One of the strongest memories I have regarding IBM is from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. I visited it on a school trip to Washington years ago, I took with me quite a few very strong memories, and one, was of a machine used by the Germans to help produce the Jewish Registry. It was sat behind some glass, with the easy to recognise IBM logo stamped proudly in the corner.
As I say it was a fair few years ago and I was quite young, but it made me start to realise that business has basically no morals. It's probably shaped the way I view business today. Not super dramatically, don't get me wrong, but this video reminded me of that.
You can Google for IBMs involvement with the holocaust, it's quite interesting.
Am I an idiot for not have a clue what this actually does after both watching the video and reading the FAQ?
As far as I can tell it's hyper-local news app tailored to specific protests. People send them messages and they send updates out? Which I guess is useful?
Maybe when something comes along to replace "save"?
With the steadily increasing amount of software that auto-saves without you noticing, maybe soon we just wont need to "save" anything. It'll just happen.
I'm keeping track of my hours worked, so I have a rough idea of when it'll actually have properly paid for itself. I'm not kidding myself, don't worry :)
If it did, nobody would pay the $1. Though that's a rubbish answer, and probably accidentally passive-aggressive. So here's a longer one:
People in the tech world love joining clubs that give no real reward. People started joining Facebook because it was cool to be in the Facebook Club, same with Twitter, the iPhone, new communities etc. I'm over-simplifying it, but that's because The Club I built is exactly that; a crude over-simplification of an already existing and replicated system.
The value comes from the psychology. Paying to be in something early and fun, even though there is no intrinsic reason, is nice. It's similar to how trophies and rewards work on other sites and in games. There's no reason why you want it, but it feels nice.
But I agree that it's also certainly not an impressive feat of technology, that's for sure :)
I toyed with the idea you can only pay to get somebody else into the Club, and you can't pay if you're already in the club. Mostly just because I thought that would generate some funny dynamics.
I think the invitations idea is a good one, though I want to keep it so every member has paid $1 to get in. maybe adding some incentive to getting your friends to join. Like your name appears in a slightly larger font if all three of your invites were used.
Right now it's just a static HTML page that I'm manually updating, but there are a lot of ideas, like this one, I'm hoping to play with.
Cheap, tiny, poorly made, a quick buck and lacking scope? I agree. I think "horrid" is a bit much though, but then I would.
It was sort of an experiment for me and if it ever turns any real money I will be using it to build on existing plans for a proper start-up. The Club isn't the pinnacle of what I want to make, rather it's a side-note.
Though, unless I covered it above, why do you say it's horrid? Simply the vapid and useless nature of the product?
I agree, $0.07 isn't stunning (it's only going to get me a half billionth of my jet), but to break even in such a short space of time I found interesting.
Though could it not be considered profit in some form, as I'm working for free on the project? It's the site's profit, rather than my own?
Until I started dating an American girl, I can't say I was ever in a situation where I needed to know how big America was. The US just isn't very significant to the average European.
It's smaller, yes, but not by much. The USA is 9.8 million km^2 and Europe is 10.2 million km^2. Though that does include Alaska.
I think the thing that took me the longest to "get" was simply the distances between things. If you'd asked me a few years ago how far one coast of the USA is from the other, I'd probably guess at around a thousand miles. Top to bottom maybe 500.
Mind you I also didn't realise Washington wasn't in Washington state.