what is kayvaa?
Kayvaa in short is a social high-five, exchanged digitally amongst friends and strangers alike for simply being awesome in one way or another.

Kayvaa is a game that is played by both friends and strangers via the web and mobile networks. The game itself is distributed in that you do not have to come to the site to use it. It should be used in your daily life via mobile and text and on the web. The idea is that in your daily routine or out with friends, you often give each other props, dap, cred, cool points or some variant thereof. Kayvaa is the system that sets rules and keeps the points digitally for this social game that we all play – and allows everyone to play. Kayvaa dap, points, what have you are given to friends that you have made and acquired through the site or it may be given to strangers who have done something that deserves recognition. The underlying principal is to allow people to be recognized for their actions, if the actions benefit the society as a whole.

DESIGN:

version 2 is up, it will get more colour (mandy…) and some more nav in the coming days.

GOT COMMENTS ON THE DESIGN (of kayvaa, I know the blog is tacky) ? LET ME KNOW IN THE COMMENTS BELOW!

what is kayvaa?
Kayvaa in short is a social high-five, exchanged digitally amongst friends and strangers alike for simply being awesome in one way or another.

Kayvaa is a game that is played by both friends and strangers via the web and mobile networks. The game itself is distributed in that you do not have to come to the site to use it. It should be used in your daily life via mobile and text and on the web. The idea is that in your daily routine or out with friends, you often give each other props, dap, cred, cool points or some variant thereof. Kayvaa is the system that sets rules and keeps the points digitally for this social game that we all play – and allows everyone to play. Kayvaa dap, points, what have you are given to friends that you have made and acquired through the site or it may be given to strangers who have done something that deserves recognition. The underlying principal is to allow people to be recognized for their actions, if the actions benefit the society as a whole.

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UPDATE 2:

found it – check out my chi.mp profile.

UPDATE:

Rethinking this it seems that the need for a qr code and new cards are actually in the way of the end result, which is to present a lot of contact information that needs to go in a small space. perhaps the best way to think of this is as a protocol, not necessarily a service – with a vanity name or number that will deliver all of the information that was to be presented to the user’s database of choice. if i had a card that had name, number, company url and a digitalcontact id of 5546 – entering 5546 into the website or mobile app would just import all of that information, additional links, and an image of the contact and the card into my preferred dB. So like a vCard: this is just an expanded version. removing the qr code removes technical hurdles (how do i use this?) and physical hurdles (if have to go through another company to get my cards made now) and allows the end user to provide one simple line of text that will connect the card holder to lots of importable and useful information.

Business cards are not going anywhere for a long time. there has been many attempts to try and replace them with digital alternatives such as beaming a vCard from phone to phone. But honestly have you ever had someone offer you a digital business card alternative of any kind and then been able to retrieve or reuse it? Did it feel the same as the exchange of an actual business card? Handing someone your card has always been a very personal gesture – one that solidifies a meeting and possibly  a prospective relationship. It is somewhat an institution in and of it’s own.

Elegantly presenting all of the information that we like to present in this digital age however, is a bit of a task – but since i have seen the introduction and funding of stickyBits has given me the idea of connecting the traditional business card with the rest of our digital identities, using the same sort of technology (qrCode possibly).

Applying a generic sticker to a stack of cards is not only impersonal but a quite a hassle. If one could order new cards with a digital stamp already added that would link the card holder (either via some sort of recognition built into card scanning software, via mobile device with mobile image recognition software, or with a number/shortcode of some sort in case you do not have the ability to use either of the above).

the link would be to a digital representation of the user who presented the card with whatever social connection information they choose to share (even imagine setting preferences for individual users, based on their email address or some other identifying information).  the site itself is an index, but not necessarily an open one – the key to the connection is the card, and you can only browse basic information until the user has presented you with a card. Access to this would allow you to add all of the users contact information (whatever they have chosen to share with you) to whatever info database they keep.

All this seems complex, but there is already scanning software and libraries built for iphone, android and i am sure windows and mac. The cards themselves would be printed by a third party (white label and drop shipping done for me) and the site would start as a simple frontend (photo, links, about me, about my business) with a simple backend to setup these links and information.

There is an argument to be made that several websites already serve this purpose. Facebook, myspace, my personal blog. All of these spaces are places where we open up portions of our lives to our friends and people who know me. Linked in has this possibility but i do not feel that they are taking their position to the fullest and are expecting people to connect with their website and with others on their site.

