Commerce
paidcontent.org gets into finance
Rafat Ali and Staci Kramer over at paidcontent.org have added a Finance tab to their site and along with it launched a financial index of the top 100 new media sites. Dow Jones has quite a nice little business from licensing its various indexes to financial firms and mutual funds that wanted to benchmark themselves [...]
Predictive Markets Seminar at Yahoo
Back in June I worked with a team that hacked together an interface for a simple predictive market in which Yahoo employees with trade shares in projects that would pay out when the project IPO’d by getting released to the public. The idea was that value would go towards projects that the Yahoo engineers thought [...]
Christmas Shopping 2.0 and Riya
A little tidbit I picked up from a fellow at Riya. They will be announcing Riya 2.0 in the next few days which will take their face-recognition know how and apply to finding similar things when out shopping. He pointed to the rather ornate carpet on which we were standing and said that Riya would [...]
Reuters opens up bureau in Second Life. Can taxation be far behind?
The 200 year old news service which transmitted its first dispatches via homing pigeons has opened up a news bureau in the virtual world of Linden Labs’ Second Life.
Adam Pasick, who goes by “Adam Reuters” in Second Life is the wire services sole correspondent, editor, and bureau chief.
Being a financial news service, reporting is focused [...]
What I learned about Direct Marketing
I had two hours to spare yesterday to make it over to SES just down the road from my office. I was not able to attend any of the sessions so I did a quick loop ’round the trade show floor, met a few folks (including the guy on the left who was looking for [...]
Why I cancelled my Bank of America Visa card
Despite the fact that I’ve got more pieces of plastic than I really need it really irks me that in order to activate the new card B of A sent me I have to listen to a two-minute spiel about why I really should consider signing up for a credit protection service.
No option to <press [...]
The Power of the Web
TechCrunch covers Teambuy.com.cn, a "group buying" site based in China,
co-ordinate large numbers of consumers interested in buying the same products. People agree on a place and time to meet, then enter the store in crowds of up to 500 people at once. The crowds tell the store owners that they all want to buy, say [...]
nikeplus.com, a social network of iPod-enabled runners
Apple & Nike launched a new joint service that combines a wireless sensor that you put in your running shoes that uploads pace and distance data to your iPod Nano which you listen to while you run. After your run, you can sync with your nikeplus.com account and share your stats with other nikeplus.com members. [...]
Micropayments
I attended the HBSTech event on the Evolution and Future of Micropayments last evening in Mountain View.
Presenting were:
Preston Roper, VP of Marketing, BitPass
James Hall, co-founder of FTVentures, a fund with deep experience in micropayments
Peter Ashley, Director of Merchant Services, PayPal
KC George, Manager of Product Innovation & Coordination, Visa USA
The session was not as interactive as [...]
Is it cool to be accessible?
Two posts that came together on the same riff but from different angles. Do communities scale?
First Danah Boyd on "coolness"
"Coolness" is about structural barriers, about the lack of universal accessibility or parsability. Structural hurdles mean people put in more effort to participate. It’s kinda like the adventure of tracking down the right parking lot to [...]
