without thought

Watt’s next?

2008 looks set to be the year of the ‘We’. Today, Tech Crunch announced the launch of a new online product called Kluster. Kluster is designed to help companies take advantage of a sea of on-line talent and may have a solution to one of the chief concerns bugging democratization; ‘What’s in it for me?’. Kluster appears to have an answer to that quandary with a currency system referred to as ‘Watts’. Tech Crunch quotes CEO Ben Kaufman

“Our Watt system is like a currency. You get a certain amount of Watts. As you do more things you get more Watts. Instead of voting on ideas, you invest your Watts in concepts you like.”

So if this system works, Kaufman’s company may well be the first to successfully apply capitalism to what (think ‘Open Source’) has generally been described as a socialist model. Kluster is due to be Beta tested at the this weeks Ted conference. The conference, which I’m told is quite exclusive, explores ‘ideas worth spreading’ and it will be very interesting to hear how the concept behind Kaufman’s Kluster gets received. Seemingly Kaufman will be talking at the conference so lets hope we can look forward to coverage of those talks on Teds site in the next week or two. In the meantime a quick glance at the comments on the Tech Crunch article are none too encouraging but as Don Tapscott points out on Google talks (_04), every revolution has its fair share of Luddites. (Thanks to Imelda for putting me wide to this story).