Philip Rosedale's Latest Project, Coffee & Power, Connects Location-Based Projects to Virtual Currency

Coffee and Power, the latest project from Second Life co-founder Philip Rosedale, is now in open testing for folks who live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Sort of like Foursquare meets Craigslist, Coffee and Power uses the Google Maps API to connect people in a local region who need tasks accomplished with those who have the time and resources to accomplish them.

Called “missions”, these tasks can be completed for cash or barter. For example, Philip himself is currently offering to give someone an hour of startup CEO advice in exchange for lunch (see pic.) Like Second Life, the system also has its own internal virtual currency, C$, which can be spent in future projects, or converted into real cash.

It’s a very compelling idea and another example of a broader trend which Rachel Botsman calls “collaborative consumption”: Leveraging the power of social media and Internet APIs to create online communities based around sharing real resources with speed and efficiency. For Philip Rosedale, it’s also very much like the user-generated world of Second Life, which operates in a similar way, just in a virtual context.

“Coffee & Power is like Second Life,” Rosedale told me in an email, “because it's a place where people can create new and unique value. SL empowered people to create digital things and be helpful to each other as avatars. C&P does something similar - it creates a common place where people can create a new kind of value - this time because they have different skills and are physically near each other in real life.”

Philip says his experience in Second Life will apply in this real world context as well:

“From SL, I learned that people loved to learn new things and take on new skills,” as he put it. “This was then borne out in the worklist and Coffee and Power.” (The worklist is an earlier project from Rosedale’s new startup, LoveMachine.)

“People can do things that other people think they can't - more often than not. So this will help with C&P as it did with SL.”

For Philip Rosedale, it’s also the latest iteration of ideas that began even before Second Life. As Linden Lab staffers have put it to me, Philip’s projects are usually spinoffs of previous ones. In the late 90s, Rosedale created The Rig, a virtual reality/haptics feedback system, which led to Second Life, which led to The Love Machine, Linden Lab’s task management system, which led to the LoveMachine startup, and now... Coffee & Power. With the growth of social media and mobile computing, this could be the idea that has the broadest impact.

Comments

[Melponeme_k]

Horrible.

Getting fools who should know better to work for free.

Fact...The knowledge people are using to do these "missions" have real world, real debt causing price tags.

The free work will be used for monetary profit but the fools who did it will just get...coffee.

Wake up people.

[Botgirl Questi]

A similar site just launched: http://mashable.com/2011/05/18/zaarly/

[Osprey]

Very like a reverse Fiverr.

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

Bright new shiny object...of the month.

[detoxification]

I benefit reading this article. I demand to learn more on this topic

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I'll code for food. Hell, feed me, pay my mortgage and utilities, and give me a little spending money now and then, and I'll give you a LOT of code. In point of fact, that's pretty much what I'm doing in my current dead-end job.

Without a graduate degree, without being a central-casting stereotype of a whitebread IT geek, without an H-1B visa and Indian surname, that's about the best you can hope for these days.

If Philip has a better offer, I'm all ears. I'll consider any framework that focuses on what I can deliver rather than my papers or my looks.

If I had to live in San Francisco... ah, if only that were possible. That would be yummy frosting on the cake.

[Ajax Manatiso]

So Phil is willing to do CEO work in exchange for a lunch? He's down to "will work for food"? That's sad.

[rikomatic]

I played with the app for a bit yesterday. I think it's a really fun idea for places like SF and NYC. I really do want Philip to teach me how to arc weld.

Don't know how it would work beyond major metropolitan centers.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

How would it work beyond major metro areas? Hmmm... well, I know of this virtual world where your physical location is immaterial....

[Ciaran Laval]

Looked at this today, nice concept and I'm surprised they haven't developed an SL version.