By Richard Peck
SGM - Start Gaining Momentum - was the first company to introduce a fully operational "digital commonplace". This is a piece of software which didn't exist before SGM developed it - it essentially allows users to build and manage an online "portfolio" of operations for their lives.
Released under the "Track Everything" mantra, the Digital Commonplace quickly became one of the more popular in the "self development" world, used by both male and female counterparts to accelerate the progress in their lives.
The biggest reason why the Digital Commonplace became so popular was that it brought forward the idea of "programmable systems". These took in data from a myriad of different sources, and allowed users to collate and track it in any way they needed. Obviously, the systems which provided the most pointed results were quickly adopted & became popular.
Ultimately, it's the popularity of one system which has really moved SGM's digital commonplace to the forefront of the market. As what many would describe as a "killer app", the underlying use of this system pretty much encourages the majority of users who end up adopting the overall system for their account. That system is the virtual commodity tracker.
Commodity trackers are nothing new. However, being able to "track" the figurative price of "commodities" that YOU determine is.
It takes most people some time to understand the importance of this - if you're able to input data from 200+ different API references, you're able to essentially build "profiles" of different metrics in the world. For example, you could track the rate of car purchases in the US to Internet Adoption in India.
The problem with having access to this much data is that it's easy to become overwhelmed. In other words, not channeling that data into actionable information is a missed opportunity. This is where one of the more pronounced digital commonplace systems comes in... the virtual commodity tracker.
Commodity trackers track the "price" of commodities in a market. Coffee, Oil and Wheat are some of the more popular. However, there are many other types of commodity, most of which are never really looked at. The ability to "track" the price of these different commodities is actually quite difficult to achieve / replicate. This is where SGM's Digital Commonplace came to help a number of users...
The SGM virtual commodity tracker allows you to not only determine the "price" of a commodity to track (such as someone's Twitter / FB / YouTube growth), but also gives you the ability to include a HUGE number of "inputs" to make it work.
For example, being able to identify someone's YouTube growth by how many comments they have - or how many times their videos had been shared online - would give you a much better way to identify the growth of their channel.
The point is that this system can take *any* sort of data. Even standardized "web" data (being able to track prices or availability of particular products) can be inputted... formulating a "price" that you can associate with different "commodities".
This not only allows you to manage *exactly* how you're actually able to get the most out of the system, but gives you the ability to consider data and metrics that you may have never considered before. This - partnered with the ability to share this data - is what people are really looking for with the digital commonplace from SGM.