In her keynote speech at last year’s annual Netroots Nation gathering, Darcy Burner
pitched a seemingly simple idea to the thousands of bloggers and web developers in the audience. The former
Microsoft MSFT +2.29% programmer and congressional candidate proposed a smartphone app allowing shoppers to swipe barcodes to check whether conservative
billionaire industrialists Charles and
David Koch were behind a product on the shelves.
Burner figured the average supermarket shopper had no idea that buying Brawny paper towels, Angel Soft toilet paper or Dixie cups meant contributing cash to
Koch Industries through its subsidiary Georgia-Pacific. Similarly, purchasing a pair of yoga pants containing Lycra or a Stainmaster carpet meant indirectly handing the Kochs your money (Koch Industries bought Invista, one of the world’s largest fiber and textiles companies, in 2004 from DuPont).
At the time, Burner
created a mock interface for her app, but that’s as far as she got. She was waiting to find the right team to build out the back end, which could be complicated given often murky corporate ownership structures.
She wasn’t aware that as she delivered her Netroots speech, a group of developers was hard at work on
Buycott, an even more sophisticated version of the app she proposed...
