Over the next handful of articles I’m going to dive into what Kaplak is and how it works, as far as I can at the present time. This first article is a slightly modified re-run of the background article from our old main site :
Background
Originally, kaplak is an old maritime judicial term of Dutch origin. For bringing a shipment of stores safely to port, a skipper could be paid a bonus, i.e. káplak, calculated as a percentage of the shipment’s value. This served as financial compensation for the risks taken and hazards overcome at sea. Káplak literally means ‘fabric for a cap’, with a reference to the incentive it provided to stay on deck even in bad weather.
The internet is like an ocean, travelled by data packages. It is happening all the time, everywhere, at the same time. It is a global network of instant communication, of conversations, information and knowledge. Of human experience, artworks and products in all kinds and forms. As long as it can be digitized, i.e. made understandable and transportable by computers and cables, it can be made accessible on the internet.
In a global world of ‘unlimited shelf space’, as Chris Anderson coined it, there’s a market even for products on the very slim end of the long tail. If you can approach your market precisely enough, using the internet, you’ll be able to reach the unknown destinations, which will make your product meet it’s niche customers. This is one of the great promises of the internet, but it doesn’t come without problems.
Your problem
How do you get noticed? – and more importantly, noticed by your target audience, on an internet which grows by millions of new websites alone every month?
How do you get paid? How do you get safe and fast transfers of your digital goods and digital money, which will allow you to keep doing what you do best, without the hazzle of setting up and running your own ebusiness and marketing networks?
Visibility
The World Wide Web alone grew by a staggering 4.4 million websites from april to may 2007, and this number is increasing. Paradoxically, while all this information is made available and accessible all the time, to everyone, at the same time, it also makes it difficult to find a particular piece of information, if you don’t know where to look. We come to depend on recommendations, from people and companies we trust, to find what we’re looking for. Search engines deliver such recommendations. Your friends, colleagues and social networks provide others.
One method of communicating our preferences and recommendations is to create hyperlinks on the World Wide Web, which points others to interesting files, information and communities. As the amount of hyperlinks on the internet increase, however, we also need methods to filter the hyperlinks; to select certain criteria for collecting, ordering and presenting them.
At Kaplak, we don’t believe in re-inventing the wheel. Search engines and web indexes are doing great jobs at filtering information, answering queries and creating visibility on the World Wide Web. But we recognize a few significant problems with search as the only method of filtering and finding information.
In order to search for something, you need to know what you’re looking for, at least generally. You need to be motivated enough to take your time to use a search engine, type in your query and sort your results according to your preferences. For some queries and products, this process can take hours, as the most interesting results (typically niche-oriented results) remain buried deep down the results pages. And of course, you can’t search for information or products you don’t know about.
Even peer-to-peer filesharing technologies such as bittorrent, which otherwise holds great promises, has difficulty tackling files with less-than-mainstream interest. One has to be something of a hero to keep one’s bittorrent client open all night, in order to seed one’s work for the lone leecher which stumbles upon it by chance.
A large amount of information and products remains unseen by their potential customers and markets. You come to depend on marketing agencies and banner advertisements in order to be seen. Most marketing schemes however, are not precise enough to reach very delicate groups and environments. And you need to have established your business model, in order to use them.
Making your ends meet
Cheaper hardware, internet connections and free software make it economically feasible today for almost anyone to create a business model using the internet. This has so far led to a tremendous growth of thriving webbased businesses, whose economical and social ramifications have possibly not yet been fully understood or recognized.
Business models on the web, however, have mostly been thought in terms of luring customers away from whatever they were otherwise doing on the web, into ‘visiting’ a specific website. This website typically offers particular ‘webshop’ software, handling inventory presentation and customer monetary transactions. Alternatively, the website offers all its contents for free, relying instead on income from advertisments, of which some of the least intrusive are the popular text ads from Google and others.
In either case, if you want to sell something using the web, you’ve also been left with the task of maintaining a website and administrating online transactions, taking time from what you do best; creating new products. If you’re successful, you soon face the choice of hiring help to administrate your growing online business, or cut back on the hours spent creating products. This makes you a manager, which is great, if this is what you want, but not so great, if you want to focus on creating and working within your field of expertise.
