Hub Culture
Encyclopedia
Hub Culture is a social network service
Social network service
A social networking service is an online service, platform, or site that focuses on building and reflecting of social networks or social relations among people, who, for example, share interests and/or activities. A social network service consists of a representation of each user , his/her social...

 that operates the global digital currency Ven
Ven (currency)
Ven is a global virtual currency used by members of a social network service Hub Culture to buy, share and trade knowledge, goods and services globally. It can be spent at any Hub Culture Pavilion or used for micropayments on the Internet at large. The value of Ven is determined on the financial...

, and according to its website, is "the first to merge online and physical world environments." It was founded in November 2002. The Hub Culture group of companies is privately held with offices in Bermuda, Geneva, Hong Kong, London, San Francisco and Singapore. Dedicated representatives are in over 60 locations worldwide.

The site has been noted in the Wall Street Journal, CNNMoney.com, New York Times, TechCrunch, Wired, Bloomberg, PSFK, Springwise, Huffington Post, Harvard Business Review, Trendhunting, GDR, and other trend related websites.

As of September 2011, Hub Culture lists over 20,000 members and has exchanged over 6.1 million units of its virtual currency, Ven
Ven (currency)
Ven is a global virtual currency used by members of a social network service Hub Culture to buy, share and trade knowledge, goods and services globally. It can be spent at any Hub Culture Pavilion or used for micropayments on the Internet at large. The value of Ven is determined on the financial...

 . Members create profiles with tags tied to areas of expertise and knowledge, sharing information to help others in the network with business related activities. Members may build working groups to manage collaborative projects with wikis, file sharing, discussions and event planning, or exchange the virtual currency to acknowledge favors and benefits that come from the sharing of information.

Currency

Ven
Ven (currency)
Ven is a global virtual currency used by members of a social network service Hub Culture to buy, share and trade knowledge, goods and services globally. It can be spent at any Hub Culture Pavilion or used for micropayments on the Internet at large. The value of Ven is determined on the financial...

 is a global virtual currency
Virtual currency
Virtual currency is used to purchase virtual goods within a variety of online communities; which include social networking websites, virtual worlds and online gaming sites....

 used by members of Hub Culture to buy, share and trade knowledge, goods and services globally with anyone in the network and can be spent at any Hub Culture Pavilion or used for micropayments on the Internet at large. The value of Ven is determined on the financial markets from a basket of currencies, commodities and carbon futures. It trades against other major currencies at floating exchange rate
Floating exchange rate
A floating exchange rate or fluctuating exchange rate is a type of exchange rate regime wherein a currency's value is allowed to fluctuate according to the foreign exchange market. A currency that uses a floating exchange rate is known as a floating currency....

s. Global pricing for Ven is provided by Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters Corporation is a provider of information for the world's businesses and professionals and is created by the Thomson Corporation's purchase of Reuters Group on 17 April 2008. Thomson Reuters is headquartered at 3 Times Square, New York City, USA...

 in partnership with GGMarkets, a leading UK company that provides trading platform solutions to both financial institutions and private clients. Ven first appeared as an application in Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...

 on 4 July 2007. In late 2008 the currency became tradeable to anyone with an email address, making it the first global digital currency to move from an online social network into the real world.

In December 2009 Hub Culture began using Ven as a micropayment system for the distribution of content produced by members in the network, allowing users to charge access to individual articles or videos posted inside the network system.

In May 2010, carbon pricing contracts were introduced to the weighted basket that determines the value of Ven. The introduction of carbon to the calculation price of the currency made Ven the first (and only, to date) currency that is linked to the environment. An open API for Ven arrived in January 2011, providing new forms of distribution and access to the currency for the web at large via a developer interface at VenMoney.net.

In April 2011, the company announced the first commodity trade priced in Ven for gold contracts between Europe and South America. On Earth Day
Earth Day
Earth Day is a day that is intended to inspire awareness and appreciation for the Earth's natural environment. The name and concept of Earth Day was allegedly pioneered by John McConnell in 1969 at a UNESCO Conference in San Francisco. The first Proclamation of Earth Day was by San Francisco, the...

