be deployed in a community INSTEAD of advertising.

Collaborative Production – when the community decides what to produce

When advertising friction is removed, it becomes a very simple matter to make coupons fungible. In the event that the dollar collapses, people can easily switch from the discount currency to the value proposition currency, i.e., social currency.  After a while, social priorities will drive wall street production priorities instead of wall street production priorities driving social priorities.

Believe it or not, the key to financial sustainability may just be in the wholesale elimination of advertising. The Value Game by Ingenesist project is designed to correct this market friction.

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Collaborative Production, Consumption, or Destruction?

Many important ideas are emerging related to collaborative consumption and the sharing of physical assets.   The primary idea is that communities can save money and conserve natural resources. The most powerful byproduct of collaborative consumption, in my opinion, is that communities can organize around physical assets to produce what they actually need, not what they are told to need.

The idea of collaborative production is generally referenced around a host of enterprise collaboration tools.  However, many of these tools are designed to benefit the for-profit enterprise allowing them to collect high value knowledge assets while eliminating high risk employment liabilities under the noble flag of “Crowd Sourcing”.

Collaborative Production

True collaborative production is related more to the idea that communities decide what to produce. In classical economics, the merchant class allocates land, labor, and capital and largely decides what will be brought to market but also what can be withheld from a market.  Collaborative Production starts with the idea that a community allocates it’s own knowledge resources to produce what they need and withhold what they don’t need.

This distinction is actually quite important.  Combining some sugar with fat and stirring in a lot of advertising to produce candy is much faster and easier to do than raise carrots, for example.  While the farming community may prefer to raise carrots, profit margins on carrots are driven by supply and demand for calories – as such, carrots compete directly with candy.

Have you ever seen a commercial advertisement for Carrots?

Ultimately what gets produced is that which is easiest and cheapest to produce, store, and transport – not necessarily what a community needs to be cheaply and easily produced.  Eventually the knowledge assets required to grow carrots begin to atrophy by the process of collaborative destruction.

Collaborative Destruction

Today, many communities are trapped behind closed doors.  People do not know their neighbors.  They are unable to reach an agreement about what they can build together.  When they lose their “Jobs” they lose their identity and direction and they attach to whatever idealism crosses their fear threshold.

The greatest challenge ahead of us – and the greatest opportunity as well, will be to interact with each other.  We need to know what the other people around us know and find a place for our own knowledge assets in our community.  Communities need to collaborate outside the construct of a corporation and produce the things that they need.  Social Media provides an astonishing tool for a new form of social organization if and only if it can be used to beat the effects of collaborative destruction.

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Creating An Intention Currency

In the last few articles, I’ve discussed the importance of Intentions as a superior means of storing and exchanging value because of the ability to predict economic outcomes.  Only from these conditions can we construct an alternate currency.

For all Intents and Purposes….

Suppose that we suggest that one’s knowledge inventory is a good representation of their intentions to do things.  You can test this by strolling through the aisles your neighborhood Barnes and Noble book store and observing your own reactions to the titles as they flash by.  Notice how your tendency to act  (stop to read the byline or even pick up the book to read the cover) correlates to your organic knowledge, passion, interest, or experience.  Notice which sections you tend to linger in and how your eyes float up and down through the shelves, etc.

So let’s say that you studied business in college.  We can then say that you have an intention to conduct business.  The same holds true if you studied math, engineering, art, music, creative sciences, and/or social sciences. So we can say that a knowledge inventory is an intention inventory – assuming that you are not distracted by ADVERTISING.

Let’s make some predictions:

If you have low knowledge and high interest, your intentions would correlate to those of a student. If you have high knowledge and high interest, your intentions would correlate to those of a teacher.  If your have low knowledge and low interest, you would register no intentions.  If you have high knowledge and low interest, your intentions are ambivalent.

One step deeper:

If we were to assemble a community’s knowledge and interests on a few bell curves, we could make predictions about what a community intends to produce. If a community has high knowledge and high interest to build airplanes then we can place a value on those intentions in a market.

Now here is where the fun starts:

If we can predict future value, we can create and “intention currency” and capitalize it.  That means that we can turn it into a debt instrument and make a promise to pay back the today’s intention currency with future intentions.  If we can capitalize an intention currency, we can securitize a combined pool of many intentions and sell “Intention Bonds” that finance today’s intentions with those of tomorrow. Meanwhile, as we build the airplane, we have the incentive to innovate and create new knowledge that we can use to pay off the intention debt in the future.

Preoccupied or unoccupied?

If is sounds crazy, be assured that it happens all the time by corporations, marketers, demographers, politicians and even among some prison inmate populations.  Of course they will never tell you this, but unfortunately communities of people, social networks, and all the knowledge inventory sequestered inside corporations or messing around on Facebook have not figured out how to monetize all these intentions for themselves.  This is because they are preoccupied by an influence currency called – ADVERTISING

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Walking Into The Trap Of Influence Currencies

My earlier post about influence vs intention created several interesting conversations on several blogs where it had been re-posted [1], [2]. My assertion is that an influence based currency may be an easier path to forge but a dangerous path to follow.

Any new currency that claims to improve on the current financial system must ultimately be able to be capitalized and securitized.  Indeed, people should be influenced to use Zipcars  – but how exactly did the Zipcar get there?

Influence goes nowhere

Sorry folks, I know that the Klout people are working awful hard to become the standard of online influence. Fueled by corporate marketers, It is also clear that those who have influence in this domain are going to try to keep it at nearly any cost.  It is obvious that there is increasing pressure to monetize social media and Twitter is easy to scrape into loads of data that must mean something economic if one were to look at it hard enough.  The end game on influence, however, is Politics – influence currency will ultimately resolve to a state of mutually opposing forces.

Skipping stones

Assume that the pond is calm.  My influence causes ripples that cause others to react or take action.  Likewise, the people around them react as well, and so forth into a set of infinity consequences.  By definition, consequences are not intentions.  The only intention is to influence and the only influence is to induce consequences to an otherwise calm place.

