government

Are We Hard Wired?

by Dan Robles on May 31, 2011

Hardwired Control Matrix

It has been a challenging month at Social Flights.   Our soft launch story was broken by FAST COMPANY, then it was quickly picked up by  THE NEW YORK TIMESBLOOMBERG TV,  FORBESINC. TECH,  WASHINGTON POST, and MASHABLE, then picked up by various other magazines and bloggers across the web.

Huge Interest in The Business Model

Social flights picked up tens of thousands of hits and several thousand members within a very short period of time.  We also received almost a thousand RFQ’s for charter service and our web traffic rank according to Alexa.com is under 20,000 – better than any other private jet broker in the country, including NetJets.

I personally communicated with dozens of 3rd party entrepreneurs that want to plug into our value proposition and we are discussing multiple high value partnerships in North America and around the world.

Are We Hard Wired?

Introducing such a radical approach brings many challenges, especially in the area of customer expectation.  People are hard wired to schedules, and lines, and pat downs, and waiting, waiting waiting. Social Flights was never conceived to dictate on a market how they should fly and to where.  Social flights will certainly not take people someplace where they don’t want to go – like an airport hub for transfer.  Social Flights will never hold a passenger’s dignity hostage behind some hidden cost or irrelevant regulation.

Losing The Hard Wire

We estimate that Social Flights will optimize at about  2.5 Million members – or roughly 5000 people in each of 500 locations across North America.  At that point our service model will begin to “simulate” the selection and convenience of the commercial airlines.  Keep in mind – this system will “simulate” scheduled service except without hard wires.

5000 people X 500 places model

  • This is the point where there will be a high likelihood that 8-10 people will all want to go to the same place from the same place within reasonable intervals of departure times.
  • This is the point where fluctuations in price and schedule such as de-icing costs, landing fees, fuel cost, or seat cancellation policy can be absorbed across the whole system rather than an individual passenger load.
  • This is the point where ground support vendors will commit substantial discount incentives to controlled bundles of passengers.
  • This is a point where the data that is generated by The Value Game and held solely by the players becomes valuable enough to predict the outcomes of future Value Games.

Not An Easy Puzzle to Solve:

Social Flights is attempting to do something that has never been accomplished in social media with such high value shared assets.  We seek to answer the question: Can people organize themselves around the concept of “Value” much like we have organized ourselves around the concept of “Money”.  Based on our earliest readings, the answer is that people are not as Hard Wired to money as those who control money would like us to believe. Looks like they’d jump the first plane out of Dodge if given a chance.

Read More

The Value Game Cracks the Monetization Paradox

by Dan Robles on February 20, 2011

The Value Game is becoming increasingly generalized as more entrepreneurs seek to learn how to apply it to new economic realities.  The first company to launch is Social Flights.  Quickly funded, in full operation, booking jets and signing contracts, the Social Flights success trajectory has been truly remarkable.

The Ingenesist Project is deploying several more applications of The Value Game.  Our next venture is to develop Reputation Management for High Net Worth Individuals (HNWI).  Here’s how it goes.

The Social Influence Game:

Player 1: At some point, the government is going to stop supporting many very important social programs such as schools, health care, child care, retirement benefits, and possibly even close the charitable tax deduction.  In order to survive, social causes will need to come up with new forms of support or fund themselves with a new form of currency.

Player 2: Many politically and financially influential people in communities are finding that their “Google Results” often tell a story that is less than flattering.  Some have old lawsuits, unpopular business associates, or just too much personal information that presents a skewed picture of how they actually feel toward their community.  It is risky, difficult, and expensive to change Search engine results and it is nearly impossible to “control” what other people say.

Player 3: Legions of Social Media Gurus have long learned to aggregate and influence markets using social media platforms.  They have learned to match knowledge surpluses to knowledge deficits as a means of building their own online reputation and influence.  Many Social Media Gurus have achieved a strong Social Media Presence, which supports book tours, lecture series, personal brand image, or corporate clients and sponsorships. They constantly seek new content.

Converting Political Currency to Social Currency

The Social Influence Game will match HNWI with Social Causes where the HNWI can exert their political and Corporate currency in exchange for Social Currency.  Many HNWI have a powerful lifelong network of other influential people from whom they can find advice, mentorship, assistance, or discover goods, services, or physical inventory that may become useful and available to a struggling social enterprise.

Social Media Gurus who make these connections will blog, comment, and promote their ability to match power surplus to power deficit.  Internet Search results will redraw the Social Graph.

Holiday Shopping For the New Millennium

In practice, HNWI can “Go Shopping” for social causes.  When they find one that suits their talents and passions, they will be able to see what that organization needs; beds, food, heating oil, legal advice, CEO mentor, someone to lean on the land lord or even exert a position with the local government, etc.  The HNWI then will pull out their lifelong Rolodex of powerful persons and exert their influence in favor of the social cause through the interpretation of the Social Media Guru.

Winning The Game:

After a short while, Google will start pushing the old search results of the HNWI farther and farther down the page as the tweets, comments, and blog posts accumulate.   The Social Media Guru will find gold in their own backyards instead of Corporate Astroturf.  Social Causes will achieve their mission while managing new resources and earning important new friends.

