P2P Barter – My entry to the MintChip Challenge
Here’s an explanation of what we have today, followed by a Use-Case for my idea…
A newspaper illustration depicting a man engaging in barter, paying his yearly newspaper subscription to the "Podunk Weekly Bugle" with various farm produce. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
TODAY:
1. Person A is a farmer who has worked hard all season and is ready for harvest of their crops. For simplicity’s sake, let’s call him the “Seller“, since the next step will be to sell their produce. For that they may need any of the following:
a location (i.e. storefront or directly from their farm)
an advertising budget to attract patrons to their own farm directly (or to their storefront)
transportation or a carrier service to do deliveries, or,
distributor agreements which arrange to have the produce picked up exactly when it is ready and bring it to 3rd party wholesalers or retailers for stocking in their storefront
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Unboxing the MintChip
Royal Canadian Mint (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Royal Canadian Mint(RCM) has sponsored the MintChip Challenge 2012 in an effort to attract developers to the idea of developing software for the MintChip and giving away their best financial application ideas, basically, for free (on the long-shot that you are one of the few who win).
Starting April 1st, 2012, they began mailing out physical MintChip developer kits for up to 500 contestants (which will likely be an order of magnitude more actual developers involved when you count those who will inevitably work on larger teams).
Since Digital Currencies and related technologies have long been on my radar as a major business opportunity area, as well as a personal interest of mine in terms of how they work, it was only natural to apply for a kit. Today, mine finally arrived!
Contained in the package:
- USB-microSD reader with MintChip software pre-installed
- 2 MintChip MicroSD cards (aka. the MintChips themselves)
- 2 SD-microSD card readers (paired with MintChips; one can act as sender, one as receiver)
- Brief instructions on how to find your $100 balance for each MintChip (but no URLs, of course!)
- The package itself has a punch-out Door Hanger on the back
Distinguish Between Venture Debt and Venture Capital
Image via Wikipedia
If you are an entrepreneur, you might often get confused about when to raise venture capital as against venture debt. This is because these two words have very thin
margin of convergence which raises the misconceptions in the first place. The basic difference between venture debt and venture capital is that the debt you have taken must be repaid. Venture capitalists are also very much interested in getting back their capital along with a profit. Most of the times distinction between the repayment of venture debt and the liquidity needs of venture capital blurs due to some current market dynamics. To most skeptics think that managing debt and repaying them back in a venture debt is a lot different from a venture capitalist hoping to get their money back. Here are some points that will help you better to understand the difference and similarities between venture debt and venture capital.
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More victims in the Google API Graveyard
Image via Wikipedia
On May 26th, Google announced the deprecation and/or shutdown of many of their most popular and widely developed against APIs, leaving many developers and even Google fanboys feeling dumbfounded, betrayed or at the very least neglected.
According to Google, the following APIs are now deprecated but have no scheduled shutdown date:
- Code Search API
- Diacritize API
- Feedburner APIs
- Finance API
- Power Meter API
- Sidewiki API
- Wave API
- Translate API (v2)
Meanwhile, the following APIs will be both deprecated and shut down (within 6-32 months):
- Blog Search API
- Books Data API
- Books JavaScript API (not new Books API)
- Image Search API
- News Search API
- Patent Search API
- Safe Browsing API (v1 only)
- Language API
- Translate API
- Transliterate API
- Virtual Keyboard API
- Video Search API
- Web Search API (deprecated since Nov.1st, 2010, not in this round)
Since most of the negative comments floating around the web are centered on the shocking loss of Google Translate, here are some possible Google Translate alternatives:
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The Beginning of the next-generation of BCmoney
This is the first post of the new year, and we’ve got some exciting news…
Pledge your support
As promised, we’re continuing development of the BCmoney MobileTV platform and concept, only under a new domain. We can’t give too many specific details, but we can say that we’ll be integrating some of the best open web projects out there into the new platform.
It will be built on the following three core technologies:
- Content Aggregation & Discovery service (ActivityStreams + oEmbed)
- Trusted Recommendation Engine (WebID + OpenRecommender)
- Digital Cash Micropayments (BitCoin + PaySwarm)
One of the most exciting topics on our radar for 2011 is “Crowdfunding“, or the financing of interesting and innovative projects by the community, rather than through a single investment firm or bank loan. Speaking of interesting projects, one content aggregation service we’ll be implementing in the new BCmoney will be OMP3. Also sure to deliver interesting innovations in mobile web application development will be jQuery Mobile.
Stay tuned, its sure to be an exciting year!
BC$ = Behavior, Content, Money
The goal of the BC$ project is to raise awareness and make changes with respect to the three pillars of information freedom - Behavior (pursuit of interests and passions), Content (sharing/exchanging ideas in various formats), Money (fairness and accessibility) - bringing to light the fact that:
1. We regularly hand over our browser histories, search histories and daily online activities to companies that want our money, or, to benefit from our use of their services with lucrative ad deals or sales of personal information.
2. We create and/or consume interesting content on their services, but we aren't adequately rewarded for our creative efforts or loyalty.
3. We pay money to be connected online (and possibly also over mobile), yet we lose both time and money by allowing companies to market to us with unsolicited advertisements, irrelevant product offers and unfairly structured service pricing plans.