Stuff you can’t live without
“jp” runs a great website about personal money management called My Money Blog. The author is publicly tracking his networth as he works to accumulate $1 million starting with basically nothing as a 20-something year old college grad. It’s a brilliant idea and I wonder how long it will be before he starts earning more from his website than his day job.
Could Patents Ever Be Beneficial?
Clearly software patents are not urgently needed by anyone except patent lawyers. The pre-patent software industry had no problem that was solved by patents; there was no shortage of invention, and no shortage of investment.
I have to disagree with this. Some software patents represent considerable investment. Consider compression or encryption algorithms. A great deal of research goes into creating a highly efficient compression algorithm like MP3. If there were no patent protection and no opportunity for licensing revenues, we might not have things like portable music players.
I recently got into a discussion on JavaRanch about mobile payments (m-payments). It started with a simple question.
Are there m-payment systems which are done in J2ME? Would be really grateful to know about any company which is using that kind of a technology, case studies and theisis? What about the trend of M-Payment systems.
Several others expressed interest in the topic so I added my thoughts and I’m going to rehash them here. Basically, I think that you already can use your phone in place of a credit card or a check in certain circumstances, but for whatever reason, consumers don’t do it and merchants don’t encourage it.