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Posts tagged with markets

Paying Customers

Marco Arment (developer of the much beloved iOS app Instapaper and co-host of the 5by5 podcast Build and Analyze) discussed his business model on NPR’s Planet Money:

Apple already had everyone’s billing information from iTunes … you could buy things just by typing in your password … That, for the first time, brought very, very easy payment to the modern software world. That, more than anything, is why there is a business for paid apps… you charge a small amount of money … and that’s it, you’re done. You don’t need to go seek venture capital money, you don’t need to sell out your users’ privacy. They’re not even your users, they’re your customers — for the first time in a decade. It’s great.

Good interview, but it would have been nice if the Planet Money guys had thrown Marco a bone and used Phish covering Funky Bitch as the intro/outro music.


“  I’ve always thought this was the real story behind the software that John Gruber highlights in his occasional User Interface of the Week posts. It’s not so much that the designers of these applications have no taste, it’s that their users have no taste. There’s something about an ugly, cluttered user interface that says ‘computer’ to the great majority of users out there.” — Dr. Drang on browser chrome

Police Stations as Markets

As suggested by the Milwaukee police in response to several Craiglist-based robberies.


“  Every business built on gatekeepers eventually fails. At some point some technology comes around, making the entire old school industry obsolete.” — Jeff Price

“  A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors-in all likelihood, a couple of dozen-and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh.” — Waldo Jaquith on the impracticality of a cheeseburger via Kottke

“  For Siri to be really effective, it has to learn a great deal about the user. If it knows where you work, where you live and what kind of places you like to go, it can really start to tailor itself as it becomes an expert on you individually. This requires a great deal of trust in the institution collecting this data. Siri didn’t have this, but Apple has earned their street cred.” — Jon Pielak, former Siri-iPhone developer

“  Decentralization, in tech as in politics, is how we prevent one entity from having too much power. Power corrupts.” —  Brent Simmons

“  The asymmetric nature of the bonus (an incentive for success without a corresponding disincentive for failure) causes hidden risks to accumulate in the financial system and become a catalyst for disaster. This violates the fundamental rules of capitalism; Adam Smith himself was wary of the effect of limiting liability, a bedrock principle of the modern corporation.” — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“  This is not actually just a baseball story. It is a story of rapid change in the business world and how there will always be people who resist change because it threatens them.” — Keith Law on Moneyball

Underpants Gnomes Everywhere

John Gruber:

Sustainable businesses are built on profit.

Brendan Nyhan:

The Internet may reduce the costs of organization or communication in important ways for political activists, but fundamental barriers to third party success - most notably, strategic voting and the Electoral College - haven’t changed.