2009 WeMedia PitchIt Winners Update

2009 PitchIt! Challenge Winners: Jacob Colker of THE EXTRAORDINAIRIES and Ben Berkowitz of SEECLICKFIX

It wasn’t exactly a walk in the park.

But the day last year that Jacob Colker and Ben Berkowitz met each other for the first time as they hiked from the Mutiny to the UM campus for the PitchIt! competition it was clear that they were each onto something. Their vigorous pace matched the vigorous grilling they were giving each other about their respective business plans.

Memo to this year’s finalists: prep well and often before the big day!

But Jacob points out: Be yourself and your passion will show through.

Winning Business Models:
The Extraordinairies. It is a Game-Changing enterprise, literally. Smart-phone gaming is their competition: “We want people to change the way they look at their free time, and see those moments as an opportunity to use a few spare minutes of the human mind for social good…People want to give back.” But where people may lack hours to give, moments can be plentiful.

In just minutes, BeExtra allows you to micro-volunteer for a social cause on your computer or mobile phone. Opportunities such as translation, tagging photos for museums, and mapping playgrounds are just some examples.

The Extraordinaries is now applying to become a B-corp, a new type of corporation that uses the power of business to solve social problems.

This enterprise encourages crowd-sourcing intelligence, such as participating in the Haiti relief effort by scanning and matching faces to identify survivors. With write-ups on CNN and TIME, it is no surprise that Jacob says “our platform is perfectly designed to be a citizen journalism tool.”

SeeClickFix.com is an organization devoted to helping communities help themselves. Using citizen journalism and crowdsourcing intelligence they puts issues on the map, literally.

Co-founded by Ben Berkowitz who was frustrated by the slow municipal response to graffiti on a building, Ben decided to cast about for like-minded citizenry. The obvious route was to put pressure on local governments to act, and direct pressure from citizens seemed to be the way to go.

What he learned at We Media was that THE MEDIA is THE MESSAGE (still!). Legislators and officials give a leg up to newspapers, radio, and TV pressure in determining priorities. SeeClickFix now provides embedding tools for media-casters to gauge what the public wants. Prior to We Media, Ben’s team believed their tools would primarily be on municipal websites. Places like Tucson, AZ and Clifton, NJ have SeeClickFix embedded but a new target emerged.

Doug Hardy, Associate Editor & Internet Supervisor of The Journal Inquirer of Manchester, CT, explained that a new paradigm is being created. As traditional media is threatened it boils down to listening to your clients. What drives the citizen-consumer? Well, the things that matter to them. Stories generated by a wave of concern get traction in the public mind. So his paper embedded the SeeClickFix widget and he has been reaping the plentiful harvest of public angst in spades.

Community points are allotted to contributors. As to whether those points could be monetized, Ben points out many feel that once real money is at stake in any online game, that actually kills the game.

The We Media PitchIt! win allowed Ben to jump feet first into the project full-time, and to develop the smart-phone app. Contacts made at We Media led to rejigging priorities and new reachout to stakeholders. SeeClickFix is positioned as a social enterprise that is able to generate news stories. Users add the weight of their vote to an issue, and contribute A/V content to it as well. Ben says they are embedded in about 150 news sites.

Ben also says SeeClickFix has no competition. He points out that what sets them apart from other hyperlocal sites is that, anywhere in the world,  and in multiple languages,  it can foster interaction among government, news media and residents. And, because of that, everybody wins.

But if newspapers and local TV broadcasters die off like dinosaurs, SeeClickFix will still be there, its niche assured by its visibility on municipal NGO websites as well as its own, by the sheer natural pull of collective homeostasis…what makes us better.

And that’s Extraordinairy.