If you want to find the future, you have to get back to the basics.  Think of it in terms of Word and SMS.  Would I literally write my grandmother a letter saying I used something?  Or would I literally write my friend that I love to rent movies from a certain place just because, and not because it is the closest?  The big big dollars are being mounted on less and less supports.  And yes there is strangely absurd correct placement of advertisements on the web these days with re-targeting technology and

We also talked about the difference between SMS and MMS.  It seemed common that this idea worked better through MMS and that most phones are capable of receiving MMS.  We did argue about the potential plagiarism rights an SMS creates.  He was saying that people can simply send themselves coupons, thereby creating cause for theft.  He was saying that waiters can simply send themselves a bunch of messages, or even in the first place not tell that the SMS was used and pocket the money.  This led me to the validation step.  Currently his process does not have a validation system.  I suggested that once the coupons have been sent to the user, that they would be required to validate the coupon in front of the waitstaff thereby expiring the coupon from use by that user.  The total validated coupons received for that client could then by submitted at the end of the week or month for their records, eliminating theft from waitstaff.  But he saw that people would not pay the extra money to send one more message to validate their coupons.  This led me back to the fact that I wanted to change his model to be free to the user.

Regardless each message is locked in to costing RMB1 under his model so this would not work or change.  However he said I could have my own number to use for RMB3000 a month.  So the Clickboards on his site or others around the Internet could be accessed through my number.

He kept explaining that the mobile coupon market is still very young and has not taken off.  He has seen little success with this type of business model.  Something that can not support itself.  And charging the client for giving away the coupons is very difficult.  Alvin sees the light that the Clickboard has but not necessarily through coupons and believes charging clients RMB12 per acquisition of coupon will be difficult.  Getting any money out of them would be hard.  So he sees value in the Clickboard but not for this.  This is a conundrum.

He followed up his argument with a colleague he helped try to take print coupons to the mobile media for use.  He said there was little success.  However I am going to follow up with this person Andrew Collins of MailMan.com to see if he sees the light in what I’m doing.

We concluded by saying that I need to do my own stand alone website that would act as the hub for Clickboards and that I could on a trial basis use his website as an extended portal.  And again use my free number in which these discounts would be accesses through MMS.   This he said he would do on the basis of a friend.  However to build this standalone website with full Java applications could take three months with ten people working solely on the project for a grand total of RMB300,000.  This is currently what his mGuanxi.com website is worth.

I then asked what he is doing with mGuanxi.com and he said it was simple the social tool of his service.  I began to understand that not too many people are that involved with this site as their choice for a social media.  We then went into behavioral advertising and that kind of tailspinned as he did not see people interacting heavily enough with the site to truly allow it to work for the clients.  I see that and asked why there was no advertising on the site now and he said he did not want it to be overbearing to the user at this point but that is in the plans.

Currently Alvin is working more in Search Mobile Advertising which I agree is where most people see the potential for the mobile devices in the future.  He is working with some big names and I think that is where his aim is.  Maybe he will apply the Clickboard to this service in the future.  He liked the idea and I’m sure he is thinking of ways to utilize it.  One day I hope I still get credit.

He left me feeling encouraged that the idea has potential but told me the more you do the more pitfalls you will discover.  He is reluctant to change, that is one of the number one pitfalls that occurred during this meeting.  However if I was to start he would go with the flow and help me out.  So as he said keep talking to investors and get their advice.  So keep talking about it!

Dear Ken and Jessy,

You may not know me directly but I believe you have been talking with Don Stewart and now my boss Richard Zhang is in Shanghai soon to have a meeting with you.  I want to put forth a proposal for you.  I am your man in Tianjin.  I have been the Chief Editor of Jin Magazine for over a year now.  I am responsible for putting a ‘famous face’ of Tianjin on the cover every month as well as find the multiple stories and contacts for these stories together for the writers each month.  If you like I could send you a copy of the magazine from before I started and our most recent so you can see the drastic improvement that has happened under my supervision.  I have been able to carry out every task that Richard has put forth and I have added elements to the magazine that generates response from the readers.

I wish to do the same for you.  I am extremely interested in your mGuanxi and believe I am one of the most beneficial people you will need to make this web and mobile service successful in Tianjin.  I’m excited about the possibilities and wish to give you a business plan that could incorporate advertising into your site.  This would take your site from being a social and savings  media to a social savings networking utility.  I proposed this to Richard and he could not see the finer details.  But RMB100,000 at base is something I think worth pursuing.  I’ve attached my business plan for Clickboards geared toward facilitating mGuanxi, as well as my resume for your revue.  Regardless of your wish to accept my plan I would still like to take the same opportunity I did with the magazine and really add some real impact to your up and coming web portal and mobile media which is emerging in Tianjin.  I have already begun to invite my friends to join my contacts on mGuanxi.  

