Micropayments

A bat hitched a ride on the space shuttle Discovery and I think it's going to be a long long time till touchdown brings it down again. Of course, IBM apparently wants to buy Sun too. We also cover the hot new features in the latest software update for the Nokia 5800. Oh, and the iPhone too.

IBM to buy Sun? http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/technology/companies/19sun.html?partner=rss&emc=rss http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10198901-92.html

iPhone OS 3.0: What you need to … Read more

Valve's Steam software has a new feature for game publishers that lets them sell additional downloadable content, or DLC, from within their games.

To do this, it uses a new in-game purchasing system built off of the in-software Web browser. The first title to feature this is The Maw, which now includes two additional levels that can be purchased for $1.25 each, then played immediately. Previously, all add-on content was sold as a separate purchase from Steam's game store.

The new feature is available to all developers as part of Valve's Steamworks publishing platform. For games … Read more

Micropayments are once again being broached as a way to pay for online content. It's not that micropayments have a proven track record. Some of the recent pieces on this topic include:

I'm with … Read more

Since its launch in early February of last year, Facebook's online gift store has run off of standard U.S. dollars, letting users purchase gifts one at a time, or in bundles at a slight discount. However, starting Monday the popular social network has moved to a micropayment system where each point represents a cent, opening up its gifts marketplace to items outside of the $1 standard.

There are several benefits to using such a system, the least of which is user convenience. Microsoft, which has had its own points system since the advent of the Xbox Live Marketplace, … Read more

So you liked that blog post you just read--why don't you toss the writer a buck or two?

That's the rationale behind new-media outlet Salon's latest initiative. Members of its "Open Salon" user-generated content community can now "tip" one another with real-world money if they like what they see. You know, like street musicians. Popular content will also appear on the main Salon.com homepage.

Plenty of sites have instituted virtual reputation gauges (i.e. Yelp's "compliments") and a handful of amateur-content-driven media sites like GroundReport give their contributors a … Read more

iMooch, an online community where users can sell and pay for content using a concept called "mooches," launched a new public beta version of its today. Most importantly, iMooch is temporarily letting users post content for free and make real money from it.

Usually, iMooch lets you create a mooch for $6. One dollar pays for posting your content, and then you are required to use the rest of your funds to give $1 to five other mooches within 30 days. As I mentioned, however, to build a larger community the site is letting users post free for a limited time.… Read more

In the turbulent, choppy waters where P2P networks and copyright law chomp at each other's fins for dominance, there's at least one beast that thinks it has a solution to keep everybody happy. Its name: Grooveshark. The tagline? "Everybody gets paid."

As content distribution has mutated from analog to digital, the companies that came into existence to control the distribution have panicked and floundered. Decentralized peer-to-peer sharing made this all possible, but it's also thrown nearly a century of copyright law beyond the deep end and into rough waters.

… Read more

A friend sent me a link to the transcript of a talk that author Peter Wayner gave at Google last year.

It's basically about how Google could provide an incentive for newspapers and bloggers to do more original reporting rather than just rehashing previously published reports. (Yes, I know that's what I'm doing here-- but I've done a lot of genuine on-site reporting here lately, from Hot Chips, Zonbu headquarters, and Siggraph-- so I can see both sides of the issue.)

Wayner presents some interesting figures. He says… Read more

Photobucket members will discover a new option when logging in this morning. The company has partnered with Meez, the 3-D avatar service to give Photobucket members a place to store and host their 3-D avatars. We don't normally cover personal avatar services, but when they partner with sites with over 40 million users, it's worth noting. Meez has approximately a million users (which in and of itself is no small feat), and the service has apparently seen quite a bit of growth in the last few months.

Users can pick from a ton of options to make their … Read more