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Proposal from knightcontest.com

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The Continuum Project - Location Based Services for Web and Mobile Publishing

Primary Contact Name

Miss Fang Lin

Describe your project

The Continuum Project (CP) will use Mo'Blast technologies to help local communities establish an online presence. Mo'Blast Inc., an innovator in location-based technologies, has developed a scalable solution for the geotagging, aggregating, and distribution of multimedia content on the Web and mobile phones. The system (Mo'Blast), currently in alpha stage development, includes the following: a global landmark database; support for geotagging (latitude, longitude, altitude) of content in text, photos, audio, and video formats; a local search engine; distributed systems and distributed caching facilities for speed and performance; open APIs for third-party developers; and a low cost structure. Furthermore, Mo'Blast provides end-to-end transcoding and image processing services so that videos and images from different sources (Web cam, mobile phone, and video cameras) can be uploaded, processed, and streamed efficiently in real-time, on the Internet. The proposed Continuum Project will be a toolkit built on top of Mo'Blast. It will be free for non-commercial use. CP will provide a set of tools for a content moderator to create a channel (online community), assign it a location, define a locale (language and timezone), invite members, and assign write permissions. CP will also allow skinning of Web sites and adding/removing of tools and third-party widgets. Content creators will be able to submit content via smart phones and computers. Once published, channel content is accessible to members on Internet enabled devices. Community members can discover content by proximity (where I am), by channel, by tags, and by time. Alternatively, members can define a radar (area of interest) to see an aggregate view of all channel postings inside that radar.

Primary Contact Email

flashgirl111@yahoo.com

Organization or Business Name

Mo'Blast

Who would want to use it and why?

Schools, non-profit organizations, community advocacy groups, and city services will want to use CP to promote, inform, and engage their community members. To inform, the local police or a citizen watch group would want to set up a channel to alert people nearby, a crime has occurred. CP will have a proximity broadcast feature that allows the moderator to define a range of broadcast, such as 25 miles from a crime scene. People with radar set to that area, or has the “I'm here” feature turned on, will receive an alert on screen. To promote recycling volunteers and community groups, can use CP to landmark places to drop off batteries, old cell phones, computers etc. CP, therefore, is a tool for a community and a tool for a group of communities to exchange ideas and work together.

Why are you the best person or organization to develop this project?

Mo'Blast is the best company to develop this project because our expertise is technology. We are geeks. We know what kinds of problems can be solved by software since, in all likelihood, we have either solved it or have seriously thought about it. This is precisely the case here. We believe having developed Mo'Blast location-based platform gives us significant advantages over our competitors. We have, in our estimate, a 90% head start in the race. In addition, we have solved the two most difficult problems plaguing existing location-based service (LBS) solutions; scalability and cost. Current solutions cannot support growing number of users on a global scale without incurring inexorable cost or performance penalties. Mo'Blast has overcome those issues. Lastly we hope you would pick us, because we sincerely believe in the merit of our product and the benefits it will have to local communities.

U.S. State

Country

United States

What potentially bigger thing might happen if everything went perfectly and the stars all aligned?

Socially, people will perceive CP as the place to find and bond with other locals who share the same passion. As a result, more people, especially the tech-savvy generation, would partake in local community projects became they feel empowered. Technically, the project will support millions of users and attract many third party developers to our platform. CP would popularize widgets on its geographical community platform similar to how Facebook spurs widgets development on their social network platform. Finally, Our APIs would be building blocks for future geospatial applications.

How will you be able to measure whether or not your project has really made a difference?

We will measure by popularity and effectiveness. Popularity is the easier of the two to track and it consists of be the following; the amount of Internet traffic, the number of registered users, the number of active users, the number of channels, the number of third party widgets, and the amount of content added per day. Effectiveness would require regular feedback from users and community moderators. We will actively encourage our users to help us improve our services by participating in Internet surveys and usability studies.

Web site

http://www.moblast.com

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge

$750000

What unmet need does your proposal answer?

We answer the need to reach people locally in a way that’s more practical, flexible, and powerful. It’s more practical than a typical Google Map mashup because it gives content the center stage. Content is searchable, portable to mobile devices, and can be archived. It is more flexible because communities can customize widgets to fit their needs. It is more powerful because content can be aggregate from more than one sources, in new interesting ways.

Total cost of project, including all sources of funding

$2000000

What specific, unique opportunity do you see that will make this project more successful than others trying to fill that general

Our unique opportunity is little downside risk. Our team has been quietly researching and developing our LSB infrastructure for over two years. We have a very complex, well-designed, feature-rich framework in place that others do not have. We also have a team of talented developers who are passionate about what we do. So much so, we have each invested our own time and capital in the success of this project. We know our efforts cannot be easily replicated. While we think our strength is the design of the solution; in the short term, our asset is rather intangible and hard to discern among our competitors. In the long run, however, the flexibility to add features, the lower cost to maintain and grow the system will win out.

Expected amount of time to complete project (in whole years):

2years

How will people learn about what you are doing?

We plan to launch two side-by-side marketing campaigns. The first will be a proactive campaign that targets student-lead social responsibility programs at MBA schools. We will select and contact 100 schools, like the Center for Responsible Business at the Haas School of Business in UC Berkeley, to introduce the CP toolkit. Our goal will be to invite students in those programs to use the toolkit and to assist local non-profit organizations in creating channels. The second campaign will be an ad campaign to lure people to our website. We estimate we will spend $10,000 on Google AdWords.

Do you have any other funding or investment? We’re interested in knowing who else is interested in your project.

No. We have not pursued any funding or investment prior.

Are you working with anyone else to complete this project? If so, please give names and what they would do?

Who else is working in this area? How does your work fit into the larger context of work in this area?

Jaiku (recently bought by Google), Loopt, and Plazes are some companies that come to mind in the LBS space. Jaiku has sharing of “activity stream” and is available on Nokia’s S60 phones. Loopt is a location-based social site. One can send messages to friends and track where they are. Plazes has sharing of activities at a location with groups. Our work fit as the next innovation in the LBS area. We introduce new algorithms, back-end design, support multiple channel aggregation based on a defined location, content discovery, search, and archive support that our competitors do not have.

What do you guarantee will happen if you complete the activities in this proposal?

With the funding we seek from Knight, we can guarantee a server farm to support 300 organizations, and cover bandwidth expenses for up to five million users for one year. Ultimately, we want to see our project become self-sustaining. Mo’Blast will commit to establish a Continuum Fund to help pay for future expenses. We will contribute a percentage of our ad revenue from the commercial release of CP toolkit to fund the non-commercial sites. Additional funding could come from sponsorship and advertisement on the non-commercial site on a need only basis. It is our intention to keep the non-profit channels ad free; however, we cannot guarantee this beyond the first year.