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Carbonrally joins gaming with cutting carbon emissions
When Jason Karas began to see more people wanting to get involved with energy and climate change issues, he realized something pretty quickly: there was no fun way to do it.
“There was no simple way to make people feel they had an empowered way to go about this large issue,” Karas said . “I wanted to see if the Internet could mediate or orchestrate collective actions on a massive scale.”
Since 2007, Karas and his small team at Somerville-based Carbon Challenge Inc. have been working toward that goal through their growing website, Carbonrally.com.
The site makes a game out of cutting carbon dioxide emissions, offering regular carbon-reduction challenges to members who sign up for free.
As a member, you get detailed information about what your actions mean for climate change and you get to see how much CO2 your commitments – such as using a reusable coffee cup or planting a vegetable garden – are saving. You can play individually or as part of a team. (The current winning team on the 30-day leaderboard as of June 3 was the Panthers, a 72-member team that had reduced 37 tons of carbon.)
The site is also producing revenue, says Karas. Some of the site’s challenges have had corporate sponsors; for instance, eBay sponsored a challenge about the carbon savings of buying and selling used clothing, and it had a link included in the challenge.
Carbonrally also receives revenue from setting up custom leagues, Karas said. Customers that have commissioned leagues include Intel Corp., NBC and, most recently, Boston University. The leagues allow different teams at the organization to compete against each other - at NBC, for instance, 11 different departments from news to finance vied to cut the most carbon.
Carbonrally has received two rounds of angel funding, which Karas did not want to discuss other than to say the funding has come from Seattle and Silicon Valley. The company hasn’t received venture capital and hasn’t needed it, Karas said, thanks to low costs – the company employs just five people on a contract basis – and the company’s revenue stream.
Bilal Zuberi, principal at Cambridge VC firm General Catalyst Partners, said he met with Carbonrally more than a year ago and said he found the site to be an interesting idea, “especially given how much some of these casual games have taken off in past years.”
“They’re obviously taking that gaming and applying it to completely different context, to actually do something useful,” Zuberi said.
Still, Zuberi said he wasn’t sure how the site would be able to keep members coming back over time – what would make it a “must visit” site on a regular basis.
To that end, Karas said his team is looking into ways to make the site into something more than just a “feel good” competition. Carbonrally would eventually like to incorporate real energy use data and provide real rewards, he said.
As more usage data is collected through the rollout of smart grid technologies such as smart meters, Karas said there will need to be a way to get consumers interested in doing something with the information.
“Nobody’s figured out how much the consumer wants to deal with that data,” he said. “The smart meter guys will need things like Carbonrally or similar things, as a way to make it fun or engaging.”
Actual rewards or prizes for cutting energy could be part of that, Karas said, though he said that’s likely several years away.
For now, Karas, 43, said Carbonrally will continue to look for innovative approaches to engaging people around carbon issues, noting that the site is still in its beta stage.
But that doesn’t mean it hasn’t made a difference: commitments made by the site’s 33,000 “rallyers” had cut more than 5,000 tons of CO2 as of June 3 – equal to taking 1,000 cars off the road.
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