Hello, what do you think of the following:
There's seems a lack of web api's being created on a pay for use basis. Most web companies I see are creating end user applications. The api's available are mostly for newfeeds or databases (ebay/amazon/google apps).
Why aren't there more developers quickly turning out micropayment api's. There's a whole lot of people on the net - affiliates - who are scrambling to make some money off of lousy ebooks or adsense etc., give them real products they can earn commissions on.
Sort of break things competely into one man companies earning small commissions on multiple products in a free flowing market.
An area where this type of thing is really lacking is in image recognition. Someone could put a service where for one tenth of cent it will locate a cat in a picture, someone else puts out a dog recognizer (see opencv or torchvision haar recognizer). Or in speech recognization, someone works to create a really good "hello" recognizer, someone else puts out a "bye" recognizer etc.
Payment is about trust. In order use someone to give or collect money on my behalf I have to trust them. Trust for startups is hard.
Secondly, people aren't always interested in small payments. When the cost of a transaction approaches zero it often becomes it.
If there were an arbitrary scale of value, people would more willing to pay $5 for some that gives them 5 value than $0.50 for something that gives them 1 value. They would look for something that gave them 1 value for free.