If your mymission2 username appears above then look out for an email from us which will tell you how to claim your prize. If you haven’t yet received an email then make sure your email address is correctly entered into your mymission2 profile! Don’t worry - nobody will see it but we need it to be able to contact you.
Remember, we’ve changed the incentives as of October 1st. We are now awarding automatic rewards to the top 10 points earners PLUS two $50 prizes and a $200 grant each month. Click here for more info.
We love great ideas here at Mission Control. We always ask for them.
So when Mission Controller Chris came up with an idea for a video ad, we thought we’d let him run with it. He wrote, auditioned, filmed, directed and edited this ad in no time at all.
We’re looking for a bright young thing with lots of energy, ambition and guts … but who has fallen out of the crazy tree and hit every branch on the way down.
The role is to dream up fabulous publicity stunts, make them happen and then ensure everyone in the world knows about it. Think Rag Week organiser meets PR guru.
We think a good job title for this role is “Publicity Activist”.
Have you got the bottle to do things that others wont? Are you larger-than-life with amazingly intelligent wit and are you able to charm your way out of trouble? Have you organised a successful university rag week or do you have relevant experience in creating publicity stunts or PR?
If you are nuttier than squirrell poo, you wanna be a celebrity and you think that 1+1=3 then we would love to hear from you.
This is a full time role based at Mission Control in London. Start date is “yesterday”.
mymission2 exists so that people can help each other achieve their dreams.
We want to reward people …
who publish their own great missions
who help others achieve their missions
who bring other people to the site
The incentives to date have been very effective in many ways but we think we can improve them by reducing the monthly rewards for simply earning points and introducing monthly prizes and grants for the people who we think contribute most to mymission2. So the following monthly incentives will be used from October 1st onwards.
1. Automatic rewards based on mission points earned in the month:
$50 Amazon vouchers to the highest points earner
$30 Amazon vouchers to the 2nd highest points earner
$20 Amazon vouchers to the 3rd highest points earner
$10 Amazon vouchers to the 4th highest points earner
$10 Amazon vouchers to the 5th highest points earner
$10 Amazon vouchers to the 6th highest points earner
$10 Amazon vouchers to the 7th highest points earner
$10 Amazon vouchers to the 8th highest points earner
$10 Amazon vouchers to the 9th highest points earner
$10 Amazon vouchers to the 10th highest points earner
2. Special prizes each month:
$50 to the “Commissioner Of The Month”
$50 to the “Responder Of The Month”
The “Commissioner Of The Month” will be the publisher of loads of great missions or even just one spectacular mission.
The “Responder Of The Month” will be, in our opinion, the most helpful person at mymission2 during the month.
3. Special grant each month:
$200 to the “Missioner Of The Month”
The “Missioner Of The Month” will be the missioner who quite simply is most deserving - the person we want to help the most. Our grant is to say “thanks” or to support them in their cause.
The monthly prize winners and the monthly grant recipient will be chosen by us here at Mission Control. We will decide how to award these prizes and grants - as cash, online vouchers, specific products or services, etc. We’ll be considering both quantity and quality. Our decisions are final and it is possible to win multiple prizes.
What do you think? Let us know by posting comments to this blog post.
Some people have noticed that we have been sending out some of our e-mail in triplicate. The source of the problem has been identified, and the culprit has been sent to sit on the naughty step.
Following on from the success of the Battle of the Bands that we hosted in July, mymission2:unplugged will be held on Wednesday September 17th in London. Click here for more info and to check out the acts.
The venue is the fabulous Ramshackle in Fulham; its new owners are restoring it to its former glory when bands such as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and the Sex Pistols played there!
The audience will decide who wins! At the end we’ll ask the audience to cheer for each act … so we need you to come and support the performer you know or just cheer for the act you like the best.
- 4th: jogillespie wins $30 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 5th: jonny<>blue wins $20 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 6th: robertcollins wins $10 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 7th: james2001 wins $10 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 8th: cindiroussell wins $10 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 9th: marisalondon wins $10 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 10th: oliverjenkins wins $10 worth of Amazon voucher
If your mymission2 username appears above then look out for an email from us which will tell you how to claim your prize. If you haven’t yet received an email then make sure your email address is correctly entered into your mymission2 profile! Don’t worry - nobody will see it but we need it to be able to contact you.
Yes, we did it! We SMASHED the world speed record for 2 people to burst 100 balloons. The record was previously held by Dermot O’Leary and Alan Conely who got the record at about 25 seconds on a live TV show (The Paul O’Grady show) in 2006.
Previous holders of this record include Vernon Kaye - TV presenter.
But David Ashford (CEO) and Will Ferrand (Mission Controller) - representing mymission2 - totally smashed the record by bursting all 100 balloons in just 12.25 seconds!
