Future Technologies May - New Business Models

To carry on with my monthly post about something new and exciting, i've decided to choose new business models - no really it is exciting!

I recently saw a great presentation from Mervyn Levin, Levering Ltd Consultancy (his background is impressive as you can see from this PDF i've found covering a bit of his biography http://www.southeastmedianetwork.co.uk/knowledge/asia.pdf) on the subject area 'The Digital Economy in East Asia'. He talked about the different business models in the games industry in China, instead of relying on consoles and packaged (physcal) software which can be easily pirated a new industry has developed whereby online gaming has taken over. The online gaming industry tried charging a subscription (in the same way we're all talking about with SaaS, Software as a Service) but this proved unsuccessful so instead they have monetised features in the games and utilise microtransactions. To put it in layman terms if i'm totally into a game I might pay 50p for a better sword, 50p is not exactly a lot to me but if enough people do it (and a new sword would eventually need an accompanying shield etc) it can soon add up - especially when you have a population size like China.

This has all started me thinking about other new business models that are starting to slowly enter our lives. As i've already mentioned everyone is talking about SaaS and i've been hearing about various new ideas with organisations looking into providing all kinds of software on a monthly subscription or one-off fee type basis (made much easier with cloud computing but i'm not going to go into that right now!). At an event recently I heard about a new company that is looking at allowing people to pay for software on a one-off basis i.e. you get an email with a photoshop attachment and could click to pay for a day's use of photoshop in order to view and if necessary edit the attachment - fab idea. Sites like http://www.myhrtoolkit.com/ (check out the 2 minute demo) are totally getting the idea of the scope of SaaS and how it could be used for almost everything (also a Yorkshire company btw!).

So what else can I predict will move to a new business model? Well I don't want to be contraversial by talking about the Post Office and I am absolutely supportive of the Royal Mail but I do also see a future where individuals won't have to buy a stamp to attach to a letter and then pop it into a postbox, after all this is a classic microtransaction scenrio that could be made easier with technology (and I don't believe this would mean you don't need a post office, they're about much more than buying stamps after all!).

I used to be able to pay for the bus in York by using a 2D barcode on my mobile phone - it was great! They've stopped using it and I don't know why because it was so easy, all I had to do was send a text to get more bus tickets on my phone and my bank account was immediately debited - i'm really hoping they can bring this back to buses and that some bright spark makes sure you can use the tickets on any bus in the UK - how great would that be! So what else can we pay for with our mobile phones? Games, tickets, hotel reservations, parking spaces and where could this take us? Into supermarkets, airports (negating the need to have a different currency to buy a bottle of water)?

Also, as we're all wanting to be *the* knowledge based economy isn't it time we monetised knowledge better? We already pay for advice, could we do this in a microtransaction type way? Are people prepared to make a one-off payment for a single recipe for example instead of a cookery book? (okay that's a bad example due to wikibooks cookbook http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook but you get the idea).

Could you sell a book chapter by chapter? How much would you pay for a 30 minute online chat session with a solicitor? Why has no one thought to have a 24/7 online IT support company where you allow access to your PC / MAC and pay by the hour? What about an online magazine that allows you to click on anything in the photo to be taken to buy it (i.e. clothes, furniture, games, whatever the magazine specializes in).

There has already been talk of charging for single TV episodes. Could it work, I think maybe. People download individual episodes from torrents so would they pay a small amount if it was made easier and more reliable?

I think it will be really exciting to see the next round of new ideas with this new kind of business model.