It's not that explicit. The terms talks about different kind of virtual currencies, my understanding is that "consumables" are allowed, as long as your currency isn't trad-able back to real money
904 karma · joined February 19, 2007
The piratebay is not illagel in Sweden (yet) in the sense that last time there was a court case about the legality of linking to copyrighted material it was found to be legal. I think this was in 1995 or something.
If The Piratebay is found illegal then the ISP's will not go after the site but they will go after ISP's and force them to block the URL like they have in Denmark
I'm Swedish. But it doesn't mean that I'll defend Sweden in a war against Norway. I have very little more in common with the Swedes who lives on the border to Norway then the Norwegians who live on the border to Sweden. However, I'm Swedish - I grew up there and I have my cultural heritage from there. That's not wrong - it's just fact
However, chat have never been easy to monetize so right now it's adding to the amount of time that users spend on facebook. Which is good
On a high level IM is becoming a commodity. I'm not bullish on the long-term survival of MSN Messenger in it's current form. Facebook has just launched a much more relevant IM service than MSN or AIM will ever be.
The fundamental problem with IM remains, it's hard to monetize. As is social networking. With a built-in micropayment system the chances of succeeding there increases. That's why mobile makes a massive difference.
problem 2: phones don't have panels
problem 3: phones don't connect to isp's they connect to carrier wap gateways.
One attempt to track mobile is from Opera but it's highly skewed to the type of people that have Opera on their phones and the activity that's significant for them: http://www.opera.com/mobile_report/
We launched our virtual economy this summer and are just integrating premium (the ability to pay for virtual economy coins). We're live in 11 markets with premium and gradually adding more. People use their phone and something called WAP-billing to pay for the coins. $6.99 buys you 200,000 coins for example.
Historically monetizing users on mobile have been an order of magnitude easier than on the web. Ringtones is a billion dollar business for example. SMS is a $80 billion dollar business. What web services/categories can generate that kind of revenue? And SMS is a pretty poor protocol. The key is the built-in mobile micropayment system called PSMS or WAP-billing.
One of the companies we look at for inspiration is Mobagetown, a mobile web based community in Japan. It's a $250MM company in terms of revenues at just 10MM users.
Our main challenge is to make people realize that Alexa doesn't track mobile web ;)
Gustaf, Heysan
Google Trends is better but still crap. http://www.google.com/trends?q=heysan
I'm Swedish and we get un-metered 24mbit up/down for $40/month. Many of my friends have 100mbit down at home. A large chunk of the population also have 5mbit usb-cards of over 3G network in their laptops. You can get it for $30/month.
The crappy Internet infrastructure in the US is one of those things that I really don't understand. What is the reason for this? Failure of market forces?
- Gustaf
Fail.