From: Adam Rifkin -4K (adam@XeNT.ics.uci.edu)
Date: Thu Jul 13 2000 - 19:53:13 PDT
Steve Dossick wrote:
> Sign up for iPal (still in pre-release, and with a spiffy new UI and
> web-based access coming soon) and register your interest in
> Health/Fitness & Nutrition/Weight Training & Bodybuilding
> ...and you'll be notified whenever we find _NEW_ cool stuff on the web
> regarding your interest, including when selected merchants have new
> offerings on the subject.
Lately for no particular reason I've developed a fascination for
a game called "Name That Business Model". The way this game is played
is similar to the way Hollywood pitches movies in under five words
("Diehard on a Bus", "Jaws for the E.T. crowd", etc.). It's fun to think
of company such-and-such as "RealNetworks meets Akamai" or "InfoSpace
crossed with Phone.com".
Okay, so what is iPal's business model? Is it:
(A) We sell your information to our partners in exchange for them
"giving" you fresh information for free. [Yahoo meets MicroStrategy.]
or is it:
(B) We give our partners access to you because we're building the
biggest darn community this side of Raging Bull, and those sticky
eyeballs can be monetized through an advertising network. [AOL crossed
with DoubleClick.]
No need to tell me the actual answer. I prefer to speculate instead
that iPal is AvantGo meets Google: we give away the consumer version to
entice all the CIO's into purchasing licenses for the enterprise just
like AvantGo, and we give a wonderful user experience as a front end to
a patent-pending back end so that 97% of iPal users would recommend it
to a friend on the basis of speed, accuracy, and usability, just like Google.
If only there were a b2b angle... or a wireless angle... :)
---- Adam@4K-Associates.comIf you want to be in P2P you'd better have good desktop tools, depth in protocols, and good content management, and a great server-side, and on and on. -- Dave Winer
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