Don G. Park

This is the first post in a series on how to distribute the profits created through a group effort. An incoming generating business has two areas of worth, the income stream and ownership. Measuring contributions to the project is the other half of the equation. This first method was discussed with two collaborators on a current project.

Having a mechanism that is clear and agreed upon lets contributors know what they are getting into and is an effective recruiting tool since potential contributors can make informed conclusions about the potential real-world value of their contributions.

Hourly Weighted Profit Sharing

At the end of each income period, the profits are divided between contributors weighted by hours worked.

This scheme addresses only profit sharing and not ownership. Its a simple plan that requires a certain amount of trust. Lets say the income period is one month. Each contributor records the hours worked throughout the income period. The business income has expenses and reinvestment taken out. What is left is profit. Each person's share is their hours worked for the period divided by total hours worked for all contributors.

Notes

Value: There is no distinction between hours worked by different people. Each person's contribution is considered equally valuable. Each person is trusted to honestly record useful hours worked on the project.

No income: If there is no income for the period, the hours accumulate until there is a period with a payout.

Implementation

We are using a shared google docs spreadsheet to keep track of and total the hours worked. Another spreadsheet will be the general ledger of the business, showing income and expenses. The last day of each month is the end of the payment period.

Legal: In this case, the business is owned by my sole proprietorship. Each contributor is paid on a 1099-MISC form. If significant profits occur over time, another structure such as a partnership should be looked at and probably has better tax benefits.

The Big Idea

The Team

My dreamteam would be

() - Lead Graphics Designer

() - System administrator

() - Lead software developer

() - business development

() - delivery person coordinator

I have names for these positions but I'm not sure about naming them here since its just a draft and they haven't been consulted.

Standard startup items

• elev pitch
• exec sum
• b. plan
• 10-slide pitch deck
• investor Q&A

The last two saturdays have been extraordinary. i have taken to a habit of simply walking out the door on saturday with no expectations and the whole day to do whatever i am lead to do in the moment. Also I have a no-computer policy on saturdays except for communication such as email and twitter. And even then, no sitting in front of a screen for very long - the point is to get out the door. My cell phone keeps me connected anyways.

I was walking down hawthorne from 20th toward downtown. I got to the hawthorne bridge when I got a DM from @pdxsays. It was 7pm. I'm not sure what I did previous to that but the DM changed everything.

@PDXsays: "chk this: 24/7 OR Symp Orch. W|K 7 pm Saturday for 24 str8 hours 4 Nation at War no joke pls RT".

I saw @pdxsays sitting in the benches opposite to mine. I waved to her to come over and we enjoyed the rest of the piano recital. i tweeted that we were there. The next hour was the portland gay mens choir which i had heard of a number of times but have never heard before. We stayed for the next hour to hear them sing. They were tremendous and had written some thoughtful lyrics to go with the war-protest theme. A choir of human voices is possibly the most beautiful sound in the world. In my upbringing, a raised voice was most likely done out of anger or frustration. A choir is the opposite, a powerful sound that communicates love and feeling in cooperation with each other.

The list of performers included Pink Martini, which is a bit misleading as the band was not appearing but a founding member was a prominent organizer and performer during the event, Thomas Lauderdale. @pdxsays and I looked over the schedule and saw that Thomas Lauderdale was performing at 3am. We thought about staying up for it but instead went home to sleep, with a plan to meet again outside my house at 2:30am to return to W+K. I got up and we met and returned on time. The auditorium was now half-full instead of completely full. Which is impressive for 3am. There was a lot of yawning, though I felt rested. Lauderdale started to play on the piano and was mesmerizing, like Li had been. This time there was a tenor, Carl Halvorson, singing pieces of operas in Italian. I was so glad to be there and thought that it was a tribute to the generosity and compassion of the Oregon Symphony, Thomas Lauderdale, and Dan Wieden.

Because of my earlier tweet, @writeinmovement and @justin_nitz joined us at around 3:30am. This was the first example of the power of twitter. I have been following writeinmovement for a while, met her a couple times at the usual events, but we run in different circles. Because of my tweet, she and justin did not hesitate to join us and we had an enjoyable time listening to the music. At about 5, @pdxsays and I left W+K to have breakfast. We went to the 24 hour hotcake house for some greasy omelet goodness. I got home at around 6 and slept for a few hours. It was a good time.

The next saturday I knew that @melissalion was reading from one of her books. It also happened to be at the expo center where a "sustainable living" convention was going on. I had lunch with @yuetsu and mentioned this event. He offered to drive so I rode to the expo center with him. The convention was better attended that i was expecting. @yuetsu tweeted that we were there to hear Melissa. We found her at the "SWAN" (Support Women Artists Now) stage and listened to her recitation and some backstory on the writing of each book and how autobiographical or not, they were. She was charming as usual, and had her son with her. By chance, @brampitoyo was at a lecture on innovation with @lilbutterfly in another part of the expo hall. Because he saw @yuetsu's tweet, he came over to the building we were in, to find us. @yuetsu had another engagement and I wanted to stay and continue to wander around the hall and around the city so I told him I'd stay behind and take the max home. After a few DMs between Bram and myself, we finally ran into each other. I was wondering how our cellphones could be used for location tracking. cellphone GPS accuracy is too low-resolution and has spotty coverage indoors.