We’re waiting for official confirmation from Guinness World Records before we break open the champagne though.
We’re delighted to welcome Chris to mission control.
Chris, who is 26 and very tall, is a drama graduate and enjoys scriptwriting - so he has the perfect skills to be helping missioners to realize their dreams!
There’s no doubt that we’ll be forcing Chris to take charge when we eventually host a “comedy night” as a mid-week mission here in London … yep, you’ve guessed it, Chris has also been a standup comedian!
- 3rd: jogillespie wins $50 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 4th: arveycastella wins $30 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 5th: andreadanelle wins $20 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 6th=: carlanelson wins $10 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 6th=: robertcollins wins $10 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 8th: belindayoung wins $10 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 9th=: grahavalentin wins $10 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 9th=: tonimckilliga wins $10 worth of Amazon voucher
- 9th=: timothya.ruan wins $10 worth of Amazon voucher
If your mymission2 username appears above then look out for an email from us which will tell you how to claim your prize. If you haven’t yet received an email then make sure your email address is correctly entered into your mymission2 profile! Don’t worry - nobody will see it but we need it to be able to contact you.
We’ve just put a new release up at mymisson2.com, which on the one hand adds lots of fun new functions, and on the other hand fixes a few bugs that crept in to the last release!
With over 50,000 missioners, we had to have a good hard look at the back-end architecture of the product to see how far it would take us. Well, our friends over at Spika have done a terrific job, and we’re well on track to keep growing the system with the same architecture, with a few tweaks, for some time.
Not having to worry about that has allowed us to bring a few things forward that we have been wanting to do for some time. You will now see that every category, and ever mission, has its own chat room. At the moment, you can only access that on the site itself, but soon you’ll be able to access it from anywhere. We’ve also added social bookmarking functionality, and changed our Facebook integration to bring us in line with the new platform.
The point system has had an overhaul as well, so that you only get points if you have filled out your profile. That said, you can now respond and start missions without the need to input a full profile, so it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other. Of course, if you register, you could win Amazon vouchers! We’re also giving away more points for responding to other people’s missions.
We’re always open to suggestions, so keep them coming through to control at mymission2.com
The Monday Mission - The Battle of the Bands - was a great night thanks to all the bands and the people who came along to be entertained and then vote. Here are the results:
The venue is the fabulous Ramshackle and its new owners are restoring it to its former glory when bands such as Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and the Sex Pistols played there!
The audience will decide who wins! At the end we’ll ask the audience to cheer for each band … so we need you to come and support the band you know or just cheer for the band you like the most.
We’re delighted to welcome Becky to mission control.
As well as helping missioners to achieve their goals, Becky will be organizing some crazy events to spread the mymission2 message. Look out for her at mymission2.
Becky is 24 and describes herself as “polite, fun and reliable”. She has just finished a degree in Asia Pacific Studies & Business Management at Leeds University.
Congratulations to our top missioners - these are the people who have been the most helpful throughout our private beta phase.
We’re rewarding them with the following prizes …
$100 worth of Amazon vouchers to JP
$100 worth of Amazon vouchers to MOFAL
$100 worth of Amazon vouchers to PAG
$100 worth of Amazon vouchers to yvonnegoh
$100 worth of Amazon vouchers to j.desande
If your name appears above then look out for an email from us which will tell you how to claim your prize!
We’ve always wanted to reward our most helpful and active missioners. One day we hope to enable all missioners to redeem their points in some way. But, for now, we are rewarding the top 10 points earners each month. This is what we are giving away for June 2008 …
- 1st place gets $200 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 2nd place gets $100 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 3rd prize gets $50 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 4th place gets $30 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 5th place gets $20 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 6th place gets $10 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 7th place gets $10 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 8th place gets $10 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 9th place gets $10 worth of Amazon vouchers
- 10th place gets $10 worth of Amazon vouchers
Prizes can be provided in US$ or the equivalent value in UK£ or Euro€.
The best way to earn points - and therefore prizes - is to provide really helpful responses to people so that they award loads of points to you when they close their mission!
We’re delighted to welcome Will and Heidi to mission control.
We had 71 responses to our ad on Gumtree for 2 mission controllers and 12 of these went on to take part in the audition that we ran. A sincere thanks to everybody who applied.
We chose Will and Heidi to be our first mission controllers so look out for them at mymission2. They’re here to help our missioners achieve their goals and will do (almost) whatever it takes to this end! But watch out … they also moderate the site’s content!
Will is 20 and really sporty. He is studying modern languages at Edinburgh University. He speaks English, French, German and Italian.
Heidi is 25 and really creative. She has just finished a degree in criticism, curation and communication for art and design at Central St Martins, London.
