Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Could Facebook Credits Lead to Offline Currency?

Facebook Credits could be a springboard for a broader and equally significant offline payments says Thomas Power, CEO of online business network ecademy.

"It starts with a Facebook piggy bank, payment system and credit card," he says. "Then it's a savings account and a loan perhaps for university." Later, it might be about mortgages, life insurance, health insurance, car insurance, house insurance or pension payments as well.

Payments systems intended to support buying of digital goods conceptually can be extended into the peer-to-peer lending model as well, he argues.

There Will Be No Files In The Cloud

When cloud computing gets much more traction, one of the implications is that users will "download" and "share" files and download apps a whole lot less than they do now. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson doesn't think so. The file metaphor is necessary and fundamental when digital objects have to be pushed around like physical objects.

There is no need when objects become the equivalent of Web pages. In a cloud implementation, people do things, use things, view things and listen to things that essentially are Web addresses, not digital objects in the current sense.

IBM PC Turns 30

IBM released the "Personal Computer Model 5150" in August 1981. Costing $1,265 in 1981, it didn't have a monitor, parallel ports or even a hard disk. The machine used a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 processor and featured 256 Kbytes of random access memory. In today's terms, that set of hardware would represent an investment of $2995.


Growth is the Only Fix

Have you had enough of this,yet?
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