Can Second Life Founder Philip Rosedale Transform the Way We Work in Our First Life? Watch Our Interview & Decide

Coffee & Power is the new startup from Second Life founder Philip Rosedale, and its goal is to transform the way we work and live in our first life. Last week, producer Ana Alves and I did an extensive interview with him, and this Labor Day weekend, I hope you set aside 30 minutes to watch:

In essence, Coffee & Power links small job requests (online and in the real world) with a community of users who are connected with each other via social media (web and mobile), a game-like ratings system, and virtual currency, Coffee Dollars, which can be bought and sold for real cash. Next week, I'll write more at length why I think this is so transformative, but in this video, here's the main topics we cover:

How Coffee & Power dovetails from Second Life:

They're both empowering open-ended virtual economies where people can build and share small projects and tasks in an online community. Unlike SL, however, the Coffee & Power network is layered over the real world and connected to mobile as well as the web.

How Coffee & Power works for specific missions (i.e. jobs):

They appear dynamically on the C&P site with an offer of Coffee Dollars (the system's virtual currency, which is 1 to 1 with US dollars.) Like Second Life, many C&P tasks are not traditional jobs, and empower people's talents that they might not use in their real world careers. There's a user-to-user trust rating system linked to an MMO-like leveling mechanism, which helps you decide if someone is reliable and competent enough to hire. C&P's developers have added some limitations to prevent gaming of these trust metrics -- for example, you can only rate someone if you've paid them for a complete mission.

How Coffee Dollars work:

You can buy them from the company and you can cash them out at any time. (At which point, your tax information is collected.) While it's pinned to the US$, Philip believes using virtual currency creates some special community affinity and fun that makes it more compelling than just using real cash.

The state of the Coffee & Power global community:

While small (about 1500 missions have been put into the system so far) it's already spread across the world, and the ratio of real world to online tasks is about 50/50. Missions tend to fit the middle ground of work that's smaller than a full time salary job but greater than the kind of micro tasks that are associated with sites like Amazon's Mechanical Turk.

Should Twitter buy Coffee & Power?

There's also a Twitter-like function, where you can follow specific C&P members. This seems to make C&P a very useful application that could easily integrate with Twitter's ecosystem, which in my opinion, makes C&P a good fit with the microblogging social network.

What's the tipping point for C&P?

I believe it's when the community becomes large enough that you take care of most of your real world work and make a sizeable side income. Says Philip: "We're not seeking to replace your 9 to 5 job... at least not yet." C&P also helps answer the question, what will the global village look like?

Can C&P connected the developed world to the developing world?

Mobile penetration is extremely large in Africa and other developing regions, which unlike Second Life, makes C&P a potentially powerful way to connect the developing world with the developed one. (Africa has already innovated the use of virtual currency for real goods and service, with mobile minutes.)

Can something like C&P's gaming/leveling system be applied to Second Life?

Philip believes that's possible, and as Chairman of Linden Lab, he'll be advocating features like that for SL's developers.

Much thanks to my friend the lovely and talented social media producer and metaverse consultant Ana Alves, (Irah Anatine in SL) who shot and edited this video (and heroically worked around some pretty echo-filled footage.)

Visit Ana's site here, and read her guest post on NWN, "Second Life and the Grid of Presence".

 

Comments

[Geo Meek]

How about a Coffee & Power in Second Life?

[Hamlet Au]

You can put SL-related tasks *into* C&P, I've seen some crop up already.

[melponeme_k]

Yay, Free Trade dressed in the Emperor's new clothes.

Heaven forbid anyone gets paid a living wage to beat inflation.

[EnCore Mayne]

genius! again.

[Rusalka Writer]

If nothing else, he has managed to create the ugliest website I've seen in several years.