I know all the clients from Jin Magazine and deal with them directly.  I am in charge of getting coupons and discounts to many places.  My frame of mind around advertising is the financial aspect as I got my MBA here in Tianjin.  I look forward to helping you and quite possibly introducing Clickboards to your web portal and mobile media. 

For the best of your consideration,

AC Grindl

Chief Editor 

Jin Magazine

2. CONFIDENTIAL INFORMATION
The employee shall not use any information, technology or any other confidential information concerning the company’s business other than for the performances of his or her duties as an employee of the company, or divulge such information or technology to any person who is not an employee of the company or in the breach of any instruction given to the employee by the company in relation to such information and technology disclosed to them by any person who has business relation with the company.  The foreseeing provisions with regard to confidentially shall still remain in effect after the termination of this contract.  All inventions, improvements, modifications, discoveries, and ideas which are made by the employee using confidential information and facilities provided by the company at any time during or after the normal hours of work at the company, and which relate in any way to the business or operation of company, shall be the exclusive property or the company, and the same are entitle to pretection under the trademark law, the patent law or any other law of the people’s republic of china relatin to intellectual property.  The employee shall assign the company all rights to such inventions, improvements, modifications, discoveries, and ideas.  The compensation for such employee will be considered by the board of directors.

I believe I’m ok becuase this may only pertain to: using confidential information and facilities provided by the company, which I did not do.

So now I am still thinking of how to incorporate my current boss into this affair.  I went to him today to discuss a few things.  One of them being the value of jinmagazine.com.cn.  If you see on my site it is worth $518 and his website which I recently did a homepage makeover is only worth RMB580.  So my blog is actually worth more than his website.  Our two competitors in the land of Tianjin Expat sites are between $10,000 to $15,000.  Even redoing the website so that all the links work and it is really flashy isn’t going to help.  Even promoting contests through the magazine that drive people to the site isn’t going to help much.  Richard told me that money wasn’t a problem as long as he can see a revenue stream.  Well when you are competing in a $30,000 market your share really can’t be that big.

So I was thinking that I would transform part of jinmagazine.com.cn into the Clickboard website.  The first step is to clean up his website so everything is functional, then I can begin incorporating the Clickboards.  Basically we would issue a JIN card and promotions can be gathered from all three websites, plus using Alimama we can put local ads on websites across the Internet where we can put Clickboards and people can collect discounts.  Then we can even incorporate print ads to carry text message codes so people can acquire the coupons when reading magazines in town.

But Richard is not going to pay for any of the development, probably just keep my at my shitty salary.  So that is where the angel investor comes in.  I would continue to make the backbone of the magazine each month, but the actual editing would be done by someone part time.  I could still write articles and do some design critique, but all the other little stuff can be taken care of by the consultant and a part time editor.

I on the other hand would have an income I could use to recruit students and we could put this into action.  However, this would now entail three parties: Richard, the angel investor, and myself.  Before this goes any further I need to see a lawyer and find out what I can protect.  If I can incorporate everything into jinmagazine.com.cn, then what is mine in the end?  I have to have some legal entity, and does Richard in the end pay me for facilitating his website?  How would it move onto bigger arenas past that of Tianjin?

My example here is with advertising. People are still going to have to spend money to get back on top and get their businesses back up and running. The first cuts in budgetary plans are usually at the advertising budgets. But these are also the first to be replaced.

Many people these days are wondering where to put their ad dollars. Print media is said to be dying. Everything is apparently going online, and why not, you really get more specific information that way. But what about the targeting of these ad dollars and the amount you pay. This is starting to create real concern. Google is running a monopoly and adjusting prices based on ‘falsification’ of Adwords’ performance. And sites that have over a million visitors a month are getting the rod because they have to put ads on their sites that only pay them when they get clicked on, greatly devaluing their site.

The real scare comes in when Google and Facebook hide certain critical points that concern your rights in their ‘terms of use.’ By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. Facebook recently said the same thing.

This selling of personal information for any use under the sun is not what I intended when I signed up for these programs. With Facebook I get to choose my friends and who sees my photos and stories. Now that Mr. Matt Zuckerberg says any advertiser can buy anything on my profile, it doesn’t feel quite as private. That is pretty scary to one day run across myself in some book about people in Tianjin.