We had a good laugh here at mission control that Heidi has a degree in being critical. Yikes, what have we let ourselves in for
We’re pleased to announce that we have secured £150,000 seed capital from an angel investor. We’re not able to disclose details of the deal but we’re very pleased to have raised the funding we need to improve our revenue streams and add some new high priority functionality.
Finally, a pad of our own. We’re on the north side of Putney Bridge in the deluxe suites at Riverbank House. If you’re in the area, drop in (just ask our fabulous receptionists to give us a bell), and you can have a cup of our sludge-like coffee.
Yes, if you are enthusiastic about helping people, we’re looking for some “mission controllers” to come and work with us in our luxurious new accommodation overlooking the river in Putney, South West London.
Not a sign that we have nothing to say! Quite the opposite, in fact. Activity has been frantic at MM2 Tower, with vast reams of virtual paper being produced as we finalise our operational plan for the next 12 months.
We now have over 15,000 users in just under 4 weeks, which is a figure we dreamed of, but secretly wondered if we could pull off. Not only are people registering, but they are creating missions, and helping others fulfill theirs. How lucky we are to see champions emerging from the community who are as enthusiastic as we are to help others fulfill their dreams.
There are some key trends emerging, and not unsurprisingly, the biggest one is that the more specific the mission is, the more chance you have of getting a useful response. My favourite of the latest crop is this one, where we have someone who wants to write a fantastic song as a way of expressing how they feel. Having tried, and failed, to write songs over the years, I am certainly going to give her all the encouragement and help I can (which may be to send her one of my old songs and say don’t write like this!)
There are a number of innovations we are going to build into the service over the next 12 months, and we’re already adding feature requests to the roadmap from out users, so please send any into us. You can see our contact details at the top of the blog.
We’re seeing lots of new missions being created which are just not likely to get any responses at all because they are vague and there is no real call to action. But that’s ok, the people with serious goals are getting helpful responses. I’ve actually been really surprised about some weird missions which are getting loads of responses.
The top tip to attract more responses to your mission is to respond to others as much as possible - in particular you should search for missions that are similar to yours and respond to these. This will raise your profile and people are much more likely to see your mission. You can even copy the URL from your mission and paste this into your responses.
Posting responses is great fun and of course it helps your fellow missioners!
So go to www.mymission2.com and see how many helpful responses you can post.
Over three thousand new members in our first week!
We’ve had all sorts of missions, from the completely off the wall, to the relatively mundane. It’s great to see that people are actually helping each other already. We thought it would take time for us to get the critical mass together to really see that mutuality, but even with the numbers we have now, it’s working.
I’m pleased that I have been able to help some people out, including helping one lady with her Spanish (I found her a course, not taught it…)
What we are seeing is that the more specific you are, the more chance you have of getting a response. Make sure you take the time to give some real detail about what you want to achieve, or even start off with some brief details, and come and add some more later.
One of the things I love about blogging over “traditional” media is that is is generally more pithy. And more brutal…
Many thanks to Mike Butcher for his Techcrunch profile. Hopefully, it proves that there is no such thing as bad publicity…
Mike’s main comments were that some of the current missions lack specificity, and that we asked him all sorts of seemingly irrelevant questions. Undoubtedly, we’re going to have people who publish the unattainable, but already this morning we’ve had someone post a mission to improve their Spanish. And that is where the data we asked Mike for comes in. If that person lives in South London say, and Mike had told us that he lives in that vicinity, and worked as a Spanish teacher (in addition to his 24 hour TCUK party lifestyle ), we’d have matched them up by now…
It’s all about the “social contract” of you asking people for help, and giving some of your expertise in return at a later date. “Dull”, perhaps, but we see ourselves akin to a dating site to match people’s dreams to people who can help fulfil them… And if you remember those old Dateline questionnaires on the back of magazines, ours is a hell of a lot shorter!
And to prove that I still dearly love Techcrunch in all its incarnations, here’s a link to me launching planes yesterday for Mike Arrington when I should have been launching a company…
Well, who would pick April 1st to launch a new product? It just seemed too good a day to miss, frankly. We’d tested the product to destruction, everything was ready, and as it happens, we were presenting at an event as well.
For those unfamiliar, mymission2 is the world’s first aspirational network, where we match up people who have dreams and goals with people who can help fulfil them.
The site for the launch was the MashUp Innovate event, and we’re looking forward to seeing some of the photos from the event soon. It was a great event, with 12 companies pitching their wares to a mixture of people, some of whom allegedly had money, so that’s always enough to get a good crowd together.
From our point of view, it was good to get face-to-face feedback on what we are trying to achieve, and how we’ve implemented it. All of the reaction was good, and we’re looking forward to a lot of the participants taking the plunge, and starting their own missions soon.
Posted by Dashford
Posted by Dashford
Posted by Dashford
), we’d have matched them up by now…