[Isadora Fiddlesticks]

with the recession, you need every little opportunity to get something on the table...may it be a full time job or something on the side. we should be open to any kind of jobs, big or small just so it can keep us off an unproductive life. nowadays we have to be flexible...websites like this makes it possible, secure and easier.

as i see it, C&P takes off where craigslist or have left off...and yes, this is very promising and significant.

[Isadora Fiddlesticks]

craigslist or odesk...

[bongo]

Very creative, he can hire a "customer base" from "freelancer.com" then turn around and sell the "buisness" to another tech company with stock that has a value.

[melponeme_k]

"with the recession, you need every little opportunity to get something on the table...may it be a full time job or something on the side. we should be open to any kind of jobs"

This depression is permanent. It makes money for those who managed to climb into the elite.

Slave labor makes them super rich.

Nothing will change until we make change by standing up to them.

What this man is offering all and sundry are pipe dreams. Its a delusion of jobs, our real work, our real blood, sweat and tears for a useless FUNNY MONEY MONOPOLY MONEY. That may or may not be worth real currency (more likely NOT). WAKE UP ALL!

[bongo]

yes, we're all just migrant coffee workers to Senior Rosedale... en la casa.

[Daniel Voyager]

Great interview. :)

It would be nice to see a region just for Coffee & Power in Second Life for everyone to visit.

Like the LoveMachine region.

[Ignatius Onomatopoeia]

I'm with melponeme_k on this. Bruce Sterling noted, long ago, that in the Regan Era we moved into a New Victorian social order, with vast gaps between the movers and shakers and those they shake (down, generally).

Philip is an optimist, and that's always a delight (I want to believe!) but it's not the whole story. If our downturn in epochal, then we may want to pair Philip's predictions with Peak-Oil and New-Urbanist writer James Howard Kunstler:

"We're leaving behind [our old] kind of economy, with secure salaried plug-in positions provided by giant corporations and governments. We're headed into a world not of 'jobs' but of vocations, trades, crafts, situations, and a lot of casual labor, largely self-guided by those with who possess a functioning internal compass."

Difference? Without enough fossil fuels to run our suburban Consumerama as-is, we'll be living like our grandparents did in 1930 in 2030. We may be connecting to our day-labor in new ways, but I agree with Kunstler's view, not Philip's, that it won't be a utopia.

Coffee and Power? Better name might be "brother, can you spare a dime (for eBaying my junk or doing my laundry)?"

[Dizzy Banjo]

This is interesting and optimistic. Feels a bit too similar to a micro version of eLance.com and other services for comfort. I'm a bit unclear what C&P's business model is - do they take a cut of transactions?

I like the movement of micro job / payments concepts from SL over RL. However, those concepts were there in RL before they were in SL.. in different forms, I guess this is a particular way of facilitating them.

Saying all that - it looks like Philip and Ryan are doing some creative new product thinking and creating something that really relates to todays market place, considering all the things going on in tech now. Maybe this could be where we look for innovation from the 'ex SL gang'.. ;)

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I'm amused by the ongoing efforts of neoCalvinists to portray servitude for sustenance as some sort of virtue.

Coffee & Power will work when you can get doctors, lawyers, landlords, grocers, professors and other providers of goods and services to work for coffee bucks... at rates of compensation set by the consumers. That's the missing balance in the Power equation.

[Rae]

I sat through the first few minutes of the interview and the idea sounds something like what is already being done by elance.com, with a few additional bells & whistles.

[Hamlet Au]

From what I can tell from the Elance.com site, there's actually a lot of significant differences: That one is in great part B2C, doesn't have a virtual currency or gaming system, and is online only. C&P is almost exclusively C2C, and half the tasks are real world. But as Philip acknowledged at the top of the interview, there are other startups working in this space.

[Dani Durant]

I am a older person; Philip Rosedale,to me, changed how I see myself, and millions of others. Whatever he applies himself to, it will work, for him. And that is the crux of SL. We do it for us. It may be complex, but it is that simple. The rest follows.
Good luck Philip with this new venture:)and ty Hamlet for posting this interview.