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29 Jun 2004 by Jason Fried
I love this. TreoCentral, a community site built around the Palm One Treo Smartphone series, needs a driver so the Treo 600 can use standard bluetooth cards:
We want Bluetooth on our Treo 600 and we’re willing to pay for it. Sure, we could wait for the “next generation” Treo, which will have built in Bluetooth, but we don’t want to have to upgrade our Treos just to add Bluetooth functionality.
So, instead of just complaining, they are asking their members to put their money where their collective mouths are. They’ve started a donation-driven Bluetooth Bounty to raise the necessary development funds to make this happen. The first person to develop a working bluetooth driver for the Treo 600 wins the pot (over $3900 at last count).
This is the free market system at its best. Got any other examples of sites/companies raising money on a build-this-feature basis?
3 comments so far (Post a Comment)
29 Jun 2004 | Brad Hurley said...
I would love to see more things like this.
Back in the early 90s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency created an incentive program that was unofficially called "The Golden Carrot," in which a bunch of electric utilities pooled a large sum ($30million) to be awarded to the appliance manufacturer that could successfully bring to market the most efficient CFC-free super-efficient refrigerator. It spurred a lot of innovation and new technology. Actually in this case the pool of money was used to fund rebates to offset the product's incremental cost, thus ensuring that the winning company (Whirlpool, in this case) would sell more units.
Anyway, I think the concept is great; you just need to gather a critical mass of people who are willing to put up real money to make it happen.
29 Jun 2004 | Jason Gerner said...
Most definitely. The GNOME (and related projects) bounties:
http://www.gnome.org/bounties/
29 Jun 2004 | Jason Gerner said...
Forgot to include a link to the Shuttleworth bounties as well:
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/bounty.html
And here's the previous URL as a fancy hyperlink :)
http://www.gnome.org/bounties/
