Claus Witt

Last friday I attended a seminar partly about this subject, and even though the seminar was great and informative, I think the part about social media had been hyped a bit too much though. The content was in my opinion a bit on the stale side. Martin Thorborg is always worth to listen to, but this time it was more about “people should get into the social media” than “how to actually do it”.

In the weekend I found the following video with Perry Belcher which stated that you should pretend that using social media is like attending a party.

I have previously written about how it might be a business venture for the ones out there with some extra time on their hands to begin producing either flash games, iphone apps or facebook applications. The funny thing about all three types of projects is that it is not needed to be the greatest application/game ever to start making money. Hype is probably more important.

Some Facebook developers have made serious money on creating quite simple applications for the Facebook Platform. A lot of them uses advertising as their main source of income.

The real difference is that iphone apps, through Appstore, and flash games, through Nonoba.com, has the opportunity to make people pay for using the software. Even though there has been rumors that Facebook would provide a payment platform for the website, which could be used by application developers, nothing has materialized yet.

As I have previously written, I have a lot of business ideas which I am working on. At the moment I am working on all the surrounding things to starting a new online business.

I have previously tried to start a web consultancy company called 9iA which existed from 2001 to 2007, but was shut down at the end of ’07 primarily because we did not make enough money – and as a result I owe quite a substantial amount of money. When we started 9iA we did not have a plan, or anything that even closely resembled it. We just got an office, some computers and started working. This time it is different. Maybe it is a result of my previously failure, maybe it is because I now have a girlfriend and a son, or maybe I’m just getting old.

One of the things that I am pretty sure of is that no mather which one of my ideas I will eventually put online, it has to be a kind of subscription service. Paypal is in my opinion the perfect company to handle the payments, and I have found an article about how to handle recurring payments with paypal.

Also have a look at Paypals manual on Instant Payment Notification.

For a while I have been pondering wether or not I should try to conquer the evergrowing flash-game-market. There are several ways to make money this way, and a lot of the games out there are quite simple. Some of the ways to make money on online games include sponsoring, in-game-ads and micropayments. The first two are probably the most widespread, since it does not need to be an advanved game to gain an income in either of these two categories – only a gameplay which ensures that the game will be played/viewed a lot of times. And with what I have seen, sometimes it is the stupidest games that get the most plays.

For micropayments to work however, I guess one would have to actually create a game which is so enticing that the players will return again and again, and will want to spend money to get an advantage, extra levels, other characters or other things which could be sold seperatly. I have found a list of ten ideas of microtransactions in games. There are some good advice there, I must admit. I will ad one of my own here:

Create a game with a montly highscore list – the winner each month will win the ultimate prize (and if you could get this sponsored from somewhere… Even better). You will then let all players buy all the advantages they want… Beware however, I don’t know if this is legal or not – I suspect that it is not ok in Denmark, where I live.

One of my former contacts from JCI has created a blog about women and money. At the moment there are only two posts, but if she keeps up the quality she will most surely get a lot of readers. You should definitely read her post about creating a budget.

She has promised me that it is ok for guys to read her blog as well. But be warned – it is in Danish.