h a l f b a k e r yBusiness Failure Incubator
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Wantsfiles
Specify your wants in a machine readable Wantsfile stick it at your website's root and automatically match and purchase products | |
Specify all that you want in a file at the price you want it at
and
have machines satisfy your bids. Sellers could do the same with
sellfiles but from the other direction.
Either the seller contacts your server or you contact the seller
via
indexing, either way, the matching and exchange
of money
happens automatically.
Could advertise jobs this way too.
The wantsfile looks like this, a bit like Ansible:
---
- groceries:
- name: 4 pints semi skimmed milk
price: £1.50
- name: 100g milk chocolate bar
price: £1.50
delivery_maximum: £5
For the computer literate, we could have cloud computing that
looks like this:
- static_web_hosting:
archive: dump.tgz
price: £3 flat
bandwidth: 12000rps
- database_hosting:
database_name: postgres
backups: 30 * * * *
backup_location: s3 bucket
price: £10 per month
[link]
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Automatic matching of buyers and sellers works on stock
exchanges, but that's because the things traded are clearly and
rigorously specified, and the whole process is closely watched
by regulators to make abuses more difficult. |
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Absent those conditions, people will game this. Consider, for
example, the processes of delivery and payment. Will payment
be in advance or in arrears? Either way, at least one party is
taking a risk, and how will you manage that risk without a human
in the loop to decide, for example, whether what was delivered
really matches an acceptable definition of "milk"? |
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Alright. Would this be compatible with e-mail? |
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For example, I put a wants.txt file on my domain, crawlers read it, and
send advertisement offers based on the wants specified to my
ads@root
e-mail address. Then, I have my personal search engine that indexes
those ads as opportunities, and I choose to approve what offers to
approve. By approving, I update wants records, marking records as not
needed for the time-frame or excluding them from wants file entirely. |
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A bit like subscriptions to offers of specific types? Advertisers will gladly
use the knowledge on what your domain wants file, to spam more
accurately. |
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Product specification and many details can be got around by specifying brand names and a standard header with mutually agreeable generic terms. e.g. |
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Payment is immediate and to be cleared through credit card, customer retains option to chargeback. |
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Chargeback will be initiated unless:
{
Delivery of undamaged product within 2 days of payment.
Product matches description in wantsfile.
} |
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Merchant is not responsible for unsatisfactory products that match the description, where the delivered and undamaged specified brand name is found to be an inadequate product. |
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A dontwant is just a want with negative weight, or amount? |
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On Monday my site could be hosted by XYZ supplier and by
tuesday it could be hosted by someone else. |
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My groceries could be delivered by one supplier one day and
by another the next. |
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[pertinax] I think you're onto something here - there ought to be some clear
standards covering common household items for trade - these might initially
cover simple commodity items like bread, flour, sugar, beer etc - this has been
attempted in the past, as far back as Medieval times (if not further) and whilst
standardisation is the enemy of the marketing department, it does provide the
consumer with a solid foundation. Producers of goods lose out because they're
no longer able to entice their customers with snake-oil imbued products, or
invent things that their products eschew (now with 99% fewer dangerones!) in
the hope of achieving shelf-prominence - but in this post-shelf based
consumerism we have today - this may be the end of a lot of that nonsense. |
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No frills consumables could well be the next big thing - profit margins would
be cut to near nothing though - perhaps this could be an in for state-provided
supply chains? |
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