The key to this would be offering a professional look and feel, and not be cheesy. The brand should be one that is prestigious and that the user should be proud to be affiliated with. Ordering the cards should be as easy as ordering professional quality business cards or sending us a card to recreate with the (insert the brandname here) digital mark added to it. Introductory cards and services should be free just to get users in.

Comments and suggestions always appreciated.

i don’t know how many times i have gotten a text or photo on my phone and needed to get it back to my pc – like a twitter message that was delivered via sms or an image that i want to save and i am sitting in front of my comp at work or at home.
when the twitter message comes in i can view it on my phone by just clicking the link but it would be so much nicer to view on a desktop. i can either log into twitter and find the post by the person and click on the link there – or i can type the link in while i look at my phone. either way is a bit of a cumbersome process.
What if there was an app where i could select something on my phone and send it to my pc – and once it showed up i could click it from there.
or in the case of an image, i could either save the image and email it to myself – or plug in the usb and collect it that way – but if i had an app to just send it to my pc – that would be much easier.
Another: i hate that i keep all of my passwords on my phone and have to type them in – this should be a simple element that anyone could incorporate into their app and use – passing the password and link to the pc, but noting it as disposable, so that it is not saved in my m2pc history.
So this would be a service that i had a username and password to and once entered on my phone i could just send things back to whatever pc was logged int to it – and it would show as soon as it was received so i could just link to it or save it there.
the service would allow me to see the last x number of things that were sent back to my pc – and browse through them in a web interface.

in my life i have to keep up with lots of small tasks – and i don’t necessarily need help remembering to do them, just need a running track record of if they happened or how many times it happened during the day. did my lawyer call or respond to my email, did i email my lawyer, how many cigarettes did i smoke, was i able to speak to my son this morning, did i go to bed before 12, etc…

all of these things together define my daily routine and then turn into: why is this situation happening?

now if i had a small app that asked me these questions every day, and i could respond with a yes/no, or a number indicate if the response applied to today or yesterday – i start to gain some quantitative data about how my life is going. why was i having a bad week? well, i had 5 cups of coffee every day and went to sleep after 12 most days. at the end of the week I can assume that I have to cut back on coffee and go to bed earlier – or my week will be bad.

I could keep a diary – but that is another thing to do.

if there was an app that allowed me to set some basic questions – and the app asked me daily, then i am keeping a diary of statistical data without the hassle.

the interface would be simple – question and answer, day that it pertains to (today or yesterday), room for a small note to explain further if needed, and a way to dismiss the question all together: something like ‘i am done tracking this’ which would remove the question from the que.
A review, which should be sent weekly, should look at all of the data i am tracking in a calendar and quantitative view. with that data i could hopefully gain some insight into my habits and make some changes for the positive.

so this would be sort of a daily diary twitter style – not a bunch of thoughts written out that i have to go back an re- read, but conscise data in a graph that shows instances per day and their outcome. simple really – a quantitative overview of my habits and their results.

I want to get to the end of the week/month/year whatever and say (with coffee for instance) – i had an average of 3 cups per day, and i was OK – but in sept i moved to 5 per day and started having bad weeks. the 3rd week of sept i started smoking 6 cigarettes per day, probably because i was having bad weeks due to the extra coffee.

if twitter is a concise insight into my thoughts, then this would be a concise insight into my habits.

The Deets:

the app should naturally start on the web, with an xml output that could be used for mobile and desktop versions.

users could sign up – set their initial questions (public/private) and possible responses, and set their question delivery method and time. (cakePHP)
links to livst.at/nathan would see my public questions and graphs
desktop app in air gathers questions from web api and has ability to display at a set time
mobile versions (android,iphone) should be quickly following
widget to embed on my blog/facebook for a particular question or set of questions
api ()
all answer methods should be aware if the daily set has been answered – i.e. my android phone would not ask me if it checked the db and saw that i already answered (by desktop or email). so i don’t get a bajillion popups all asking me the same thing.
public questions and responses could be autoposted to twitter

how will it make money: ads, silly. then sell to yahoo. Profit!

I know I have said this before, but there has to be a single point of consumption for all of these social networks and updates.