Intension Currency is a far more difficult nut to crack, but crack it we must.  Intensions are organic – everyone has them.  They originally appear in a person’s God-given natural interests, talents and passions.  Intensions appear in what a person studies, the collection of knowledge that they choose to accumulate and subsequently act upon. Unfortunately, far too often the influence of the few interferes with the intensions of the masses – again, allow me to make a reference to politics.

Intention lives in our knowledge inventory

Rational people act on a basis of what they know how to act upon. Predicting intensions is a function of reading a person’s organic knowledge inventory.  Unfortunately, the human knowledge inventory remains sequestered behind the corporation, HR file cabinets, and the deeply flawed and archaic resume system.   There is not, however, an inventory of what people know in a community, what they are passionate about, and what they intend to do with their lives.  Knowledge is the most basic storage and exchange of value – but where is the inventory?

Goldman Sachs knows this well

There is no economic system that capitalizes and securitizes the intentions of a person, a community, or a network of persons except the “Corporation”, which happens to be the ultimate political influence machine.  We need to be really really careful about falling down the vortex of “Influence” currency – we may just be walking into a trap.

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Printing Social Currency; Influence vs. Intentions

What is more valuable, their Influence or their intentions?

The heat is on to discover a new currency

Obviously, money is supposed to represent productivity otherwise why would people work for it?  But, everyone is pretty much resigned to the fact that the dollar – and indeed most global currency – is irreversibly divorced from actual productivity.

No Alternative  Algorithm?

The reason why people must trade dollars is that there is no other alternative, and the computer algorithms that control the value of the currency have yet to tell us otherwise.  That’s it, really.  The questions remain, how, why, and when will people stop working for it and what will they work for which can replace it?

This will not be as simple as living in yurts, trading cheese cultures and tweeting about it. Complex infrastructure like a judicial system, transportation, medical care, clean water, energy and food production rely on a financial system that can capitalize and securitize whatever the replacement currency may be.

Influence vs. intention

The latest twist in the new currency movement is the idea that on-line influence can be used to support a currency.  There is no shortage of noble leaders aspiring to “define the standard” in their own image as a service to the lesser masses who seek their respective place in the great new economic void.  PeerIndex and Klout are the two main players that promote a social score based on influence, obstensibly to mimic the credit score upon which all currency depends.

Bad Influence is worse than no influence

Unfortunately, influence is a flawed measure.  Marketers are the target beneficiaries of such influence which is clearly defined as the ability to get other people to take action on a marketing message. My ability to influence others to buy Twinkies does not an economy make. In other words – influence is a consumption currency, not a production currency.

A far better marker is “intention”

For comparison; today, money is conjured into existance by banks based on the signature of a loan candidate who states in writing their intention to produce enough value by their future words and actions to exceed the value of the currency being borrowed (created from thin air) plus interest.  That’s how debt works.  That “intention” is then capitalized, combined with the intentions of others, and securitized into bonds that finance important social services and institutions that support those intensions.

Likewise, a social currency may be similarly conjured into existence – based on a person’s promise to increase human productivity in the future, not however, to increase human consumption in the future.  The social marker for the next currency must be an intension to produce something, not an intension to consume something.  The real danger, of course, is if we define the next currency as just another consumption currency or whether it can truly be married to productivity.

Obviously, it would be helpful to have an inventory of what value an individual is willing and able to produce in the future since this is the best marker of intensions.  It would be even more helpful if there were a public knowledge inventory of what value people in a community are able and willing to produce together.  I’ll stop here because a knowledge inventory for communities does not exist – and curiously, none of the great minds in Social Media are clamoring to define that standard.

Likewise, that is where the great opportunity for the future resides.

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Who Needs Anti-Social Travel?

I recently returned from a trip from Seattle to Nashville. I am involved in launching a new airline applying The Social Value Game to a legacy industry.  The objective of this venture is to match a fleet of 15,000 private jets to social media networks for efficient door-to-door travel. The start-up is largely founded on the premise that a dismal travel experience is a dismal social experience.

Here is how my trip from Seattle to Nashville went using Commercial Airlines:

11:00 I get in my car and leave home for a 1:00 Boarding
11:45 Drive 25 miles through heavy traffic and bad weather, arrive at self-park car lot near Airport.  I get into a cold shuttle bus.
12:00 Arrive at Airport Security and strip down to last layers of clothing
12:15 leave airport security after long line after harassment over 3 oz of toothpaste remaining in a 6 oz tube and a telephoto lens that obviously resembled a printer cartridge.
12:30 Arrive at gate. Airline took my baggage away because it did not fit in the “Impossible box” and charged $25.00 baggage fee. (95% of all carry on bags would never fit in the “Impossible Box” so why me?)
1:00 Flight was full.  Poked, bumped, cramped, body complies to shape of existing space
1:30 departure was late. Connection in Salt Lake City was tight
3:30 Lands in Salt Lake city, late. No attempt to release tight connections first
3:50 Exit aircraft with 10 minutes to use restroom, grab sandwich, and run 1/2 mile to the next gate
4:20 Board flight to Nashville. Crowded. Window seat. Poked, bumped, cramped, body complies to shape of existing space
4:30 Flight leaves. 30 minutes into flight, I drop my Ipod under seats. Absolutely impossible to recover until airplane lands. No music, sucks.
8:00 Airplane arrives at Nashville (10:00pm Local time). Baggage claim took forever
9:00 (11:00 local): Finally get into rental car
10:40 arrive at hotel near location
11:00 (1:00 local) set alarm for 7 am local (5:00 am Seattle time) head hits pillow
5:00 am wake up sore, tired, and feeling oppressed.

Total Travel Time 12 hours one way and 24 hours RT door to door.

