I have been involved with AGLOCO as a founding member and have been actively recruiting new members for three weeks already. I decided to start a blog on my activities, but that has seemed to be a lesser and lesser part of what I like to write here. More and more I find myself thinking about what an economic network can become. I like updates from John Chow http://www.johnchow.com/ . And the official blog http://aglocoblog.blogspot.com/ and one very straight forward one called Infomediary http://jr-infomediary.blogspot.com/ . They are on my list but wanted to point them out up here.

 

My predictions

• AGLOCO will have over 2,000,000 by the end of 2007.
• I will have over 10,000 total referrals by the end of February
• AGLOCO viewbar will be released by the en of February – and then no Mac – just my thought)
• First company between Google, Yahoo and Microsoft to do a ‘major’ deal with AGLOCO will be Microsoft (no surprise here, given Bill Gates comments)
• AGLOCO will file to go public the last quarter of 2007 (and I will have 20,000 referrals by then)

 

I promise not to ‘edit these’ to make the right after the fact.

I saw this 'old' Bill Gates quote on John Chow's blog. It was i believe a statement he has made publicly more than once in the last year. (I did a quick search – used live search just for fun.)

Well AGLOCO is one way to do just what Bill Gates says to do (not that he is always right - but maybe this time?) MSN would have trouble paying people to search, but using something like AGLOCO's economic network... it could work. Does Bill know something that Eric Schmidt should be worried about? 

Gates said that search engines like Google Inc. get their revenues from advertising because people use these search engines. “Google’s business model is not based on free software,” Gates said. “Their business model is based on advertisements from which they make a lot of money.”

But they don’t share these advertising revenues with the end users who help them get the revenue, Gates said. “Google keeps all of the money with itself,” he added.

(Through its AdSense program, Google does share advertising revenue with Web site publishers who carry ads that Google sells to advertisers.)

In its bid to share revenues with users, Microsoft may give free software or even cash to users, said Gates, who did not discuss further details.

 

 

 

 

When I first saw the name ACLOCO, I thought it was not the best name I had ever heard for an Internet community. In the three weeks since I have come to say it often enough that it rolls off my tongue easier than Skype (which i can not decide whether to say the e at the end.

 

I did a search of AGLOCO on Google just before writing this. 540,000 page results. I counted the days since launch - 18 -  This means the increase in pages has been an average of 30,000 a day. While not in the league with of a MySpace or YouTube at this point (about 150,000,000) it is already running at a 1,000,000 a month and should rise as it grows in popularity.

 

And this is before the service is launched - wait and see what happens then.

 

 

Carl Anderson, CTA Holdings Gil Penchina, Wikia
Tim Ehrlich, Latham and Watkins LLP Zaw Thet, 4info
Greg Chin, Latham and Watkins LLP Valerie Williamson, OSTG - Open Source Technology Group
Graham Winter, Richards Butler
Guy Connell, Richards Butler David C Martin, IBM Oliver Brock, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Lars Nordwall, SugarCRM, Inc.
John Shoch, Alloy Ventures
Dave Pidwell, Alloy Ventures Thomas Hellmann, University of British Columbia
Dave Robertson, Collegiate Images Bruce Lacey, CarrierIQ Johannes Pohle, Morgen Group
Robb Watters, Madison Group
Justin Everett-Church, Adobe Systems Inc Chad Balch, Ph.D., Stanford University Lisa Busby, George P Johnson Company
J.D. Brasesco, SAVVIS Communications Chad Balch, Ph.D., Stanford University Richard Sze, Software Developer
Geoffrey Shenk – SEM Specialist
David Steinberger, Tickle Inc.
Alexandre Gourevitch, Science Po Paris Jacques Clay, French Tech Tour Victor Tsai, University of California, Berkeley
Jennifer Jackson, Owners Advantage Murray Arenson, Matrix Equities
Allen Gaul, GreenPoint Financial
Mike Depatie, Kimpton Hotels
Sam Ladah, Haas School of Business James Reed II, Plum Tree Technologies Jean-Marc Mommessin, Stanford University Ken Myers, Crushpad, Inc. Gary Capata, Capata and Co.
Greg Stebben, Radio Group
Brandon Blum, University of Michigan Ilya Strebulaev, Ph.D., Stanford University
Dana Duggan, Vanderbilt University

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do You Realize How Valuable You Are?
Advertisers, search providers, and online retailers are paying billions to reach you while you surf. How much of that money are you getting?

