(Photo: Exec)

Sometimes when we pass a homeless person on the way into our multi-million dollar luxury Chelsea apartment, or our driver takes us through the island slums to get to our private beach on St. John's, we suspect that we should probably think about giving back a little bit. People are, like, poor, you know? But the problem is that we're frequently so busy being the CEO of a Very Important Venture-Backed Startup that we don't have the time to go volunteer somewhere.

For that, we are thankful that Exec exists.

The San Francisco-based startup is a lot like TaskRabbit, minus the price bidding for each task. All execs make a flat rate fee of $25/hour, and you can hire them to do everything from personal shopping to cleaning to research. Starting today, you can also hire them to volunteer for you.

Users can pay to hire an exec for a definitive amount of time to volunteer at one of three designated charities. It's an interesting twist on the volunteering model: the thinking behind it is that people frequently donate money instead of time even though a lot of charities desperately need physical volunteers. All profits go to the three charities beginning now through the end of August.

Any honest way to help a charity--no matter how painfully privileged--is a good thing. But we couldn't help but bristle at the notion that if you throw enough money at something you'll never have to interact with it. Maybe instead of paying a poor Exec employee to help build a house or read to kids, you could actually get out in the world and make a difference? Just spitballing here.

Now if you'll excuse us, we have Instagram photos of our tennis court to take.

Mock up of the MetroChange

Have you ever seen folks standing by the Metrocard reader (the one that tells you how much is on the card, not the turnstile) just swiping card after card from a big pile. That's because a lot of times people end up with a random chunk of spare change on their card, but end up throwing it away instead of refilling.

A group of students, Stepan Boltalin, Genevieve Hoffman and Paul May, from NYU's ITP created a prototype for a system called MetroChange that lets straphangers donate that left over fare to charity. The trio points out that every year $52 million is lost on Metrocards people throw away. The problem has gotten so bad the MTA is introducing a $1 replacement fee in the new year.

The kiosk the group created also doubles as a recycling container for the depleted Metrocards. The group is looking for a partner, either the city or a charitable organization, to help them process the payments.

Here's a video demonstration of how the MetroChange system might work. Thanks to Alexis Madrigal for spotting the project.

MetroChange from Genevieve Hoffman on Vimeo.

Yes, Occupy Herbstreit really is that good. And apparently, good guys, too.

Plenty of Occupy Wall Street-inspired sites have popped up since people started organizing as The 99% in New York and then cities around the country. Some have featured slightly lighter content and inspired more admiration (Pets of Awwcupy Wall Street, Occupy Sesame Street, etc) than others (Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street, for example, and the controversy that surrounded it).
Now, one of these sites—which, like the others, has taken on a fan-following of its own—is using the platform they created out of all of this for a good cause.

One of the slightly more niche O.W.S.-related parody sites is a Tumblr called Occupy Herbstreit, a reference to ESPN's College Gameday analyst Kirk Herbstreit, who inspires college kids to get up really early in the morning, get incredibly drunk, and stand behind him and the College Gameday crew while they get impressively drunk before noon and try to get their phallic college-football associated imagery in a background shot.

The Tumblr is pretty great; it's a collection of protest photography intermingled with college football references, and it's a wonderfully smart treat for sports fans, and maybe even the occasional Occupy Wall Street protester who went to a Big 10 or SEC school, assuming they even exist. They've amassed a decent following, and have been written about around the sports world, from ESPN to Deadspin, and whatever's in between.

Well, now the guys are using their platform to help promote another cause in light of the allegations of sexual misconduct that have forced beloved Penn State football coach Joe Paterno's early resignation:

Tomorrow we are announcing that we would like all of our fans to consider donating to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network in light of the recent events at Penn State. We are trying to stay out of the accusation and blame game, but focus the attention towards fighting the horror of sexual abuse.

The guys have created a donation page that they'll be announcing officially on their blog tomorrow, and wrote in an email to Betabeat that they're "hoping this can be our legacy as this project winds down."

Now, really, Drake, is Tumblr all that bad? Rarely has a parody Tumblr resulted in anything more than a book deal; it's nice to see one that knows it won't be anything more than what it is—a silly parody Tumblr, if not a smart one—aspire, if only for a moment, to be just a little more.

Smiley Tim Cook, New People-Liking CEO of Apple.

Apple's new not-Steve-Jobs CEO Tim Cook is running the company these days. Have you heard? If you're wondering what's changed with regards to the gig, well, as the Wall Street Journal's Jessica Vascellaro reports, quite a bit.

Bullet points:

• Cook is doing the boring boss stuff that Steve Jobs hated ("administrative matters that never interested Mr. Jobs"), like how they handle promotions and corporate reporting.
• He's sending lots of company-wide emails. He calls everyone "team."
• He split up the education division—which used to operate separately from the rest of the company—into sales and marketing, and merged them with their respective wide-reaching counterparts at the rest of the company.
• He made Vice President Eddy Cue more powerful with a better title ("senior vice president of internet software and services").
• People expect Cook to be open to stock dividends and stock buybacks, which Jobs was definitely not into.

But best of all?