One complete day of productivity wasted. One day of life squandered. Zero time spent with my family or friends. Zero personal time to enjoy or reflect. Zero moments feeling secure, healthy, or self-worthy. 24 hours of confrontation with my surroundings. Zero moments of inspiration. Zero opportunities to be exposed to new ideas. Zero interesting people to learn from. Zero trees, flowers, sunshine, or fresh air. Zero fresh food; no fruit, vegetables, or raw nuts. Zero memories – except bad. No laughter, no friendship, no community. No exercise except running in fear.

The opportunity of the next economic paradigm is the ability to articulate the social value on all of these things – the ability to predict into the future the True Value of all the things that are squandered by an anti-social experience.  That is the essence of The Ingenesist Project.

Who Needs Anti-Social Travel?

With a private airplane, I could leave my home at 11:00 for a 11:30 departure at a small local airfield 6 miles from my house. The flight would have been about 4 hours long and I would arrive at my destination for dinner reservations with my colleagues. The flight would cost less than 1400 dollars round trip and I could return a full day earlier (eliminating 2 nights) than the the commercial flight for the same set of meeting objectives.

If a person’s time is worth 50 dollars per hour, the difference between 10 hours of flight time is 500 dollars off of a 1000 dollar ticket. The commercial flight costs ($300), including parking ($100), airport taxes($50), extra airline fees (50 dollars), car rental ($300), 2 extra hotel night ($400) for a total of 1200 dollars (I have the receipts to prove it).

So if 10 hours of your life is less than 200 dollars, then fly commercial. If your time, family, community – your life – is worth more than 20 dollars per hour, then you should consider taking America’s newest airline.

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My Christmas Gift

This year, I send my Christmas greetings from Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico.

Besides seeing all of my wonderful in-laws and cousins, I had the opportunity to meet with a couple of my students from many years ago.  They are now entrepreneurs, business owners, and influential leaders in the complex web of Mexican and International society.

I knew them when they were just kids struggling through engineering school – I saw them as gems in the rough, now I get to marvel at the diamonds.  Wow, what an incredible experience.   Of course, they can’t see how I view them nor can I see how they view me.  One thing is certain, these are very special relationships.  I managed to hold back tears of joy.

The trust is instantaneous and profound.  We hang on each other’s words as incalculable truths pour from our experiences.  We cite each other’s nuances and we recall quotes long ago lost.  I remember the extraordinary challenges of getting 250 of them through the US Engineering Board exams.  We spoke of the early days of NAFTA and the oppression of the Maquiladora Industry.  We spoke with the wisdom that we wished we had 17 long years ago.

I wonder what happened to the others.  I know a few that have also become quite successful.  The only thing I gave them was proof that they were equal in every way to any engineer on earth.  As such, they managed their careers with that single data point lodged in the back of their mind.  Now they are proving to me what I had only suspected then.

In return, they gave me everything that I am thankful for today as I celebrate Christmas with my wonderful family.  I met my wife while working with these kids.  I found my own ethnic identity working with these kids.  I learned Spanish working with these kids.  I earned the wisdom to represent a fortune 100 company around the World after working with my kids. In fact, my blog and all supporting research is a direct result of a flaw I observed in market capitalism while working with my kids and their interaction with NAFTA. The courage to leave corporate life and take a leadership role in an hugely disruptive start-up company is a direct result of working with these kids.

These kids (men and woman) are among the greatest gift I could have ever imagined receiving.  My advice to others is to always have students.  Always teach people what you know.  Always elevate others and you will find yourself elevated to astonishing heights. Be a student and provide this joy to those who wish share themselves deeply with you.  This is where true happiness is found.  This is the gift that Christmas celebrates – be a teacher

Merry Christmas.

Please Support The Symbionomics Project on Kickstarter

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What Is An Ingenesist?

Eric Rosenblith 1920-2010

I have been putting off writing this blog post until I could find a simple answer to the question “What is an Ingenesist?”.  I invented the term “Ingenesist” to capture the creative, intellectual and social nature of human ingenuity without falling back on current definitions and the silos that perpetuate them. Something has gone wrong with the world and the solution could not be found in the current world view – I needed a new word for my work.

Ingenesist comes from the Latin (ingeniare), French (ingénieur), and Spanish (ingeniero) word for Engineer.  These words, of course, were created long before an engineer was defined by such alphabet soup as BSME. MSCE, IEEE, ABET, NCEES, EIT, PE, etc…  The term ‘Ingenesist’ was meant to represent people whose ideas and actions increase the productivity of other people.

A friend of mine lost his dad yesterday.  I read the obituary and could not help but realize that this person lived through what were likely the darkest and the brightest hours of modern human civilization.  He was an artist and a teacher.

Then I hit the quote in Mr. Rosenblith’s obituary:

“We truly need to be thinkers, poets, painters, engineers, and philosophers.’’ – Eric Rosenblith

And that is how I found my simple answer.  With humility and simplicity, he captured the creative, intellectual and social nature of human ingenuity. The least I could do was finally write this blog post.

My sincere condolences to Alan and his family.  Please support the Symbionomics Project on Kickstarter

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Groupon: 93% Off Sugar Calories

Finding Groupon for LCD monitors

I’ve been collecting Groupon Spam in a special folder in my email box. I guess that it is technically not Spam since I did sign up for it.  Or is it?

Up to 83% Off Laser Hair Removal (depends on how much laser hair you have?)
Up to 52% Off Eco-Friendly Water Bottle (Is the bottle 52% full or 52% empty)
65% Off Canvas on Demand (I demand Canvas!)
Half Off Brazilian Blowout in Bellevue (not going there)
52% off Body Scrub and Facial in Georgetown

I am really trying to root for Groupon. I am desperately waiting for the value proposition to emerge. Someday soon, Groupon will come up with a proposition that truly delivers something that I really need to increase my personal productivity and elevate my community to true collective power status. I feel it coming.  If not, then surely Groupon will innovate with new ways to understand what the market really needs during times of financial hardship and leverage their near-6B dollar influence and pending public stock offering to champion the plight of the masses.

