From the category archives:

Commerce

Facebook virtual currency now real

September 1, 2010 Commerce

USA Today reports that Facebook Credits will be available as gift cards at Target.
The new Facebook gift cards will be available in values of $15, $25 and $50 at all of Target’s 1,750 retail stores and at Target.com. Two or three more national retailers will start selling the cards in coming months.
The [...]

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USPO should copy Finnish NetPosti

March 11, 2010 Commerce

A recent editorial in the New York Times spoke of how internet commerce is eating into the US Postal Services’ bottom line.
The Postal Service made a profit until 2006. Since then, declining mail volumes — as more Americans use e-mail and pay their bills online — and the demands of its retiree health benefit system [...]

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Business Idea – Parking Space Net

November 16, 2008 Commerce

I’m in Finland this week visiting Nokia, my new employer. The Finns use SMS for everything including late-night spot loans. Last night at dinner, one of my colleagues texted a taxi service and within two minutes he got a call from a cab that was waiting outside the door. He just texted his address to [...]

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paidcontent.org gets into finance

September 24, 2007 Commerce

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 [...]

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Predictive Markets Seminar at Yahoo

December 3, 2006 Commerce

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 [...]

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Christmas Shopping 2.0 and Riya

November 7, 2006 Commerce

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 [...]

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Reuters opens up bureau in Second Life. Can taxation be far behind?

October 18, 2006 Commerce

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 [...]

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What I learned about Direct Marketing

August 10, 2006 Commerce

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 [...]

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Why I cancelled my Bank of America Visa card

July 21, 2006 Advertising

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 [...]

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The Power of the Web

July 5, 2006 Commerce

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 [...]

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