We're constantly looking for better ways to define Yepic . . . what it is, what it enables. We've called it the content collaboration marketplace, and while that accurately describes the functional elements of the service, it doesn't really articulate what Yepic is all about. This article seeks to bring some clarity to the vision of our company.
One Platform, Many Applications
At it's core, Yepic is a technology platform that lets you do 5 very simple things:
1. Write articles.
2. Collaborate with other authors to improve articles.
3. Buy and sell articles.
4. Make requests for articles.
5. Collaborate with other users on requests for articles.
Simple, right? Write, collaborate, buy, sell, request, and collaborate again. About what? Now we get into the different applications of this simple, but very powerful platform for information development and distribution.
Level 2 Information
We were trying to come up with a way to describe the kind of information we'd like to see flourish on Yepic, and the one we've come up with--we know, we know, kind of a lofty goal--is what we call "Level 2."
Level 1 information is general info about a subject. The kind of stuff you'd find on Wikipedia, for example, or all over the web on billions of website. This is common knowledge, and it's generally available in abundant supply on the Internet. The quality varies substantially, although Wikipedia has really raised the bar in this respect. They, too, use a collaborative platform that allows users to contribute to, edit, and reformat the information on their site.
Level 2 information is information about a subject that has been adapted and formatted to a particular use. So if the Wikipedia page on The 2006 World Cup were Level 1 info, information about how to get tickets, where to stay, and how to have an excellent time at The World Cup would be Level 2.
Level 2 information is valuable information, stuff people are actually willing to pay to know. The closer it comes to the needs of its user, the more valuable it becomes. The more credible it is (and credibility can be attained either through the credentials of the author or by the number of people who validate and/or contribute to the information), the more valuable it becomes.
A friend of mine is moving to San Francisco and is facing the daunting task of figuring out where to live, whether to rent or buy, etc. He's researched Craigslist and has spent time reading up on San Franscisco in Wikipedia and a few other Internet portals. He's read as much Level 1 information as he can find, and he's still pretty frustrated. What would a good piece of Level 2 information look like for my friend?
Well, it would probably start with authentic experience. How about an article written collaboratively by 10 couples who've actually moved to San Francisco in the last year? How about 10 that have actually bought? How about 10 who've bought who make between $140-200K per year as a couple? How about 10 who've bought, make between $140-200K per year as a couple, and worked in San Jose? How about an article written by this group that identifies the top 10 pitfalls that can be easily avoided when moving to San Jose? Or an article that talks about the top 10 steps someone can take to survive financially in such buying conditions? Now we're starting to approach Level 2 information. I described the article to my friend and asked him how much he'd be willing to pay. "I dunno. Quite a bit, if the info was good."
If the info was good. Great point. How are we supposed to trust the content we find? That's why Yepic allows every user to rank everything they buy and every author who contributed to the article. How about one of the articles above that's been purchased by 238 users, 232 of which gave the article a highly favorable rating? Aha. Now my buddy's ready to spend some money.
You can take this approach with any subject. Drive the info down into Level 2 territory, adapt it and format it to a highly useful purpose, get some collaborators to improve your credibility, and price the article reasonably. If the content's good, if the title's enticing, if it looks and feels credible and useful, it will sell. And when it sells, people will give it good ratings. And that will convince other users to buy it too.
All the while, Yepic's management will be looking for ways to help the Internet community discover your content.
How will you make money? Yepic pretty much passes all the money from each sale directly to you. We just recoup some adminsitrative costs of hosting your info. We're even seriously contemplating waiving all those administrative fees in the beginning just to get the community off the ground.
More later . . .
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Friday, May 19, 2006
A Terrific Fast Company Article on Pro-Am Networks
This article really captures the spirit of Yepic . . .
Amateur Revolution
From astronomy to computing, networks of amateurs are displacing the pros and spawning some of the greatest innovations.
From: Fast Company Magazine | Issue 87| October 2004 | Page 31 By: Charles Leadbeater Illustrations by: Istvan Banyai
Rap inflects global popular culture from music to fashion. Linux poses a real threat to Microsoft. The Sims is among the most popular computer games ever.
These far-flung developments have all been driven by Pro-Ams -- committed, networked amateurs working to professional standards. Pro-Am workers, their networks and movements, will help reshape society in the next two decades.
The 20th century was marked by the rise of professionals in medicine, science, education, and politics. In one field after another, amateurs and their ramshackle organizations were driven out by people who knew what they were doing and had certificates to prove it. Now that historic shift seems to be reversing. Even as large corporations extend their reach, we're witnessing the flowering of Pro-Am, bottom-up self-organization.
