dcaranda

why isn't this an NFT project?

The Dolphin Embassy was a project by Berkeley art collective Ant Farm. It's mission was to develop dolphin/human relations through the creation of a common language and a mobile laboratory. The project received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and was shown at SFMOMA.

Ant Farm is considered significant as the first studio practice to incorporate new media in its work. Thematically it looks like they were focused on the confluence of new technology, utopian optimism and psychedelic drugs.

Iterations of the designs for the Dolphin Embassy continued into the early 2000s with a proposal for a space craft that would act as a joint dolphin-human space colony and would contain a massive, free floating sphere of water that would be ultra sonically stabilized.

So cool! One of my favorite art pieces! http://greg.org/archive/2010/06/01/cue_the_dolphin_embassy.h...

Every employee gets a receipt of how much they donated to which charities. Their donation also shows up in their year end paystub and W-2, both of which can be used in their tax returns.

On fees, it's typically just the network fee (e.g., Mastercard) that gets waived. The issuing bank, acquiring bank and the processor, still take a cut.

Bank transfers have too much friction. You wouldn't pay your corner store with a bank transfer. You'd rather swipe a card. It's why you carry around your bank card (which as a VISA or MC logo). You wouldn't pay for something on eBay with a bank transfer. You'd use PayPal. An interesting point is that both PayPal, VISA and Mastercard on the bank-end are really just a series of bank transfers wrapped with a more refined consumer/merchant interface (card / POS terminal).

@korzun Federal law does not allow for charitable donations through payroll deduction to be done pre-tax.

@korzun My name is Danny and I'm a co-founder of RaisedBy.Us. Thanks for your question!

Regarding the 3rd party issue: All donation methods (RaisedBy.Us or otherwise) involve a third party. Even when you go directly to a charity's website to make a donation, you will use a third party payment provider. The most common method is debit or credit card. This method actually involves multiple third parties that all take fees (an issuing bank, a merchant bank, a settlement bank and a network such as VISA, Mastercard, Discover, etc). This fee is called interchange and it typically inovlves a flat fee of 30 cents per transactions plus about 2.5% to 3% of the total value of the transaction. We thought this was pretty expensive. Donations through RaisedBy.Us charge 0% and no flat fee per transaction. We accomplish this by using a back-end provider that settles transactions with charities using checks and ACH methods (which are much cheaper the credit and debit transactions) and we charge the companies (not the donors) to access the service.

Regarding tax write off: RaisedBy.Us does not get a tax write-off for the donations that are processed through our program. Only the initial donor (e.g., an employee at one of our participating companies) gets a tax write-off for donations.

Note: America Movil, Carlos Slim's mobile network, controls 80% of the Mexican market. In that context, this is just a really awesome story of empowerment.

Anybody have feedback on Fiverr.com?

Remove bias from the system.

internet == selfies

Identity is a basic problem for any online transaction. For instance, Paypal's biggest innovations were around fraud prevention.

Jumio is a great solution to bridge online transactions and offline verification (physical IDs, passports, credit cards).

If I had to speculate, I suspect Jumio gets disrupted by products that attack the root problem by no longer needing verification - more specifically, virtual currencies. But that feels like a distant prospect right now.

In long-term (10+ years), yes. But the current reality leaves a lot of opportunity. Merchants and exchanges have huge forex issues.

Being entrepreneur friendly is so central to VC marketing that this effort will likely pay itself as a PR expense.

Also, transaction fees are typically presented as being deducted from the capital being moved, as opposed to just charging the company. Of course, net it's the same. But language matters.

it's to avoid bias in the system

No Betable? Just curious given Sohail's real money gambling role at Zynga.

Also, I'm curious to what degree Africans reject being grouped in the monolithic term "Africa". That's a billion people. Cape Town / Nairobi / Lagos / Cairo are completely different places.

Needs a favicon. But this is great! Super excited to dig in.

Cool! Looks great. Best of luck!

Are contributions tax-deductible?

Any new sensors/hardware not on a typical smartphone? Is the big advantage essentially a pervasive screen?

I ask because a common way to think of mobile app innovation is in terms of hardware advances: Mobile Data: Blackberry Email GPS: Maps, Local Services (Foursquare) iPhone 4 Camera Upgrade: Instagram The list goes on...

