| The Future Of Money: Richard Smith And The Dollar ReDe$ign Project Posted: 12 Jul 2009 03:07 PM PDT I followed a mention in some online journal, back at the end of June, to an online whatzis called The Dollar ReDe$ign Project. The man behind it is Richard Smith, a brand strategy consultant, whose work is showcased at ThinkCreateBelieve.com, whose company is The Extent Or Measure Of A Surface, and whose main blog is The Daily Blend. He's been interviewed all over, most recently on Fox, who pronounced it "the neweset internet craze." Richard's deep motivation was to help restart the economy, and the means? Redesigning our money, and rebranding it, to shift our thinking and to help the little bits of paper in our pockets act as a sort of social catalyst for change. He set up the project in the form of a contest, and received dozens of truly wonderful designs. Kyle Thompson won the contest with this design, who wrote ""I sought inspiration in numerous areas of American culture and history, and eventually decided to focus on the philosophers and political thinkers (i.e. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Charles de Montesquieu, among others) who inspired the Founding Fathers. I chose this for several reasons, the most important being that I feel that a new system of US currency should be hopeful and positive, while simultaneously reminding citizens and the world at large of the ideals on which the United States was originally founded." 
Runners-up included these: - Istvan Banyai
- Nate Castiglione
- and Gabriel Eid
I had a chance to interview Richard last week, just after he had announced the winning five designs in the contest. Highlights: - Several of the designs -- like those of Eid and Banyai -- included bar codes, suggesting the interface between digital and physical money. But they didn'e write about that aspect in their submissions. It must have seemed just another design consideration to the designers, and they proceeded without an elaborate use-case analysis.
- Richard pointed out that paper money has become a convenience, not a necessity, at least for the banked and credited. (for the unbanked, paper money and other commodities, like cell minutes, remain more important than credit or debit.)
- Richard likened money as being like a business card, although one that you can exchange for goods.
- The old and now odd iconography of US money -- the masonic symbols and so on -- is antique if not out-of-whack with what we stand for now, and the design of the money -- all one color, all one size -- argue for at least a facelift. Richard suggest that redesigning it would have a transformative impact on the country, and "would give people hope".
- We discussed the costs: revamping all the money scanners in metro stations, for example. But this is marginal relative to the value that he perceives could be realized. Richard pointed out that many countries in the Eurozone switched over, with equivalent costs. Richard suggests that these costs could be part of the stimulus package.
I hope that all those coming here and reading this will sign the petition, and support this project. To date, Obama's administration has not paid much attention, but if enough of us keep howling about this, maybe they'll think about it.
The Future Of Money series is sponsored in part by Neo.org 
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| In-Depth Look Inside the Twitter World Posted: 12 Jul 2009 01:35 PM PDT A recent analysis by Sysomos of Twitter data leads to some amazing conclusions: [via Sysomos | In-Depth Look Inside the Twitter World] Over the past few months, Twitter has experienced explosive growth, attracting celebrity users such as Oprah, and a growing mountain of media and blog coverage. Sysomos Inc., one of the world's leading social media analytics companies, conducted an extensive study to document Twitter's growth and how people are using it. After analyzing information disclosed on 11.5 million Twitters accounts, we discovered that: * 72.5% of all users joining during the first five months of 2009.
* 85.3% of all Twitter users post less than one update/day
* 21% of users have never posted a Tweet
* 93.6% of users have less than 100 followers, while 92.4% follow less than 100 people.
* 5% of Twitter users account for 75% of all activity
* New York has the most Twitters users, followed by Los Angeles, Toronto, San Francisco and Boston; while Detroit was the fast-growing city over the first five months of 2009
* More than 50% of all updates are published using tools, mobile and Web-based, other than Twitter.com. TweetDeck is the most popular non-Twitter.com tool with 19.7% market share.
* There are more women on Twitter (53%) than men (47%)
* Of the people who identify themselves as marketers, 15% follow more than 2,000 people. This compares with 0.29% of overall Twitter users who follow more than 2,000 people. "We wanted to take an extensive snapshot of Twitter that goes far beyond anything done to document Twitter's use, growth and demographics," said Nick Koudas, Sysomos' co-founder and chief executive. "While Twitter's growth has been well documented, we wanted to put the spotlight on how people use Twitter, as well as identify many of the key trends in their backgrounds, demographics and activity. Our study, based on the most comprehensive dataset of Twitter users, provides a wealth of information for anyone interested in getting in-depth details about Twitter." To discuss this report on Twitter, use the hashtag #sysomossurvey or copy us @sysomos. Visit the appendix for complete list of graphs. For more Twitter analysis studies by Sysomos, see the right-side navigation bar with a list of related articles. One in five users have never tweeted? I believe that 5% account for 75%: the true Twitterheads. The thing that strikes me is the a/ rapid growth in 2009, and the b/ shift in in demographics toward younger people. Maybe the MySpace defectors really are showing up at Twitter. 
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