51% off Rowing Class (in the winter?)
60% Off Spider Vein Treatment (My Spider is very sick indeed)
$10 Off custom mixes from My Mixed Nuts (seriously?)
$10 dollars off Mexican Fast Fare at Taco Time (a Cultural Insult to all Hispanics)
53% Off Woman’s Clothing at Pitaya (what happens to the other 47%)

After all, Groupon is the next paradigm in influence advertising – fighting for the little guy to deliver true value. Everyone is looking for a bargain so what more social pursuit could any morally conscious social media enterprise endeavor to deliver to the vast population of consumers?

Up to half off Quest Field Tour (“Up to half off” statements always worry me)
$10 for wine at Vermillion Art Gallery (I’d pay $10 for Art at the Wine Gallery)
$10 for Custom Smoothies (I wonder what the original price was)
Half Off Executive Dry Cleaners (somebody’s got to take ’em to the cleaners)
67% off at Transformation Boot Camp (is there a money back guarantee on that?)

Instead of empowering people to pursue what they are most talented, passionate, and interested in, Groupon seeks to modify human behavior to adapt to the availability of surplus inventory dumped into the desperation market.  Companies are struggling to keep their doors open and people are not sure if their today dollars will buy anything in tomorrow’s dollars.  Instead of exploiting the throes of financial decline, surely our great social media innovators can do better than Groupon.

Ref: The Value Game

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Intrinsic Banking

Paper money does not have intrinsic value

Paper money has no intrinsic value. The word “Intrinsic” means: something that belongs to the essential nature or constitution of something else. The ‘intrinsic brightness of a star’ is a common definitive statement.  Synonyms of the word include: built-in, constitutional, hardwired, immanent, indigenous, integral, inherent, natural, etc.

“Society” is intrinsic to economics

The Bank is an important institution for vetting social value. Despite the observation where it seems money is created out of thin air, traditionally a bank looks into a community of people and their talents to identify “social value”.  This is the likelihood that a person or group of persons can execute a specific economic outcome in the community.  Then the bank provides them with a tool called money to represent and facilitate future productivity in the present time.  So it is not really “thin-air” – it is simply invisible social value.

Little Bank on the Prairie

In the old days, the banker was a member of the community and could judge social value on any number of intrinsic social characteristics such as social status, leadership, family values, education, personal habits, and community participation. Later, the credit score became a proxy for social value through the analysis of public data (where “public” became the proxy for “social”). The credit score was then assumed to convert social value directly into financial value.

The terms “proxy” and “intrinsic” are not the same thing.

“Brightness” is not a proxy for stars any more than “stars” are a proxy for brightness.  Yet, the distinction between intrinsic banking and proxy banking remains indistinct. An Intrinsic bank would be characterized where social value is intrinsic to the creation of financial value.

It’s all about Value

We created The Value Game as a new class of business methods to transform financial value back into social value – The Value Game performs the mirror-image effect in an economy as the credit score.  The value game increases the social value of the community enterprise by converting monetary value into social value.  Only then can the Credit Score sustainably convert social value back into financial value.

Who wants to become a Trillionaire?

The point of this discussion is not to slam banking, rather, it is to demonstrate that intrinsic banking does not formally exist – yet is must exist as a direct balance to traditional banking.  As such, intrinsic banking is at least as “Valuable” as the banking industry itself. Today we are entering an age where society MUST come up with a NEW way to store and exchange VALUE. Whoever really get’s this and pioneers Intrinsic Banking today (what it means, what it creates, and why) will become as mega-wealthy as traditional bankers, in the future.

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Social Currency Derivatives Trading

The New York Times published an article yesterday about derivative traders being controlled by 6 powerful banks whose influence serves to keep out competitors and decrease the transparency of transactions. What struck me was the graphics that the article used to demonstrate both the problem and the solution for derivative trading:

The Problem:  Murky Market – no transparency

The Solution: Introducing a clearinghouse for transparency and correct pricing

The second diagram demonstrates how the introduction of a vetting mechanism inserted directly at the spot of least transparency greatly increases socially valuable attributes such as transparency, true pricing, reduced risk, open sourcing, elimination of conflicts of interest, and increased sustainability, etc – many of the attributes demanded by the new generation of activists seeking their place in the discussion that they struggle to understand. Hedge funds are indeed important tools for reducing volatility if, and only if, they don’t themselves introduce new risks.

The Value Game:

The second diagram looks a great deal like The Value Game developed by The Ingenesist Project for the monetizing social currency. By introducing a leveraged asset in the middle of a series of transactions, true value of the whole transaction system can be established eliminating volatility and reducing systemic risks.  The Value Game works in a manner quite similar to a hedge instrument.

The Airplane Game:

The Airplane Game deployed by the new start-up called Social Flights, for example, introduces a jet airplane transaction as a clearinghouse for the balance of the transactions in the game of door-to-door travel.  When all the players put their money down on a jet flight, they convert the financial currency to social currency, the true value of the transaction can be established when compared to an alternate market such as commercial airline, driving, train, etc. – not necessarily to dollars in the bank.

Financial Currency is a derivative of social currency

It is not surprising that social currency will become a hedge instrument for financial currency in markets.  After all, nothing economic can happen until people get together to build something.  Nothing of any significance can be built unless people exchange social currency. Only after all of that, can it be converted into money.

Intrinsic Banking

As such, every broker in every market can be replaced by a Social Value Game providing intrinsic banking services.  Can you see it?


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Social Currency Takes Flight

Private Aviation is the first of several industries planning to launch a new class of business methods built on a “Social Value Game” developed by  The Ingenesist Project .  Social Flights is a virtual airline which aggregates communities according to their interests, knowledge assets, and social graph.  Social Flights matches people with mid-distance transportation options that deliver them exactly where they want to go in a shortest period of time and the least amount of harassment.

By the time you factor in Social Value, the price of private air travel becomes highly competitive.

