The Millenials are coming...
The Internet as we know it, is only 5,000 days old. Until now, all the amazing advances in society have been done on the Internet with a traditional computer and a hard wire cable plugged into the wall.
This is a Kitty Hawk moment in history, and the world is about to change.
With mobile Internet, smartphones are finally powerful enough to do amazing things remotely from anywhere on Earth within cell reception. No more walls or wires, the Internet is now fully woven into every moment of our lives. NOW is the moment to embrace the Information Era and step into the future of volunteering.
iPhone and iPod Touch users love mobile Internet, and they love the applications they can load onto their devices even more. Since July 11, 2008 (the date the App Store launched), more than 500 million applications have been downloaded in six months (Apple.com). Facebook for iPhone has already achieved 4.5 million users, and the recently launched UStream Video Service had 118,000 downloads in the first 24 hours. The iPhone isn’t just a phone, it’s a revolution in technology, and companies like Microsoft, Google, and RIM are rushing to catch up.
To-date, Apple has sold more than 13 million iPhones, and 8.5 million iPod Touches. Even more impressive, the iPhone alone represents 48% of mobile Internet usage in the U.S. (Admob, Dec 2008).
By Q3 of 2011, we plan to engage 785,000 mobile volunteers in small windows of time on a monthly basis. Over the next few years, as we develop our software for more smartphone platforms, build Facebook integration, earn media coverage and word of mouth, build partnerships and a record of success, and expand into other countries, we expect the number of users to skyrocket.
With our system, large social projects finally have critical mass, and the new technology will create thousands of possibilities we never imagined.
For example, the Library of Congress has tens of thousands of historical photos sitting on dusty servers with no way to search these archives. You can't type in "birds" or "1927” you must literally look through each photo one by one. Not very efficient! For a few people to catalog these photos, it would take years. With The Extraordinaries, thousands of volunteers could digitally label a few photos at a time. Just pick up your smartphone, look at a photo, tag it, and repeat. With a few weeks of effort from the crowd, entire photographic eras in history could be accessible to the public.
Our dream is to answer this: “What social problems can we solve with a million people working on them in brief moments of spare time?
(Photo Credit Unknown -- contact Jacob@TheExtraordinaries.org if you are the photographer)
Image looks like 10-250 lecture hall at MIT - whose director of admissions Marilee Jones coined the term millennials, I think. Intentional?
Posted by: Ehren | February 09, 2009 at 04:12 PM