Rap, for one, started as do-it-yourself music among lower-income black men from distressed urban neighborhoods, recorded by artists on inexpensive equipment and distributed on handmade tapes by local labels. Yet within two decades, rap has become the dominant popular music across the world. In league with Pro-Am music distribution made possible by Napster and Kazaa, it has turned the entire record industry on its head.
Linux is the product of mass participatory innovation among thousands of Pro-Am technologists. Many of them program commercial software for a living but work on Linux in their spare time because the spirit of collaborative problem solving appeals so powerfully. Likewise, according to one estimate, 90% of the content in The Sims is created by a Pro-Am sector of The Sims' playing community, a distributed, self-organizing group whose players are constantly training one another and innovating.
Passionate amateurs, empowered by technology and linked to one another, are reshaping business, politics, science, and culture.
In the developing world, Pro-Ams are solving a historical scarcity of professional resources. The Grameen Bank, founded by Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economics professor, trains barefoot bankers to deliver loans to people earning less than a dollar a day. This Pro-Am workforce makes it possible to cost-effectively administer 2.8 million loans worth more than $4 billion. Had Grameen relied on professionals, it would have reached a tiny proportion of the population.
The transformation of astronomy captures the dynamics that will change other fields. Amateurs laid the foundations for modern astronomy; Copernicus, who moved the sun to the center of the universe, was only a sometime astronomer. By the 20th century, though, the pendulum had swung decisively in favor of professionals for one simple reason: They had access to much bigger telescopes.
But in the past two decades, as science writer Timothy Ferris points out, three linked innovations have turned astronomy into an open-source, Pro-Am activity. First, there was the disruptive innovation. John Dobson, a onetime monk and full-time stargazer, built a crude but powerful telescope using inexpensive materials. Observers armed with their own Dobsonians can now invade deep space, previously the preserve of the professionals.
Then came the CCD, a highly light-sensitive chip that could record very faint starlight more accurately than a photograph. With Dobsonian telescopes and CCD sensors, the Earth acquired hundreds of thousands of new eyes, probing space and recording events that would have gone unnoticed by the few thousand professionals. The Internet multiplied the power of this distributed capacity for exploration: An amateur who has found something interesting can email the image to friends, colleagues, and professionals within minutes.
Astronomy used to be done in national "big science" research institutes. Now it is also done in global, Pro-Am, open-source collaboratives. There is still a huge gulf between amateur astronomers and theoretical astrophysicists. But the line between professional and Pro-Am astronomers has become fatally blurred. Much the same will happen in other fields.
Some professionals will find that unsettling; they will seek to defend their monopolies. The more enlightened will understand that the landscape is changing. Knowledge is widely distributed, not controlled in a few ivory towers. The most powerful organizations will enable professionals and amateurs to combine distributed know-how to solve complex problems.
Pro-Am activity will continue to expand. Longer healthy life spans will allow people in their forties and fifties to start taking up Pro-Am activities as second careers. Rising participation in education will give people skills to pursue those activities. New media and technology enable Pro-Ams to organize.
Pro-Ams could fuel mass participation in formal politics and in social entrepreneurship. They will play important economic roles as coproducers of services and sources of ideas. Democracy will be livelier, innovation more vibrant, social capital stronger, and individual well-being more securely grounded. After a century in decline, amateurs will rise again. And they will change the world.
Charles Leadbeater's report "The Pro-Am Revolution" is available on the Web (http://www.demos.co.uk/).
Richard's Yepic Story
Hi Everybody:
Great to be here, posting this first entry on our new Yepic blog. We set this up to keep you informed on our progress and give you more information about Yepic and our company vision.
So What Is Yepic, Anyway?
Wow. That's a fun story, and I bet Corey's version will differ substantially from mine. Here's how I came to where we are now:
Last year I heard Tim O'Reilly speak about Web 2.0 and related concepts at a conference I'd attended. In particular, he focused on wikis and how they were transforming the way information is created and shared on the Internet. I'd discovered Wikipedia (also click here for a great description of the site) shortly before that presentation, and although I'd already developed a serious appreciation for the quality of the information found there, I had no idea how it was being created. The revelation of the user-contribution system sort of hit me like a punch in the face. I was stunned momentarily: was it possible that an ungoverned, self-organized group of people could create such amazing material, without any of the normal incentives that typically drive us to produce stuff?
O'Reilly spoke at length about how users--lots and lots of users--add value, quality, authenticity, breadth, depth, accuracy . . . thereby creating a product that often exceeds professional standards. I took the concept back to work with me and started a wiki for my department. Within 8 months it had replaced all other forms of documentation we typically used and was getting adopted by several other departments. We found the collaborative platform of the wiki so much more easy to work with, and so much more optimized towards getting us to the PRECISE piece of information we were looking for in a given scenario.