Mr. Cook has also displayed some different corporate philosophies from Mr. Jobs. The new CEO recently announced a charitable matching program promising Apple would match employee donations to non-profits of up to $10,000 a year, starting in the U.S. In contrast, Mr. Jobs said at a company off-site last year that he was opposed to giving money away, according to a person who attended.

He isn't the cold, non-charity donating bastard that Steve Jobs was. Maybe this is a consequence of him having dropped less acid than Jobs?  Whatever the case, as far as publicity is concerned—and what to do with all that money Apple has sitting around—it's not hard to agree that this all isn't the worst way to spend it. At least until Apple starts matching employee donations to the Young Republicans, or something. That'll be a fun post.

When Jumo was getting ready for launch, a guy could practically feel the drool puddles from a small army of social-media buzz junkies gathering around his Chuck Taylors. Chris Hughes, the adorable blonde "Facebook co-founder" (Yeah, remember the guy whose job it was to reach out to Yale and Columbia in The Social Network? Great founding.) who used Twitter to help Barack Obama become president was behind the project.

As it turns out, the website that helps people engage in perpetual real-time narcissism makes a pretty bogus inspiration for a site designed to get people thinking about anything but themselves. But Jumo manages to be a dud even if you ignore the totally flawed premise. It’s suspicious, confusing, ugly and boring.

To get started on Jumo, you better get in the spirit of giving right away, because the website demands that users hand over a bunch of Facebook data right off the bat. Jumo wants to know your basic Facebook information and access your data whenever it wants. And it wants to post to your wall.

After that, Jumo makes fake activism easier than ever before. Pick a couple nebulous causes you’re vaguely interested in (are you into “Environment and Animals” or “Human Rights”? -- you can pick both!). Soon you’ll be confronted with a Facebook Wall-style page that displays articles and other material that sort of fall within the set of interests you chose. Right now I’m looking at two posts about refugees, something about sea turtles and a promo for a documentary about landfills. Next to each item is a little green button that’s resembles Facebook’s “Like” button except it says “Care.” Caring was never so easy. Thanks to Jumo, I can care about 50 tragedies by the time I’m done eating my Kashi Heart to Heart Warm Cinnamon Oat. It’s soothing to watch that little green button turn from green to white. “Care” becomes “Cared.” There are a million Ivory Coast refugees.  More in Somalia. Public schools in Detroit are failing. Click, click, click. Care, care, care.

Just like voting for a president, “Caring” is easy. Too bad Amnesty International doesn’t free political prisoners on the strength of clicks. Anyone who cares about doing more than making empty gestures for Amnesty is going to have to actually write a letter. (You can send money through Jumo, but it doesn’t use PayPal, so get ready to give your credit card number to yet another website.)

Part of the confusion owes to an uncomfortable fact: Jumo is as ugly as a shaved rabbit. Honestly, I’ve seen Geocities pages that looked better. Part of being a serious charity website is looking like you’re serious. And the Reebok Pumps color scheme isn’t helping here. I haven’t seen this much royal blue and lime green since I thumbed through a Pac Sun catalog. When people give money to Jumo they probably expect to get a pair of board shorts in the mail.

Look, Jumo isn’t bad for charities. It’s way too useless to do any harm. Jumo’s users are the kinds of people who if you asked them if they cared about a certain humanitarian disaster they would say “Oh yeah that’s awful,” and if you asked them what they did about it they might say “I voted for Obama.” Or, if they were really engaged, maybe they paid some money to get a little Japanese flag onto their Tumblr avatars after the earthquake. Fixing problems isn’t fun. Activism is boring and hard and frustrating. And that’s not going to change just because someone made an ugly, buggy version of Facebook and said it’s for a good cause.

Grow up, you babies.

Chris Hughes

The social networking ideas that Chris Hughes and his college roomate Mark Zuckerberg worked on at Harvard have become a revolutionary platform remaking communications and business around the globe.

Now Hughes, who is based in New York, haslaunched the Beta version of Jumo, a social network that hopes to connect individuals working for global change. He described his vision for Jumo on the company blog.

I have a problem: it's hard to find smart people doing meaningful work on the issues I care about. I'm sure they're out there, but I can't find them.

 

Occasionally, if I do find them, a second problem arises: it's hard to keep up with them. As fast as they enter my consciousness, they leave it. For all of our fancy tech ingenuity, it's a marvel to me that it's so hard to connect to the things I care about.

When I founded Jumo earlier this year, I had simple vision: use networking technology to connect individuals and organizations working for global change. I wanted to build a network to help everyday people find, follow, and support those working day in and day out to make change happen in our communities and in regions around the world.

 

The site's setup is intuitive for any Facebooker. Clicking on the tab marked HIV/AIDS from the Jumo homepage takes users to an issue page where they can follow a newsfeed about work related to the disease, join groups combating the problem and connect with other users working on this issue.

Malcolm Gladwell set off a heated debate recently when he wrote that social networks undermined real activism by making it easy for people to support a cause without committing to any real-world activity. Perhaps Jumo, which uses social networking to connect activists time, money and skills with ongoing projects, can help to disprove Gladwell's argument.

bpopper [at] observer.com | @benpopper