 2011, the first carbon credit trade priced in Ven was exchanged between Nike
Nike, Inc.
Nike, Inc. is a major publicly traded sportswear and equipment supplier based in the United States. The company is headquartered near Beaverton, Oregon, which is part of the Portland metropolitan area...

 and Winrock with the London Carbon Market for Brazilian aforestation.

In September 2011, Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters
Thomson Reuters Corporation is a provider of information for the world's businesses and professionals and is created by the Thomson Corporation's purchase of Reuters Group on 17 April 2008. Thomson Reuters is headquartered at 3 Times Square, New York City, USA...

 became the independent calculating agent for Ven, making it the first digital currency to be tracked by the global financial markets, with live market pricing appearing on over 500,000 financial data terminals worldwide.

Pavilions

In 2008, Hub Culture began rolling out Pavilions, member based workspaces
Coworking
Coworking is a style of work which involves a shared working environment, sometimes an office, yet independent activity. Unlike in a typical office environment, those coworking are usually not employed by the same organization. Typically it is attractive to work-at-home professionals, independent...

 in key cities that offer concierge and consulting services, meeting space, on an internet enabled technology platform. Hub Culture Pavilions, both temporary and permanent, have appeared in Cannes, Cancún, Copenhagen, Davos, Ibiza, London, Los Angeles, New York City, Miami, Rio de Janeiro and St. Moritz. Notable among these locations, in December 2009 Hub Culture opened a Pavilion in the heart of Copenhagen
Copenhagen
Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...

 to coincide with COP15 and a beachfront location in Cancún
Cancún
Cancún is a city of international tourism development certified by the UNWTO . Located on the northeast coast of Quintana Roo in southern Mexico, more than 1,700 km from Mexico City, the Project began operations in 1974 as Integrally Planned Center, a pioneer of FONATUR Cancún is a city of...

 to coincide with COP16

In 2010 new temporary Pavilions opened in Davos
Davos
Davos is a municipality in the district of Prättigau/Davos in the canton of Graubünden, Switzerland. It has a permanent population of 11,248 . Davos is located on the Landwasser River, in the Swiss Alps, between the Plessur and Albula Range...

, Switzerland during the World Economic Forum
World Economic Forum
The World Economic Forum is a Swiss non-profit foundation, based in Cologny, Geneva, best known for its annual meeting in Davos, a mountain resort in Graubünden, in the eastern Alps region of Switzerland....

 Annual Meeting and in New York City for New York Fashion Week
New York Fashion Week
The semi-annual New York Fashion Week, branded Mercedes-Benz FashionWeek in 2009, is held in February and September of each year in New York City. It is one of four major fashion weeks held around the world .-History:The first New York Fashion Week, then called Press Week, was the world's first...

 in its first fashion oriented collaboration with Sportmax. The New York Pavilion became the first Pavilion to offer contemporary retail fashion selections for sale in virtual currency. In May 2010, Hub Culture opened the Cannes Clubhouse, a venue tied to the 63rd Cannes Film Festival
Cannes Film Festival
The Cannes International Film Festival , is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is among the world's most prestigious and publicized film festivals...

 in collaboration with Grey Goose. A private island in Croatia and Bali project also use Ven as a means of exchange. The 2011 Davos
Davos
Davos is a municipality in the district of Prättigau/Davos in the canton of Graubünden, Switzerland. It has a permanent population of 11,248 . Davos is located on the Landwasser River, in the Swiss Alps, between the Plessur and Albula Range...

 Pavilion made history with the first vehicles available for sale in Ven, with the all-electric Nissan LEAF
Nissan Leaf
Nissan introduced its first battery electric vehicle, the Nissan Altra at the Los Angeles International Auto Show on 29 December 1997. The Altra EV was produced between 1998 and 2002, only about 200 vehicles were ever produced, and it was mainly used as a fleet vehicle for companies such as...

on offer.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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