One day I was chatting with a friend and I said, "I wonder if the wiki platform could be used for sellable information? You know, like the kind of stuff people will pay money for."
My first idea was to create a wiki environment for reviews, the main idea being that people would prefer to read one review informed by 100 people as opposed to 100 different reviews. But Amazon beat me to the punch on that one. While I was working on the concept, Corey approached me and proposed a terrific business idea: "What if," he said, "we allowed people to upload and sell their digital wares on the Internet, just like people do on eBay?" Corey then told me his idea occured to him when he a close family friend made $5,000 selling a simple how-to doc she'd written (4-pages) on eBay for $5 per copy. I then told Corey about my idea to create a collaborative platform for the development of high-value content. After a month or two we were convinced we needed to start Yepic to provide the world with a place to create, buy, and sell high-value content. We were particularly convinced there was a huge market for this in long tail, or niche markets.
We started running the idea by friends and family as we pulled together our first round of funding. One buddy told me he was eager to start writing articles on how to care for extremely rare tools he loved to collect. He talked about how it was very difficult to find anything good on the Internet about them. Another friend said he'd write an article with several friends--using our wiki-platform--on how to score more than 700 on the GMAT (he scored 740). Another friend said she'd pull together several moms and write an article on how to handle 3 toddlers. Another friend talked about ways Yepic could be used to incent his tech support staff to actually write good self-support articles for customers. Another friend talked about pulling together an article informed by 10 families that had recently moved to and bought a home in the Bay area, their tips and tricks, mistakes, etc. And the list goes on and on. The sheer excitement we felt from each of these people we interviewed convinced us that we needed to get this community built, and fast.
Now we're a few months away from launching the full-blown service. We hope you'll love it. More posts to come soon.
Best,
Richard
Great to be here, posting this first entry on our new Yepic blog. We set this up to keep you informed on our progress and give you more information about Yepic and our company vision.
So What Is Yepic, Anyway?
Wow. That's a fun story, and I bet Corey's version will differ substantially from mine. Here's how I came to where we are now:
Last year I heard Tim O'Reilly speak about Web 2.0 and related concepts at a conference I'd attended. In particular, he focused on wikis and how they were transforming the way information is created and shared on the Internet. I'd discovered Wikipedia (also click here for a great description of the site) shortly before that presentation, and although I'd already developed a serious appreciation for the quality of the information found there, I had no idea how it was being created. The revelation of the user-contribution system sort of hit me like a punch in the face. I was stunned momentarily: was it possible that an ungoverned, self-organized group of people could create such amazing material, without any of the normal incentives that typically drive us to produce stuff?
O'Reilly spoke at length about how users--lots and lots of users--add value, quality, authenticity, breadth, depth, accuracy . . . thereby creating a product that often exceeds professional standards. I took the concept back to work with me and started a wiki for my department. Within 8 months it had replaced all other forms of documentation we typically used and was getting adopted by several other departments. We found the collaborative platform of the wiki so much more easy to work with, and so much more optimized towards getting us to the PRECISE piece of information we were looking for in a given scenario.
One day I was chatting with a friend and I said, "I wonder if the wiki platform could be used for sellable information? You know, like the kind of stuff people will pay money for."
My first idea was to create a wiki environment for reviews, the main idea being that people would prefer to read one review informed by 100 people as opposed to 100 different reviews. But Amazon beat me to the punch on that one. While I was working on the concept, Corey approached me and proposed a terrific business idea: "What if," he said, "we allowed people to upload and sell their digital wares on the Internet, just like people do on eBay?" Corey then told me his idea occured to him when he a close family friend made $5,000 selling a simple how-to doc she'd written (4-pages) on eBay for $5 per copy. I then told Corey about my idea to create a collaborative platform for the development of high-value content. After a month or two we were convinced we needed to start Yepic to provide the world with a place to create, buy, and sell high-value content. We were particularly convinced there was a huge market for this in long tail, or niche markets.
We started running the idea by friends and family as we pulled together our first round of funding. One buddy told me he was eager to start writing articles on how to care for extremely rare tools he loved to collect. He talked about how it was very difficult to find anything good on the Internet about them. Another friend said he'd write an article with several friends--using our wiki-platform--on how to score more than 700 on the GMAT (he scored 740). Another friend said she'd pull together several moms and write an article on how to handle 3 toddlers. Another friend talked about ways Yepic could be used to incent his tech support staff to actually write good self-support articles for customers. Another friend talked about pulling together an article informed by 10 families that had recently moved to and bought a home in the Bay area, their tips and tricks, mistakes, etc. And the list goes on and on. The sheer excitement we felt from each of these people we interviewed convinced us that we needed to get this community built, and fast.
Now we're a few months away from launching the full-blown service. We hope you'll love it. More posts to come soon.
Best,
Richard
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