[p2p-research] Cost Recovery (was: Fundable and Michel's Computer)

[marc fawzi]

We would invest to build a transparent collective fund raising (with the
goal of cloning all the features of Fundable, namely, the ability to defer
commitment of donations until fund raising goal is met and automatic
transparency as well as being a web application easy to access by anyone)

What I'll do is to post the requirements message here on this list, get
feedback, then post it to Guru.com and get bids. I'd like to keep the bids
under $500 through (and hopefully close to $200) by managing the language of
the RFP (or RFB in this case). Remember that when it comes to e-commerce
sites, like Fundable, 99% of the cost of development is in producing the
requirements and in our case we have a living set of requiremments (or
features) in Fundable. If we start changing features etc that will raise the
cost exponentially. Only change we make is we bill at 1% instead of 10%.
Pure and simple replication.

If the bids come within the $200-$500 range I would be happy to manage the
vendor interviews and selection in consultation with this list (I've
outsourced before and the process is pretty familiar to me) and then perform
the project management with frequent updates to this list. Only concern is
finding a Google App Engine development shop in say India or Eastern Europe
becasue the technology is new, so we'd have to manage that trade off (see
below re: Google App Engine cost rationale)

The following portion of the discussion is aimed at developers (and the
technically minded):

I spent 15 minutes a couple days ago to setup a place holder 'website
application' on Google's App Engine (see: http://snowdriftgames.com ... it
just says Hello World! for now but it's running totally free of charge for
up to 5 million pages served per month, even when it's fully populated, and
they actually bill reasonably per cpu hour and bandwidth after that.

I know it's crazy for me to suggest this approach since I'm a harsh critic
of centralized clouds, but Google is known to _trade profit for power_ and
then leverage that power later for revenue directly or indirectly (their
business model when it comes to growing their revenue is to shoot then aim
as opposed to aim then shoot) so we enjoy the lower cost of hosting for now
and then when an open cloud standard is developed and when we have
sufficient mass of users it will be easy (cost rationale wise) to migrate it
to an open cloud, and who knows Google may change their mind and join the
open standard. That's as much as we could do while the net is still running
on IPv4. When everyone migrates to IPv6 pure P2P architectures (or p2p
clouds) would be decisively more viable for us and for the joe developer
than centralized ones, for reasons discussed here:
http://evolvingtrends.wordpress.com/2008/07/23/google-app-engine-threat-or-opportunity/and
more to the point here:
http://evolvingtrends.wordpress.com/2008/09/11/the-road-to-a-p2p-economy/






On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 1:58 PM, Patrick Anderson <agnucius at gmail.com>wrote:

> At the donation link Marc Fawzi wrote:
>
> > There is room for list members to start a similar service and charge only
> for the cost of maintaining the site.
>
> This would give the low price we seek while still covering costs
> needed to maintain the service...
>
> But if profits will not be taken, then who will invest?
>
> Thanks,
> Patrick
>
> _______________________________________________
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>



-- 

Marc Fawzi
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LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcfawzi
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