Comment on Why the idea of a Netflix for e-books makes sense by Mathew Ingram
Backlink: http://gigaom.com/2011/09/12/why-the-idea-of-a-netflix-for-e-books-makes-sense/#comment-655036
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Showing posts with label idea. Show all posts
Showing posts with label idea. Show all posts
Monday, September 12, 2011
Comment On Why The Idea Of A Netflix For E-books Makes Sense By Mathew Ingram
I agree, Darren -- it would be nice if libraries could come up with a competitive offering, and they still might, but Amazon so far looks best equipped to do so. Thanks for the comment.
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Sunday, June 12, 2011
Comment on Why newspaper paywalls are still a bad idea by Mark
Have there been any studies on whether regular readers click or or notice ads more or less than one-off readers who come in from links? If the latter are less inured to a site's ads, a metered paywall may result in a smaller than expected drop in ad income. Another consequence would be that sites should instead be charging ad-premiums for NON-subscribers (in cases where no accurate subscriber personal data is available for ad targeting and selling.)
It can also be the case that ad-monetization is inversely proportional to content quality. If a site with poor content can lure views through search engine results, readers will find that the most interesting things on a page are the ads, and so will interact with them more compared to a site where the content holds the reader's attention.
Comment on Why newspaper paywalls are still a bad idea by Mark
Backlink: http://gigaom.com/2011/06/06/why-newspaper-paywalls-are-still-a-bad-idea/#comment-630766
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
MILLION DOLLAR IDEA: Pay Desperate College Students To Do Anything For You
The idea: Agent Anything is a service that benefits both busy people and poor college students. Swamped at work and need to pick up your dry cleaning? Just post the errand on the site and let one of its many minions—who are all confirmed students—do it for you.
Whose idea: Harry Schiff and Oliver Green.
Why it's brilliant: Why wait in line for the iPad 2 when you can pay someone to do it for you? Agent Anything is reliable, easy to use and, if you're in college, a great way to make some extra cash. Plus, there's not much of a limit to what you can ask. Recent requests included a bottle of Patron, a washing machine and a deep tissue massage.
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MILLION DOLLAR IDEA: Pay Desperate College Students To Do Anything For You
Friday, December 3, 2010
New Law Would Let The U.S. Government Censor The Internet: Here's Why That's A Terrible Idea
The Dangers Of COICA
It’s hard for me to be sympathetic to the entertainment industry and its frustration with online piracy. For the last decade industry executives have consistently focused on using the legal system to protect their aging business models rather than focusing on the innovations necessary to deliver the products and services consumers want.
The entertainment industry’s newest legal tactic, the “Combating Online Infringements and Counterfeits Act,” (COICA), sponsored by Senator Patrick Leahy, has been approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee. While Senator Ron Wyden exercised his right to place a hold on pending legislation — which will stop the bill from traveling to the Senate floor immediately — proponents of COICA can (and most assuredly will) reintroduce the measure the next time Congress convenes in 2011.
This bill is short but significant. For the first time, it will give the government the power to censor the Domain Name System (DNS), one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure for the Internet.
The DNS is like a global phonebook for the Internet: always running in the background and used anytime you do anything on the Internet, including sending email and browsing websites. It’s been running without government interference for the last 25 years and it has helped enable the tremendous economic growth and innovation the Internet has provided to the U.S. and the World over the last two decades.
My company provides DNS services, and in fact one of the many features of our service gives our customers the ability to block sites on their Internet connections. Parents and school administrators block sites they deem unsafe or inappropriate for their children, and business managers block sites they deem inappropriate for a work environment. Ironically, our existence and our technical innovations in the market helped to spawn the idea for the legislation in the first place by showing that blocking sites through the DNS is technically possible. While the technology being proposed is similar, the implementation couldn’t be more different from ours.
COICA would induce all Internet Service Providers, including the largest like Comcast and Verizon, to start censoring sites on a pair of blacklists: one published and maintained by the Department of Justice without judicial oversight, and the other by the Attorney General. Sites that have been in the past or could today be considered for these lists include Ebay, YouTube, Dropbox, Facebook, SoundCloud, Veoh, Rapidshare and many other popular Internet websites. A site is a potential target for these lists if infringement, or linking to infringement, might be considered “central” to the site. Worse yet, getting on the list is easy but getting off could be quite difficult as it’s not clear what process will be in place to get off the list, even when a listing is done in error. The consequences for a law-abiding business of being blacklisted would be extremely dire.
The differences between the services my company provides and what the government is proposing are stark. We have always operated our service in a way that provides choice and control to our millions of users and customers. What COICA proposes would induce, and in some cases, force ISPs — including yours — to block websites for you without your input. The Internet is a global phenomenon and at OpenDNS we serve a global audience with customers around the world. If we are forced to block something due to a mandate by the U.S. federal government it would impact all our users, not just those in the U.S. That’s a terrible precedent for the U.S. government to set.
Furthermore, as we’ve seen with the ongoing Wikileaks.org saga, the government will try and utilize whatever resources it can to take sites offline. There is absolutely no need to arm them with a tool to automate it, let alone one that sits outside of any judicial review as COICA does.
Blocking a domain name is black and white act, meaning that if the Justice Department decided that one aspect of a website was enough to make infringement “central” their only recourse would be to block the entire website rather than systematically removing the infringing portion. For many sites this would lead to massive censorship of data and speech that was non-infringing.
