A big shoutout to our summer strategists who will be helping us with The Beanstockd Game full time! We are excited to see what comes out of the summer, and will be resuming discussions with our alternate reality gaming friends in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, The Beanstockd Game beta testing continues, with a few experimental features thrown in for fun. More updates soon...

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 opportunity! We fully expect to actually implement many of the ideas and strategies presented by the bright, creative, and talented students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill this fall.

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 still be on the agenda, but we're pushing back production for at least for 4-6 months to enable us to focus our efforts on our core projects.

We're very pleased with this decision, as it allows us to really ramp up our current projects, and will enable us to do a much better job on the video when we do pick this project, a GREAT addition to our portfolio of offerings to our readership, up again in the future.

Mode updates to come...

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 Spike TV Guys Choice Awards

This was a crazy weekend for Beanstockd. Not only did we have a full crew in LA, but for the first time we had TWO full video crews in LA filming simultaneously! Was quite an accomplishment for us - and the footage turned out great!

More updates to come...

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 solar panels installed onto his house. He and Gwen Stefani teach their young kids about recycling and reusing. Gavin Rossdale began the show by playing many of his most popular tunes acoustic, as well as a duet with Sheryl Crow who similarly performed some of her greenest songs. The event was hosted by Neil Patrick Harris.

Beanstockd at New York Fashion Week

Beanstockd joined the ranks of the fashionabe elite at the Mercedes-Benz New York Fashion Week in February. Among others, Beanstockd attended Adam, Miss Sixty, Mackage, Diane Von Furstenberg, Nanette Lepore, and the list goes on. Of note, they attended the star-studded Rebecca Taylor show which had gorgeous fabrics in bright colors and muted pastels down the runway. After the show, they interviewed What Not To Wear's Stacy London, who told us to watch out for John Patrick Organic green fashion. Beanstockd sat front row at Ports 1961, across from Anna Wintour, whose subtle yet clear Indian clothing inspirations made it a Beanstockd favorite. To close out fashion week, Tadashi Shoji sent an array of beautiful dresses and separates down the runway.

The Beanstockd Game.

We have begun discussions with game design firms for the next edition of The Beanstockd Game in anticipation of a future collaboration. More graphics, additional features, and mobile capability are all things in store for the next version of the Beanstockd Game. One of the firms we are speaking with is 4th wall studios with Elan Lee whom we've cited in previous posts (Here).

Other Updates.

Also in the works are the First Annual Beanstockd Awards. We will be recommending companies in a number of verticals such as media, nightlife, food and drink, technology, and events. We finalized our list of nominees and are submitting them to our panelists (prominent leaders in each industry) for evaluation. We are also making final decisions on our Beanstockd Video Host this week and are moving along with putting together the team for our feature-length environmental film, to be shot later this summer.

That's all for updates! Thanks for staying in the know!

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 out to Park City, UT to cover the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. Our review of the films we saw and the entire festival (which was very green this year!) can be found here: Beanstockd Does The Sundance Film Festival

Finally, later this summer we are making preparations to shoot our own environmental 'docudrama' which, similar to the Beanstockd Game, will aim to connect with a mainstream audience yet empower individuals in their ability to effect environmental change in their daily lives.

That's just a taste of what we've got up our sleeves in 2009!
So keep reading Beanstockd.com.
And PBS Idea Lab. :)

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 up with their new habits without being in the game environment (the school).

We're excited to take the game to the next level! We have also begun discussions with several game design firms on possible collaborations for the next edition of The Beanstockd Game -- with more immersive graphics, additional features, and mobile capability-- all of which will be heavily informed by the tests to date.

Will keep you posted!

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 later this month.

In the meantime, we are surveying the players to get detailed information on what worked, what didn't, how the game affected them, any strategy they employed, what was fun, and what could be more fun.

Preliminary comments have included:

1. The desire for a recent activity summary on the dashboard

2. The ability to chat/converse with the OTHER teams ("I really really want to let them know how superior my actions are")

3. And the desire for an archive tab of all past actions/winners/prizes, etc.

Stay tuned for more results!

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 the project. We've also recruited a wonderful new NYC-based writer who will be heading up our music event coverage and artist interviews.

