source: Bitcoin News
2016. Jun. 09. 13:15
Unsung founder Jason King has revealed a partnership with the new Austin-based ride-sharing organization Arcade City during the Crypto Show last night. The two groups will work together with the help of Arcade City’s 30,000 users to lay out the groundwork for Unsung’s application.
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The Bitcoin community is a constant force when it comes to pushing decentralization and ideas that help humanity. From teaching people about money and putting the idea of sovereign control of wealth back to the individual. Alongside this great learning experience, a few organizations have changed the way we think about giving.
One instance of this example of generosity is the Florida-based Sean’s Outpost created by Jason King, which has fed 167,360 homeless people with the power of Bitcoin-enabled crowdfunding. King has recently started another service that also aims to meet the needs of people in hunger. Unsung.org is a new Uber-like app created by King that allows people to work together with food pantries, restaurants, and grocery stores by delivering leftover food from the establishment and bringing it to people in need.
King got the idea of Unsung while he was working with Sean’s Outpost where the group would purchase food for Satoshi Forest residents from the local food pantry. While buying the food at the same time, King noticed thousands of pounds of food was also being thrown out in the dumpster. It was so “ridiculous,” Kings says as they were spending all this money and simultaneously the food pantry and others were throwing out so much food. He saw the same situation visiting every restaurant or store they worked with.
During the Crypto Show, King explained that $537 billion dollars worth of food is thrown away every year with 49 million Americans in hunger on a daily basis. To King and many others, these figures were disgusting, so he started Unsung.
Unsung has been in beta in the Baltimore Maryland region where King currently resides and the team has fed a few thousand people so far during the app testing period. The service is currently in “test flight” on iOS devices, which is a way Apple sifts through app development and eventually allows platforms to reach the App Store. King says:
Restaurants like it, drivers like it, and obviously people receiving food like it.
The next step will be the full launch on the Apple App Store and then the Android Google Play store following iOS implementation. Unsung is also running a crowdfund for the organization’s app development and hopes to raise $25,000. So far the group has raised roughly $9,000 and most of the funding has come through cryptocurrency. King stated that fiat donations were leading for quite some time until some Bitcoin “heavy hitters” came in and changed that.
Now Unsung has been traveling to Austin and is planning on working with the region’s demographic. The organization has supplied a couple of hundred meals out there so far, and King says he thinks the city is a perfect location for testing grounds.
So the guys from the Crypto Show thought that since King was experimenting in Austin, the organization should team up with the Arcade City ride sharing venture taking place there. Arcade City created by Christopher David and its 30,000 members will work together with the Unsung founders creating a base framework within the city of Austin, which has a significant homeless problem. David believes the partnership will be quite fruitful as Arcade City formed so organically and is growing exponentially.
The Crypto Show looks forward to getting the Unsung/Arcade City partnership ball rolling in AustinLong Term, David explains they have always envisioned Arcade City to expand into more than just ride-sharing. Both teams feel that the collaboration between Unsung and Arcade City Austin will be a driving vehicle to get this #HackHunger project rolling. The sense of community Arcade City already has, will transfer over to Unsung indefinitely, say the hosts of the Crypto Show. So during the show, the founder of Arcade City and Jason King decided to make the vision a reality and have created a Facebook group, Unsung Austin so that users can begin networking.
Arcade City users will soon become a part of the Unsung cause by picking up food and delivering to homeless shelters and food banks within the Austin region. Anyone can participate, and you don’t even have to be an Arcade City driver, says the company.
King says that since Unsung on iOS exists and is being used in the “wild” of Baltimore at the moment he will try and port the application to a website so Arcade City users can access the working prototype. The creators of the ride-sharing platform have already spoken with drivers who are excited to participate in this new partnership venture. Arcade City organizers and the Crypto Show have already got the ball rolling, and the ride-sharing company states:
The idea is genius. Let’s help this spread all over the country. Nobody should ever go hungry again.
What do you think about Unsung and Arcade City teaming up to #HackHunger in Austin? Let us know in the comments below.
Images via Unsung, Arcade City organizers, theverge.com
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