“Where’s my added-value?”
I threw off a social network, but who who needs another one of those? Mine has recruitment, participation and retention incentives, where none of the others do – and no need for advertising and all the staffing that goes with it – but maybe that doesn’t amount to much of a difference.
I threw off a few smaller businesses and implied a bunch more: Branded-and-packaged versions of the ThriversEd games, a publishing house/content marketer, even a career plan for writing kid-lit best-sellers.
And throwing off a plan to influence one-third of all discretionary spending – “You know, for kids!” – seems like kind of a big deal to me.
Maybe not. The best question any prospective buyer can ask is, “Where’s my added-value?” Apparently I need to build more value into my efforts.
Rebuild education so it actually works?
“Eh.”
Restore, refortify and renew Western Civilization?
“Meh.”
How about I figure out a way to kill Yelp?
“Now you’re talking!”
Just teasing. Any dog can nose out a proximate meal, but only Bloodhounds go sniffing for more-distant victuals. Even so, an API built out of the PEAK matrix could eat Yelp, eat the ‘Like’ button and piggy-back on anything, recruiting new end-users and API clients as it goes.
I’m not even going to plot this out, it’s that simple. The dataset is just four one-to-five-star scores weighted to yield the overall score, along with the housekeeping details: Event, date, Dutch Uncle, evaluated, evaluator and perhaps a brief comment field. You could pack the whole thing into one net-packet – a microformat.
That’s just details, trivial and pointless unless the underlying strategy is right. The PEAK idea – everyone evaluates and everyone is evaluated – contains within it a lifelong habituated self-improvement praxis (but who needs that?), so evaluations of things – from restaurants to blog comments – could yield that same kind of trend analysis.
PEAK seems ideally brief to me, where the ‘Like’ button is useless and the long-form Yelp-style review rewards only corruption: Hyperbolic outrage or sweet, loving lies. Plus which, since kindness is the key to PEAK, unkind – hence, unreliable – evaluators will sort themselves out of consideration in no time.
Not just a Yelp-killer, but a Yelp-killer that does what Yelp and many other SAS-asses try to do, but does it better, faster, cheaper, more-reliably and more-usefully – for the evaluated, the evaluators and the onlookers – and, plausibly, eventually, universally, all across the internet and in-real-life by way of mobile devices.
Everyone helping everyone else get better at everything every day – with the PEAK API surfacing the best of everything, turfing the worst, and maximizing the perfectibility of every single work of the mind.
All that from a few gold stars – the giant-killer to end all giant-killers looking like nothing so much as magic beans.
Seriously: How much more added-value do you need?