In this variation, The Airplane Game has 4 players; (1) A traveler, (2) accredited private jet operators throughout the US, (3) travel services vendors, and (4) a 3rd party entrepreneur.  The objective of the game is for each player to act in their best interest to ultimately produce a door-to-door cost of traveling between two geographic points on a private jet equal to or less than the cost of making the same trip on comparable modes of transportation. The true door-to-door cost will be denominated in social currency and then converted to financial currency to establish a par value.

The Airplane Game scheduled for departure in 2011

The game starts when a traveler states a anonymous intention to geolocate between their zip code and any distant zip code.  This intention will be sent to a private jet carrier who will establish a price for each seat based on a full plane.  Next, vendors for products and services matched to the traveler’s intensions – such as ground transportation, hotels, restaurants, interests, and tourist attractions at both zip codes – will assign a contingency coupon of known face value against the airfare of the private jet seat thereby lowering the cost of the seat.

Enter Social Entrepreneurs

Next, 3rd Party Entrepreneurs will use social media to locate seat inventory to put in play.  Then, they will locate product/service inventory to put that into play.  Finally, they will locate “Social Inventory” in each zip code to fill the jet and drive down the ticket price even further in what amounts to social arbitrage. The Social Flights Algorithm will compare the social value such as time savings, carbon footprint, airport congestion, and experience quality against the comparable modes of transportation, such as car/bus/train/commercial aviation, and provide a par value for each option.

Social Value Conversion Factor

Social profits can be maximized where people are empowered to travel point to point consistent with their social graph rather than car, train, or hub and spoke commercial aviation modes.  Decreasing social friction increases social profits.  This launch further demonstrates how any asset, from jets to zip cars to public infrastructure, can be leveraged to create abundant social value.

The aggregate effect of such businesses will  establish a conversion factor between social currency and financial currency from which any number of social productivity applications can be built and monetized.

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Zertified Knowledge Assets

The wisest people in history have been saying the same thing over and over again, yet we fail to listen and act: People are an asset, People are the greatest asset.

So Then, Watch your assets

Meanwhile, our “risk based” capital structure accounts only for the observed randomness of individual human nature rather than trying to securitize the potentially infinite wisdom of crowds.  This is a problem, this is our very serious problem.

Everyone is Committed to The Public Domain

Anyone familiar with The Ingenesist Project knows that we commit a new class of business methods to the public domain for other people to use for building the next economic paradigm. For example, The Value Game developed by ourselves, is being used by at least 3 new start-ups as the value creation mechanism of their business plan.  We likewise consult to social entrepreneurs across the World to help them build a new form of capital structure where knowledge assets are the basis of fungible social currency.

Zertify.com

Zertify.com is a business plan that will convert social currency to financial currency and make money for you, dear reader. Zertify.com can employ well over 40,000 people directly (and tens of millions indirectly) in the US alone within months, not years. Zertify.com is a knowledge inventory system that accounts for knowledge assets as they reside in a community – not necessarily as they reside sequestered within a corporation.

Zertify business plan

Here is a downloadable PDF of Zertify.com Sample Business Method. The word “Zertify” comes from the combination of the words “Certify” and the statistical Z-test.  These two things correspond to “Social Vetting” and “Predictive Modeling Capability” – these are the two ESSENTIAL elements for the capitalization and securitization of any asset.  Of course, I have made certain assumptions regarding taxonomies and proficiency criteria – my intention is simply to re-deploy existing market infrastructure as best as possible in this Example.  But go ahead, change it, modify it, understand it, build it, and let us help. Become a billionaire – see if we care.

Why?  because we do care.

In case you were wondering who all those wise people are, flip through this presentation (great to see Tara Hunt among such luminaries !!)

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The 3 Steps To Social Profits

I have been approached by many brilliant social entrepreneurs in recent weeks.  They each have several things in common. Each has an incredibly creative idea and a strong passion linked to a deep seated observation that social currency has value.  As nebulous as that may sound, it is very real, specific, and clear in the minds of those who I’ll call, The New Entrepreneur.

Nothing Economic can happen until two or more people get together to build something.  Likewise, when two or more people get together to build something, economic things happen. The objective of this post is to demonstrate the 3 underlying actions of a new class of business plans that will become dominant in the next economic paradigm.

Our recipe is simple:

Step one: convert financial currency into social currency

Step two: Create value denominated in social currency

Step three: Convert new social currency back into financial currency – if needed

This simple recipe forms the basis of the business plans for several start-ups including Social Flights and The Social Value Network as well as numerous other projects that we consult to in the US, Greece, Brazil, Australia, China, and Mexico.

So here is how it works

The Old Business Model:  Suppose you buy a truck and you use it to haul stuff for your own personal and business interests. After 5 years, you can sell the truck for about 1/2 what you paid for it.

The New Business Model: Suppose that you buy a truck to hauls stuff for your own personal or business interests.  Suppose that you also let The Boy Scout troop leader borrow it to pick up christmas trees for sale.  Suppose you let the Kiwanis use it to pick up supplies for their annual salmon bake.  Suppose you let the YWCA haul donated furniture to their satellite facility.  Suppose you help your neighbor use it for a home improvement project.  After 5 years, you sell the truck for about 1/2 of what you paid for it.

The difference is that now your community is engaged with your personal interests.  You have converted financial capital into social capital and created new value denominated in social currency.  One notable example includes Neighborgoods, but there will undoubtedly be thousands of variations of this leveraging every conceivable physical asset.

Now, how do you transform this back social capital into financial capital?   Well, that’s what the emerging science of Social Capitalism is all about.  Social Profit is like a fungible option with a face value.  If structured correctly, an option can have a face value equal to the difference between discount and full price. That face value can be traded like money.  When you are engaged in a community, people know who you are, they trust you and they share with you.  People are trading options – the right without the obligation to exercise a financial position in the future.

Options have real value as an asset if you have them or as a liability if you don’t

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Specifications for Social Capitalism:

The Ingenesist Project is dedicated to the development of an alternate economy built on a platform of Social Media.

The following video series provides specification of Social Capitalism as a modern social system distinct from Market Capitalism.

