Idea Lab

New Partnerships and Game Possibilities

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In September, we were approached by a major national magazine to help produce content for a new monthly green column in their print magazine, which has a subscriber-ship of 900,000 and a readership of over 6 MILLION. As they are entertainment-news oriented, but have been trying to implement a green column, their editorial team had trouble creating environmental content that was relevant for their target audience. Thus, when they came across Beanstockd.com, they wanted to meet with us immediately. The best part of our arrangement is our idea to including Beanstockd Game clues in the green column of their magazine....

• October 9, 2009
• comments

Fashion Week 2009!

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Hi everyone, So just to stray for a moment from the topic of the Game, I wanted to forward on an update from our fabulous fashion editor, Sarah Jacobson, on Fashion Week 2009: "Fashion week was drama filled but oh so fabulous. in the months leading up to september, i spent time contacting designers and PR folk and asking for invites to the shows. once invites were secured, i compiled a calendar of our events and began setting up interviews and such. during fashion week, i interviewed scarf designer taiana geifer, whose felted wool pieces are to die for. i...

• October 9, 2009
• comment

Best Week Ever!

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Recently, the Beanstockd team experienced (and, of course, celebrated!) our Best Week Ever! In August, we finally surpassed the 100,000 weekly hit mark (specifically 110,566 visits) and on Friday, August 14th we threw a long overdue regional Beanstockd get-together, with staffer from NYC, MA, PA, and DC coming in to join the festivities. We have since leveraged this momentum and are experiencing over 114% quarterly growth, which is extremely exciting. We also have had a few of our staffers move to NYC over the summer so we used the occasion to welcome them to Beanstockd HQ. Cheers!...

• October 9, 2009
• comments

Beanstockd Class Field Trip to NC

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's the start of the fall semester at UNC and Beanstockd has just taken a trip down to visit the class, present on Beanstockd, and answer all their questions. Prior to our arrival, the 20 students in the class had already done their preliminary research on us. They were very engaged, asking insightful questions throughout the class, and after our presentation proceeded with a 45-minute Q&A session. In December, at the end of the semester, we will go back for the most exciting part of this course: the final presentations! Each team of 5 will present to us their step-by-step...

• October 9, 2009
• comments

Public Edition of The Beanstockd Game

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

With the help of some new summer meat (haha... MBA interns... gotta love them) we have begun storyboarding the public edition of The Beanstockd Game. Our beta edition has received amazing reviews in our beta tests, but for our big launch we are taking the core functionalities of the game and brainstorming new ways to GAMEify the process. We are coming up with some very exciting ideas and in the process of teasing them out. After over a year, we almost forgot how fun the drawing board can be, especially with a few fresh sets of eyes... A big shoutout...

• July 17, 2009
• comment

Beanstockd UNC Case Study

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The University of North Carolina's marketing strategy course has elected to use The Beanstockd Game as the case study for their fall 2009 course! The Beanstockd Team will be traveling down to Chapel Hill, North Carolina to meet the students, present all the ins and outs of Beanstockd, and answer any questions they have during the course of the semester. At the end of the year, the students will present to Beanstockd their recommendations for a course of action in both marketing and revenue generation for the Beanstockd Game and Beanstockd at large. We are flattered and excited about this...

• July 17, 2009
• comments

Focus!

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The entire Beanstockd Team has been running on full throttle with producing the public edition of the Game, rolling out new/better/frequent video content, preparations for serving as the University of North Carolina's marketing course's fall 2009 case study, implementing advertising and other business model/administrative initiatives, and increasing our traffic across the board (which has been off the charts lately!!). In light of this, and with incredibly valuable advice from our Board of Directors (special thanks to Robert Kraft of Fox Music!) we have decided to push back our preparations for a Beanstockd environmental film for the time being. It will...

• July 17, 2009
• comment

Beanstockd Class Field Trip to LA

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

First, lots going on at Beanstockd in past weeks. This Spring, we signed our new video host Chet Cannon, from MTV's Real World Brooklyn! Chet and several members of The Beanstockd Team (minus myself and Sandra, sadly...) trekked out to Los Angeles for 2 major events. First, the Global Green USA Annual Millennium Awards took place, and we were there to cover the action. Beanstockd Classes Up the Global Green Millennium Awards Second, we covered the Spike TV Guys' Choice Awards and asked the attendees how they go green in their lives. Chet Cannon Works the Green Carpet at the...