Perhaps most importantly, the HNWI community will collaborate in order to sustain their Social Currency in the community.  They will begin to bias their personal and professional actions in favor of social priorities over Wall Street priorities.

In Short, everyone acting in their own best interests benefits the interests of everyone.  This is Social Capitalism.  If it works well enough, maybe we can finally put those pesky social causes out of business.

Read More

May The Best Currency Win

February 10, 2011
Thumbnail image for May The Best Currency Win

What do you think every dictator wishes that they had more of right now: guns, money, or social currency?

Read the full article →

Social Vetting Makes Knowledge Tangible

September 15, 2010

While the progression may not be noticeable, there will be a tipping point where the medium has built enough trust that it can support a currency. This new currency needs to be only a little bit more “trustworthy” than the currency it will replace. This is the point where knowledge becomes tangible.

Read the full article →

Independence Is A State of Mind

July 4, 2010

Just when everyone thinks that Americans are up against the ropes, they come up with an idea so radical, so creative, and so astonishingly consciousness-altering, the rest of the world just shakes their heads in collective disbelief.

Read the full article →

Black Market Social Capitalism

June 23, 2010

However, as long as it stays in the extra-legal sector Social Media will remain intangible in the eyes of the current financial system. This gives rise to two options: Government should regulate social media OR social media will operate in an alternate financial system.

Read the full article →

Social Media as a Vetting Mechanism

February 9, 2010

Where the vetting mechanism fails, the system fails. This has happened in countless instances from the current financial crisis to nearly every product, market, environmental calamity, or political failure in recorded history – the referees who were supposed to keep their eye on the ball, did not. Likewise, where a vetting mechanism is effective, the system is efficient.

Read the full article →

Video: Money vs. Productivity

January 19, 2010

This video provide an easy way to find the truth among the high-fiber ambiguity that has become our political morass. Oh Yeah, they want you to be confused because they don’t want you to act any differently.

Read the full article →

Diversity in Innovation

December 19, 2009

Most literature on the subject of Innovation cites diversity as an important component of the innovation enterprise. Unfortunately diversity rides a political narrative rather than practical applications. Polarization is the death of diversity and the political narrative that plagues our country also plagues our ability to innovate.

Read the full article →

Is Freedom A New Economic Paradigm?

December 10, 2009

A New Economic System of the country of Montenegro is based on complete and unfettered economic freedom; in other words, the elimination of all barriers to conducting business. Does this, in fact, lead to a new paradigm?

Read the full article →

Seeding the Clouds of Social Media

November 18, 2009

The climate change summit ended in a draw after Kyoto ended in party pooper. You can count the financial crisis, endless warfare, world hunger, slave labor, forest-to-dump consumerism among the same pile of sun dried bullshit. Does anyone still trust the “leaders”?

Read the full article →

Community Currency; Ithaca Hours

November 6, 2009

Many communities are giving up waiting on large corporations or government to invest or provide jobs, and are instead building on their own strengths and resources.

Read the full article →

Social Currency; History Matters

November 3, 2009

History often provides clarity in the present. I was searching the term “Social Currency” and I found these two posts on a forum from all the way back in 2001. The authors are quite explicit in their expectations of social currency in their present and deep into the future.

Read the full article →

A Learning Revolution?

October 13, 2009

Whatever is left will become the new economic paradigm: the fabric of society must remain intact, capitalism must be preserved, and social priorities must be enabled. It will be neither socialism not capitalism – both have failed. We need to learn Social Capitalism where social media is the dominant institution that issues a productivity based currency.

Read the full article →

Is a social contract legally binding…and who cares?

July 13, 2009

The Ingenesist Project posits that trillions upon trillions of dollars worth of value that is being transferred to social media from a legacy economy stifled by insurmountable debt. These numbers are indeed spectacular because they account for the value “lost”, and most importantly, the calculations provides clues on how to “find” it again.

Read the full article →

The 2.3 Trillion Dollar Mentor Market

June 29, 2009

Suppose that mentorship could be monetized like financial instruments. Within the structure of an innovation economy specified by The Ingenesist Project, the mentor would take an equity position in the protégé, not unlike taking a stock in a corporation.

Read the full article →

The New Economic Paradigm: Part 7; Monetization of Knowledge Assets

April 20, 2009

We have specified a structure for a new economic paradigm by simply integrating the the knowledge economy into the same structure as the financial system. The result is a completely new way for entrepreneurs to create wealth.

Read the full article →

The Next Economic Paradigm; Part 1

April 3, 2009

The Innovation Economy will not be delivered by corporations, Government or Academia. There no single person, country, ideology, or philosophy that can meet the challenges of the future alone – everyone will be required to participate because everyone has a stake in the outcome.

Read the full article →

Out of Cache; Will Work For Bandwidth

December 31, 2008

We can measure the time in minutes, we can measure distance in miles, and we can measure mass in grams – so how do we measure Innovation?  Am I missing something or is this possibly the most stunning omission in the history of civilization?  Who is keeping score? Where’s the referee? This is serious business, [...]

Read the full article →