The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘down-the-road’

Kwedit, the innovative and suddenly controversial payments platform for virtual goods, is releasing some early data.

The service lets users promise to pay later in lieu of a direct credit card payment when they want virtual currency for social games like Farmville. It’s not a legally binding promise, but users have an incentive to pay amounts owed because that allows them to get more virtual currency through the service. Users can pay by, among other methods, mailing in cash or paying at a 7-11.

When the product first launched they had no idea what percentage of promises would be repaid. Anything at all is incremental revenue to game publishers, and since the stuff they’re selling has no marginal cost (virtual currency), it’s all upside. But after nearly two months of being live, they say the repayment rate is 25.9% If you’re a credit company that would put you out of business.

But for game publishers, that’s a staggeringly attractive monetization option. Hopefully the company (or its partners) will also disclose the monetization rate as well down the road. Because right now game publishers are only able to get cash out of 1-3% of users. If they can get another few percent to pay via Kwedit, and 25% of that money is actually paid, revenue from games can double or more.

It’s controversial because Colbert made fun of it, and then the Huffington Post and CBS jumped on the bandwagon. CBS actually called it “toxic.”

Founder Danny Shader posted a long response here. But the short version is this – the criticism is ridiculous. It’s coming in one case from a competitor (the Huffington Post article was written by the CEO of a company that promotes Visa cards to teens and adults, without any sort of disclosure on the conflict). And the author of the CBS article doesn’t appear to actually understand the product and seems more concerned with getting parents all worked up.

The really scary stuff in social games was the Scamville nonsense where teens and pre-teens where being tricked into putting long term subscription charges on their parent’s cell phone and credit card bills. Kwedit isn’t even close to that kind of evil. It’s simply a very clever way of monetizing social games, and the most innovative new payments product I’ve seen in a very long while.

Thanks largely to its search deals with Bing and Google, Twitter is already making revenue. But that income is not the where Twitter expects its true business model to lie. Instead, it believes that will come from premium features given to businesses that wish to use Twitter. Thus far, Twitter has yet to enable such features. But starting today, it’s beginning to test what is likely to be one of them.

As it notes on its blog, Twitter is testing a new feature it calls “Contributors.” Basically, this allows business accounts to be controlled by multiple Twitter users. Yes, it’s a form of multi-account support. For example, if any of us who work for TechCrunch were given the proper permission by the account owner, we could control this account from our own individual Twitter accounts. This includes the ability to DM people, follow new users, and most importantly, tweet from it. And if you were to tweet from it using your own account, your Twitter name would be appended onto the bottom of that tweet (see image).

Many companies, such as TechCrunch, already allow multiple people to handle their main account, but it is a pain having to log out and log back into the different accounts. Many third-party services offer multi-account support, but those don’t offer a way to see which team member is actually in control of the account at the time of a tweet, this will. And there is an API for all of this as well.

Twitter is quick to note that this is “not ready for prime-time” and that this is only being tested with a limited subset of people so they can figure out how to best implement it. More importantly, that means that this feature is not yet a way for Twitter to make money. But again, it seems logical that this will eventually be one of the premium features the service offers down the road.

Back in July, Twitter launched step one of it’s business plan, with the Twitter 101 guide. Consider this step two.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Thinking about moving your electronic services to the cloud? LiveOffice, an SaaS provider of email archiving and hosting, makes the leap that much easier with the release of their CloudMerge technology–offering email archiving for most cloud email providers on the market. In addition to supporting cloud based email archiving, LiveOffice is able to archive email which is on-premise, thus creating a unified archive for all of your email.

A core belief of LiveOffice is that your email archive should be portable. By hosting your archive on their end, customers are able to migrate from their current provider to a cloud provider without having to deal with the possibility of losing precious information. Additionally, if customers are dissatisfied with their cloud provider down the road, they can migrate to another provider seamlessly–while keeping all their emails–due to the capabilities of LiveOffice’s products.

So there you are, cruising down the road in your new Honda Civic.

Read more from the original source: 
Review: EasyPlay makes your iPhone/iPod Touch slightly less dangerous to use while driving

New startup RXVantage is releasing a really smart SaaS product into a huge market - drug and medical device marketing.

Selling stuff to doctors is really big business - $60+ billion a year in the U.S. alone is spent annually in marketing to physicians by pharmaceutical and medical device companies. 175,000 reps visit offices and hospitals 110 million times per year to pitch their wares.

Today, pharma reps drop by offices in person just to schedule an office meeting with the physician down the road. They often do sample drops of medications and do a little pitching while the doctor signs for them. The average drop meeting lasts 22 seconds, for which a rep might wait up to 2 hours.

Top prescribers are visited by more than 100 reps per week, and meetings are scheduled as much as a year in advance.

Enter RXVantage.

RXVantage is “Open Table for doctors” - it’s web based scheduling software that doctors and pharma/medical device companies use to calendar those visits, manage appointments, etc. It’s free for all parties to use, and premium features are available to the marketers if they choose.

The company is just preparing to launch nationwide but has had a 2 year closed beta in Rhode Island and Massachusetts with 450 doctors and 400 reps from 75 different pharma companies. The results - 94% of the doctors pitched started using the system, and the average rep reported 4-5 more appointments per month.

The premium version of the software, which is $25/month/rep, allows those reps to get alerts on canceled appointments (and an opportunity to fill it), targeting of relevant doctors and other features.

The company has raised $1 million to date and is currently raising a second round of financing.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Looks like Fedor Emelianenko will, in fact, be in the upcoming EA MMA video game . Fedor, as he’s known to MMA fans, currently fights in M-1 Global, which is an MMA organization based in Russia. ( YouTube helps here.) This could have consequences further down the road.

More here:
Does Fedor’s inclusion in EA MMA game jeopordize any possible UFC fight?

LaCie’s orange-and-grey rugged drives have been around for quite some time, but because they used 2.5″ HDDs, they were limited to 500GB. This new XL version is 1TB, and I guarantee you’re going to be seeing bigger ones down the road. I’ve used these things before, and they’re solid

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LaCie’s Rugged XL is a terabyte of rubberized, shock-proof hotness

Happy Birthday, Game Boy! You’re turning 20 next week, and while you can’t legally drink yet, let’s take a look at the other strange and bizarre stuff you’ve been doing for the last two decades. From huffing nitrous to almost being burnt to a crisp, it’s quite amazing what has happened to the humble little Game Boy. This is a great list of 13 really wacky applications of the little handheld that could.

Here is the original: 
Strange and curious uses for a Game Boy