What's the key hardware advancement here?

- Model would probably work best for small, consumer-focused ideas (enterprise sales cycle is too long to know if there's traction after 2 months).

- 50% is too expensive.

- "Co-Founder" role is too much commitment.

- Reduce equity ask, package with a 1 year cliff + vesting schedule, market it to college students as a way to spend your summer.

- Maybe there's a model where an incubator can scale to thousands of companies, instead of dozens.

Many people are asking "why?" Too often we take for granted why we should give to charity, so it's a valid question.

Some quotes below on why.

"The world is complex, and it can't be entirely fair from a what you contribute to what you get - it's very very uneven." - Ben Horowitz (source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqI7fa04atc&t=106m0s see 1:46:00)

"I've worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions. In short, fate's distribution of long straws is wildly capricious." - Warren Buffet (source: http://givingpledge.org/#warren_buffett)

Bike directions take designated bike lanes / routes into account.

I think pixel art appeals sufficiently enough to a niche audience that it can demand the fee.

Awesome. I think the format (picture feed) has the potential to work across a bunch of verticals - movie posters (to get movie recommendations), art (to get gallery recommendations), food, etc.

Pixel art is a great choice. The emphasis is on creation and expression - and maybe it hits a sweet spot - it requires more work than instagram (making it more legitimate as an art/craft) but less than creating the mona lisa...

You should get eBoy to use it: http://hello.eboy.com/eboy/

Agreed - as a Penn alumn, it's very exciting to see this kind of activity over the past few years. I graduated in 2006 - at the time, interest in tech and entrepreneurship was very far from the cultural norm on campus.

Some assets Penn has as the interest in tech expands:

- Penn has had a professional focus for a long time because of Wharton - that means access to all kinds of business, legal, capital resources. These resources will serve this repositioning towards entrepreneurship very well.

- West-Philly is dirt cheap. It doesn't get much cheaper in the United States.

- Philadelphia is culturally very rich. I mean this in a deeper sense than the explicit things like museums and venues. Upon moving to New York after graduation, I remember distinctly feeling like NY was more conservative culturally. This goes hand in hand with the above point - making rent is easier - allowing for all kinds of things. Namely, people took more risks and were more eccentric.

the regulatory environment variations between countries is a great point

to address the point more generally, the IFC (private investment arm of the World Bank) does a report ranking the ease of doing business across countries: http://www.doingbusiness.org/rankings

Nice catch. More gold from Google's automated closed captioning on their own promotional video:

"dissented japanese underground you're done"

"to the mountain tell you what internet xxx" (personal favorite)

"fearsome evil"

"graceland"

"Events are the only reason many people use Facebook."

Is this true? Do we know this? I tried looking up stats on fb's events app usage and wasn't able to dig anything up.

Despite market fluctuations, pundits and haters - there is an objective truth that Facebook's financial performance is exceptional.

Facebook full year 2011 EBITDA was roughly 55%, demolishing google's 37% and apple's 42%. Wilson approximates a 40% margin in Q1, but ad businesses tend to be Q4 heavy due to holiday shopping. Facebook has demonstrated exceptional leverage in its model.

Facebook has growing pains for sure, but that is likely a result of being the first to scale in its market.

Who knows what the market will do, the general sentiment here and in other places seems to be largely emotional and indicate that it will go down further. But even if you strip away Facebook's brand name and sexy market, the numbers are impressive and the business performs very very well.

EBITDA is a form of profit. Whenever someone says they made X in profit - you should immediately ask what kind - net income, operating profit, etc. Depending on the business, different definitions of profit can produce wildly different numbers.

It's a generally accepted proxy for cash earnings since it looks at profit and takes out:

- non-operating costs such as interest and tax. These are "non-operating" because they have nothing to do with delivering your service/product.

- non-cash costs such depreciation and amortization.

It is worth noting that EBITDA is non-GAAP, which is to say that it's not an officially recognized accounting term. You won't see it in an audit and if you do there will be a big disclaimer next to it. The term gained popularity in the 80s with the rise of private equity. It's used in debt agreements to approximate how a business will pay back loan principal and interest.