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Don’t Blame The Bankers

There are two sets of values in an economy. Financial value and social value. The value that is required to make something is financial value. The value that a product provides to a community of people is called social value.

Financial Currency

In order to make something, money is used to purchase raw materials and labor. After these ingredients are integrated, the product is then marketed, transported and sold for more money that the input costs. This is called financial profit in a system called market capitalism. The degree to which financial profits are gained or lost is the degree to which a financial value system is functional or dysfunctional.

Social Currency

When the product enters a community, it helps people to occupy their limited time on Earth in a more peaceful and productive manner. The product unites families and communities around human attributes such as happiness, joy, comfort, security, and wellbeing. This is called social profit in a system of social capitalism. The degree to which social profits are gained or lost is the degree to which the social value system is functional or dysfunctional.

Domination

In market capitalism, no enterprise is allowed to make less money than they consume for very long without being punished. Yet, in social capitalism there is no common means to even account for social profits or losses. There are no formal inventory of raw social materials, social value added labor, social marketing, transport, storage or exchange of social capital – the social value system is largely irrational.  The profit accounting and structural mechanisms are what make market capitalism dominant over social capitalism.

Bankers should be studied

For better or worse, the financial system works exactly as it is supposed to. Bankers do exactly what they were designed to do. They will do the same thing tomorrow as they did yesterday. Bankers are extremely predictable.  The problem lies in our irresponsible design for social capitalism and our dependency on anything but ourselves for economic outcomes.  All of the means and methods that we call an “unfair advantage” are available to each and every one of us if we simply copy bankers.

Look beyond the symptoms and you’ll find the cure

By virtue of the range, complexity, and scope of problems that surround our species it should be somewhat obvious that social capitalism is poorly executed. It does not represent a system of human attributes and values. Social Capitalism is unorganized, unaccounted, and unworthy to act in the interest of the participants. That is where the problem lies and that is where the solutions need to be applied.

Must admit that WE have a problem

Anyone can point their finger at the bankers and blame them for all the bad things in the world.  It is a completely different matter to exert the mental discipline to fully understand what makes a banker rational and what makes a banking system accountable, then to generalize this genius for applicability to ALL forms of Value, including but not limited to social value.  If the bankers accept or reject any value system, they will do it rationally.

Be a Banker

Social media provides an extraordinary set of tools for social capitalists.  Specifications that mimic the banking system in social media are readily available.  Important awakening projects are arising that take responsibility for the future rather than lay blame on the past.  It’s time that we all become bankers.

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Social Stock Exchange

The over-reaching objective of the alternate/social currencies movement is to create an alternate storage and exchange device to contain “Value”.

Bizarro Capitalism

Coupons regularly portray value in Bizarro World where “Save” really means “Spend Faster”.  The vendor outlet artificially prints the Bizarro Currency which can only be redeemed in Bizarro World.  No social value is created, rather, it is destroyed.

But, if my friends sell me the product, why should I pay a salesman?

Quit complaining, the new business plan is very simple:

Step 1: Convert financial currency into a social currency,

Step 2: Create Value in the social environment (denominated in the social currency).

Step 3: Convert surplus Value back into financial currency.

Example: Suppose Alphonso publishes his knowledge inventory to a social network as follows

Career mechanical engineer, aspiring photographer, outdoors lover, economics blogger, social media index top 20%, etc.

Based on this profile, Nikon USA gives Alphonso a coupon for $500 off of any purchase of $1000 dollars.  In other words, this coupon has a tangible face value of 500 dollars. Obviously Nikon can’t discount all of their products by 50%, so they announce that only 10,000 of these coupons will be placed in circulation with some fairly distant expiration date.

The Value Game:

Suppose that Alphonso already owns a Canon so he lists the 500 dollar coupon on Craigslist for 250 dollars.  From there, he meets another photography enthusiast in his local community and keeps the difference to buy some new camping gear.

Now, we are in familiar Groupon territory; a 500 dollar deal for 250 dollars.

The value of the coupon decreases as the expiration date nears but the value of the coupon increases as the scarcity increases.  Nikon can regulate values and incentives by changing the rates at which they issue coupons. The Par value of the coupon reflects these external market forces.

People will reach into their social networks to play the value game

People will get their friends together to go on a Nikon spending spree, groups of people can buy and share community camera gear, they can donate the coupon to their kid’s high school photography class – all in exchange for Social Value.

Creating Social Value

This process of people working together around a leveraged asset (such as a 1000 dollar camera) creates social value.  It quickly becomes in the best interest for Alphonso to strengthen the photography community because his increased status will enhance his knowledge inventory and increase the likelihood of receiving additional discounts from Nikon and many other brands.

Converting Back to Currency

Every time Nikon is mentioned in conversation, this is an advertising impression – it is done in a positive light of social value creation.  This is exactly the task that an expensive ad agency would be hired to play Bizarro World.  Nikon would be largely agnostic over where the ad budget is allocated as long as measurable sales result.  Likewise, Alphonso and his friends strengthen their financial position in a market

The Future of Money

Eventually, an environment would emerge where coupons never actually need to be converted to cash. All coupons from all vendors can go into an exchange pool much like a Bond Market rated on a “social value score” and trading at a par value dependent on market forces. The difference is that Value would now be allocated according to social priority rather than Wall Street priority.

The total value of the exchange pool can become the basis of a new currency standard to fund new production of new social products and innovations.

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Symbionomics And The Space Between Things

Each stage of economic development in human history was derived from the prior stage by integrating the tools developed in that prior stage; The agrarian era, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the information era, the knowledge economy all followed this pattern.

Whatever happens next will be extremely interesting.

Today we are rapidly emerging era of human history where there is great cause for optimism. The tools developed from the Knowledge economy are truly remarkable.  For the first time in modern history, Value is not represented by things, it is represented by the space between things.

Symbionomics

The Symbionomics project is produced by world class film maker Alan Rosenblith and visionary Sustainable Community Developer, Jay Standish.  Their objective is to reveal the next great truism in the context of human economic systems. Please watch the following trailer and please support this essential project.  The hardest secret to keep is the truth.

