In fact, I did came up with this idea one year ago.
My idea was to cover the whole world with fog of war, and to make people team up to discover the world. There would be challenges, where you would pay like 0.50$ to participate, and then big reward for the first team achieving the challenge.
My idea was a free app with paying challenges. Uncovering 25% of the world ? $1 challenge, 20k$ reward. It's a really easy win. People tend to like these kind of idea, they would contact their friend abroad to team up with them, then pay to join the challenge, etc.
I finally decided, after 3months of thoughts, not to realize this project. It's currently impossible to rely confidently on geolocalisation data from any mobile device. People could cheat from iPhone dev. simulator, etc.
Well, kudos to people who did it ! Different from my idea, but anyway. Now that it's been done, I can finally explain the idea I had ! :)
Reversely, paying 1$ in not much when you'll be travelling 25% of the world.
In my very basic example it was 20 000$ payoff for travelling 25% of the world. Let's make it 1 000 000$. I'm still winning.
Covering 25% of the world's surface is almost impossible. Yet, with my app idea, people would have most probably paid for taking the 1$ challenge (i.e. paying 1$ to participate, winning 1M$ for being the first to achieve the goal).
To expand on my concept, there would have been teams, anyone could create a new team, creating teams would have been free, people could have joined as many team as they wanted.
It's easy to go viral on these stuff. Every participant would probably call their friend oversea to tell them to join their team on this particular challenge, i.e. paying 1$ with the 1M$ reward in sight. The reward would be splitted between participants of the winning team (pro rata the surface covered).
Uncanny. I can claim in true honesty that I had a remarkably similar vision for a comprehensive life 'experience quotient' app not even 2-3 weeks ago. The travel portion looked very similar: GPS enabled tracing of a global map space with percent coverage. But travel would be but one table in a comprehensive database of life experience: financial, relationships, science, arts, drugs, sex and everything else worth living for. An algorithm would tally a grand 'statistic'. It's the stuff of Borges' wildest fantasies, n'est-ce pas?
