Today I saw a job posting from “Abe Books”:http://www.abebooks.com, a Victoria, BC, Canada based company that is the world’s largest online book marketplace with more than 80,000,000 new,used,rare,out of print books from more than 13,500 independent booksellers in 53 countries. This sparked an insight for me. If I want to build a large marketplace for a specific niche, they way to do that would be to build an instore pos/management application for that niche and [...]

Today, reading an advert by Janet Swirtzer for her “How Experts Build Empires” series of programs for info-marketers, a number of things she had to say struck me as insightful. First, everyone knows and has done something that someone else would like to know and be able to do. Many of those things people will pay money for. So, I can build a product and business around that thing if I can find those people [...]

Well, lately I’ve been thinking about what I know best and realized that I’ve been working with payment systems (credit cards and prepaid cards) for more than 17 years now. So, I’ll be blogging on a variety of topics in this area. Everyone is familiar with Starbucks and their gift card (powered by ValueLink of First Data). It’s been an amazing success. In 2002, 7% of purchases were made with their prepaid card and more [...]