Ironically, because the legal definition of what facilitates copyright infringement is so broad, even the website published by the Department of Justice that they use to list infringing websites might meet the criteria for being blocked itself!
Finally, the entertainment industry already has at its disposal ample legal remedy to enforce copyright infringement: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA provides a mechanism for copyright holders to have infringing content on the Internet removed promptly without government enforcement. It also provides means of stopping sites that facilitate copyright infringing activity and was successfully used by the entertainment industry to shut down companies like Napster and Scour.
The legislation that will be considered by the Senate is not about stopping computer viruses, fighting terrorism, improving our economy or protecting children. The legislation being considered is about the US Government acting as the police force on behalf of the entertainment industry. If passed it could have far-reaching consequences on the Internet in the form of censorship, instability and economic damages.
The United States has many challenges to tackle and the Department of Justice, the Attorney General, and Congress should be focused on the many more important issues that face our nation rather than the demands of an aggressive entertainment industry lobbying effort.
More information about COICA can be found here: https://www.eff.org/coica
David Ulevitch is founder and CEO of OpenDNS. This was originally published on the OpenDNS blog, and is republished here with permission.
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See Also:
- WIKILEAKS DOWN AGAIN AFTER DNS PROVIDER PULLS THE PLUG
- Amazon Explains: Here's The REAL Reason We Stopped Hosting WikiLeaks
- OpenDNS Plans Its First Big Growth Push With $4.5 Million In Fresh Cash
New Law Would Let The U.S. Government Censor The Internet: Here's Why That's A Terrible Idea
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Startup Idea: Twitter Job Board
It may seem crazy to some, but Twitter is fast becoming a very useful recruiting tool. Job offers can spread virally by tweets and be responded to. For many jobs, a Twitter profile, with a link to a personal website, gives you as good background on a person as a resume would.
So we think there's an opportunity to organize all that recruiting activity and build a startup around it.
One way to do it would be simply to aggregate all recruitment-related tweets and let people search that, and maybe sell ads against searches like job search engine Indeed.com does for regular job search (and Google does for everything else). That job wouldn't be as simple as it sounds as not all recruiting tweets are tagged as such, but maybe they could be gathered with a combination of grabbing specific keywords, user flagging and training users to use a specific hashtag, and maybe even Amazon Mechanical Turk.
A more elaborate model might involve offering companies to spread their offers on Twitter to people who are looking for work for a fee each time the company gets a qualified lead. This could work by asking people to retweet the offer and then split the fee with the person whose retweet got the lead. That would boost the job offers' virality. At the same time, it probably wouldn't turn into outright spam, as people would only retweet (and get a shot at the money) if they thought one of their followers was potentially interested. You could also ban people who abuse the system.
Of course other startups could build this. Indeed.com, as we mentioned, is the leader in job search on the web, and might build something like this for Twitter. Hashable, which already does professional networking on Twitter, might add recruiting functionality. And the Twitter-but-not-really-Twitter advertising startups like Ad.ly and TweetUp (now PostUp) might expand into recruiting.
Here are more reasons we think this could work:
- Recruiting is one of the best monetized verticals online. Companies are always willing to pay up to recruit the right people and for the right leads in recruiting. This makes recruiting a very attractive category for startups.
- This is one area where we don't think Twitter will crush a platform app. Twitter tends to either acquire or make irrelevant apps on its platform, but these are mostly apps that, in the words of Twitter board member Fred Wilson, "fill holes on Twitter." Recruiting is a significant and separate enough vertical that it's probably safe.
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See Also:
- Startup Idea: Cheap WiFi Near Hotels
- Hell, Yes, Google Should Buy Groupon. And Twitter. And Foursquare...
- 'Twitter Answers' Could Make Twitter Gobs Of Money
Startup Idea: Twitter Job Board
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
MILLION-DOLLAR IDEA: Titanium Headphones That Can Survive A Military Battle
The Idea: The SA7 Wireless Hybrid Earphones are made from aluminum, titanium and carbon fiber, making them the strongest, most durable headphones on the block. Not only are they made from "military grade" materials, they don't have wires and can be tuned for perfect sound. They also can go through the wash.
Whose idea: Florida-based Sleek Audio.
Why it's a bomb: As far as headphones go, these are pretty cool. Afterall, they can withstand a military battle or a trip through the wash. But how often do you take your headphones into a war zone or accidentally leave them in your pocket? It just doesn't happen!
This product is clunky, unnecessary, and over-the-top. Sleek Audio should donate the titanium to better uses than listening to music...like fighter planes or military helmets.
Have a million dollar idea of your own? Send it to tips@businessinsider.com and see if it stands up to our critical readers. Just be sure to include your name and a photo of yourself, or your idea, in the email.
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See Also:
- MILLION-DOLLAR IDEA: A TV That Allows You to Watch 3D Movies Without The Silly Glasses
- MILLION-DOLLAR IDEA: A Controller-Free Whole Body Gaming Experience
- MILLION-DOLLAR IDEA: Floating Apartments That Could Be NYC's Next Real-Estate Expansion Plan
Post originale: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/UDN29-zAFfw/million-dollar-idea-titanium-headphones-that-can-survive-a-military-battle-2010-11
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