In his book Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling imagines a future where objects are tagged, tracked, and all tell their own stories. He calls these objects “spimes.” I read the book years ago, but it was the first thing I thought of when I visited SendMeHome.
The site is wacky but brilliant. It lets you register any object with a unique code, which is printed out on a small sticker that you place on the object. The object can be anything from your wallet or iPhone to a beloved frying pan. Ostensibly, the purpose of doing this is that if you should ever lose the object, anyone who finds it can contact you through SendMeHome. By entering the code on the sticker, they can learn anything you’ve decided to share about yourself or the object, and can contact you anonymously. SendMeHome offers this service for free, but charges $3.99 for a pack of stickers. (It doesn’t get involved in actually getting your item back to you).
The lost-and-found feature is the only practical reason you would use the service. But once you’ve attached a sticker to a favorite object and registered it on the site, there are other things you can do with it. You can tell a story about the object, pass it around, or put it on a mission. It is on its way to becoming a spime,. These spimes are “always associated with a story. . . . they are protagonists of a documented process,” as Sterling once described it.
Games for the Oprah crowd is how Akoha co-founder Austin Hill describes his online gaming system. The system uses “mission cards” that friends pass to each other along with a mission i.e. give someone a book or buy someone a meal. You then register that card and perform the mission. Using clever social networking tools you can see how your missions effect others, compete against friends, and generally do nice things for people.
One of tomorrow’s TC50 presenting companies is Akoha, a web-based social game aimed at spreading good deeds around the world. I can’t really tell you more than that. But if you want a Mystery Starter Kit sent to you so you can be one of the first people in the world to play, we have 500 invites here.
And no, you won’t find much more information on its site. The company is launching tomorrow. So it’s Website still just a landing page. But if you are Robert Scoble, and think it sucks, there is a special link there for you.
Akoha, a startup working on a “new type of multiplayer online/offline social game”, has raised $1.9 Million in funding from angel investors. The company won’t release details about the exact nature of their game until this Fall, but they have stated that it was inspired by “elements of social entrepreneurship, massively multiplayer and reality-based games.” As far as we can tell, it will mix user-generated content with casual gaming elements, both online and in the real world (think geo-tagged photos taken on a cell phone). People will play for both fun and charity.
Akoha was founded by Austin Hill and Alex Eberts, who together co-founded Zero-Knowledge Systems (now Rdadialpoint) in 1997. Among the Canadian angel investors are David Chamandy (co-founder, Lavalife), Ron Dembo (founder, Zerofootprint.net), film producer Jake Eberts (Chariots of Fire, Ghandi), and seed fund Montreal Start Up.
