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 [...]

It’s interesting how ideas converge and details clarify themselves. Things are coming together now on my strategy to build an addon infrastructure to facilitate extending the Squirrel POS System and then reselling those new application extensions. Talking to some resellers to get their feedback is still a task to do.

The core idea is to have people put links to things on their websites, using my affiliate number so I can paid when people click and buy. Here’s the concept: Create nice little packages (various visual sizes) of a link that people could put on their web site. One of things the link can do is purchase something on another website using my affiliate id. Here’s an example:

What I want to do to make an automatic process to retrieve driver kits from the Squirrel FTP site (if they are available. If not they should be), install them in a build environment, and automatically compile and update the drivers. Extend this to be a service to offer to other vendors that have interface drivers used in the squirrel system. They could submit source code (versioned as well), and use the automatic build process.

Online electronic-only DVD movie rental.

Well this morning seems to be about ideas for short-term development contracts for Squirrel Systems.

Okay, well there are lot’s of things on the horizon. This Tuesday I’m going to be speaking at the Gift Card Association at Steamworks. Cool Balance is building the Gift Card Association website. I’m building a lens at www.squidoo.com/restaurant-software to see how well that system works. Content is almost non-existent so far. I’m needing to learn about writing contracts to manage the relationship between Cool Balance and Squirrel Systems, Cool Balance and Second Stream, and [...]

Today, multiple projects and multiple streams of income. Resetting to thinking small.