Cristiano on Tech/Life

Last week we saw the launch of Tipit.to, the Dutch startup by Reinier, Jeroen and Alper. Tipit is a webservice that allows anyone to give a small tip (starting at 1 cent) to anyone. Tips are aggregated before payed and a similar system is used for payout. This makes it way more easier to pay a tip using Tipit than having to go through the PayPal process for every 10 cents you want to pay someone.

Why tips?

So why would you leave tips? Well honestly there are numerous reasons, but I always like to think about it as a good anti-advertisement measure. Most sites show Google Ads simply because the income they get from it pay for the server bills, which doesn’t mean they feel happy to have to show their users advertisement. Instead, a Tipit button on a website could allow users to make simple and easy donations, eliminating the need of advertisement.

Creative uses

There are obviously other reasons to have a tipjar besides preventing advertisements, and since the launch last week we have already seen a few uses that were pretty creative. The most notable is Lauren, who’s house burned down and is now looking for some money to get his life back on track (photos and videos here, or tip him here).

How to join?

Setting up your own tipjar is pretty easy, just go to Tipit.to, sign up, create a tipjar, and place the nice button on your site. In contrary to other services like Paypal they don’t need an awful lot of info about you before you can set up an account, and in contrary to services like TipJoy they pay out real money.

Is tipping the future?

I personally think we will see more and more tipping in the future. Tipping is the logical extend of the currently increased social activity on the web. Recent research shows that people are clicking less and less on advertisements and honestly I think we all hate to see them around anyway. Add on top of this that many people are starting to feel more and more invested in the sites they use day in and day out (see Flickr users vs the Yahoo/MS news), and tipping is definitely going to be hot in 2008.

• Installing/Updating WordPress with Subversion – Interesting tutorial on how to manage your Wordpress install using SVN.
• IMDB To-Watch – Keep Track of Top Rated Titles of this Decade – I seem to only have watched 27 of the 50 best movies on IMDB since 2000. I need to watch a few more and most of them are on my want to see list.
• jkg3.com – lions, primes and web design – Jamie Knight, general web "guy" I met at semantic camp. Quite an interesting conversation we had using Quicksilver.
• Xambox Scans And Files – I want this scanner. Basically I already have this scanning behaviour and this thing just adds so much ease to it.
• How Would Barack Obama Sort 1 Million 32 bit integers? – At least he has a clue on how not to. He has my vote.

So last weekend I went to SemanticCamp, a semantic BarCamp organized by Tom Morris here in London at Imperial College. The event was kind of “OK”. I said OK because honestly the event was not the best thing for me. I personally went because I was wondering what all this “semantic” stuff was all about. I guess more people had the same idea, and as a result, at most of the times, only 1 talk was going on. Combine this with a lot of no-shows and you get bored soon. I didn’t feel like listening to too many talks on RDF so I hung around with some people in the other rooms instead.

There were some great things about SemanticCamp though, most important of which was the organization, the location, and the drinks afterwords. One of the other great things about SemanticCamp was the Semantopoly game, custom made by Jon Linklater-Johnson. The game is a kind of Monopoly where you can play a web “celebrity” and buy technologies and social networks to make mashups and get venture capital. One of the board characters was Jeremy Keith so image the joy we had when Jeremy decided to play himself in the game.

Here are the photos: