From: Steve (steve@biosaver.org)
Date: Wed Apr 17 2002 - 13:52:12 MDT
Greetings,
I'm a 7 year member (though seldom list visitor) of the Extropian
movement. As this list contains some of the keenest minds on the
internet, I'm looking to it for comments about a new business venture a
partner and I are undertaking. If you'd have the time, I'd really
appreciate your opinions and brutal comments before we get too far down
this road.
The premise is that biodiversity is both an aesthetic and medicinal
resource, and this effort is a somewhat quixotic attempt to both exploit
and protect the resource. Definitely not a Green Party member, I
consider myself an anarchocapitalist technogaiaist concerned with loss
of biodiversity. The idea is part edu-tainment, part escapism enabler,
and part overpriced screensaver. In short, it's a self-updating
Biodiversity Screensaver membership, containing 4 adventures each year.
Each screensaver adventure comes from a different biodiverse hot spot,
and includes about 20 photos of animals and plants, sounds from the
forest, and "Factoids" which describe interesting tidbits about animal
behavior or ethnobotany, etc. Of the fees received, 51% are donated to
organizations like Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund.
Still in pre-release mode, the mechanics of the screensaver and website
are now functional and the initial screensaver edition is available as a
free download after completing a 17 question survey at the website.
Completion of a second (10 question) survey will provide a free 2 week
trial membership to the site, which allows searches of the Factoid
database, quizzes, games, contests, biodiversity postcards, etc. Check
it out at http://biosaver.org The screensaver installs easily and
uninstalls clean.
So my questions to y'all are: Will this work? Do you see fatal flaws
in the concept? Can you spot obvious areas of improvement?
Basically, I would like to get some opinions from knowledgeable people
before diving in headfirst and spending a ton of advertising dollars.
Here are a few concerns that we've already come up with:
- There are already soooooo many free screensavers available. --->
While this is true, we've calculated that we need only about 3-4000
subscribers per year to cover the costs. Plus we feel the content is
unique and valuable in itself.
- The average person does not yet have enough bandwidth to download the
7MB screensaver each quarter. ---> One of the reasons we're doing the
market research is to discern this. We'd love to add video snippets to
the screensaver but that would increase the download size even more.
Thanks mucho in advance! We look forward to hearing your opinions.
-Steve
PS. If you'd prefer to contact me directly rather than post to the list,
email steve@biosaver.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:13:34 MST