Just watched the demo09 presentation by the company 7 Billion People. They operate in the space that I have repeatedly suggested Facebook should focus on – Conversion. My thinking is that assuming it is technically feasible, adding Facebook data to the algorithms that 7 Billion People currently uses in customising e-commerce user experiences could significantly [...]

I have always feared that the much-hyped phenomenon of location-based services was destined to join a long line of technologies that never quite lived up to their hype. Of course I always hoped to be proved wrong but when TechCrunch ran a post last year inviting readers to send in their ideas for location-based services, [...]

Image via CrunchBase

Happy New Year. It’s been a while since my last post, in which I explored conversion as a potential alternative revenue model to advertising for web startups. In this post I want to explore a way in which Facebook could make money from conversion.
Remember that like Google, Facebook already enjoys a large [...]

Continuing my train of thought on finding new alternatives to advertising as a revenue model for web-based businesses, it occurred to me recently that yet another greater business need than exposure (which is what advertising gives to a business) is conversion – converting eyeballs to users or buyers. Businesses collectively pay billions to Google to [...]

If you are a web developer then you have no doubt rolled your eyes more than once at a suggestion by some wannabe entrepreneur like me that you should work on his brilliant idea for equity. We all know what your answer was – naff off or some less polite variation of the phrase. That [...]

In this post I look at Google’s revenue model to see how alternative billion dollar revenue models can be derived on the same principles, using Facebook and Twitter as examples. I say alternative because advertising, which basically is Google’s prime product serves only one of many business needs – gaining exposure. There are several other [...]

Update: If you have arrived here looking for a way for you and your co-workers to jointly send a farewell card to a leaving colleague, you may want to try GroupCard – a website that let’s you do just that. Be sure to read this post to the end first though .
This one is [...]

There is a little known service available on mobile phones called a callback tone or ringback tone. It allows the customisation of what other people hear when they call you, instead of the normal ring ring tone. So people who use it tend to have their phones play selected music tracks to their callers until [...]

As I haven’t posted for a while, I thought I would write briefly about three ideas in this post.

Suspend a Keyword in Google Reader: I would like to see a Google Reader plug-in that allows me to suspend keywords for a configurable number of days. So if I was sick of reading about the iPhone [...]

The first idea is for an app that might be named Crossed Paths. It would use the iPhone’s location capabilities to track each of its users’ movements. It would then report to each user which other users crossed paths with them each day – basically which users were in the same vicinity in any given [...]