Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Micropayment and donations

Rajesh Jain has a great Tech Blog. Today I came across this link.

So his first stint as an entreprenure lasted 2.5 years, great, mine also lasted just 2 years

From his blog came across this Forbes article on Micropayment - http://www.forbes.com/2005/01/26/cz_1026findsvpmicropayments.html
"Emerging Trend: Think small. Online "micropayments" for items costing between $0.99 and $5 are becoming more common, with research firm Gartner (nyse: IT - news - people ) projecting that micro-commerce could be a $60 billion market by 2015."

Just Link successful Micropayments with open source or donation based softwares and you have a great sustainable model. 3 days back I had a discussion with my flat-mate Umang on this topic. Specifically i was boasting the fact that Wikipedia had a donation drive under way. Their target was to raise $75,000 and that thay have been able to complete this within 11 days. As of writing this $94,648.70 See- http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Fund_drives/2005/Q1

We were discussing the following -
Lets say I want to donate 1 cent every time I look up for an entry at Wikipedia, I would be happy to enter into this kind of an arrangement. Good thought.. the only issue is that the transaction cost is quite high for online payments and micropayments of the order of 1 cent are still far off. But once these issues are resolved, it will be so easy for contributors like us to make donations, which will not have any material impact on our finances but all taking together will contribute a big amount to the web-site




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