If you sell very little or receive only slight traffic, none of this is feasible. Your time will be spent optimizing your website, and your traffic will be too insignificant to bring you any income from your advertisements. Perhaps you will be tempted to make your products more ‘mainstream’ to attract more customers, in order to make an income from your ads. If you receive great amounts of traffic, but still sell very little or otherwise fail to monetize your traffic, you will be hit with bandwidth and bottleneck problems too.
So, apart from tools which help your products ‘be seen’ by your target customers, as a niche producer you also need tools, which gives you an income, but without the time consumption needed to necessarily run your own webshop. At the same time, it can’t hurt if your product can help others finance their websites and internet businesses.
Kaplak’s offering
We’re cultural niche producers ourselves. We know what it means to make a living on the slim end of the long tail. Kaplak was launched, when we realized, that no other market or non-market actors today on the internet seemed to offer distribution tools, which could help us meet our present challenges. Sure, there are distribution tools if you want to give away your work for free, but none which solves your problem at the core : making money while doing what you do best.
As niche producers, our products have often targeted audiences and markets, which are so slim, that setting up and running a website and ebusiness, along with ads or other methods required to market and sell, is impractical and often deemed inefficient and unprofitable from the very beginning.
Kaplak is a tool which will seek to remedy these problems for our customers. What Kaplak is about, is creating economically sound distribution methods and tools for these kinds of products, which may not sell much, but still do find their markets.
How it works
Using Kaplak can be boiled down to these three steps :
1. Provide your product (or a link to it) and a few details of information.
2. Pick your price.
3. Determine how much of your earnings you’re willing to part with in Kaplak.
Kaplak will then spit out a widget, i.e. a small piece of code, which can easily be inserted on a website. You can use the widget yourself, on your own website, and you can distribute it to others. You can even just leave it on the Kaplak network for others to find it and redistribute it, if and when, your product is in demand.
Your product is made visible and sold by local “skippers” (i.e. website owners, admins, forum visitors etc.) on the niche websites and networks your potential customers use. They help bring your product safely to harbour, across the oceans of the internet, and in turn earn their share of Kaplak. Your product helps them finance their work,
while you sell your product in a place, you wouldn’t otherwise have reached.
You don’t need ads for your product sprinkled all over the internet or on mainstream media websites, visited by masses of people, who could care less about your not-so-mainstream product. What you need is well-placed and precise recommendations in those niche environments and web communities, your customers visit.
Company and financing
Kaplak is owned and developed by Morten Blaabjerg. A number of partners have acquired warrants for b-shares in Kaplak, including our hosting partner MC Solutions.
Kaplak’s first goals are :
1. To present a public online platform, which presents the project and invites initial customers and collaborators.
2. To create a company capable of building a first, early version of our service and sell this to our first customers.
3. To document this process and generate income streams to finance further development.
4. To create a publicly accessible workspace in the form of a wiki. The Kaplak Wiki will host our growing information base and invite participation from all interested in developing Kaplak.
5. To present a thorough second edition of the Kaplak business plan aimed at venture capital, and spend at least 10% of our time to actively develop and sustain durable investor relations.
Sounds interesting?
Please sign up, if you may be interested in Kaplak as a future user and customer, or simply would like to know more, follow our demos and our online events. We will be happy for your support. It helps us, that we can tell our investors, that we have interested customers waiting. We’d also like to ask you to take our online surveys, when we get around to that. We believe we can create a product, which is most useful to you as a niche producer or consumer, by inviting your input and participation to the process, at a very early stage.
We also welcome you to follow our blog, which is also available via RSS. Our RSS feed makes it possible for you to post the latest Kaplak headlines on your own website, blog or online profile, to tell others about this project, or simply enjoy our latest articles with your favourite RSS reader.
Investors
Kaplak issues warrants for shares in Kaplak to interested parties. Please contact us for further information, if you are interested in joining Kaplak as an investor. We’ll be happy to help you with further details.
