I am believer – ripple

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine, Jehan, let me know that he and his mates had launched ripple, an online charity that uses the power of internet advertising to collect donations.

The way ripple works is that sponsors advertise with ripple, when someone views an ad from any of these sponsors, 100% of the donations go to charity. When Jehan first ran the idea past me, I was quite skeptical on two levels:

1. Who in the world would sit in front a computer and look at ads just to donate to charity?
2. Why would someone sponsor an ad, knowing fairly well that the views were not outcome based

To cut a long story short, the guys, pursued the idea and have been successful beyond belief. From what I hear, traffic stats are rapidly increasing and the site has even made it into the daily papers.

After building the I,Ripple facebook app, I understand why the concept is successful. The idea of being able to donate to a charity by viewing an ad is so easy. For the advertiser who supports ripple, their brand is literally burned into the mind of the donater (thanks wishlist.com.au, I can’t get you outta my head)

Despite the success, ripple still has some challenges ahead. It’ll be interesting to see how it all ends up.

UPDATE: The Best Facebook Applications blog just featured the I,Ripple Application.

LINKS:

The ripple website
The ripple blog

Donate to ripple by clicking the below buttons:

Dudubaya goes Free

After a steady stream of requests to make postings free, I have decided to make posting on dudubaya completely free. I sent out an update email to all users who have ever posted to the site and its amazing how many email addresses are stale. Almost 10% of the emails have bounced.

For those that don’t know, Dudubaya is one of the little side experiments I started about 2 years ago to figure out the state of the Kenyan internet market and to help out my Mum. Initially I made some categories free and for all other categories, you need a PIN that can be purchased by obtaining a dudubaya scratchcard (shown below).

My rationale behind this was based on 2 things:

• Mobile phone prepaid scratchcards have spread like wildfire. Safaricom and Celtel (the 2 kenya telco’s) have almost every business as a reseller; the commisions these resellers get is measly. The card I would offer would have significantly higher commisions.
• Making the postings free would not help Kenyans out. There are a lot of enterprising Kenyans for whom this could become a full time job.

However contrary to my expectations, the whole scratchcard thing just didn’t pick up – I knew this from the first couple of months of feedback from the team on the ground. It took me this long to make the system free because a number of people had bought a years subscription worth of classifieds – it wouldn’t be fair to them.

Despite this, its been quite an interesting journey – from getting the team on the ground organized and building the site to getting a number 1 listing on google and yahoo – I have learnt a lot. I’ll share this over the next couple of months.