Betavine Social Exchange
Stephen Wolak from Vodafone Group R&D has contacted me about Betavine Social Exchange. Stephen is a great believe in crowdsourcing , so much so, he has crowdsourced the requirements for Betavine Social Exchange .
He’s looking for comments from possible participants, particularly developers. Here are my initial thoughts. I thought I’d post them here rather than emailing Stephen back so that other people might contribute to the discussion.
I see Betavine Social Exchange as an extension of the ‘wish list’. Just about every platform I have worked on has had a wish list, usually created by a fan or evangelism team for the platform. However, Betavine Social Exchange aims to be a lot more than a wish list. It hopes to bring people together, crowdsource the requirements for the ideas themselves and create sustainable (read monetisable) solutions.
The emphasis is on local social issues in emerging markets. While I admire and support the altruistic aspect, I suspect this theme has potential positive Vodafone PR spin and also ties in with carrier growth in emerging markets. Scepticism aside, I think it’s a great idea and question why, if Vodafone is going to the effort of administering this, the concept might not be extended to all markets and ideas. It would be similar to Nokia’s Ideas Project I mentioned last week except that there might be greater commercialisation and tie in (implementation) via Vodafone group companies.
There’s a great need for an ‘Ideas Exchange’ at the moment what with organisations trying their best to attract developers via challenges and competitions. One recent example is the UK Design Council’s £400,000 challenge to design out phone crime. I actually looked at the challenge and concluded what there are already such solutions in existence but very few people are using them. Also, such efforts are probably best (and most easily) implemented by phone OEMs (baked into ROM) rather than 3rd parties so everyone gets an un-hackable solution. Now if the original requirements ("to make mobiles useless to thieves") had been crowdsourced then the £400,000 might have been used for something other than to create yet more under-used solutions. However, that’s just my opinion, I could be wrong and a crowdsourced debate might also resolve my dissatisfaction.
However, I have digressed. Going back to the Betavine Social Exchange and the extension of the wish list idea, one problem with wish lists is that so many people either post things that aren’t possible or things that are only possible if the phone OEM implements them. A deeper social exchange would kill these ideas early and filter what’s possible and commercially viable. A more commercial exchange would attract people such as myself and my customers.
If you have any thoughts on Betavine Social Exchange then you can comment on Stephen’s blog.
