We are pleased to announce today that we have raised $1.9 million Canadian in financing from a number of angel investors.

This financing has allowed the company to complete our early development and will provide us with the funds needed to support our launch.

Here is a copy of the press release announcing our financing.

Paul Graham the co-founder of Y Combinator gave a fascinating presentation at Y Combinator startup school this weekend about the similarities between great Internet companies and non-profits in this presentation about Being Good.

Paul also posted an essay version of this speech on his website.

This speech reminds me of many of the conversations that Alex and I had when co-founding Akoha. 

We were brainstorming about social entrepreneurship, our experiences in trying to make the world a better place at Zero-Knowledge Systems and our believe that there was an opportunity to make improving the world fun.  We discussed the best approach to implement some of our ideas and decided that a company with a strong social goal made the most amount of sense.

This lead to one of the principle questions that Akoha has been designed to answer.  "What if playing a game could make the world a better place?"

We look forward to sharing Akoha with the world later this year and sharing how we think we can help everyone Be Good together.

Thanks to Heri @ Montreal Tech Watch for the link.

Illustration by Asaf HANUKA - Logo by Hamish Macpherson

Illustration is not an advertisement of the actual attendees  or events of Montreal Python.

Akoha and Standout Jobs are once again hosting MontrealPython 2 which is occurring tonight at the Standout Jobs office.

Date: Thursday, April 10, 2008
Time: 6:30pm - 9:00pm
Location: Standout Jobs HQ
Street: 3981 St-Laurent Suite # 615
City/Town: Montreal, QC View Map

The event notice is here on Facebook. 

Tonight the schedule includes,

Asterisk and Python
by Cyril Robert

Asterisk, allows the average user to do pretty much anything he wants
with his telephony system. It is open source and billed as the “future of telephony”.

The first step in using asterisk is understanding it correctly, which
will be the first part of Cyril’s lecture. The second part will
focus on how to take advantage of Python to make asterisk a whole lot
easier.

PyQT and PyOpenGL: Live hacking a toy app
by Yannick Gingras.

For the first 35 mins, Yannick will hack a toy app from scratch using
PyQt and PyOpenGL. After that, he will answer questions for 10 minutes.

Michael Deutsch also proposed we take a look at the introduction by Guido Van Rossum of Google App Engine if we have time.

For the Montreal Canadian fans attending I’ve already confirmed that a few people in attendance will be watching the game stream from CBC so I’m sure we can all keep running updates in between our Pythonistas presentations.

If you are into Python come on out and join us.

When our friend Tara was in town recently she did a video interview with me about Gift Economies and Akoha.

She recently posted the video on the SpreadLoveProject website.

The reference made part way through the interview when talking about the role of generosity in evolution is the great book The Generous Man - How Helping Others is the Sexiest Thing You Can Do by Tor Norretranders.

In the book he introduces the novel concept that generosity, creativity and cooperativeness serve a singular evolutionary purpose of making us sexier.

If you’d like to hear an excerpt of Tor Norretranders speaking about game theory, altruism and economics here is a short audio clip from his EuroOSCON keynote.

Our friend Tara Hunt was in Montreal in December doing some research for her upcoming book and visited Akoha.  Her book The Whuffie Factor - 5 Keys for Maxing Social Capital and Winning with Online Communities is coming this fall.

If you aren’t familiar with the term Whuffie, you’ll be hearing more about it in the coming year.  It is available for pre-order at Amazon today.

Whuffie is a reference to a reputation-based currency in Cory Doctorow’s sci-fi novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. (the book is available for free, but I encourage you to buy a copy or order a signed copy directly from Cory).

Wikipedia explains Whuffie in the following way,

The usual economic incentives have disappeared from the book’s world. Whuffie has replaced money, providing a motivation for people to do useful and creative things. A person’s Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to a person’s favorable or unfavorable actions. The question is, who determines which actions are favorable or unfavorable? In Down and Out, the answer is public opinion. Rudely pushing past someone on the sidewalk will definitely lose you points from them (and possibly bystanders who saw you), while composing a much-loved symphony will earn you Whuffie from everyone who enjoyed it.

……..

There are few details in the book about how this system actually worked; most of the explanations given are very general, like this one: "Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn’t starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented — your personal capital with your friends and neighbors — you more accurately gauged your success".

The idea that our daily activities could be combined into a social score or social economy is already occurring in Facebook, multi-player games, the blogosphere and many other communities.  Making it fun for people to accumulate social reputations in the context of play is one of the ideas we’ve incorporated into Akoha.

Our study of gift economies have been one of the many inspirations for themes and activities in Akoha.  When designing the rewards and mechanics of how Akoha works we looked to many different concepts of gift culture to inspire our team.