You Deserve A Piece of the Action
AGLOCO gets paid by companies to reach our Members through our Viewbar™ software.We give that money back to you.

Build the Community, Make More Money
Through our Referral Program, we reward those who are helping to build this Global Community. The bigger the community, the more money AGLOCO makes for its Members.

What's the Catch?
No catch. Sign up, refer your friends, download the free Viewbar™ software and surf the Internet as you normally would.
Just to keep the tally going, I added 250 since the last blog with my total now 4,650. I was to relaxed over the weekend to do any direct recruiting and my small drop off shows it. Unfortuately ths is a busy week for me on the day job so...

 

For those of you who have not visited the new AGLOCO website here are some home page highlights.

 

 

 

 

Ray Everett-Church is the AGLOCO Chief Privacy Officer. He was also the Chief Privacy Officer at AllAdvantage. Ray has been reading the comments in the 1000 AGLOCO Sign Ups post and this is what he had to say about the spyware issue.

I couldn’t disagree more with the characterization of the Viewbar as spyware. In my experience, spyware has four main characteristics: 1) It’s installed without your permission; 2) It surreptitiously tracks you; 3) it is difficult if not impossible to turn off or remove; and, 4) it sends your information to an unknown and untrustworthy entity where you have no control over what happens to it.

AGLOCO’s Viewbar (nor AllAdvantage’s Viewbar before it) does not have those characteristics. Indeed, AGLOCO’s Viewbar is the opposite of spyware: you must actively install it, you have to turn it on in order for it to track you and earn your hours, you can easily turn it off and uninstall at will, and finally you know who’s tracking you and our Privacy Policy gives you explicit information about what happens with your data and how you can delete it from our system if you desire.

I know a thing or two about spyware: I was an expert witness in a series of twelve lawsuits in which I testified against one of the major perpetrators of spyware on the Internet. They actually hired me in part because of my experiences at AllAdvantage with permission-based and privacy-protecting advertising technologies like the Viewbar.

If you’re interested (or can’t sleep!) you can read brief excerpts from my 80-page expert witness report (the whole report is, unfortunately, under seal by the federal court). I submitted the excerpts when I testified at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s Workshop on Spyware in 2004. My written materials are here.

I hope that helps clarify things a bit more.

Regards,
Ray Everett-Church
AGLOCO Chief Privacy Officer

Called the “dean of corporate privacy officers” by Inter@ctive Week Magazine, Ray Everett-Church is an internationally recognized expert on privacy law and Internet-related public policy. He is also the author of Internet Privacy For Dummies.

 

 

Picked up 400 referrals since my last post 4,100 in total at this point.  One thing that seems to be helping now is the some of my referrals see the numbers I have in ten day has encouraged the people I have recruited J. Three of my referrals have over 500 each so that helps me a great deal so I have been trying to encourage them to keep recruiting. I have started down my trail to landing 20 more direct referrals. I will post my results.

Saw the new AGLOCO website this morning. New Home Page is very nice and very informative. The new Learn More page is also informative. The new Referral Center page is much better than the old one, but it looks unfinished. I guess the beta site label is still on.

It is good to see progress.

I took last night off – wife and I saw the Bond movie.  But I am up still up another 300 – now 3,700  - the guys I recruited are still working J . AGLOCO member growth seems to be steady.

 My new goal of 10,000 seems high, so I think this weekend I am going to call 20 people and get some more direct recruits.

Have a great weekend all.

Well so far I am having another great AGLOCO day. Up 300 from my last post – 3,400 – this is good.

I had a comment on one post (this would be my only comment) asking for referral advice. I thought I would put some of what I did here.

As you can see by the lack of links on my blog I did not get most of my referrals here (I just started running an occasional search ad for my blog and it does fine (about 5 clicks a day) who knows if it works, but it is cheap.)

First I read most of the website and got familiar with AGLOCO (including the FAQs in the Member Services area – a tab on your account page) I would read John Chow’s blob now in addition to the site.

Almost all of my referrals come from people I know. I have 57 direct referrals.

I got 10 of these direct referrals from talking (in person or on the phone) with these people. I picked out people I thought had great contact lists (meaning lots of active people). And I told them why I was doing AGLOCO and why they should.

