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I presented an overview of the technology to Ignite Boston 3. The best part was engaging with the crowd. People laughed at the Willy Wonka example, cheered when I said we were an an open source non-profit, and congratulated me afterwards on a great presentation.

Click the >> arrows below the following image frame to page through the presentation.

The above presentation is also viewable as a pdf or google doc.

Most of all, it was a pleasure to talk about a technology that people are excited about using. Will this translate into new developers and researchers joining the team?

The take away message was the third point in our goal to provide customers with

• trusted information on how purchases effect the world
• with respect to a personalized portfolio of interests
• at the point of sale

I brought a few candy bars to the event and encouraged people to see me afterwards to try out text messaging the barcodes to our service. See slide 8 or my next post if you want to give it a try!

Transcript of presentation (as I remember it with some improvements)

slide 1

Hello. My name is Lucy Mendel and I am going to talk about the technology behind Buy It Like You Mean It.

slide 2

Suppose you have just walked into a candy store intent on buying a bar of chocolate. How do you decide which bar to buy? Each bar’s packaging, like this Wonka bar, contains its price, its ingredients and how those ingredients will directly effect your body.

Its packaging won’t tell you …

slide 3

… about the Oompa loompa factory workers being mistreated, or the toxic brown waterfall flowing through the factory. It won’t tell you that the Wonka fortune supports a poor British boy and his bed-ridden grandparents, or that the Wonka company was recently acquired by Big Evil Cocoa, which also owns Organic Chocolates.

Maybe you don’t care about these topics. That’s fine. I don’t care what you care about, but I know you, as consumers, care about more than what is printed on the packaging.

slide 4

Corporations have big effects on the world, but they care about their bottom line.

Consumers spend money, which supports corporations, but consumers also care a great deal about the world.

If we can help consumers make informed purchases, then we can give consumers control over what they care about.

slide 5

The goal of Buy It Like You Mean It is to provide customers with

• trusted information on how purchases effect the world
• with respect to a personalized portfolio of interests
• at the point of sale

slide 6

Gathering trusted information is the biggest challenge in this project. The sheer number of products and corporations is enormous.

At the simplest level, our technology is like Wikipedia. Information about how corporations effect the world is contributed to our web application and peer reviewed.

Our application is more than just a wiki. It has a rich, structured backend to keep track of corporate hierarchies and product supply chains.

The trustworthiness of information is measured by peer evaluation and the authors past performance.

Finally, discussions and analysis on the effects on the world are distilled into quantifiable amounts. This is powerful. We can create charts that meaningfully track corporate performance over time. We can insert these brief “scores” next to advertisements and products on e-commerce sites. We can rank companies on their performance so that users can quickly use that information when deciding what to buy.

slide 7

We want the technology to support a broad variety of interests, while also tailoring information requests to the interests of the asker. Thus, each user has a personalized portfolio that specifies how much the user cares (if at all) about different interests.

When a user requests a product or company rating, that rating is the average of only those interests in the user’s portfolio. Users can specify how much each interest should contribute to the average rating, as well as whether to aggregate ratings up the corporate hierarchy and supply chain.

slide 8

The most important message I want you to take away from this presentation is that consumers need socially responsible information at the point of sale.

You can try this right now. Send a text message of a barcode, eg 18675309, to score@bilumi.org.

Come talk to me after the presentation. I have ten chocolate bars like this one to give away for testing our SMS service.

slide 9

Buy It Like You Mean It is a non-profit. Our technology and content is open source. We are always looking for more developers and contributors.

Finally, come party like an Oompa Loompa Tuesday night at the Somerville Taza Chocolate Factory.

Thanks

(4 min. 30 sec.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 11:13 pm by Lucy and is filed under Events, Technology. You can follow responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.