Bram and I looked at some more exhibits and then left the expo center to take the max back to town. It was a cold and wet day so we were glad the max was already there and waiting for the right time to leave. I started talking about an ecommerce site I am starting and of the product it focused on. He suggested New Seasons, right on the max line, as a place to fulfill some data points i was looking for on price and availability. We browsed the store, I got some data, and on a whim got a can of sardines in oil, to have something to eat later. We got off the train in oldtown and the rain was still coming down. We walked across the hawthorne bridge and over to cubespace where Bram's bicycle was. We checked to see if anyone from the 'R' dataviz meeting was left over from that morning's meeting (saw it on upcoming.org), then walked in some particularly wet and cold weather to the luckylab. My birkenstocks were soaked and my hoodie rather wet by the time we got there. We ducked under eves and tried to find the driest side of a given block to walk on. I tweeted that we arrived.

I suggested the luckylab because I knew they had boardgames there and its a place that has the right atmosphere to spend a saturday afternoon not doing much of anything. By chance, Russell and Caleb from the Personal Telco Project were already there. We sat with them for a minute and I talked about wifi and caught up with Caleb who is working on his PhD at a university in Colorado. Then we noticed Ray King (@rathbone) of AboutUs playing "Go". It turns out he is an experienced player. Bram and I already talked about playing Go on the max train so he got out a "Go" board and Ray said he'd help us if we got stuck. I knew a little about how to play and with the help of the wikipedia article on the rules of Go, we got started. After some false starts we were starting to get the hang of it. Ray finished his game and instructed us in "capture" go which is a short focused form of go that is a great way to learn. Now Bram and I could really see and understand some strategies and we started to enjoy the game. After about 30 minutes of capture go, Ray left and I got a DM from @pdxflaneur, who saw my tweet and invited us to a birthday party a few blocks away. It was for a long-time friend of pdxflaneur's who was a local expert in performing Balkan music. We heard some of his life story and then a number of his musician friends started playing in the livingroom. I met a couple people and listened to some music. I was glad to have seen it but then got anxious to move on, plus it was getting kind of late (9pm). I walked with Bram down to the food carts on SE 12th. The foodcarts with the unusual hours - Wed-Sat open at 8pm and close at 3am. I've always wanted to try the fries at Potato Champion so we did. They were good and salty and there was a large outdoor space heater that we stood next to under a tent. The heat felt wonderful. Bram dried his wet gloves by holding them out next to the heater. After a bit too much grease and salt, we parted ways and I walked home.

Emotional Deprivation Disorder

"Emotional Deprivation Disorder is a syndrome which results from a lack of authentic affirmation and emotional strengthening in one's life. A person may have been criticized, ignored, neglected, abused, or emotionally rejected by primary caregivers early in life, resulting in that individual’s stunted emotional growth. Unaffirmed persons are incapable of developing into emotionally mature adults until they receive authentic affirmation from another person. Maturity is reached when there is a harmonious relationship between a person’s body, mind, emotions and spiritual soul under the guidance of their reason and will."

Deprivation

"Psychoanalytically, deprivation is the reduced fulfillment of a desire or need that is felt to be essential. Sigmund Freud (1927c) considered deprivation the result of the frustration of a drive that could not be satisfied because of a prohibition, and he was particularly interested in sexual deprivation. Later, psychoanalysis focused on the maternal deprivation caused either by the final or temporary absence of the mother or by her difficulty in providing primary care for the infant—a deprivation likely to have irreversible effects on the child's development."

Attachment Theory

"Attachment theory was extended to adult romantic relationships in the late 1980s by Cindy Hazan and Phillip Shaver. Four styles of attachment have been identified in adults: secure, anxious-preoccupied, dismissive-avoidant, and fearful-avoidant."

• 1972 - age 0 - born, living on NE 111th
• 1972 - age 4 - sister born (already have older brother)
• 1972 - age 5 - brother born (now two brothers)
• 1978 - age 6 - first grade, All Saints
• 1979 - age 7 - second grade, new school: St Rose (now Archbishop Howard)
• 1980 - age 8 - braces (orthodontic)
• 1981 - age 9 - fourth grade, new school: St Therese.
• 1982 - age 10 - parents separated, moved with father to SW Barbur, fifth grade, new school: St Claire
• 1983 - age 11 - parents divorced
• 1984 - age 12 - braces off
• 1985 - age 13 -
• 1986 - age 14 - eigth grade, new school: St Thomas Moore (St Claire closed 8th grade)
• 1987 - age 15 - freshman, Central Catholic High School

ecommerce

inspired by the bacn.com success, a new food store is in progress. it is "simple" ecommerce. portland is a foodie town and there are a number of portland suppliers for the product, which can be purchased in single units. that means inventory on hand can scale from zero on up - very-low startup risk. the focus is on a particular product made as locally as possible. there exists some stores online already, but none stand out in what i have seen so far.

