One of the most respected high-tech companies in the world has created their own barter currency to stretch company assets for innovation. The new Hewlett-Packard “Tycoon Currency” will be allocated and based on actual use and need.

It’s a virtualized, market-based system for managing and delegating computer resources. Tycoon pulls a company’s IT (information technology) services into an abstract utility layer, and users can barter or bid for it within their own companies or among others.

It works like this: Within a company, employees are given a certain number of tokens (Tycoon Currency) per year to spend on computing resources. The more urgent a user deems the need, the more tokens he can bid for use of the equipment. Users who provide resources can, in turn, spend their earnings (tokens) for using resources later on.

Hewlett-Packard has been testing Tycoon since November 2004 at its Singapore offices and in several European locations…with a pilot project taking place with a Scandinavian company. Engineers will use Tycoon to bid on access to high-powered computers needed for simulations.

H-P says marketing a commercial Tycoon won’t happen anytime soon because the technology represents a major shift in business processes. But in the future it’s expected to provide businesses that otherwise couldn’t afford high-powered computing, to be able to access leading-edge technology through Tycoon.

The BarterNews FastStart Programs provides scores of examples of such barter techniques and strategies, see: FASTSTART

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 9:28 am and is filed under Best & Brightest Barter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.