Simply –

1. It is simple quick, free, private and you can quit anytime time so the cost of joining and promoting AGLOCO is Very Low.
2. The upside is high (originally I quoted old AllAdvantage amounts I had read – like lots of people making over $1,000 a month and some making more than $1,000 a month.) Now I would tell them that if this works – they will make some money ever month but when AGLOCO is a public company I think each person in your total referral group (In my case now 3.400 should be worth $150 dollars – I think I may use $50 to be conservative. It is still a huge number.
3. I tell them about the LEVERAGE – What I mean by this is that for each direct referral that I have recruited, I already have an average of 60 extended referrals – (and this number is going up every day - could hit 80, 100, 200 ... I do not know.....) What that means is that, on average, for each direct referral I have signed up I have gotten 60 total referrals. At a value of ust $50 each, it means that I will eventually get $3,000 for every direct referral i sign up. Plus the monthly cash dividends AGLOCO will send out.
4. To eventuallyget $3,000 for each direct referral is a huge incentive and I think that is what will drive my referrals – and their referrals etc. to work on AGLOCO a bit for at least a month or two. (You can see it in the blogs and search ads etc. - that some people already get it) - John Chow who I mentioned before had 10,000 AllAdvantage referrals and proably has over 1,000 AGLOCO referals already.

In summary – the cost is very low, the work is quite limited and the upside is huge.

I mailed out almost 400 emails (nearly everyone I had in my address book) – so far about 10% have signed up. I am going to send a second letter this weekend with my new exciting pitch.— I do not know all the people who signed up because only about 20 of them told me they signed up.

I am going to call at least 25  of the “best” ones left on my list (after I send the email) and see if I can get them to help out (and help themselves of course.).

My new goals are 100 direct referrals and 10,000 in total.

Ok, I have been as quiet as I can about AGLOCO all day.

I picked up 2 more directs and 300 more extended referrals since my last post. This puts me at 3,100 total. My next goal is 4,000.

I am trying to figure out how to get most of my direct referrals to work harder now. This is the crucial time. It is THE best time to get referrals as most people have not yet heard of AGLCO. That means the super star recruiters – the ones with 1,000,000 friends on MySpace etc. are still all out there.

AGLOCO probably has less than 100,000 members (I helped get 3% of them.) I am trying to figure out what the value of AGLOCO is right now and what % I will get to own.

Let’s say that AGLOCO goes by 100X in the next 12 months to 10,000,000 Members. I would guess they would be worth somewhere between $2 and $5 billion.

Looking at their global rates page it looks like a lot of cash flow will go to all members, but about 50% of the ownership will go to the network builders.

So using say $3 billion and dividing in half that would mean $1.5 billion for builders.

My share will certainly go down from 3%. Say it drops by the same 50X (which would mean I would get only 6,000 total referrals) – I would get 0.06% of the builder share.

That is $900,000. My God that is a lot of money. In one year…. No wonder even the janitors at YouTube are smiling.

Shoot, if I am off by 10X and the company is only worth $300 million I get $90,000 – that is a lot of money to make for just helping to build a network somebody else designed.

This is the coolest thing I have ever worked on

OK, I admit it. My wife is tired of hearing AGLOCO from me a fifty times a day. So I promised I would not talk abbout it so I am blogging early. I got 300 referrals while i was sleeping. I am approching 3,000 fast.

This really works. People do understand the concept of a consumers union to share some of the wealth of the Internet. (Like the original unions in England during the Industrial Revolution. AGLOCO is the first consumer's union in the Internet Revolution. It is great to be an early member.

This is so much fun. It is almost addictive. Every 30 minutes or so, I go to my AGLOCO account page and check my referrals. I got 4 directs and almost 500 extended so far today. That gives me 2,500 in total. If it keeps growing at this rate I will be over 5,000 by Sunday.

It is pretty cool to think that I helped 5,000 people get involved with AGLOCO.

As usual - I checked my favorite blogs - they are now silent on AGLOCO - I wonder how many signups the VentureBeat guy has? Oh well that is OK. The bigger the network gets the stronger it becomes and every Member wins.

So sign up now AGLOCO thrives. www.agloco.com/r/aglo-0868

Since I was an early member of AGLOCO I have been watching it and reactions to it. The site seemed to have the usual start up problems of up and down - and missing links and passwords. I have not heard much of that the last 24 hours.

