myavkow: Making Money Web

The Education Tech Series is supported by Dell The Power To Do More, where you’ll find perspectives, trends and stories that inspire Dell to create technology solutions that work harder for its customers so they can do and achieve more.

Non-profit organizations and passionate individuals have found a slew of creative ways to leverage social media and the class='blippr-nobr'>Internetclass="blippr-nobr">Internet to make the world a better place. Online campaigns help provide clean drinking water, food and malaria-preventing bed nets to people who need them.

Creative uses of the web are helping to provide and enhance education. These four projects, for instance, found innovative ways to help build schools through digital campaigns.

1. Epic Change

Epic Change has become a model for raising money using social media. Since 2008, its annual TweetsGiving has asked people to tweet about what they’re thankful for while making a donation. The strategy was so successful that #tweetsgiving became a trending topic on Twitter during the first year’s campaign.

Starting out, the benefactor of TweetsGiving was a school in Tanzania that was founded by Mama Lucky Kamptoni, a passionate local woman who started the school using money she earned from her poultry business (now there are two more benefactors). Epic Change wanted to help her rebuild and expand the school.

The organization also launched To Mama With Love, a website where users can make a donation by creating a “heart space” for a mother they care about. The “heart space” is a collection of photos, videos and words dedicated to that mother. Other people who care about that mother are invited to donate in her honor.

From one of the classrooms that was built using donations from these campaigns, the students now tweet and connect with the rest of the world.

“So often, we hear the stories of children in the so-called ‘developing’ world from the perspective of the media, non-profits or friends who have traveled or volunteered,” explains the Epic Change Blog. “What happens now – when these students can share their own stories, and build relationships with the rest of the world, for themselves? How will the world be different when these children, who live so geographically far away, move into our virtual backyard? What difference will it make in their lives to know that their voices will be heard?”

2. Stillerstrong

When Ben Sitller launched the Stillerstrong campaign on YouTubeclass="blippr-nobr">YouTube, Twitterclass="blippr-nobr">Twitter and a branded website, he did it with a video that poked fun at Lance Armstrong’s Livestrong campaign. It was hard to tell if he was kidding.

But the campaign, which sells Stillerstrong headbands and accepts donations by text message and credit card, has raised about $300,000 to help provide temporary schools for Haitians displaced by January’s earthquake. At the time the campaign was announced, the organization and its partners Causecast and the Global Philanthropy Group were expecting each school to cost between $45,000 and $55,000.

3. TwitChange

Instead of auctioning off celebrity memorabilia to support a charity, TwitChange hosts eBay auctions for celebrity Twitter interaction. The donation’s bidders put down to have a celebrity follow them, retweet their tweet, or mention them in an update. The proceeds go to aHomeInHaiti.org, which will use them to build a home and school for children with disabilities in Haiti.

The first auction in September raised $531,640.25. The website instructs us to “stay tuned for the celebrity tweet auction coming this holiday season.”

4. University of the People

Less of a “campaign” than a full-blown effort to democratize education, University of the People provides tuition-free higher education through an online campus.

Since launching last year, the university has accepted about 700 students from 100 different countries to its three- to four-year programs for business and computer science. Recently the university opened computer centers in Haiti so that students with limited Internet access could enroll in its courses.

“I do believe that if we take the millions of people around the world who could not afford going to university and teach them tuition free, we’re not only changing their lives, and their family’s lives, we also change their communities, their countries,” founder Shai Shai Reshef says. “And if we have a lot of them, we will change the world for a better world.”

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More Social Good Resources from Mashable:

- How Online Classrooms Are Helping Haiti Rebuild Its Education System/> - Why Social Media Is Reinventing Activism/> - 5 Creative Social Good Campaigns for the Holiday Season/> - 4 Real Challenges to Crowdsourcing for Social Good/> - 9 Creative Social Good Campaigns Worth Recognizing

Image courtesy of iStockphotoclass="blippr-nobr">iStockphoto, urbancow

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Since a few people told me they found my notes on cloudtop applications useful when I posted them a few months ago, I thought I'd share some more notes in the same spirit.

Part of my immediate motivation was when my friend Andre wrote up some notes on building a Web-scale app in a weekend, Jason Kottke made a smart mention of the difficulty of delivering messages, as evidenced by Jeff Atwood's post earlier this year. If these smart folks are struggling so much, surely there must be another option?

Well, I've noticed a pattern that suggests there is a better way. This time it's not a pattern in end-user applications, but rather in infrastructure services, which I'd call "Delivery as a Service." In this model, new offerings provide a set of message delivery services for developers that share a few common traits:

Digital services that pre-date the Web, or were designed without the Web in mind, can now be exposed as simple Web services

Legacy platforms that require extremely expensive startup costs convert into a cost-per-message (or cost per thousand messages) model

Message systems with effective anti-spam components usually exert a high cost on spammers that can also be a prohibitively high bar for small developers unless they're able to pool their efforts

Service providers can aggregate requests from many small, separate applications to make costly services approachable for independent developers

You can figure out what the hell these service providers do, unlike many generic Web service providers

With those traits in mind, who's providing Delivery as a Service systems now? I'm sure this is a far-from-comprehensive list (suggestions very welcome!) but these are the few that got my gears turning:

Urban Airship: Love these guys. Primarily focused on doing push notifications to iOS-powered Apple devices, they're rapidly expanding into related in-app sales, rich-notifications, and other areas. While Apple does offer an API for its notifications, it's not as easy to use and Web-friendly as UA's offerings, and they handle much of the other infrastructure requirements that would otherwise be onerous.

Postmark: Good old-fashioned email! It turns out that, these days, delivering email that doesn't get marked as spam is actually kind of a pain if you're not a huge provider. And much of the commercial email market it optimized for direct marketers. But Postmark has an interesting niche in providing the valuable email capability for developers that don't want to spend precious development cycles on boring-ass email.

Twilio: Perhaps the most impressive of the bunch. Twilio handles voice, IVR and SMS functionality for many apps, with a really simple API that any developer can work with.

Now, individually, none of these capabilities are particularly new. (Though of course, iOS push notifications have only been around a relatively short period of time.) But making them broadly available, accessible through simple APIs with code libraries available in common programming licenses, and having initial access be available for pennies or even for free? That represents a big change.

Tomorrow's Implementation of Yesterday's Technology, Today.

With the proliferation of these services, features that would be "someday" or "after we get funded" features can be pushed up much earlier in a product's lifecycle. And markets that would otherwise be underserved are now approachable; Every company that's putting money into developing an iOS app around their services could use Twilio to provide a robust SMS-based interface at the same magnitude of cost. The early signs of success for each of these little companies is promising too; It might inspire bigger infrastructure providers like UPS (which has its own API for shipping services) to market their services more like these startups as well.

I find delivery services most compelling in the context of how they serve the "cloudtop" apps I described a few months ago, but I can see these being equally important for enterprises or other environments as well. We need more simple services to connect to the real world, to "old-fashioned" technology that isn't Web-centric, but that could still be enhanced by being connected to the Web. Making a RESTful API for faxing might not be sexy, but it could enable some businesses to reach new audiences or do something creative with all of those underutilized rolls of thermal paper. If you can think of services like this that should exist, or if you've built one, let me know in the comments.

This post originally appeared at Dashes.com.

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Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Making Money Web