• July 17, 2009
• comments

Beanstockd February/March Updates

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

[by Kim Zeigler for Beanstockd.com] February was an eventful month for Beanstockd! Global Green USA Annual Pre-Oscar Event in LA Beanstockd attended Global Green USA's annual "green carpet" event in Los Angeles. Maria Menounos wore a milk fiber dress with recycled glass layered necklaces. Heather Graham noted the enormous magnitude of what will happen to our planet unless we all start acting fast. Rosie Perez was having a hard time walking in her super cute runway shoes from all the pain. Dominic Monaghan was there as well as always participating in a number of other green movements. Gavin Rossdale has...

• March 5, 2009
• comments

Other fun stuff Beanstockd is up to..

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Each week, we look forward to keeping you apprised of changes, developments, and progress happening with the Beanstockd Game. But, this week, I wanted to amend our weekly report card with some of the fun stuff happening on the media side of Beanstockd! This month, we were able to send several of our writers to the Presidential Inauguration, and even got a special invitation to attend the Green Inaugural Ball in Washington, DC. Our writeup of the event can be found here: Beanstockd Goes to Washington: The Green Inaugural Ball After the inauguration, a few of our team members flew...

• January 28, 2009
• comments

Bigger and Better Betas

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

2009 is already proving to be a big year for The Beanstockd Project. After a few rounds of successful internal beta tests and user feedback, the Beanstockd team is preparing for our first institution-level test of The Beanstockd Game at the United Nations International School in New York City. Due to the academic calendar and feedback from current users, we will be holding two, 2-week long game cycles at the school for the test. Those two cycles will be broken up by the students' Spring Break, during which we will survey players on how well they are able to keep...

• January 28, 2009
• comments

Beanstockd Internal Beta Test

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, members of the Beanstockd Team participated in the inaugural Beanstockd internal beta test of the Beanstockd Game. Members of the Beanstockd Team spent one week taking environmental actions and getting credit for it through the Beanstockd interface in order to brainstorm ways to make it better, find any bugs, and compete for a team prize: organic sweets from Manhattan's finest green bakery. After a 5-day, head-to-head battle between Team Apley and Team Wigglesworth (we arbitrarily split into two teams), only one winner could remain. Congrats to Team Wigg! They will be handsomely rewarded at the Beanstockd Holiday party...

• December 15, 2008
• comments

Happy Thanksgiving! Love, Beanstockd

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

As Thanksgiving approaches, we wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on the past few months and offer a few words of thanks. This past August, after winning the MTV-Knight Foundation Young Creators Award, appearing in Entrepreneur Magazine, and participating in the summer-long DreamIT Ventures incubator program, Beanstockd relocated to New York City. Since the move to the Big Apple, we brought on 5 new staff members including three interns, a PR Director and an SEO Website Marketing director. These are some of the most hard-working staffers we've ever had, and it's been great having so much fresh energy on...

• November 26, 2008
• comments

Market Research for The Beanstockd Game

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

We're doing a bit of market research to understand how different communities perceive and can benefit from The Beanstockd Game. Because the competition is so community-centric, tailoring the nuances of the game (prizes, length of game cycle, competitors, etc.) to different types of communities is profoundly important. Since we are quite solid on the university demographic, we're asking for your feedback re: the business version of The Beanstockd Game. We wrote up a handful of multiple-choice questions to learn how The Game can benefit companies and individuals in the corporate realm. We're asking if you could help us out by...

• November 23, 2008
• comments

Plans for Beanstockd Mobile

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Recently we've been getting a lot of emails from people seeking advice on applying for the Knight News Challenge. We're excited to see so many of our friends and fans of Beanstockd applying to the contest! Good luck, and for some advice writing the full proposal, be sure to check out this article by Amy Gahran. This week, I wanted to give some insight into our plans for a mobile application and how this feature fits into the game. The mobile app will actually be an integral aspect of the project from a conceptual standpoint. The overall goal of the...

• November 3, 2008
• comments

How a Community Map Improves the Beanstockd Game

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Last week, we spoke at length with 42 Entertainment founder Elan Lee, who managed to break down in 10 minutes concepts that we had derived over the course of many months of debate. Over a year ago as we pieced together our game conceptually, much of our time was spent scrutinizing the specifics of the game: the interface, the rules, and the rewards. What we boiled down was a game where over the course of one month, players earned points for minimizing their environmental footprint in 3 ways. In addition to monitoring utilities usage (a back-end function), players received points...

• October 13, 2008
• comments

Beanstockd in 500 Words or Less

by Angela Antony
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

If you haven't already read our mid-summer update (found here) 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....

• September 30, 2008
• comments