Categories
Ideas

Media Micro Payments

Given the proliferation of payed media services like Netflix, Spotify or newspaper paywalls like the Times or Telegraph if there was a system where individual media items could be read for a small fee would people be interested in say paying 1 cent for an article or 10 cents to listen to a piece of music once?

However, micro-payment infrastructure is non-existent. Yes there are things like Patreon which serve artists and there are plenty of advertising driven services principally Google and to a lesser extent targeted ads on Facebook. The paid services such as Patreon expect ongoing payments which is annoying and mostly they are not micro whereas the advertising driven services require millions of views to generate a good income, for instance Spotify play return is 1:1000 that is 1 million plays result in $1000 and are biased to the favour big artists. But often most people listen / read / watch something once or at most twice so why not have a service where you consume per view say $0.10 or less. The service could be additive. That is if you consume the same item you ‘buy’ lifetime ownership.

The service would need to be a plugin or a wrapper website and the user authenticated and possibly anonymous to avoid irritating follow up. But if it was as simple as clicking a button to unlock an item with the cost clearly shown it could open up a lot of media that is otherwise hidden behind paywalls.

Categories
Agile

Is Conway’s Law Flawed?

Is Conway’s Law Flawed?

What is Conway’s Law

Conway’s Law says “organisations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organisations.” . Also restated by Eric Raymond as “the organisation of the software and the organisation of the software team will be congruent” [1]. To further illustrate Conway’s Law, Conway states, “It is a consequence of the fact that two software modules A and B cannot interface correctly with each other unless the designer and implementer of A communicates with the designer and implementer of B. Thus the interface structure of a software system necessarily will show a congruence with the social structure of the organisation that produced it.” [2]
In many cases this makes sense, so you hear about software development teams aligned to a business unit. In banking, for instance, if the bank trades FX there will be developers working on FX trading apps but in addition there may be developers aligned to Finance who happen to use the rates supplied by the FX team. Consequently there will be an interface between these teams, even if its not direct. In fact teams that are not business aligned or form part of the organisational communicate usually get into trouble as they are not serving the organisations needs.

Is Conway’s rule a Power “Law”


  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law
  2. http://www.melconway.com/Home/Conways_Law.html
Categories
Blog Low Latency Technology

Peer 2 Peer Trading Demo

            SMR is building a peer 2 peer trading platform for trading on foreign exchange. This video shows two traders buy and selling from each other. For technically minded the app is built as an AngularJS single page app with web socket REST API Scala / Java server with Cassandra as the data store.

 

You can also see in on YouTube

 

Categories
Blog

Design Patterns

            Design Patterns
Pattern Description Java Usage
Constructional
Factory Method
Builder String Builder
Prototype
Singleton
Structural
Adapter
Decorator
Façade
Fly Weight
Behavioural
Command
Interpreter
Iterator Iterator
Observer Observer Listener
Pub Sub
State
Strategy
Visistor
Concurrency
Active Object
Double checked locking
Join
Lock
Monitor
Block Chain
Volatile
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