It was one of the largest, most-profitable companies in the world 100 years ago (then known as Standard Oil).
Exxon is still one of the largest and most-profitable companies in the world today.
And, given that many of their existing oilfields will continue producing for the next 100 years, Exxon is likely to still be one of the most-profitable and largest companies in the world long after we are all gone.
The same is true of the oil industry. The oil industry was one of the largest and most profitable industries in the world long before we were all born. It is still one of the worlds largest and most profitable industries today. And it will still be so long after we are all gone.
Interesting fact: many oilfields in the San Joaquin basin of Southern California have been producing oil since the 1890's. Continuously.
It's hard to think of many industries where the risk-capital that you invest today will still be paying dividends 100 years from now.
Viewing, logging, replaying, and manipulating HTTP headers is an absolute _must_ for many web developers.
Wireshark is fantastic, but having this feature embedded in the browser is very useful.
I've tried Googling for "DIY enterprise search", but I haven't come up with anything.
All I've found are these very heavy (and very expensive) systems from Autonomy, etc...
Here's my problem: I've got a corpus of over 1 million scanned text documents in tif format. No OCR has been performed.What is industry best-practice for indexing and searching through these documents?Does anyone have any first-hand experience with commercial and/or open-source solutions that are performant on this type of problem?How about experience with ranking algos other than tf-idf?I'm...
The Wall Street Journal is charging extra for a "professional" subscription with access to premium features.From TechCrunch:"Dow Jones debuted a premium business news site dubbed The Wall Street Journal Professional Edition in an attempt to get companies to pay up $588 a year for access to more personalized, business-related news and analysis."See:...
Microsoft: "put a computer on every desk."Google: "organize the world's information."Ebay: "democratize commerce."What are your examples?
I was thinking of doing exactly that -- charging just under $5k/month for a data service.
It seems, however, like that might be a poor decision.
As an employee at a corporation, would you have an easier time charging $400/month to subscribe to a web-app or charging $4,800 up-front for a yearly subscription?
A lot of people on HN are selling website subscriptions and/or software to corporations.If we're selling directly to corporate users, it's important that the user be able to charge the purchase to their corporate credit card without having to track down someone higher-up with purchasing authority.At your day job, what is the most that you can charge to your corporate credit card for an IT...
I am trying to find a practical way to monetize a free Google-indexed vertical search engine that already has traffic.Has anyone tried to monetize a vertical search engine by charging users for premium content?For instance:Let's say you have a free vertical search engine for real-estate, but you charge a yearly subscription fee for the ability to download scanned TIFF images of quit-claim deeds...
We are preloading Asus Netbooks with our proprietary software and reselling them to clients as a turnkey solution.We want to brand these netbooks with our logo and company name.Can anyone recommend someone who can provide us with a beta run of a dozen or so custom decals?Thanks in advance
What are some strategies, besides advertising, for monetizing a vertical search engine targeted at professionals in a specific industry?
It's easy to accept the status-quo.
Before the Internet, consumers accepted that there was an inherent trade-off between selection and convenience: you could either have the convenience of the corner store with its limited selection, or the selection of a WalMart if you were willing to take the drive out to their regional supercenter.
The Internet allowed companies like Amazon to deliver both more convenience and more selection. Consumers could have their cake and eat it, too.
Today, most people accept that there is a trade-off between living where you want to live, and working where you want to work.
What if that were not true?