A single place that I can go to that aggregates all of the updates and feeds of my friends, news outlets – and it should provide an xml that is consumable by others – for a fee.
I would also like to take this a step further and request iphone and android mobile apps that can consume this xml and provide device specific options for notifications based on user defined groups or individual users. For instance – if a message comes through from mom, I can choose that there be a notification instantly cause it is mom. Or I could choose that I get notifications if there are 5 new posts by mom. Or I could get notifications when there are new posts in the ‘people I love’ category, of which I have added mom as a member.
I would also be able to view all of these in one place – so opening the app I could go to see ‘moms’ updates only by clicking the individual tab and selecting mom (perhaps since I check hers so often or if I choose to do so she could be a favorite so she is easily found) or i could click the tab for the category i made called ‘people i love’ and see all of the updates from the sources in that category.

this app should be intelligent as well, duplicates should be removed (in case there is someone like me who has their twitter tied to their facebook status), pics and videos should be fetched, websites that are refrenced should have a thumbnail, rss should be downloaded for offline reading on mobile devices.

this app should be a single source for all updates, and be accessible and consistent on mobile, web, and desktop.

good ex. of the need and the suggested solution:
http://emptyage.honan.net/mth/2010/02/this-buzz-is-killing-me.html

working with ad operations with a small to medium publisher has allowed me to see an opportunity in the way of providing ad statistics in a way that is easy for the operations person to gather and the advertiser to consume. We are receiving 3-4 requests for statistics a day for basic things such as the number of impressions and clickthroughs – but we also provide a detailed set of reports for amount of video viewed (in quarters), sections that the user clicked to go to the site, which video was playing when the click happened, etc…

all of these events are sent back to our servers to be aggregated and when an advertiser calls to check on them  – we create the reports and send them on which can take a few hours and some custom made scripts to gather.

What if there was a third party to do this for us though – an independant company that would offer ping, clickthrough, and quartile creation, spitting out a short url tied to each event. The advertiser could enter the details: event title, location in the creative, and other metadata – and once the ping was saved the system would return a shorturl to record the event.

Once all of the events for a campaign were created and saved, the system should provide a comprehensive pdf or spreadsheet with the ad events that may be emailed to the publisher or the creative team to place into the creative.

to solve the need for up to date statistics on a particular campaign the system should, on an hourly or bi hourly interval, gather all of the pings that had been sent back to the system and generate an xml document based on the returned data that all parties can see.

the final leg of this is a desktop air application that would fetch the latest event info and present it in raw and graph format, allowing the advertiser the ability to keep up with how their ad is doing on any given network in almost real time. This application could be custom branded to prvide the publisher with additional marketing in the form of desktop real estate.

the business difficulty here is defining the end consumer: is that the publisher – a service that they would buy to provide their advertisers with greater insight into advertising performance on the publisher’s network and a little marketing? perhaps the advertiser: so they can keep up with the statistics across multiple platforms, or even the creative agency – so that they can provide their advertising customers with the data?

in the end, this seems like a relevant and necessary application, no matter who is charged for it…

is omniture an innovator in this space?
(http://www.omniture.com/en/)

Everyday on my way to work I pass the soho hugo boss with it’s interesting items in a minimal arrangement in the window. There is usually some mention of GQ and ther style associated with it. While this shop is not too expensive for my budget, it is enough so that I have to consider a purchase for sometime before making it. With this in mind I often find myself looking, but not entering the store.

The main thing I would need to consider the purchase of a hugo boss suit is more information. Since this place is a bit haughty, and I am usually in a hurry I never stop in to gather that information, which might be just what I need to buy that suit – or better yet, given the right experience, to become a boss customer for life.

That’s when this thought ran into my head: what if there was a touch sensitive display associated with the window? What if I could ‘click’ the suit jacket by simply touching the window where the jacket was. This of course would bring up a display of pricing sizing and description. And would be so fucking neet that many others would gather behind me to oooh and aaaah at the awesomeness of this window display. This would also be costly to develop, cumbersome to setup, a bitch to keep running and produce a hell of a lot of fingerprints on said window.

Shortly after having this thought I struggled to find a much simpler solution. One that combines elegant futuristic design, but also one that combines the ability for the outside customer to gather their own information and is also easy enough for employees to replace/install easily. This comes as a tall order burt I have recently stumbled upon qr codes.

