commerce

Location-based DRM

March 9, 2012

Reading news of the Loopt acquisition this morning got me thinking. What if someone were to build a service that would check your location and use it as a way to unlock content that would normally sit behind a paywall? Here are a couple of the use case. Starbucks could do a deal with the [...]

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$335k For Virtual Property, What Bubble?

November 18, 2010

Yes we all may laugh at people spending real money on virtual goods but for some it makes economic sense. Club Neverdie in Entropia is a “turnkey” business that runs itself. Set up as a place of entertainment, it generates cash that more that covers the initial cost of investment and has now attracted investors, [...]

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Facebook virtual currency now real

September 1, 2010

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 article [...]

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Unfortunate Truth

May 16, 2010

With reports of large plumes of underwater oil making their way to the Louisiana coast, it now appears that the Gulf Oil spill will be much worse than imagined. The image above is from the wonderful site, Fake Science. For more on someone who’s doing something about the cleanup, listen to my friend Alex Wise interviewing Lisa [...]

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USPO should copy Finnish NetPosti

March 11, 2010

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 [...]

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Business Idea – Parking Space Net

November 16, 2008

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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US Postage up a penny on Monday

May 11, 2008

As of tomorrow, First Class postage is going up from $0.41 to $0.42. I bought a book of Forever stamps a couple weeks ago and as of tomorrow they are worth a penny more. That’s a 2.4% gain in just a few weeks. Not the most practical investment vehicle, you have to stand outside the [...]

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paidcontent.org gets into finance

September 24, 2007

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

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

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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