Video games, movies, plays and such are standardized. They have standardized pricing, standardized distribution and standardized categories. Reviews by critics have been standardized. We don’t really need that for free games. It’s free. Try it. You haven’t spoiled the plot. When there is three hours and $20 at stake, good critics are a must. From the seller side, standardized marketing and standardized advertising are critical. If I were a critic what would I say? Don’t play it if you are looking for fun. It’s fun, but there are more fun games out there. But this is the best way to win a space flight. Free hope. Game of the Year! Editor’s Choice!

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So what genres are there for sweepstakes, contests and lotteries? There’s the monopoly state lottery franchise. They keep a good deal of the money. A great value proposition for the schools, not so great for the players. Then there are the occasional sweepstakes. And? Well, there aren’t that many because they all lose money. Until now that is. Complain about Free Space Shot like you complain about there being no meals and no first class on Southwest Airlines. We have to get rid of something to make it pay. Would you put up with three times as many competitors to have the prize insured by Warren Buffett?
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We have been trained by the FTC, Attorneys General and our parents to be skeptical of prizes. You may have already won! Spanish Prisoners and foreign lotteries and all that. Do you ask for the terms and conditions when you go to McDonald’s for a cup of coffee? No–it’s probably not even worth your time to get a refund if the cup tastes bad. Free Space Shot is free and easy. Come to my house and I’ll give you a dollar if you tried it and you didn’t like it. What have you got to lose? Your skepticism?
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It’s tough to put together a brand for a legitimate contest. There are few comparables.

So let me give it a try:

Are you a daily lotto player? If so, you might like our skill contest. It’s cheaper. And instead of watching ping pong balls, you can watch the thermometer.

Do you love sweepstakes? If so, you might like our skill game. No stamps. We don’t need to contact you if you win, you get to see how you are doing all through the process.

Do you love space? We offer the most exciting range of space prizes and our has no expiration.

Do you love bingo? Have fun and win prizes and support good causes.

Do you believe? Are you under 18? Do you dream about buying something you can’t afford like college or a house for your parents? Do you want to better yourself, learn statistics, learn science and math? Do you want to live the life of Dennis Tito and Anousheh Ansari? Fasten your safety belt. We’re it. It’s us or staying an Earthbound science fiction fan.

Free Space Shot.com is attracting a lot of press. Takeup of our press release is about 900 media folks (I’m told the average is about 250). We have over 60,000 folks who have downloaded our press release. We’re on track to get 5 times as many page views as Hobbyspace.com this month.

We have also attracted some skeptics. Part of our marketing effort was to find out that there is a deep cognitive dissonance afflicting people over 13 in this country. Not only are they dissatisfied with NASA’s efforts to produce a space age, but they are bitter and resentful. They have not satisfactorily mourned the loss of their childhood and adolescent fantasies of being an astronaut. Not only are they jaded about spaceflight, but they are hostile to anyone who puts forward a legitimate prospect of success. That’s why we are targeting students 9-13. They are pre-sold on space.

Hence, Free Space Shot’s target market is not people over 13; they are not only not pre-sold on space, but had those hopes dashed. They may say they want to see spaceflight, but that is frequently just a license to gripe about NASA. Or private industry. Or the government of their choice in one of the real or potential space powers in the last 60 years. When it comes to lifting a finger to actually fly into space themselves or help others do so, they don’t.

The most severe form of this affliction is outright hostility to personal spaceflight such as that exhibited by Rep. Jim Oberstar.

The skepticism gets louder when people are onto something. For example, I’ve had two folks pick on Free Space Shot as impossible and sinister. Sinister?! Lucas wasn’t pilloried for making millions on Star Wars. Science Fiction books? No, perfectly safe psychologically. Is it that I am hawking non-fiction hope? Let’s look at comparative track records for other non-fiction hopes:

Hope for world peace: not doing so good

Hope for peace in the middle east: not doing so good

Hope for end to religious strife: not doing so good except in Ireland

Hope for carbon abatement: not doing so good (although I am bullish)

Hope for energy independence: not doing so good

Hope for nuclear disarmament: not doing so good

Hope for winning the lottery: Illinois thinks it’s peaked and is selling

Hope for winning a poker tournament after paying by credit card: Against the law

Hope for NASA settling the Moon and Mars: about 15 years away and holding.

