No time to volunteer or give back to society? Jacob Colker wants to help you exploit a wasted resource: your spare time.
In the seconds it takes you to send a vapid Tweet or check TheSuperficial, Colker contends, you could be teaching English to an immigrant, or helping a NASA explore the surface of Mars.
How?
Colker is behind a new iPhone application called ‘The Extraordinaries,’ that lets you choose from a list of short do-gooder actions whenever you have a free second. Think of it like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for the nonprofit set. They call it "On-demand volunteerism by mobile phone."
So far the application is only live on iPhones, but Colker plans to roll out on Blackberries and other devices soon, and introduce new capabilities like video. Colker won $25,000 at last week’s We Media conference in Miami, so he’s better positioned to get there. For now you can input text and take pictures–features that GroundReport hopes to leverage to fuel on-the-fly citizen journalism.
We’ll keep you posted.