Comment by devijvers | Hacker News Reader

Comment by devijvers | Hacker News Reader

1/ Calculate which mobile subscription on the market would be cheaper based on your mobile activity of previous months. Needs a way to keep track of hundreds of subscription rules and way to easily scan and OCR paper invoices and/or pdf invoices.

2/ Offer free salary calculations. Charge employers for sending paper salary slips (PDF versions are for free) and employment related and legal counseling. Also offer free self-service portal for employers and employees. Barrier: requires a lot of knowledge of local employment, fiscal and social security regulations. Reward: if you can break the barrier you'll probably be the first and make a killing.

3/ Offer a service like square with the distinction that once a cent is converted to a online cent the entire history of that cent's online usage is freely accessible (radical transparency.) As soon as the cent is withdrawn that history will be lost of at least will be frozen for ever. This way when I want to accept a payment from you I - or my application - can scrutinize the history of the cents you offer me. If there's something in the history of a certain cent that I don't like - example: it's been used to buy X, Y or Z - I'll reject that cent. Other people can step in and tag transactions or even a party in a transaction in a certain way so that I can configure my application to reject those tags. This simple mechanism introduces a new negative feedback loop in our economy that we don't have but need in our economic system.

I like 3, but I'm not sure how it would be executed but you would first need crazy volume. Please push forward on it! I'd love to brainstorm with you for fun. It seems like it would need to be one of those things that came as a side effect of something else you were building. Not sure.

You would have to do the tracking independent of the owners of the penny, of course.

And there is more value to this than providing a new negative feedback loop. If someone believes that the source of the money is just as important, if not more important, than the amount of money, then such a history is very valuable to them. For example, I'm sure there are some religiously organized charities that don't want mafia money for donations, especially if such money was going to fund construction for a house of worship, etc.

I see this as being potential very valuable in the oil-rich Gulf countries.

On 2, how is this different from salary.com. Maybe one of its competitors have an API you could use.

1 is cool. I worked at a company where we discussed doing this with carriers for their corporate customers, where obviously you have all the historical data and tariffs. On the technical side every bit of activity was an event, so we could easily replay it through a theoretical tariff, and we wanted to use genetic algorithms to come up with new, better tariffs (which were pretty complicated as they involved various different international voice and data rates). You might think it was in carriers' interests not to do this as they make tons of profit on their customers overspending, but apparently not.

We never ended up doing this, however, and most of their tariff discussions continued being back-of-cigarette-packet calculations.

The idea and technology would actually be applicable to all sorts of domains - utility bills, for example.

I think the transparent money idea is a clever one. Bitcoin does this although I'd say it's a side-effect rather than a feature and you have to accept a whole lot of baggage. Applying this to money would be clever. I haven't thought it all the way through but it feels like you'd get tripped up by the fungibility of money. If I use some of my tainted dollars to get a loan and then use those loaned dollars to buy something from you, haven't I bypassed your filter? (As long as they guy making the loan doesn't mind getting paid with tainted dollars.) You could try to make the loan provider tag their loaned dollars with the tag of the payment, but I'm not sure how you'd enforce it. Not to mention that fractional reserve banking means that "new" dollars are being created and destroyed all the time. Still it's an interesting idea and bears further thought.

>>Calculate which mobile subscription on the market would be cheaper based on your mobile activity of previous months

Is there a way to do that? From what you are saying it is like tracking the number of incoming and outgoing calls and keeping track of the bill. Wouldn't that be a privacy issue, and also do the service providers agree to provide such data ?

>>Offer a service like square with the distinction that once a cent is converted to a online cent

I like the idea, but what do you mean by online cent? Square takes the payment by credit card, so it goes directly to merchant account. Isn't it? So where does it get converted to online cent? Correct me if I am wrong! This can be compared better to paypal; that is where the money gets converted to online cent.

> Wouldn't that be a privacy issue, and also do the service providers agree to provide such data?

There are a number of popular services which ask that you give them your passwords. Failing that, you could ask them to install an Android app or to have the user manually upload the data. Invoices were mentioned in devijvers's comment.

1) Mobilsense

http://mobilsense.com/

I worked there for a summer a few years back. They do exactly what you described.

For 1/ if you're based in the UK you can use http://www.billmonitor.com/ which analyses your bill every month for you

Reply on news.ycombinator.com