LandingPage from alan rosenblith on Vimeo.

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The Future of Social Currency

The Branded Debit card has long been a staple of the vanity financial services industry.  Having your favorite football team, alma mater, or non-profit proudly displayed upon your purchasing prowess is a clever offshoot of those printed checks of days gone by.  Now, in the age of social media, YOU are the brand. Your product is your information and the information that passes through your social graph.

Self-branding

The most valuable asset is not who you’ve known in the past – many of those relationships are played out.  Rather, it is whom you will know in the future.   Your future connections are where all new innovation will be valued – all the decisions that are yet to be made and all the intentions yet to be acted upon. The only metric that can accurately predict this is your knowledge inventory; what you know, what you are talented in, and what you enjoy doing.  You are the future maker.

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Social Value is Social Enterprise

The fastest way to unleash the extraordinary value that is contained in communities of experienced, talented, and motivated people is to provide a substrate for them to trade their knowledge assets among each other.  When people get together around a purpose, they build things that create incredible social value. The Social Value Platform provides an electronic accounting system for social value.  In The Social Value Game, vendors deposit inventory into a strategic community of people and the community creates social value.  This new social value is then converted into monetary revenue in the next economic paradigm called Social Capitalism.


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A New Generation of Social Business Methods

Now on Kindle and IPad!!

The next Generation of electronic accounts:

There are approximately 5.5 Trillion dollars worth of retail transactions made face-to-face in the U.S. driven by a 400 Billion dollar advertising industry. Many analysts believe that the next platform for money transfer will use mobile devices (as clients for web transactions) in lieu of debit cards or cash.  Companies such as PayPal expect to be the greatest beneficiaries of this trend and are predictably promoting and developing the transaction modes.

The big hurdles will be security, friction, and privacy

Mobile to web transactions introduce any number of hacking opportunities.  Furthermore, PayPal, The Wireless Carrier, Marketers, The Bank, The Federal and State governments, and a host of other intermediaries are taking a piece of your paycheck and your data profile along with that Slurpee you just texted.

A huge amount of anti-social friction is imposed on the consumer in the name of convenience

Most people are unaware of the latest technology in debit cards that will allow them to transact in social currencies.  Vendors can issue electronic coupons directly to a customer’s debit card.  New social media applications allow people to exchange coupons from different companies among each other without necessarily converting them to dollars.  This scrambles the data, preserves anonymity, and escapes taxation.  Yet they can be just as easily redeemed for dollar denominated discounts at the point of sale.

The Social Value Game

Most people are also unaware of a new class of business methods being deployed in social media based on The Social Value Game developed by The Ingenesist Project.  The Social Value Game allows people to leverage their social influence around a product or service to attract coupons from companies willing to sponsor the customer’s social activity in their marketing strategy.  As such, social priorities will drive Wall Street priorities

A New Generation of Social Business Methods

When combined, these two technologies can vastly reduce the frictions of electronic commerce, reduce advertising, improve anonymity, scramble personal data and increase the security of transactions while introducing a strong bias toward social value in commerce.  Instead of encrypting the device, these technologies encrypt the currency. At the point of sale, coupons will enter an exchange pool and the customer will receive their discount.  In effect, they are selling their access and their data instead of having a gatekeeper sell it for them.

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The Invisible Hand of Social Capitalism

Living to work, or working to live?

Everyone knows what money is supposed to be – it is supposed to be a representation of human productivity, otherwise nobody would “work” for it, right?

It is also fairly obvious that money is not the only thing that represents human productivity. People work for family, community, reputation, love, recreation, art, music, etc.   These values are denominated in social currencies.

Working for Social Currency

Market Capitalism has deftly turned social currencies into consumption verticals.  People consume recreation products, family products, community products, reputation products, etc. The irony is that people are  foregoing all those things to drive off to work in order to earn the money so that they can buy back their family, recreation, and community. People are “working” for social currencies denominated in dollars.  The Mantra of Madison Avenue is to “Steal the thing that people love about themselves and sell it back for the price of the product”

Influence Peddling

Well known internet celebrities are getting sponsorships from some well known corporations – but not all.  The reason is clear – these people have the ability to influence the opinions and interactions of their community.  However, if the sponsor has a terrible product, that same influence can turn against the brand and the influencer in an amplified manner.  It is clearly in the brand’s best interest to match the product with the message of the influencer and vice versa.

Everyone is an influencer within their own knowledge inventory

A mechanical engineer can influence the professional community of engineers.  A math teacher can influence students.  A police officer can influence citizens.  A patriarch can influence an extended family. A big brother can influence a little sister.  Taken together and segmented across a hugely diverse knowledge inventory of human civilization, everyone is an influencer of everyone else.

Printing Social Currency

So instead of going to work to to earn money, people could just as easily go into their community to earn influence.  Brands can sponsor people based on their knowledge inventory to use, share, organize, and improve communities and products.   The most successful product will be those that help people to improve their communities. As such, brands and products will likewise benefit from stronger and unified communities.  Products that weaken, marginalize, oppress, or isolate people from their communities will fail.

The Invisible Hands of Social Capitalism

Nothing economic can happen until people get together to build something.  Strong linked communities will get together to build “economic” things. What they choose to build will become the value generation mechanisms of the future economy that will transform social value back into financial value.  Like Adam Smith’s invisible hand of Market Capitalism, the Invisible Hands of Social Capitalism will reward people for organizing themselves to make what they enjoy most and are naturally talented in producing.  We’ll call them “Recorporations“.

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Reverse Economics And True Value Social Games

Illustration from Wired (reversed) - Aegir Hallmundur; Benjamin Franklin: Corbis

Debit Cards and Credit cards routinely handle conversions from Dollars to Pesos to Euros and Yen.  The calculation is simple because there are known conversion rates between them.  In Fact, the credit card or debit card is buying the other currency much in the same way that they buy the pair of Levies, IPad, or bag of Tulip Bulbs being purchased.