I for one am not using Facebook anymore. I have had about enough of it anyway and only get on 30 seconds a day to read the feed. Google I am attached to still though. I am even thinking to get the new Google phone. But there is a difference.

Google is an ad agency and they use the information themselves. There is no need for them to sell off their inventory; it does more good in their own hands. As for them being a monopoly, that is probably true, but at least I can still get my mail.

So what about Clickboards.net?….

Unlike both Google and Facebook, Clickboards.net User Agreement will only take about one minute to read and be very straight forward.  The reason being as that every user agreement will be individually created as the user continues to modify their profile.  The user gets to transform their profile by setting their privacy settings, something that is established from the beginning.  As the user baby steps their way into using the platform, the more ability they have to control their social savings network.

The information is never sold, but the use of the information is given to the advertisers.  Advertisers are allowed to make as many requests as they would like when tailoring their ad to reach the directed audience.  However because they don’t need it, they don’t get the information.  As long as they see performance they get their monies worth.  And that is the direction online advertising has taken, completely performance driven.

So the initial user agreement may look something like this:

I agree that all information that I supply in the initial agreement to use this site is confidential and will not be used by third parties.  All information that I garner fit for use through my privacy settings and filters can be used by Clickboards.net and only used internally to help third parties gear their advertisements to something that relatively follows my interests.  My demographic information will not be sold or distributed unless I specify certain information can be used to better target my interests and better facilitate Clickboards.net to deliver more relevant information from advertisers to me.  I have the ability to continuously modify and change this information and previous settings will be relinquished from use by Clickboards.net.

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Solution, offer the rebate later.  Go ahead and shop buy anything you want and share what you bought, brag about it, get others interested, but don’t wait for the savings.

With your online account tracking your history, anyone in your network, according to your setting of filters and privacy, can review some of the favorite items you’ve saved on or bought lately.  If they are interested too, they can go get it.  Say one hundred people in your network bought Super Bowl memorabilia for full price, well according to WujWuj, if they had bought it through their group buying, they would have all saved 20% if they waited and bought together.  Well you are still a group and you all still bought the same stuff, so why not still get the savings.  This is possible if you offer the savings later after the purchases have been made.

You can still promote the things you buy and attract more people to your purchases, thus still taking action, and therefore still applicable towards recieving savings.

So what do these points do for you and why should you take the time to manage them and share them?  Well you can use these points for special discounts.  It is like a store where you purchase coupons using your points.  The more points you hand over, the bigger and more special the discounts you can select.

Advertisers can give you points for using the Clickcard on their site and basically the more you get involved with Clickboards.net the more points you get.  So the more you control your account and the better the targeting and more sophisticated your filters and the more you open your privacy settings, the more benefit there is for you.

For instance if you sign up your phone with the account you could earn a designated number of points each month.  Imagine going grocery shopping and paying for half your items with preferred customer points.  With more people in your network and the more integrated you become with them, the more potential there is to acquire shared savings.

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As a user and customer, I don’t want everything I do stored in some database for the use by a third party or even Google for that matter.  Why? I have no authority over my own habits and what everyone else can know about me.  There really is no upside to me giving my information away, either knowingly or unknowingly.  Where is my privacy, where are my filters, where is my say over what I want to see?  Basically advertisers these days regurgitate exactly what I’m doing now.  Adwords, Ha!

What I really want is something that is intuitive.  And this is only possible through my own making.  Yes I actually want something to track my habits, but I want the ability to maintain and fine tune my own personal shopping history to my liking.  I may not buy a computer every day or even a phone, but I am really into them and I want to know what is on sale every week.  Who is going to know this through a shopping history.

The only thing the Google phone can do is tell you all about your perishable items.  Things you buy constantly or the places you go constantly.  Is there really a benefit to this? Not really.  How much information can you get out of me knowing that I buy deli meats every time I go to the grocery store.  What I really want to know is when the ready made pizza dough is on sale because I love to make pizza.  Or maybe I’m waiting to find a deal on a nice wallet from Banana Banana.  And online I may not look everyday but I need to know when JC Nickel is going to have a leather jacket at a discount.

Google is really coming to an end in terms of ad sales.  Have you ever looked into SEO?  It is pretty bogus.  If I design my site to have the best key words, I will get to the top of the list.  Am I talking about what is really important, probably not.

Shopping history is designed by a user.  Yes the Clickcard stats are important, but the profile must be tweaked by the user to add the most impact from the actual information gathered.