Beanstockd in 500 Words or Less

If you haven't already read our mid-summer update ("found here":http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2008/07/how-can-a-game-make-you-go-gre-1.html) I'll give you the abridged version. My name is Angela Antony, and my cofounder's name is Sandra Ekong. We were roommates at Harvard. Like most things hip and cutting edge, Beanstockd was born in Paris. Sandra and I lived there for 6 months during our junior year in college; it was there that we discovered that we were an unstoppable duo, that snails are ocassionally edible (it's really a personal choice), and that our chic Parisian lifestyle revealed some fundamental problems with the way we lived our lives in America. After six months of 5 minute showers, air-drying clothing, and 5-dollar bottles of water (quoi?), even we were taken aback by our callous consumption back in the states. The light bulb was the realization that it took only 2-3 months abroad for two non-environmentalists to comfortably adopt a way of life that avoided overconsumption. Our mission became to find a way to recreate the subtle social pressure we experienced while living in Europe that caused us to change our behavior. If we could compel people to make these small, almost negligible lifestyle changes on a mass scale in the US, we surmised, it could make a very decisive difference in the environmental movement. From the streets of Paris to the basement computer lab of Lowell House at Harvard, the Beanstockd Project was born. Months of debate, dialogue, and due diligence allowed us to pinpoint three major gaps in the environmental movement that we felt were not being adequately addressed: negative stigma, lack of personal accountability, and lack of incentive system ("read more here":http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2008/07/how-can-a-game-make-you-go-gre-1.html). Our comprehensive solution: The Beanstockd Project (www.beanstockd.com), a social media project comprised of an online news source (Beanstockd News) and The Beanstockd Game, an environmental competition powered by real-life pro-environmental actions. Beanstockd is led by an incredibly passionate 20+ person team, with a readership hundreds of thousands strong, creating a model of environmental action that is not only novel -- built on socially and psychologically-sound principles -- but highly scalable and self-sustaining. We look forward to your comments, challenges, and ideas as we fill you in on the issues we've overcome and the ones that we face in our rescue mission to save the world, one tongue-in-cheek step at a time.