The vision of The Extraordinaries

It has always been a challenge to tap a volunteer for a few moments. It’s a management issue, and a productivity issue. What good can someone actually do in such short time? Then in 2007, Apple introduced iPhone and revolutionized the mobile industry. It was just the beginning, as mobile is now the focus of innovation for Apple, Google, and more.

With smartphones, we finally have mobile Internet fast enough and devices powerful enough to make someone truly productive from any place with cell reception. It is now possible to harness a few minutes, and have it actually matter. Realizing this was our moment of obligation: How can we use this technology for social good?

So, we created mobile smartphone software designed to facilitate crowdsourcing (a large task, broken into little pieces, and worked on by many people). Typically, these tasks are small, requiring only a few minutes to complete.

Many successful businesses use crowdsourcing. In only two years, iStockPhoto dominated the stock photo industry by crowdsourcing its photographs. InnoCentive has solved tough scientific problems by crowdsourcing solutions from amateur scientists. Wikipedia uses crowdsourcing to generate millions of articles from amateur writers.

We bring crowdsourcing to mainstream volunteering.

We have completed iteration one of our iPhone software and we will soon launch pilot tests. Over the next five years, we will expand to Blackberry, Google Android, Windows Mobile, and more. We will also launch a desktop widget to give regular computer users the ability to use a few moments for social good as well.

With millions of smart phones being sold over the next few years, anyone with a few minutes free will be able to log in and contribute to projects for social good, and use their collective spare energy to advance humankind. As people get hooked on doing good through easy, short, and non-intimidating tasks, this will act to feed new people to traditional volunteering and increased engagement.

Comments

[UpDog]

This is phenomenal! Is there a tax angle to be had here? i.e., if professionals could get a write-off would it increase the amount of help given?

[JacobColker]

Thanks UpDog, great thought! we've thought about that and we may build it into a later version. Do you know the tax law? Any resources you can think of?