I had a dream this morning, which later turned in to a day dream, which now is feeling more like a mission. And you can help!

I wanted to start a brainstorm here about ideas for business that might want to co-brand with Rosetta, where it would help them improve public image, and help Rosetta get the word out. Must be win/win or it doesn't make sense to take the time and effort to pursue it.

So far, I've got the following ideas, please add other types of business, or other reasons the fit makes sense. And if you are in the business of promoting business and know how to take steps towards these ideas, please chime in, we need your help to make this happen!

Life Insurance: Tends to be a steady, renewing customer base each year, in fact many policies are locked for 10 years or longer. If we all live longer, because of Rosetta's work, then it means we'll have to pay more years of premiums in for life insurance, and ALSO means there inevitable payout will be delayed for years. People that study science are probably slightly more likely then average to take care of themselves in other ways, and to live longer. So, the idea is for a life insurance company to promote Rosetta, and give you a discount on your policy if you crunch 50,000 credits per year. This discount would pay for itself by the interest on the money they don't have to pay out because the long-term population they are insuring will live longer due to Rosetta's research.

Sweepstakes: When we pull a WU and crunch it, we are given a random number seed. This is the basis for the crunching done on a given WU. What if you gave out sweepstakes tickets with the same random number seeds on them?? And noone knows in advance which seed will yield the best model predictions, and noone knows in advance how many models will be crunched from a given seed. Seed that yields best prediction reveils the winning ticket!

Now, couple this with an international company that already uses similar sweepstakes promotions, and wants to associated itself with health and investing in the future of science and medicine... I'm thinking Coke, and McDonald's here. Come to their website and see the results generated for your seed. Give enough info. for people to get curious about what all of this is about. Grand prize, a trip to the city the person who crunched the WU is from! ...or to Seattle to visit Bakerlab.

Maybe even associate it with AIDS research WUs.

[disclaimer] It's just an idea! Bakerlab hasn't approved the idea and will make their own decision about what to do with the idea. Hopefully we can help do preliminary ground work and find an interested company to get the ball rolling.

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Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/

Along a somewhat similar line of thought...

A bit ago I had wondered if we could form a relationship w/ a 'swag-vendor', along the lines of the Mozilla store (GatewayCDI, Inc.), to provide stuff that users might want to purchase. Since we're a non-profit we can't make any $$ off of the sale of merchandise (afaik) and so I thought we might take our 'cut' of the R@H action in 'merchandise credits' that we could then 'spend' to send out swag to users that had accomplished some goals (user of the day, 1M credits, top prediction, etc). We don't have the manpower to undertake of any of this sort of thing, so it seemed a good idea to have a store, funded by the sales of R@H stuff, that could send out R@H prizes to folks for us.

So, I contacted GatewayCDI about the idea in general and they said that it boiled down to the number of folks interested in getting R@H cups, hats, laserpointer, whatever. If enough interest existed then it might be possible to do something. That's about as far as it got...

I don't know how the U. of Washington and HHMI would view this sort of thing (UW is notorious for wanting 'their share'), but if it didn't cost them anything and their particular logos weren't used.... who knows...

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A non-profit organization can still sell things for profit - the money just has to remain within the non-profit and be used to further its goals. ie it can't be run to generate profit for anyone.

However, Rosetta@Home is non-profit research, I don't think it's actually a non-profit organization. Although this would depend on how the university of Washington does its thing.

The problem with branding is that a lot of people don't like ads and this may discourage them from folding. One would really have to do some surveys and research before considering this, but I don't think it'd be worth it.


However I could see Intel or AMD being interested in a deal similiar to what review sites get: If someone orders through their site, they get a small cut of the sales price. That "cut" could either be used towards advertisement or returned to the purchaser. (like a discount)
You could also set up a scheme were the money from those sales would be used towards point rewards, which could offer processors from that manufacturer - again encouraging more folding. It'd depend on the kind of deal the processor maker would offer and how many would take advantage of it.
Personally I'd throw every cent generated by that in an ad-campaign, because nothing is as important as 'spreading the word' for a DC project.

This would encourage folders (many of which run multiple systems and thus spend an above average amount of money on upgrades) to buy parts of the manufacturer - not only because they help out Rosetta, but also because the fact that the manufacturer is mentioned on a website with a processor intensive task would imply that they're superior to the competition. Sony is jumping on F@H's back and possibly saving millions in EU taxes, because this is likely a huge part of what they needed to get the PS3 legally classified as a computer and not a gaming console. (-> lower taxes, worth millions of dollars - anything they invested in F@H is peanuts in comparison)

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Perhaps part of my original idea was misunderstood. I wasn't actually thinking in terms of bringing MONEY in to Rosetta. I was hoping to bring out exposure to people and bring in more machines. But yes, if profit comes in from merchandise sales, it should be easy to spend it on advertising of various forms so as to retain the not for profit status. In fact, I think the money could be used to run the lab or any other project function as well. But yes, since that is all presumably covered elsewhere already, promotion would seem to be the way to spend which brings in more crunchers.

Are there any budding authors out there?? If someone wrote a book that outlined how to use Rosetta and/or BOINC for a Science Fair project, this would be another good way to bring exposure, and have people pay something for it too. In fact, the cirriculum being created for the Seattle schools might be a good rough draft of such a book.

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Add this signature to your EMail:
Running Microsoft's "System Idle Process" will never help cure cancer, AIDS nor Alzheimer's. But running Rosetta@home just might!
https://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/