To 'thank him'? The guy makes huge bank on speaking and his books, which is deserved. He gets paid for his work, and for that he can pay for the work he receives. 'Let's work for free for a rich guy' is hardly what I call a good idea.

This isn't a dig on Seth, either, he's a great writer and solid thinker. He deserves what he makes, but I have a serious problem with giving free IP and sweat to a guy who can afford bespoke software.

  > 'Let's work for free for a rich guy' is hardly 
  > what I call a good idea.

The whole thing might not be as economically irrational as it might seem at first. Seth Godin is a brand with a large value. Nukomeet is a consulting company and presumably the time they put into the project is returned in the form of a work that can be referenced when pitching work to new clients. For Nukomeet, it's an investment in marketing.

We put this app together in 1 hour, it's rather a quick hack for fetching RSS entries than a complicated project. In terms of design there are like 2 pages: list and single entry. You can use this code to create a « mobile app » for your own blog. I wouldn't go so far and say we give away our work for free...

agreed - I'm a Seth fan - but he can totally afford to get his own app

Seth Godin writing about crowdsourcing : http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/09/beyond-crowd...

Nice one!

Great idea - I'm absolutely in. However it will be even greater if we take inspiration from Seth's post: building for "beauty", "wonderful", experience, uniqueness etc. That's why we should start with overall design (not only graphics). You code is nice sign of effort and engagement. Now let's use it build something extraordinary. Especially as it's nice, ambitious case: how to make something so trivial like blog reader into valuable thing. So let's start brainstorming the 'problem' we're going to solve with that app. I've got two: 1. Seth's posts are often burned by truckloads of other posts in my 'Favourite' stream. 2. His insights deserve better (than typepad, gReader) visual presentation. What other can we identify?

I also think he would love this collaboration rather than choosing between 40 candidates and throwing the work of 39... I'll put my stone to it, hope it'll reach Seth's ears !

I guess Seth Godin would like more the idea of a collaborative and open project than just an app made by a random marketing agency for branding.

Apparently Seth Godin already received more than 40 applications to make his app for free. Let's make them collaborate instead of compete...

No one would really do this for free alone. Maybe not for cash, but I am sure having it in their portfolio would be more than worth it. Being part of a 40 person team, not so much.

It is easier to collaborate on code than design, which is most important as I am sure the code would be trivial, or at least not useful to reuse. 40 designers would seem like a huge mess to me, and 40 programmers would seem a bit overkill.

If I were him I would choose the best of the 40 and pay them a fair rate.

+1 “Getting people and organizations in sync is the project of our times.” – Seth Godin in “Organizing the Unorganized” This idea's about the right thing to do then.

I couldn't agree more, I hope this collaboration brings something really cool

I can see the benefits of riding on the back of somebody elses' brand, never the less I find these kinds of projects really bad fanboy'ism.

Collaboration is fine but you need to start with the design, not the code. No one cares what the code looks like.

Sure, but it's not about how the code looks like, we just hope to find better synergies with such initiative. And yes, we are looking for a designer, are you interested ?

I'm not a designer, otherwise I would help.

Phone Gap? If I were Seth I'd be disappointed.

excellent movement! "Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together." - Van Gogh