Reflection

This assignment helped me to contextualize a lot of the information that I had learned during my "Classrooms of the Future" project. In my readings, despite all the advancements in technology and VR, most of the "big ideas" in education were driven and anchored in architectural spaces designed for specific purposes. Green spaces for gardening. Community spaces for arts and media. Locations that blurred the lines between school and community were at the centre of education innovation in most of the literature we reviewed. In the words of Amy Poehler as read in Yes! Please: The doing is the thing.

With this idea in mind, I realized that there was a niche for a really good, classy, stylized search engine only for things that exist in the real world and that can be physically experienced. In way, StudioPass is a reactionary response to a culture obsessed with "onlineness". It is an anti-search engine. It is a directory only for the most immersive, most 3D, most engaging technology humans can rediscover: real places and experiences.

In my imaginary venture, I would like to start StudioPass as a non-profit organization or a social enterprise. The organization would work like a co-operative, where each business contributing to StudioPass would get not just the benefits of directly advertising but a share of all profits brought in by the site as a whole. When one business soars on the directory, everyone benefits. The more content, referrals, reviews, or offers a business decides to list, the more they can claim a share of the final co-op revenue.

Read more about Co-Ops from this Pamphlet, from the Ontario Co-Op Association

And I believe there is room for revenue. In an era of modern analytics, where attribution can be worked out down to each interaction, there are many models to build on to create an innovative revenue structures that:

  • Increase revenue to businesses by directing local traffic effectively through curated and well-placed offers and

  • Reward the contributions of different types of businesses at different stages of growth
    (For example, businesses with lesser funds may be able to contribute content (uploads, posts, replies), others may have more pull with visitor traffic (offers, promos), others may contribute revenue share (premium services). etc.)

  • Provides customers with valuable offers curated to their own interests

In an era in which businesses feel beholden to maintaining websites, Google pages, Facebook pages, and Yelp locations, I believe there would be an interest in a site or directory that allowed businesses to be co-owners and co-creators of their own marketing story.