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 Funding and projects and startups through social number crunching.
 We are a small tight knit group of friends and IT geeks who have a catalog of ideas for cool products and services.
We have worked on projects for startups and fortune 5000's alike. The work we were doing was typical corporate stuff and while we all share pride in purpose, at the end of the day we weren't really "helping" anyone outside the company. We got together as a group and decided it was time to focus our combined efforts on projects that can help other people, and help people fulfill their dreams. Of course having this lead to us developing new products, ideas and services in that vein full time wouldn't hurt either.
As is so often the case,..the creation and fruition of such things costs time and money, and while we�re more than willing to burn the midnight oil for our passion, none of us could afford to back this project completely so we decided to ask for your help. Keep in mind that by helping to get Crunchshare.com off the ground, you'll also be helping lots of other great causes and projects, startups and causes as described below. Your investment has an exponential effect on making other projects come to life.
Crunchshare.com has the goal of developing an Application Program Interface
(API) that allows organizations that are in need computer time to tie into the
members of our Crunchshare community. Our community will act like a giant
distributed supercomputer. This type of CPU sharing has been proven successful
by programs like SETI@Home and many others, but most of the existing models
focus on one site/cause and are usually non-profits. They also share a set of
drawbacks (you have to install multiple programs that can conflict with each
other and there's not a good social media tie in etc..) These models don't
generate revenue so in most cases they rely on donations for maintenance,
whereas we will be a one stop funding shop, and plan on generating our own
revenue stream to be self sufficient.
Major corporations pay millions of dollars a day for the type of access that
allows them to do this kind of number crunching and modeling. We will sell
access to our API to organizations that are in need of large processing power at
a greatly reduced rate. That will provide a valuable service and in turn allow
Crunchshare.com earn enough revenue to fund individual and community projects
and at the same time allow it to be self sustaining.
Joining
is FREE and easy. After you join the Crunchshare community, you will download
the screensaver/stats app. When your computer or smartphone is idle our
screensaver will start up and the number crunching will begin. Each screensaver
is tailored to specific projects/causes and will give stats on how many numbers
have been crunched and/or how much money you have generated for the investment
pools. Your crunching will earn you levels and from the application screensaver
you can check/share your level with others. You will also be able to access the
giveaways, member communication and social media sharing. Users will be able to
select different designs of the one selected for their cause or project. We will
encourage the community to design/share screensaver skins of their own.
You
benefit the projects you are interested in, while also
helping the community projects.
We
use your idle CPU cycles in 3 tiers. The primary tier allows you to choose a
project and 40% of your computer's idle CPU time goes towards that goal.
Everyone in the community picks their own primary project and all projects are
available for anyone to select, so other people may pick it as their primary as
well.
The community votes as a group on secondary causes/projects that
then get 30% of the idle CPU cycles of all community members.
The
tertiary tier (the remainder of CPU time) we then sell for commercial uses to
help maintain development costs expansion etc... As an example, selling time to
auto manufacturers for crash test modeling will help us maintain and grow
Crunchshare.com. We would like to get enough money from this portion to allow us
to make Crunchshare.com self sustaining and allow us to put money back into the
community pool as well. That way there will be even more money available for the
projects you want to see get launched.
This workflow diagram shows a scaled down version of how
Crunchshare's tiers are setup.
For our user
interface example shown below, both the individual user and the
community have decided to help some charitable organizations. You'll
see that the Breast Cancer Foundation is this particular person's
primary, (thus the pink branded interface). The Autism Foundation of
America as another preferred cause that they have chosen as a
primary. Primaries can be cycled through as you wish. The community
has voted that today's secondary cause would be the Down Syndrome
Research Foundation. We will run secondary for one week. In the
background the remaining CPU cycles would be used by something like
the auto manufacturer as we described above, and the funds from that
would cover costs, grow the site, and add to the community
investment pool.
As mentioned before, this shared data crunching model has been
proven successful in other cases, and
where someone has
already developed a engine for a particular cause (like the causes
listed in The World Community Grid or Seti@home) we will seek to
interface directly with their systems for CPU time and/or donations.
Screensaver/Interface
Skinned for Breast Cancer Research
Click for full sized image
Submit your
projects for funding
As a Crunchshare community member you'll be able to submit your project or cause
for funding, and any individual in the community can select it as one of their
primary project/cause to donate 40% of their computing time for. If your project
is selected by the community, everyone will in the community will donate their
community 30% to your project.
If your project is chosen or if
there is enough community interest for it to be used as a community project and
if your project requires CPU cycles, we work with you to tie in to our API,
otherwise money generated from selling the CPU time listed as supporting your
project will provide you with funding.
Fund many different projects and causes both on Crunchshare.com
and on
other sites without spending money.
All of us see charitable causes in the world, and projects on places like
Indiegogo, and Kickstarter that we would like to help, but many of us simply
can't afford to help them all.
With Crunchshare you can help many different
projects without breaking the bank.
We did the legwork, research and planning for our API product and
determined that the initial development costs would be between one
and two million dollars. That's even after you consider that the
companies that want to use this service in the future will have to
do some programming on their end to connect with the API (another
service we can help with that will generate revenue) Unfortunately
we did not have access to this kind of money and worried that
investors buying in for a percentage would want to change our model
from large donations with small profits, to the exact opposite.
We're perfectly happy getting some trickle income from something we
love doing, but an investor is going to want to see ROI, ASAP. So
for version 1.0 we started designing a version that uses
cryptocurrency* mining with each Crunchshare member being a client
on a mining network. Mined currency is donated to the causes in the
same percentages that we will eventually use for the API model.
Almost all the money generated by the tertiary tier of CPU cycles
will fund the 2.0 version. When funded and complete the API model
will generate revenue much faster than the cryptocurrency miner
will, but we need this version bringing in money to fund version
2.0. We hope this project will be successful enough that 2.0 will be
achievable in a very short time frame (under 2 years after 1.0
launch).
*If you're not familiar with cryptocurrency,
here's the
Wikipedia information link
We are open to talking to any investors before our funding goal is reached with
the understanding that our primary goals will always be to help people, projects
and causes. There is a very real potential for Crunchshare to boom and create a
large ROI, but we're not willing to compromise the mission for any reason
We want to keep this project open until it's funded, if it takes us a year or
more to get funding to make this fly so be it, but this is an important project
and we will see it come to light no matter what. Every person that helps fund is
reducing the time it will take for us to be up and solving problems and helping
people get their projects funded.
The money we're raising will go to development costs, maintaining the hardware we already have for modeling and testing, legal services and some initial advertising. The bulk of the programming will be designed by us our group, then outsourced to the cheapest code house that we feel we can trust to give maximum ROI. Anything raised over the target will go towards reducing timelines and adding marketing components to increase exposure.
If you are interested in becoming one of of advertisers or featured sponsors please contact us, we would love to have some big hitters in on this project with us, we currently have over a dozen sponsors lined up for ads and sponsored giveaways. We feel that product and prize giveaways are the most effective form of advertising for our model as it gets the word out about your products and services, and drives the community forward.
Please share this project. It would be the greatest gift in the world for us to
know that something we helped to create could help make someone's life better
and/or make one other person's dream come true. Anything beyond that is icing on
the cake. So let's put a TON of icing on this cake
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