Trading coupons for coupons

In other words, a debit card or credit card should also be able to use IPads, Levies, or Tulip Bulbs to buy money.  Of course, they would not use an actual IPad any more than a bank uses an actual Dollar – they trade a 100% coupon of a dollar for a 100% coupon of an IPad.  By adjusting the exchange rate between IPads and Dollars,  a 50% coupon for an IPad equals 300 Dollars and it is easy to see we are in very familiar Groupon territory.

The Dollar as a black market Currency

The debit card (or any form of mobile payment system) can, in fact, be used to trade what in earlier technological eras would be called a Black Market currency.  For example, After the Mexican currency crash of 1994-1995, I personally witnessed people empty WalMart to the bare shelves literally overnight, only to find those items circulating as currency the next day – in exchange for Dollars; the black market currency of the less developed World.

Drive the economy in reverse in order to drive the economy forward

With a high velocity and frictionless payment processing system, the economy should be able to operate in “reverse” just as easily – if not better than – it operates in so-called “forward”.  Here is why:

Suppose that Big Box retailer issues a coupon for 50% off all of it’s products for one Christmas Season because they want to beat out every merchant in the country.  The contingency coupon gets applied to all the credit/debit cards of all people that have ever shopped at the Big Box.  Since the local merchants are driven to failure and they’ll need to liquidate anyway, their response is to also honor the Big Box coupons.  This will initiate a spiral and all retailers will begin to accept each other’s coupons.  Soon, the brands such as Nike, Coca-cola, and Canon will be pulled into honoring retailer discounts.   The “coupon” will become the currency instead of the dollars.  The exchange rate between products will be determined by local arbitrage.

Lose the friction, improve efficiency

First, it would become very difficult to tax these transactions.  It would also be very difficult to inflate or deflate a dollar currency against these transactions. Arbitrage opportunities will be based on the true social value of a product in a community.  The dollar denominated conversion factor will become increasingly arbitrary.  The the new currency will be a social currency because people will now favor whatever products have the highest Social Value in their community relative to the knowledge assets of the community.  Advertising friction will disappear.  Assume Market Friction was 50%…..what changes?

In the end game, social priorities will drive Wall Street priorities

Social Currency is real currency.  The technology exists today to make it a frictionless exchange.  The economy may actually run better in so-called “reverse”.  The only thing missing is a True Value Social Game

References:

Sepp Hasslberger The Future of Money

The March issue of Wired Magazine carries an article titled: The Future of Money: It’s Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free.,

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A Tale As Old As Time

by animeartist67

Nothing grabs people’s attention these days like a discussion about the future of money.  Yet few subjects diverge as wildly. The stakes are high since personal and political fortunes are cast against the ideals of what money is, what it has been, and what it will become.  The temptation to cast the future of money in one’s own image is a tale as old as time and likely the source of most social conflict.

The Future of Time

There are two futures of money being foretold today. One is predicated on the demise of Capitalism and persistent denial that scarcity is a real economic element, despite the obvious scarcity of time in one’s life, for instance. The other future seeks to correct the flaw in Market Capitalism so that one’s scarce time may become more equitably allocated and less easily exploited by others.  Social values such as freedom, liberty, family, community, trust, health and welfare are derived from how one is allowed to prioritizes their own time, not how one is able to prioritizes the time of others.

The United States of Mind

The reason why this distinction is important is that no great economic paradigm of human civilization ever came about as a result of wholesale collapse of the prior economic paradigm. Rather, each new state of human social organization was derived from the prior state through an integration of tools created in that prior state.

It is now time to take account of these tools and figure out how to integrate them correctly.  This is the only way to foresee where we need to go and how we can get there.  The only way to defeat gravity is to understand gravity. The work will be difficult, it will be scientific, it will be intellectually challenging, and it will be inclusive of all living systems – including those that we seek to change. The trick to the future of money business will be to cure the disease without killing the patient.

Unfortunately, we may not have much time

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The Social Value Index

The Big Mac Index is published by The Economist as an informal way of measuring the purchasing power parity (PPP) between two currencies and provides a test of the extent to which market exchange rates result in goods costing the same in different countries.  UBS Wealth Management Research has expanded the idea of the Big Mac index to include the amount of time that an average worker in a given country must work to earn enough to buy a Big Mac.

Time is the true scarcity

Everyone is allotted a certain amount of time before they must leave the game and how they choose to allocate their time defines how they stand in the economy playing out before us.   People may store, exchange, borrow and give their time to others.  People can also steal, exploit, and waste the time of others.  Likewise, the greatest innovations are those that create time and the greatest scourges of our civilization are those that kill time.

Social Value Index

There are many indices that help us to track comparative values. These include the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500, etc. People track them over time to help define productivity. Productivity (you and I going to work everyday) is what gives the dollar it’s value, not the other way around. Likewise, the Social Value Index will compare the financial profit (or loss) of a product or service with the social profit (or loss) of that product with respect to time.

Future of Money

The future of money will most likely arise from entrepreneurs influencing the social value index with thousands of new business models rather than the creation of some new independent currency.  The ratio between financial currency and social currency may in fact become that “new currency” standard.  As the dollar loses it’s steam, the social currency will gain steam and the Social Value Index will rise (not unlike like the S&P 500 index since 1945) to reflect a measure of social economic growth; i.e., abundant social factors of production will define productivity instead of scarcity of land, Labor, and Capital.

The trick is to cure the cancer without killing the patient

A new social currency will be born from the slow and steady evaporation of the old debt as the dollar atrophies, rather than the wholesale demise of Capitalism. As such, the Social Currency will become increasingly biased toward social priorities instead of Wall Street priorities and the pesky little flaw in Market Capitalism will correct itself.  This is the primordial soup from which ideals such as the environment, renewable energy, wealth disparity, education, etc., will become highly profitable social enterprise.  This can be achieved quickly and cheaply with existing technology if we index the data correctly; that is, with respect to time.

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