Anyone who spends any time at all online knows how easy it is to waste that time on sites one might call the online equivalent of junk food. ProcrasDonate is a site that hopes to turn that wasted time into something good while also giving users an incentive to waste less in the future.
Users begin by downloading Massachusetts-based ProcrasDonate’s free Firefox add-on and registering with the site, including choosing the charities they’d like to support and the amounts they pledge for each hour they waste. They then select the sites they consider their biggest time-wasters—Facebook and Twitter are both obvious choices, the site notes—and link their Amazon account for payments. There’s also an option to highlight sites that are the opposite of time-wasters through ProcrasDonate’s TimeWellSpent category; in that case, users can choose to reward those site owners for their worthy content.
Either way, users then go about their normal online activities, and ProcrasDonate records the way their time is spent. For each hour they spend on websites marked as time-wasters, a pledge gets recorded for their selected charities; every hour spent on those marked as TimeWellSpent, conversely, means a donation to those sites’ owners. Whenever a pledge reaches a threshold of USD 10, a donation is made directly and in full from the user’s Amazon account. Users can track their cumulative donations via ProcrasDonate’s “my impact” page; they can also request weekly emails with progress updates. A meter bar in the browser add-on, meanwhile, shows how much time has been wasted over the course of the week, gradually turning red when that amount exceeds the user’s set goal.
Much like Pledgehammer—which turns resolution set-backs into charitable donations—ProcrasDonate’s win-win-win potential is what makes it especially compelling. Consumers waste less time; good sites get supported; and charities get helped along the way. Where else could consumers’ ongoing challenges be turned around for good…? (Related: Wrist device rewards kids for exercising — Learning site motivates kids with real rewards — Appealing to gravanity of smokers who plan to quit.)
Website: www.procrasdonate.com
Contact: support@procrasdonate.com
Spotted by: Margarita Barry
Longtime Springwise readers may recall T-Post, the Swedish company we wrote about back in 2006 for its news-based t-shirt subscription service. T-Post is still going strong, and we couldn’t resist mentioning one of its latest issues: an augmented reality t-shirt that lets wearers play a virtual game of Rock-Paper-Scissors.
Focusing on the topic of higher education, T-Post’s Issue No. 51 was designed by 23-year-old Marc Stromberg to reflect the increasing incorporation of games and other recreational activities into mainstream education. With technical help from creative collective Moment 77, Stromberg’s t-shirt design features images of real rocks, paper and scissors. The cool part? When wearing the t-shirt, T-post subscribers can stand in front of a webcam for the ability to play a virtual game of Rock-Paper-Scissors with a computer-generated arm that appears to be coming out of the shirt. A video demonstrates the virtual game in action. Though the t-shirt is no longer available, a printable version of the image is available on T-post’s site.
We’ve now seen augmented reality in a range of apps focused on everything from music festivals to architectural tourism to virtual makeovers, but this is the first time we’ve seen it used in clothing. How could *your* tech-savvy brand use AR to forge some new OFF=ON connections? (Related: T-shirt comes with free music downloads.)
Website: www.t-post.se/rockpaperscissors
Contact: info@t-post.se
Spotted by: Jenny Lau
We’ve seen a few different efforts to document the world through auto-snapping cameras—including both Yahoo’s photo-based marketing campaign and Vicon’s life-caching device—but recently we came across one that adds video to the picture, so to speak. DailyRoads Voyager is a free application for Android-powered mobile phones that enables continuous video recording from moving vehicles.
DailyRoads Voyager is intended to serve as what’s essentially a video black box for cars, recording everything but allowing users to keep only what they’re really interested in. Whether it’s an encounter with unusual wildlife in the road or the sequence of events leading to an accident, the application works in the background to timestamp, geotag and save all videos on the SD card; as space fills up, it automatically deletes the oldest ones unless they’ve been tagged for longer-term storage. DailyRoads Voyager can also take still photos at user-selectable intervals; whichever format is used, it can upload all recorded material in accordance with the user’s preset specifications. The accumulated files can then be easily managed, played back and grouped in selections.
For now, Romanian DailyRoads is still beta-testing the Voyager application. Integration with YouTube, Picasa, Flickr and others is coming soon, the company says. App-dev entrepreneurs: who will build the first interface for seamless accident reporting…? And insurance companies: how about partnering with them? (Related: iPhone app helps State Farm users submit a claim.)
Website: www.dailyroads.com/voyager/
Contact: www.dailyroads.com/contact.php
There’s something appealing about a fixed price of $5. Washington state’s Ferry Farm Stand tapped into that appeal with its grab-and-go bags of produce, and now Israel-based Fiverr is expanding the concept into the world of services.
Similar in many ways to both Mechanical Turk and ShortTask, Fiverr lets anyone sell a service of virtually any type for $5. Those “gigs,” as they’re called, of which there are more than 20,000 already listed on the site, span the spectrum in focus and practicality. Many are much like what one might find on ShortTask—writing positive product reviews on a website, for example—but others venture into much less pragmatic territory, such as furnishing “7 hours, 53 minutes of vacuum cleaner sounds.” Categories on the site include “Fun & Bizarre” and “Silly Stuff” along with the more staid classics such as “Graphics” and “Social Marketing.” For each task sold, the seller receives $4; Fiverr keeps the rest. Both buyers and sellers remain anonymous, while a feedback system enables participant ratings.
Now in beta, Fiverr gives cash-minded sellsumers and minipreneurs a quick, standardized way to sell their skills, both practical and otherwise. One to emulate on a localized or niche basis… or to test out in *your* next big thing? (Related: Computer tasks for workers in the developing world — Bidding system for domestic outsourcing.)
Website: www.fiverr.com
Contact: www.fiverr.com/feedback
Spotted by: Bryce Hufnal
Upscale food trucks have been popping up all over the place for some time now, selling everything from wood-fired pizzas to Korean tacos to gourmet desserts. Now, make way for the double-decker bus, which entered the picture last month complete with a rooftop restaurant.
Aiming to go well beyond the taco truck that’s so ubiquitous on the streets of LA, local entrepreneurs Travis Schmidt and Jason Freeman began with a vintage double-decker, and then spent six months adding a full kitchen downstairs and open-air seating on top. Now, what might well be America’s first “bustaurant” is officially called World Fare, a mobile restaurant that serves up a variety of high-end dishes from around the world. One favourite, for example, is the Bunny Chow, an originally South African street worker food that features a hollowed out loaf of bread filled with chicken curry, coconut milk, chick peas, cashews and cilantro. Also notable are World Fare’s house-made “drinks in a bag,” including strawberry basil lemonade. Like several of the recent contenders we’ve seen, World Fare keeps its fans updated via Twitter; weekly schedules are also posted online.
As economic conditions declined in recent years, street vendors and low-cost curbside cuisine ascended; now, as prosperity begins to improve once again–albeit slowly–it makes perfect sense to see the mobile dining experience get upgraded once again. Foodie entrepreneurs around the world: time to hit the well-heeled streets with a double-decker bus of your very own? (Related: Foodie podcast highlights curbside cuisine — Coffee chariot caffeinates Copenhagen.)
Website: www.worldfare.com
Contact: travis@worldfare.com
Spotted by: Jim Stewart
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