This October marked our first return to Harvard, where Beanstockd was born, for the Harvard Undergraduate Women in Business Conference where Sandra and I were invited to speak on behalf of Beanstockd. It was a wonderful experience meeting aspiring young entrepreneurs and speaking with them about the process of building our organization. As an added perk, while we were there we met Bobbi Brown! Look for an upcoming feature on green initiatives at Bobbi Brown Cosmetics.

This month, as you may have read, Beanstockd was named one of 35 finalists for the 2009 WeMedia Game Changers awards. Other finalists include Twitter, Digg, NPR, BlogHer and The Huffington Post, and we are flattered to be in such great company. They included a nice little write-up on us as well. Please vote while you're there - it takes under 5 seconds, and one award will be decided by community choice!

Finally, as we reflect on the past few months, we must say thanks again to all our mentors, advisors, and supporters that have helped make Beanstockd so successful over the past (almost) year and a half. In particular, everyone at DreamIt Ventures, our mentor from The Musser Group, our two amazing lawyers at Ballard Spahr, Paul Bottino at Harvard TECH, everyone at the Harvard Green Initiative, and of course, The Knight Foundation, just to name a few.

And with that, the Beanstockd Team wishes everyone a Happy Thanksgiving!

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 answering these questions from the perspective of your Place of Employment (it only takes 3-4 minutes total!). The 'questions' page will also give you a preview of the game.

Click here to participate!

We appreciate your help and are very excited to receive your responses. Email me if you have any questions or comments at all (angela at beanstockd dot com).

Sincerely,
Angela

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 Beanstockd Project is to drive tangible behavioral change among users. The game currently provides an incentive structure for taking environmental actions, but our limitation is that we can only rewards these actions retroactively. The mobile application, however, has the potential to actual change the course of a person's day through interaction with the game. Beanstockd Mobile will allow users to weigh different options before the action is taken, essentially incentivizing a user proactively for the more environmentally friendly action.

For example, let's say a user is headed to a restaurant and can either take the subway or the bus to get there. For the same reasons we started this project, there exists an information gap to the public about environmental consumption-- for instance, most people don't really know whether it is more environmentally friendly to take the subway versus the bus, and the answer may be circumstantial (depending on traveling distance, weather conditions, traffic, etc).

The mobile application will allow the user can insert 2 (or more) options and the Beanstockd game will calculate the points that each choice earns at the current time, allowing the user can take the more environmentally-friendly action and earn points for it on the spot. In addition to rewarding choices proactively (by allowing the user to advance more quickly in the game), the mobile application will be an interactive way for users to learn how different actions compare environmentally and create new habits using the Beanstockd game.

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 for logging everyday pro-environmental actions: recycling, taking a 10 minute shorter shower, unplugging appliances; and for purchasing pro-environmental products over their equivalents: local/organic food, environmentally-friendly products, supporting socially-responsible companies. The goal of this game was to create an incentive system around going green.

During these early stages of our project, much of our debate revolved around whether or not our game would be fun, or whether it would feel a bit like homework. Although there was always the prize, we realized that the prize alone would be a fleeting interest for players. To ensure sustained gameplay, the game itself had to draw people in.

Hence, in the very early stages, we added several entertainment layers to mitigate the homework suspicion. These ideas included a feature which randomly matched teams at the beginning of the round as direct competition, an initial environmental assessment which based results of the game on change, and a real-world clue component where moles would infiltrate the community playing the game and pepper clues throughout the community.

As we pieced together what the game did and what it would look like, we scratched all of these features and instead opted to include a massive, central community map. We even contemplated scratching the map since it served no direct purpose, but over the course of several UI meetings something told us that a map was a key feature. The map later evolved to include more information, such as a ticker which displayed the latest actions in real-time, a pop-up feature which showed the current team standings as you rolled over their representations on the map, and plans for a mobile add-on where one would be able to see where actions logged via mobile phone had occurred in the community.

What Elan explained to us was that two novices had organically deduced a fundamental game design principle: essentially, there are two key elements which keep a game moving forward 1) a storyline, and 2) extremely visible competition. We had considered both without realizing it, and opted for the latter. Given the aim and functionality of our game, the storyline attempt always felt forced, but the visual layer reinforced a sense of urgency, serving as constant reminder of the community's (peers, colleagues, and friends) progress in reaching a highly competitive, shared objective. Oh, and a cool prize doesn't hurt either.

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).

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.