ParkEasy: the social parking community.

It looks parking gets a lot of attention on my blog. This idea is all about helping others to find an easy parking spot. It works a bit like Uber but for future available (parking) space. When you are a member of the ParkEasy community,  you check in your car wherever you park and notify ParkEasy when you will approximately be leaving your parking spot again. Another member of the ParkEasy community that looks for a parking spot in a certain area at a particular time gets notifications of the available ParkEasy spot that become free within a 15 mins timeframe. He can give a heads up that he will be arriving to take your place via the app.

It’s by code of the ParkEasy community that you only give our your parking spot to other members of the community. When the parking spot changes, ParkEasy community members both get rewarded with some transaction points. With those transaction points, you raise your profile within the community. Being a member of ParkEasy will become payable over time and when it is, any valuable member of the community will have raised enough transaction points to prolong their membership for free. The new ones start with a small registration fee to start and gain transaction points.

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Battery walls exchange service.

With modular systems on the rise, phones and tablets will be able to use the same parts in different brands of technology. I foresee a standardisation of batteries. And my next idea anticipates it with a technology parts sharing society;

Battery walls are vending machines with charged batteries. When you enter your old, you get a ‘new’, charged one. Every battery that gets returned gets checked on optimal life expectation. If it’s below a certain threshold, it will be recycled.

The business model works on very small subscription fees & a transaction cost. It could be placed at entrances of business parks, in office buildings, on parkings next to highways, high traffic consumer places, etc…

 

Search.me: Search your cloud services.

You know that feeling that you don’t know where you’ve put something? Are your pictures partly on Picasa, Dropbox and perhaps you’ve also published some on Flickr? Or that one file, is it in mailbox X, Y, Z or on Box.net? Filter failure is a reality nowadays. It mostly happens when you don’t know where you have filed it.

Search.me is a virtualisation layer that indexes all your (private) info and makes it discoverable via a handy personal search so you can easily find your stuff back across all the cloud services you use.

Not only does it index (not copying) your content in all these places, an extra offer is made to manage your cloud services more efficiently. Using simple ‘fall over’ principes, you can use freemium models to their full potential. Just because it’s a virtualisation layer, it can bypass certain limits in freemium services by creating new accounts or cleverly combining multiple services.

Off course search.me is also freemium available… And soon will be bought by Google.

NoMoreFraud.org, an e-commerce fraude detection service and insurance. #oipd

I am the owner of the feelgood brand for pregnant women ZOYOKO.com that offers designer maternity wear of the highest quality from a large variety of suppliers. We use Atos Worldline and Ogone for our online payments but in all fairness, they suck bigtime for vendors because they only protect the customer. In November we had a good sale for almost 900 EUR. As the credit card was Japanese and used in Greece, we waited for shipping the goods until the amount was registered in our bank account. We shipped the same day and a couple of days later the goods were delivered at the address requested.

In december, we got the request from ATOS to provide them with proof that we authorised the fraudulent payment and requested the payment back. We acted in good faith (we have regularly expats buying) and as we pay Ogone a monthly fee of 10 EUR + 0.3% of the total revenue on top of the normal fees for fraude detection. I was really upset when they told us WE should configure the module ourselves and that it is no guarantee it will detect fraude. It can only assume there is a higher risk of fraud involved… When they told us we should contact every customer whereby the ‘lights’ are orange (>75% of the cases…) and ask them to pay by bank transfer, I felt deceived. So not only do they not take any responsibility, they just make you pay without asking or delivering a service worth the price.

From my frustration I got the following idea. A Mollom-like fraude detection service and insurance in case it goes wrong.

What’s a Mollom like service, i hear you think? Well, it uses the wisdom of the crowds not only to detect but prevent misuse of spam comments on (blog/)websites. By offering it for free to small sites, it gets the adoption it requires to grow its knowledge base. Also, it has a build-in robot detection step 2 authentication in case of doubt wherein real people can enter a captcha to proof they’re human.

So the NoMoreFraud pitch is the following;

NoMoreFraud facilitates and guarantees payments on websites while blocking fraude. The service is in direct contact with Card Stop services around the world, it automatically blocks any payment instantly when it knows a credit or bank card is used falsely. Basically it aggregates all blocked bank and credit cards in the world instantly, so both vendors as well as customers are protected better against fraudulent use of stolen or lost cards.

The service works in close collaboration with authorities around the world to catch the thieves who (try to) use the credit card.

On top of pay per use fee (0,1% of the transaction cost), you can get extra insurance in different formulas (1 EUR per month for up to 1.000 EUR value, 10 EUR per month for up to 10.000 EUR value, …) but normally, over time this insurance should become obsolete.