IP

  • Main
  • RSS 2.0

More on Web 2.0, price discrimination, and commoditization

My continuing discussions with search industry participants at Where 2.0 about the business case for offering your data for free.

Sections:

Topics:

As announced at O'Reilly's Where 2.0, Google released their mapping API as did Yahoo. Microsoft is also mentioning that their Virtual Earth will be for free. I'll leave it to others to discuss the key elements of these APIs. From my perspective, the kicker is the licensing terms. For instance, Google is offering their API for free as long as people can use your mapping web application for free.

I had a chance to follow up a bit with Mark Law from Microsoft's Virtual Earth on their licensing terms. In particular, what does it mean to be non-commercial? According to him, non-commercial means you are not making money off the map data, so it sounds like Google. They plan to introduce a tiered pricing structure for access to the data for commercial use, based on volume and number of services used.

Continue reading "More on Web 2.0, price discrimination, and commoditization"

Bud posted this on June 29, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Copyright and the remixable web

Will remixing the web encourage people to use more liberal copyrights because the value of participating is higher than the value of retaining an exclusive lock on their data?

Sections:

Topics:

I'm listening to the John Battelle panel on local search at O'Reilly's Where 2.0. John Frank of Metacarta just raised the point that dhtml (aka ajax, an easy javascript technology for mixing in content into web pages from web services) enables copyright infringement, a bad thing from the perspective of the recent Supreme Court ruling on file sharing services. You're probably okay if you do not encourage stealing of copyrighted materials. I wonder if things like microformats and easy data sharing will push more and more providers into putting more liberal copyright restrictions on their work that allow for sharing.

Bud posted this on June 29, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)