the wordpress e-commerce plugin was tried and quickly discarded after struggling with things like getting an admin screen to load. a new rails project has begun with a focus on the bare minimum, fastest to market feature set imaginable. i expect the site to be online by the weekend.

stage one

stage one is 4 local products and 1 national product in the store, all available at certain portland grocery stories. a completed order will trigger an email for fulfillment (packing and shipping). the html theme will be the focus of improvement since that has such a large impact on the customer experience.

stage two

stage two, which is dependent on some amount of success from stage one, is to implement a crowdsourced local delivery scheme. a page where a list of orders that are ready for delivery can be viewed, and anyone can make a buck by picking up the package at the distribution point and taking it to its destination.

its a few days work and at the very least will be a good learning experience.

on Monday there was a data visualization meeting that i foolishly missed by showing up to the wrong building.

I've got two visualization projects

Android Market Top Apps

Im collecting the top 700 or so apps as they are ranked in the android marketplace, thanks to cyrket.com. The shuffling/repositioning of the apps over time should be interesting. Im thinking a list of the top 100 and an animation as each app changes places, with maybe a lightening of color for each round that an app stays in the same place.

IceCondor location data

Over last fall, I have 35,000+ location records from wearing my cell phone with icecondor running. I have begun to use google static maps to build the frames of an animation, then stitch them together into a movie.

The tag definition site, tagal.us, could be made more useful if tags have a location. Trending tags for a given geographical area could be queried. The current least-effort approach is as follows. A tag is defined as free-form text. URLs in the text are converted to anchor tags. These URLs are added to a job queue. The queue is worked on as needed to scan the contents of the given URLs for location markup. If location markup is found, then the lat/long (address too?) is stored in the tagalus database along with that tag. Its a microformats based approach that takes no extra effort on the part of the tag creator other than including useful URLs in the definition.

For example, if a user is comfortable with Shizzow.com as a database of places, a description for the tag #UGNW might include this url http://www.shizzow.com/places/YIwYMj. Shizzow uses the "geo" microformat.

The HTML from shizzow's place page for the Urban Grind

 <div class="adr">
  <div class="street-address">
911 NW 14th Ave.
  </div>
  <span class="locality">Portland</span>, 
  <span class="region">OR</span> 
  <span class="postal-code">97209</span>
  <span class="country-name">United States</span>
 <div>

 <div class="geo">
  <span class="latitude" title="45.52940800000000">45°31'46"N</span> 
  <span class="longitude" title="-122.68539100000000">122°41'7"W</span>
 </div>

Regarding trending tags: the creation of tags come into tagalus directly. The use of tags do not. Unless tagalus gets a copy of the hallowed, proverbial "firehose" (total twitter stream copy), it might not be practical for tagalus to monitor tag usage. One way is for tagalus to hit search.twitter.com for every tag it knows about, using a frequency adjusted by tag hit count returned in the last search. Maybe trending is not part of tagalus's role.

Statistics about the Android Market for 7-March-2009

Top Applications in All categories (except games).

1. Weather Channel
2. MySpace Mobile
3. ShopSavvy
4. US Yellow Pages Search
5. DailyHoroscope
6. Free Dictionary Org

Top paid apps

The position of the paid apps in the overall ranking are estimated as there is no count and I am doing this by flicking the list and watching the prices (99% are free) scroll by until a paid app shows up.

1. SnapPhoto pro (about #140) $0.99, 1,000-5,000 download count category
2. Hello IM! AOL/AIM (about #200) $9.99 1,000-5,000 download count category
3. dxTop Home Screen replacement (about #300) $3.99. 1,000-5,000 download category
4. Power Manager (about #400) $0.99. 500-1,000 download category

Games category

The top app is PacMan (free) in the more than 250,000 downloads category. Solitare is #2 in the same download category. I had to scroll down about a hundred apps to find the first paid app. It is Retro Defense for $4.99 in the 1,000-5,000 downloads count category.

Summary and Conclusion

The top ranking for-pay non-game, SnapPhoto Pro which is an enhanced photo taking app, has made between $1,000-$5,000. The next spot with Hello IM! made $10,000-$50,000. That is confusing because the IM program that comes with android speaks AIM already. The top game, Retro Defense, has made between $4,990 and $24,950. The for-pay market has been available for 15 days. If we take the middle dollar value and double it for one month, that means Snap Photo Pro is making $5,000 a month, Hello IM! is making $50,000 a month, and Retro Defence is making $25,000 a month. Those are the big winners in the app space.

How many "winners" are there? As soon as we get to the fourth top for-pay non-game app, we get into the $1,000/month category. A successful android non-game app can expect to make $1,000 a month or less.

More information is needed about the number of G1s owners there are. Ive searched the tubes and its hard to get data like that. Anywhere from 500,000 to 1,500,000 units were sold from oct-dec 2008. The market does not say when the app entered the market and the price can change at any time so an app at 1,000 downloads for $5 may have been $1 earlier and recently changed prices.