Oh wait, I also did the stalker ads idea, or sort of. I believe that someone will come up with a successful solution for location-based mobile coupons. What we have seen with our project is that this idea clicks with customers, but it is hard to develop a scalable model to acquire local advertisers. Local business owners seems extremely reluctant to embrace the internet medium for some reason (even with some free limited service, free pilot programs, etc.).
It's interesting that customers like it. I started working on something like that, but the thought of being on the receiving end of constant advertising through my phone as I walked around really bugged me so I dropped the idea.
An explicitly opt-in version I could go along with, but the legwork to acquire advertisers was more than I wanted to do.
I hate to play devil's advocate, but that kind of crap is the reason Facebook apps exploded. You don't get viral growth without supporting friend-spam.
It's actually not required for signup. You would still receive coupons for free up to a face value of $5 (which is the vast majority in volume).
That was an incentive to foster virality, but your comments are very much appreciated.
In a weekend I coded the virtual business card idea a few months ago, but it didn't catch up at all. Basically the click-through rate of the tiny link in email signatures is below 0.1% so its virality is basically none.
http://www.tinyvcard.com i thought it was a brilliant name :-)
That is a cool name, but it seemed really hard to actually see someone's business card. The codes didn't support vanity URLs and it looked like there was a $10 signup fee. Physical business cards are designed to be read easily and shared easily. They are even pretty cheap.
Google App Engine represent one more step towards lowering the barrier to entry to web applications and services.
Any small team of developers can deploy a successful web application with no system administrators and no VP of operations. GAE takes away all the complexity of databases, replication, redundancy, monitoring.
For my last project (http://www.btexty.com , an open mobile messaging platform), we switched to Python and GAE, moving away from a Ruby On Rails setup on dedicated hosting, that we used from a previous project (http://www.moqpon.com mobile coupons).
I'm very happy with that decision. For a duo of developers, forgetting about the hosting platform allows to focus on product development and dramatically increases productivity.
The revenue sharing is quite surprising to me:
"As publisher, you will receive 35% of the list price when someone buys your content from the Kindle Store."
I think you might run into breach of the guidelines of the mobile marketing association. All messages application to mobile should be sent from a short code, to make it easy to opt-out. See http://www.mmaglobal.com/policies/code-of-conduct
