Category archives: Uncategorized
the betacup prize: What happens next?
Posted by admin on Monday, 4 January 2010
Hello and Happy New Year
First, we would like to thank you again for supporting betacup by pledging and in many cases asking others to do the same.
By now you have likely received a notification from Kickstarter that we did not reach our goal (so no pledges were accepted).
So now what happens?
Fear not, the project will continue and we are still just as committed towards our goal of eliminating paper cup waste.
The good news is that thanks to your efforts in helping us to raise awareness we have been approached by a number of corporate sponsors who have indicated that they also want to support the prize.
Ideally we would have completed our negotiations before then end of 2009, but it is still ongoing and we hope to have some good news and make an announcement very soon.
Once we know how much prize money we have secured from sponsors we will run another Kickstarter campaign for a smaller target of $3000 – $5000 to form our “people’s choice” award.
Thanks again for your support, we look forward to following up with you.
the betacup team
Posted in: Uncategorized | Tagged: fund, kickstarter, prize, sponsorship | 1 Comment
Share your coffee drinking routine with us
Posted by admin on Monday, 28 September 2009
On a recent trip to San Francisco we asked a couple of regular coffee drinkers to share their typical coffee routine with us. As with our initial survey, the responses were incredibly interesting and in some cases a little surprising, especially when we asked about their reasons for using a reusable cup (or not).
I was particularly interested in the responses from the last couple when they were asked about using reusable cups. Both expressed a preference for using a reusable cup whenever possible, but while the gentleman remembered his because he carries it around in his backpack, the woman was actually drinking out of a paper cup because she had left her reusable at her class.
What is your coffee routine? from the betacup on Vimeo.
We’d love to collect more of these examples. What is your routine? Do you use a reusable cup or do you prefer disposable paper cups?
You can either share yours with us through a video response or fill out our survey at http://thebetacup.com/about/survey/
Posted in: Uncategorized | Tagged: | No Comments
A beta way to a betacup
Posted by shaunabe on Friday, 25 September 2009
In May 2009 Toby (@tobyd) talked to us about his idea for a new, better coffee cup. After he presented the idea, we immediately joined in with ideas of our own.
And after a little back and forth it occurred to us that we might be solving the wrong problem.
Why?
1. lots of people are familiar with the problem – 65% of people in the US drink coffee, so tens of millions deal with this problem every day
2. its a shared problem – this problem doesn’t just belong to your favorite beverage brewing brand, we as customers, are complicit
W think lots of people are motivated to solve this problem. Which means there are probably already people with some great ideas.
So we decided we’d come up with a a beta process to get to a betacup.
The simple version of the process looks like this:
Of course, anyone can draw a process. But there are some important details:
1. who participates?
2. who decides?
3. who owns what?
4. what happens afterwards?
We wanted to share our thinking on each of these topics and see what you think.
Who participates?
Like we said, we think lots of people have thought about this. Just look at how many people weigh in at mystarbucksidea. And many of the ideas are pretty good – good enough that Starbucks is acting on them.
So we want anyone to participate in adding ideas, rating them or commenting on them.
We’d like to get to a prototype, so text and sketches wont get you all the way to the end, but we’ll be inviting people who can prototype and we’ll encourage them to team up with folks who have promising ideas, but cant build prototypes.
Who decides?
We would like anyone who participates to be able to decide on winners.
We’ll also have a jury, because there are some stakeholders who will be under-represented. For example, manufacturers might love the winning ideas, but if they cant make them, well, we’re less excited about them. So we want these types of people to weigh in and we’ll ask them to explain if they differ from our popular choices.
Who owns what?
If you submit an idea or a prototype, you still own it. It’s that simple.
Once the awards are done, we’ll do what we can to get the prototypes through manufacturing to market. So we’ll be having discussions with the owners of the most promising designs. We expect a range of outcomes – some people might want to license their designs, other might want to set up companies to commercialize them.
We’ll encourage everything and do what we can to help if we think it will help get the ideas from concepts into the hands of coffee drinks.
Oh yes, the content on this site and the research wiki are licensed under creative commons.
What happens afterwards?
Like we said, our main aim is to take the best idea/s and make sure they get to market. So we’ll start with licensing discussions but then its off to the manufacturers and retailers. Its hard to know what to expect – some approaches will likely be sold to coffee shops and restaurants, while others might be sold directly to customers. We’ll know more once we have a sense of the winning approaches.
For details on the plan and the process, take a look at the betacup wiki.
What do you think? Does this seem fair? Where do you want more details?
Posted in: Uncategorized | Tagged: | 1 Comment
