I'm taking a hit on the exchange rate hoping for a future appreciation of bitcoin value. Basically, I wanted to speculate in bitcoins in a productive way. This was the best experiment I could think of in the short term.

Also, the dollar > btc conversion is handled by bitpay.com.

Most of the ideas came out of an earlier discussion on reddit and viable bitcoin businesses, etc. The idea was to start something that consumers would really want i.e. good deals.