These are simple and printable little matricies of dots that when decoded by a mobile device with a qr code reader, can provide links to urls, actions for the device to take or simply text for the user to read.

combine these with some window cling-on’s in an elegant design and your window design becomes interactive with the user’s mobile device.

A custom branded application (or one that is ‘theme-able’ and changes based on your location, what store you are in front of/in) to allow the customer to quickly scan and decode the qr code and you have a sophisticated way to deliver data to your patrons. Not to mention a business model.

Pricing, additional details, special deals, others bought, others looked at, refer to a friend, save for later,find the best price, share on facebook, twitter it, whatever. You have all of that functionality in the palm of the users hand, making your window shopper a fan, follower or patron in their own time.

So I have been thinking diligently on how a business can keep up with all the references and reviews of it’s brand online. There are separate tools for popular destinations (twitter google whatev) but finding facebook, yelp, citysearch, etc ratings are a matter of eyeballs on pages. If there was a tool to aggregate all of these consumer conversations in one place, and even more – what if you could respond to any of these social mentions directly from the interface.

This application hit a bit more of a nerve the other evening when a friend’s boss texted at 1 am about a review that was posted on city search.

Creating an interface to manage consumer/client public reviews would leave the business owner in touch with their public facing social reviews but also allow them to manage those reviews in one place at one time. And still have time to sleep.

This will need to interface with all major places that there is a way to interact with a public brand, starting with facebook, twitter, citysearch, yelp, and smaller ny metro services as it will be launching primarily in the ny metro area.

The user should have a site agnostic way of seeing all reviews since the last login. Since this will be an app where a business owner or brand manager will hand out these tasks to someone else to manage – this should have an overview with listed reviews, who handled them and quick links to the posted responses. The interface should list the review or statement, a place for marking if it was pos, neg or neutral, and a method of response inline.
The interface should have a setting manager to allow a brand manager to setup accounts and choose notification options (email, sms, twitter dm)
An owner should be able to set these defaults and assign new users/brand managers to the account or remove individuals.

Revenue model:
This could go with two possibilities:
free/ ad based edition and a fee/ pro user edition offering direct response capabilities.
Or a subscription only model

While living in tennesee – I spent a good portion of my teenage years working on a computer into the wee hours of the morning, and during my breaks to either rest my brain or think more I had the privledge of listening to my next door neighbor wail on the drums. He was and still is one of the most amazing drummers I have ever heard. Richard and I would often not talk for weeks even though he was next door – but when we did, I would hear stories about ‘getting gigs’ and shows they had played.

One thing he talked with me about was similar bands in differing areas helping one another get a show at a venue that was ***understanding*** of their music. There were lots of venues to be played everywhere for an up and coming band, but getting on the roster was difficult, and it was hard to know whether all your time was going to pay off. Would the right crowd be there for your style, was there a good turnout on the night you got booked for, how are proceeds from the door split, and what was the sound system like (should you bring your own?).

In one method of finding a place to play – bands or their reps would search for ‘tba’ and a location, producing results for venues that had booked the headliner but had not yet found the opening act or the sideshow.

If there were a central location for band members to rate and review gig spaces they had played as well as a method of swapping these locations out for one another, there would be a app opportunity here.

Imagine a site that allowed band members to essesntially become remote managers for one another. Where bands from one area could help bands from another area get gigs at cool places with responsive crowds and on good nights.
Now I am thinking about the systrm here and I am not sure that enforcing a trade system would be best, mainly because I just read an article about craig from craigslist and how he sees things. His philosophy: provide the means of communication and the people who meet there will work out the details amongst themselves.

I am not even sure of the medium of exchange – some may help others for the clout (or the dap as I referred to it in school), others may do it for the return favor and yet others may do it for money. Whatever the chosen medium of exchange I sure as hell don’t want the site to be a hindrance to the ends of helping local bands go on national tours. This brings new talent to a new area and exposes local bands to new fans. This removes the need for high priced managers and representatives – which in my mind is the only reason left for the huge record labels.

In this ecosystem, bands would need profiles and pics and samples (import or link to myspace?), a rating system to rate the remote reps (linked in style of network with recommendations written – had to asked for by the user, should be suggested after a gig date by the system to the band that was booked), and the service/introduction, and a rating system of the venue that also takes genre into account (47 punk bands said boo, 35 pop rock bands gave a standing ovation)

All thoughts appreciated – especially if you rock. Currie, I am lookin at you.