The Valley's impoverished imagination

There's a story in the Guardian about the mobile content market, which is huge. Good factoid: Crazy Frog, an annoyingly popular ringtone, sold more downloads than Apple's iTunes music store in 2005. But that reminded me: how come there's still no popular micropayment service on the web? Imagine if a website could smoothly charge a cent, for instance, each time a user clicked through to read the full text of an article, or view a clip. If the cost was low enough, and the transaction sufficiently invisible, internet media could finally escape its dangerous dependence on advertising. And readers could pay for news, on subjects such as politics, for which there's no advertising support. And why is that such a preposterous dream? Well, for one, because entrepreneurial talent and venture capital money is so drawn to increasingly marginal mashups.

Just browse through Techcrunch or Mashable, two sites which highlight the faddiest startups. From just the last few days: voice over internet, with added social network magic; peer-to-peer downloads, with recommendations based on a user's history; event publishing, with a social twist; or a wireless hotspot finder, which connects you to other users. Tribler, EQO, WeFi, Jangl. The names, and ideas, blur into eachother.

Nothing personal against any of these products. Some of them, if one stopped to think, might even be intriguing. But they're riffs on existing ideas, or mashups of larger phenomena, rather than anything more substantial. There's nothing wrong with that, either: except that there are so many important pieces missing in the internet economy. The startups are putting up the drapes even before they've finished the foundations.

Where's the ubiquitous micropayment utility? Better search than Google's? Self-service graphical ads? Some kind of solution for the gigantic reservoir of remnant ad inventory? The ultimate online university? A site which rates and ranks medical professionals? Many of these ideas have been tried before, before the market was ready; and there are still plenty of obstacles; they require scale; and epic ambition. But it's precisely now, with venture capital prepared to make bigger bets, and established companies willing to embrace the new, that the grander projects should be attempted.

Let me end with a shout-out to Jason Calacanis. His new project, Mahalo, isn't new. A human-edited search engine, providing curated answers to popular queries, it is one part Google, one part About.com, and one part Wikipedia. But it does at least pick up where About.com left off. Search does still have room for improvement. Search is important. And the idea is grand. Better to do that, and fail, than play around with the silly ideas that clog the tech news sites at the moment.

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