How come no one is talking about SkyePay? I found it through Skype Journal. Of course it is still a third party proposal without official Skype sponsorship so we’ll just have to stick to our imaginations.

I guess anytime there is a debit/credit relationship there is an opportunity to create a payment platform. Using SkypeOut/In as a method for money tranfer is actually pretty ingenuous now that I think of it. Its certainly not that far fetched since land line phones bills often act as a bill aggregator. In China ,the payment war is largely based on the mobile phone as a platform.

If this is actually built, I think there is an opportunity for Skype or a partner to create a Keen.com like infrastructure for 1-900 advice service with little or no infrastructure investment. OR copying the latest keen.com incarnation, Ingenio, and create a pay per call advertising network for classified services, again with little or no cost.

Also the problem with short code sms services is that the phone companies take over 20-30% of the total billing amount. So its next to impossible to sell anything with a COGS since the 30% take rate will for sure eat away the gross margin (such as pre-paying for movie tickets using a mobile phone) . With this, and a fixed SkypIn/Out cost per minute, all this might be possible using gateway services (like the ones from the company that proposed SkypePay, Connectotel). This is huge as I’ve talked to numerous entrepreneurs who wanted to use sms short codes as a billing method but was stymied because of the take rate.

Couple months ago I wrote that

Actually the future of UI design is going to get a lot better and a lot worse at the same time. One of the good thing about traditional web controls was that because the available interface elements was so constraining, it was in fact keeping the UI’s from getting too bad (and too good). Now that product managers and UI designer have almost unlimited tool box to play with, expect the Bell Curve to flatten: a lot of over designed and badly designed web app. (Think Windows applications before Visual Basic) End users are used to dropdowns, radial buttons etc . . . now they have mryiad of “clickable” controls they’ve never seen before. On average, it will probably get worse before it get really really good.

Well, Alex Bosworth (who is much more of an expert than me) has actual examples. One of the best nuggets is that Ajax drag & drop is pretty cool but as an UI element in a web app, the jury is still out. Here is the post.

Lots of participation in the forum too so the post definitely struck a nerve.