FreeRice - charity or profit center?

Many people have discovered FreeRice, the fun little website where you test your vocabulary, see some advertising, and have some rice donated to the world's hungry - paid for with a fraction of the funds taken from the advertising revenue.

It is definitely innovative, and at first cut, sounds like a good idea. But is it legitimate? I'm not talking about whether the rice actually gets donated. There is no proof given, but even assuming that it does get donated as promised, is this site moral - or is it a personal profit center based on deceit and greedy taking of the public's good will and time? There has been a bit of discussion on this topic, but not very much considering how much traffic this site is seeing (10's of million's of pageviews per day).

So what is the issue? The problem is that the actual value of the daily donation is tiny and the potential revenue is huge. I've seen estimates on the web that show profits ranging from about $10K to $150K. Mine put it at about $100K (see below). But the main point here is not legal, it is ethical and social.

If the sole premise of a site's existence is to do charitable work, then it must do so honestly. As with other charities and organizations that manage other people's resources, it should disclose what percentage of income is actually given as charity, how much is administrative overhead, and how much is profit. It doesn't matter that the source of the funds doesn't come from the customer's cash. It still comes from the customers - just through their time and attention rather than their dollars. And the ethical requirements of charitable work are different than pure business.

The standard bar for understanding ethical behavior is full disclosure. If the site said what was really going on, and people continue to choose to participate, then the site has cleared the bar and will reap the world's good will. But without saying what is really going on, we have to assume there are nefarious purposes, and significant personal benefit taken from the charity of others. That kind of behavior may thrive for a while, but can't last as charitable work that is honest will take over - and it can't happen soon enough.

My estimate:
200,000,000 approx donated grains (Nov 15, 2007)
25,000 grains per pound
8,000 donated pounds
$5,600 donated dollars (assuming $0.70 per pound)

$5 assumed CPM (thousand ad impressions)
20,000,000 Impressions
20,000 thousands of impressions
$100,000 revenue

ICDL Going to Mongolia

I'm going back to Mongolia next week to finish the job I started last year. The International Children's Digital Library (ICDL - www.childrenslibrary.org), which I am the technical director of, is working with the Mongolia Ministry of Education, Culture and Science on a World Bank-funded project to help improve literacy, and a culture of reading for pleasure.

While the larger project is centered around traditional paper books, there is a surprisingly foresightful effort looking at digital technology. Last trip, I set up an ICDL server in Ulaan Baatar - available at www.read.mn. This time, I'm going to set up some servers in rural schools and to do teacher training (with graduate student Sheri Massey) to explore how technology can be used in places far off the grid.

While Mongolia is slowly wiring up the country, a significant number of soums (i.e., towns) may have electricity, but have no internet. We decided that since we know the internet is coming (eventually), and they were buying computers anyway, we would set up the ICDL on a server in each school, and use the local network to provide access to the 200 new books (plus many of the existing ICDL books) to the children in these schools.

I'm afraid that as crazy as it seems, the only way to set this kind of thing up is to go out there with software (and many, many backups) in hand, and set things up myself. We've got our system configured to now also run on Windows servers with standard distributions of Apache, Tomcat and MySQL. And we've got things set up so it all starts up nicely when the computer starts. And we can even update the library by sending a disk out there, and having someone press a special button (or so we hope).

Installing this software without recurse to help if things go wrong is a bit daunting. Especially because these schools are all 1-2 days drive on cold dirt roads from the Capital and each other. I'm really, really hoping I don't have a bad technology week.

And, of course, I won't be able to blog about the trip until afterwards since I'll have no connectivity - but I'll be sure to have lots of stories when I come back on November 12th.

A Great Computer Scientist - Randy Pausch

You may not know Randy Pausch, but you should. He is truly a great computer scientist - but unfortunately, one who is dying. He was scheduled to give a CS Distinguished Seminar at UMD last year, but had to cancel on account of his illness.

On Tuesday, he gave his "last lecture" at CMU which Allison & I attended. Given that he is brilliant, a wonderful showman, and forthright - and expecting to die before long with advanced pancreatic cancer, it was a talk that is hard to describe the gravitas of - whether you know Randy or not.

While the audience (an overflowing room of 500 or so), was obviously distraught - Randy focused on the lessons of his life. What he was proud of, what was difficult - focusing on what it took to achieve his childhood dreams. And he talked a lot about the satisfaction he has taken in focusing on undergraduate education and broadening the students interested in computer science (through Alice, his very popular 3D system that offers an introduction to programming) among other things.

You may not have the pleasure of getting to know Randy in person, but I promise that you will not be disappointed if you spend the 1.5 hours to watch his talk. Here is a wall street journal article about it.. The weird thing is that the hyperbole in this article is actually understated. The talk was far beyond anything I've heard before.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119024238402033039.html

The full video of his talk is here:
http://www.etc.cmu.edu/global_news/?q=node/42

Randy's personal page and treatment blog is here:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pausch/

FolderShare in slow motion

More than any other software in recent history, FolderShare has changed my work habits, dramatically improving my mobility and the reliability of my data. It is simple file synchronization software that makes all the files (and subfolders) in a folder stay the same across machines across the internet. Adding, removing, moving, or changing a file in one machine results in a near-instantaneous matching change on all synced computers. And it even works on Macintosh (sort of).

FolderShare is amazing because it enables me to go back and forth between my desktop computer at work, my laptop, and desktop at home. (I also use it to collaborate on important shared projects with other people). And by replicating my files across multiple computers, it is a free and simple backup solution. It even gives me the ability to remotely delete files were my laptop to get stolen.

FolderShare was created by ByteTaxi, a startup a few years back, and acquired by Microsoft November 2005. And sadly, Microsoft has not done one single thing since then. The website has not changed. The product has not changed. Actually, that's not true - it got a bit worse. When Apple upgraded their OS some months back, encryption to Mac stopped working, and now the only way you can sync to Macs is to completely disable encryption on all synced computers - pathetic.

Well, they did add a newsgroup, but they don't respond to users. Has Microsoft learned anything about Web 2.0? About the speed of the Web? About being innovative? They acquired an awesome product, and are slowly smothering it to death. Yes, there are rumors that it will re-emerge as a new Live service, but when I saw how pathetic Live's new SkyDrive service is, I came close to losing my last bit of hope. If FolderShare wasn't the best solution of this kind out there, I would have given up on it (and probably Microsoft) long ago, but it is still great (modulo the Mac encryption problem).

So, Microsoft, please, please - be more responsive. Yes, you're a big company - but do you really think sitting on a great innovation for coming on 2 years without any communication to your users is the caring for your users? Has your confidence eroded all awareness of the impact of your actions on people's perceptions and feelings about Microsoft as an entity?

I won't be that surprised if Live does come out with something good here eventually, but I'm afraid that even if the product is revived, my opinion of Microsoft has suffered.