So I am putting hope for personal spaceflight for the middle class out there. Am I being held to the standard of a hope? No, I am being held to the standard of a juvenile ideal. Businesses sometimes fail, but I am considered a swindler if mine does. I am pilloried a cheat if I promise less than I should. So perfection drives out the good. Kudos to an I-think-I-can small business? No, pilloried for not having terms and conditions that make it cost $1 million for Virgin or Microsoft to give away a $250,000 space flight.

Teachers and parents take note. Your schoolchildren will be told that the dream they follow is impossible. The evidence? Just that improbable is close to impossible. I offer license to hope. Am I offering a good or a bad if I fail? If Google can raise $10 billion in ad revenue and NBC $2 billion a year, why not Free Space Shot $100 million? It can. If enough believe it and play, it will. 200,000 kids is only 1% of kids 9-13. That’s all we need to have our own private economy where the skeptics will just shake their heads and say that fools being led by fools have done the impossible and start harping on the next “impossible” dream that comes along.

I wouldn’t be attracting the criticism if I wasn’t starting to sound eerily plausible; too good to be true. What if it is true? What if it really is this easy? Go back to sleep while the kids and I prove it out. Join the fun in a few years when even your subconscious is convinced.

As they say in Little Miss Sunshine, “You can’t fail if you don’t quit.” We’re not quitting. The Moon or Bust.

check out freespaceshot.com

Should be an interview at Out of the Cradle and the essay at The Space Review is up.

In October 2000, I left IBM Research to form a company, First Intellectual that would build “patent walls” of hundreds of patents to protect financial service companies’ service offerings, create a tidy royalty stream, parry any future efforts by competitors to collect royalties and preempt many “patent trolls” from doing the same thing. This is common practice in technology businesses, but new to services. We did OK. We got some meetings with the heads of IP at ML, MSDW, Qualcomm, JP Morgan and a few others. They didn’t really want the service we were providing, but would buy IP consulting services. After a few months, we realized that to be freelancers we’d need a big war chest to file suits. That the war chest alone was a viable business and that invention alone was not. That is, that good patents are inexpensive. We also learned that financial services are a cooperative network because for an offering, one needs the customers of all entities to participate to make the float successful. Playing mean doesn’t work well. These aren’t the kind of folks that thought they needed protection. Certainly not from each other. Trolls had not yet arrived to break up their club. We closed up shop.

Fast forward five years. On December 30, the front page headline on the Financial Times is “US financial service groups rush to join patent stampede”. Sort of. 238 patents, while up 3-fold, is nothing. IBM gets 3000 alone in their sectors. It’s still early. If you want me to be your hired gun and file 500 patents in financial services and get $1 billion a year in royalties, give me a shout. But anyway, I was there over five years ago with the answer.

One gets more myopic with time, so maybe Space-Shot.com is only a few years ahead of its time. Certainly, we don’t need to spend $1,000,000 to stay open for five years waiting. It’s run mostly by robots. First Intellectual needed people. If one comes too early to the battlefield, there is only half a decisive win. As Sun Tzu puts it, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” I knew the answer, but not the people who didn’t care for the answer I had. I suffered a defeat despite having the billion dollar business. My buddy who said next time I had a billion dollar business, I should let him syndicate it passed on this one. His loss. Life is a repeated game though.

after 207 losses. I guess they were due for a win as Howard Cosell would say. The underdog sometimes can triumph. It was written up in the New York Times.

I gave $15,000 last week to help morale in a unit in Iraq. Here’s why.

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Nader Elhefnawy gets half of the trend when he says that “The 1970s was a period of intense concern about natural resource shortages…. [but] commodity prices started dropping…. Julian Simon … [bet] that the prices of copper, chrome, tin, nickel, and tungsten would drop by 1990. Simon won the bet handily. Even more dramatically, the price of oil, which hit $40 a barrel by 1981, fell to $10 a barrel by 1998.”

In Simon’s The Ultimate Resource 2, he shows how ingenuity has always led prices to fall. Including the price of agricultural land.

Elhefnawy goes on to say:

Over the long term the energy, raw materials, and space of the solar system and beyond will need to be tapped if humanity is to go on expanding. Simple math dictates this. A two percent annual growth rate in energy production means a roughly eightfold increase in a century’s time, century after century, and current levels of energy production are already taxing the Earth’s ecosystem beyond its limits. (emphasis his)

No, actually not.

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Jeff Foust over at the Space Review reports that NASA has its work cut out for it to convince kids that it is relevant. My prescription is simple. Become like the Park Service and open up the Moon for visits.