What I have heard is a great deal of talk on the Internet. A Google search on AGLOCO returns over 150,000 hits. On launch day I looked and found less than 10,000. That is a huge increase in pages talking about a six day old company.

I have continued my recruiting and now have over 2,000 total referrals. I do not know how the rest of the early members are doing, but I keep sending notes to friends to have them sign up.

If you are not already a member - click here to sign up and I will get credit for referring you. www.agloco.com/r/aglo0868  .

I am pretty excited with AGLOCO. I sent out a couple hundred email invitations and now have 49 direct referrals and over 1,000 indirects.

I have studied the business model and it seems solid – very solid. AGLOCO revenue sources seem extremely strong. I like search – Google pays AOL about $0.10 for every search – AGLOCO gets big they will pay AGLOCO that too. Advertising is obvious and then there is all the commissions that Amazon and everyone else pay – those can go to AGLOCO. Plus the fees when anyone who signs up for many of the services out there – Skype pays $10,  eBay pays $20, PayPal $12, the Visa banks $100 or more for a new credit card and home loan refinances as much as $1,000. There are hundreds of this “deals” out there for AGLOCO to get.

With all this I think AGLOCO is a multibillion dollar company – owning part of it will be a very nice thing to have.

Hope some of you reading this are my indirects – and if you are – get out there and recruit... NOW….

Three of my favorite bloggers all had something to say about the coming of AGLOCO – all on the same day – today.

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington

“They may be right, and there is certainly nothing wrong with trying. If they can get enough people actively using the software, and the advertising market doesn’t implode, my guess is they will have a success on their hands. AGLOCO isn’t going to make the world a better place, but it may be a profitable business”

GigaOm’s Liz Gannes

“But in this day and age of cheap entrepreneurship, AGLOCO won’t have to raise hundreds of millions, right? We are going to try to sign up so we can tell you more (hey, why not?).

Venture Beat’s Matt Marshall

“This AGLOCO team is intriguing. Eight Stanford MBAs have joined, which is unprecedented. Many Stanford MBAs join companies before they graduate, but not a grouping this big, and especially not at a time when VCs and other companies are poaching MBAs more than they have in the past.”

I like what they say

They also had other editorial comments – Marshall liked the privacy angle and the resulting celebration with President Clinton. Arrington didn’t like talking about the party (since when did Arrington not like a party?) Ms Gannes seemed to take a conservative approach using the old adage “If nobody’s saying bad things about you, you must not be doing anything important.”

Me…. I am sticking with my guns too. I really like this company – I like their Privacy – lead by CPO Ray Everett-Church – I like their tem – with the competition of top MBA graduates these days – for AGLOCO to get 8 Stanford MBAs in formation – I think they have thought through the model (and it must be really attractive because the Members get 90% (minus operating costs ) – management profits only 10% - and they still got 8 Stanford MBAs – this has GOT TO BE A BID IDEA for that to happen.

I plan to be a big member of AGLOCO. A friend of mine, Brian Greenwald, goes to the Stanford Graduate School of Business and he is one of the founders of AGLOCO.    

 Through Brian I became a prelaunch member and I got a peek at their website this morning. I can say I am very excited by it.

 I, for one, do feel that other Web 2.0 companies have been ‘taking advantage’ of their earlier users (maybe all their users).Their users provide some, if not most, of the value for those companies and the founders and venture capitalists get all the money – this includes MySpace, YouTube, eBay, Skype and even Google.. If AGLOCO can get me a portion of what is created, I will feel a whole lot better about it.

I like that AGLOCO works in the background, so I use the Internet just like before.

I like that it is owned 100% by its users.

 And, I especially like the AGLOCO referral system that rewards people who help build the AGLOCO network.

 I am telling all my friends about it and giving them my referral (AGLO-0868). I started using YouTube right after they launched (a bumpy experience at the begging).I posted several videos I thought were cool and told my friends about them. They looked and they posted and they told friends - a year and half later they get $1.6 billion – I get…….  If AGLOCO goes public at least I will be getting my share. I think .

 Their site should be live for everyone in a couple of days. Click here to sign up and I will get credit for referring you. www.agloco.com/r/aglo0868 .

 

http://aglocoblog.blogspot.com/