This topic is for brainstorming ideas for applications on SAFEnet that might be monetizable by Maidsafe*, and with an emphasis on ones that are doable with SAFEnet’s current or near-term capabilities.
With Safecoin is easy to imagine many possibilities, but Safecoin is some way off and it is possible that some money-making apps are possible right now. What might those look like?
* As proposed here “here”).
While it might be possible to fork any application because of the nature of the GPL, their ownership of the SAFE name has a strong leverage.
SAFE Proxy: Providing a similar service to any number of VPN services out there, but some of those are honeypots and you don’t know which ones to trust.
SAFE Mail: As convenient as Gmail but completely private and snoop-less. Indeed, Gmail is more than mere e-mail, but the way it dovetails with other google services makes it a form of groupware for some small businesses.
I think putting together something like a bootstrap type admin interface that allows messaging (email), file sharing and the security of having all traffic/docs within the network environment (proxy) would be an easy sell as a one time purchase. Having someone pay a few dollars for something like that and letting them keep the access in perpetuity would be good.
This would also allow an ongoing revenue stream for devs once the Safecoin gets up and running without ever having to approach the user for additional in app purchases, upgrades, etc…
Just a thought…
I really like idea of monetizing off security/privacy services available for clear web that don’t intend on switching over to the network. And then when people figure out that the overhead of developing on safe is so low with so many security benefits then they may just switch which would be equally beneficial.
It can be a freemium model which is peer-to-peer, with a free-and-open-source client, but for a small monthly fee your client can bootstrap off Maidsafe droplets.
The most obvious thing i can think of would be make an online course about decentralised technology. Make it fun. Make it thorough. Include slides, videos, interactive tutorials, one-to-one skype chats. Allow users to choose which modules they want to pay for. Perhaps even give them a certificate of some sort? I would pay for this, but it would need to be done well.
What would be the benefit to using droplets as opposed to keeping private data on regular network vaults?
Speed and reliability of connection to the network. The droplets are, as per the way things normally happen on SAFE, the same as other nodes with except for being hard-coded. They are the same with regards to storage, and there would be no loss of privacy from using them.
The data, in the case of SAFEproxy, is webpages retrieved by the user’s browser.
Think of the droplets by (a very rough) analogy with bittorrent indexing sites: If you know a download is out there somewhere that you want, you could just fire up your bittorrent client and, if you knew someone already well-connected, bootstrap to a cloud of similar clients and search their kademlia table for the download. But hardly anyone does that. Instead they get a torrent file from an indexing site. A Maidsafe droplet network would serve a similar purpose, of getting you well-connected to the much-larger cloud of peers. Once you’re there you don’t need the droplets, although even then they might help with speed. I’m not sure how authentication could be done in order to only allow paying clients to bootstrap from the droplet network.
hmmm…would the network be able to connect to designated vaults though? I didnt think you could pick what vaults you connect to on the network…that it was random…unless you are talking about doing a specific network similar to the test community one that has a specific binary that only loads a designated set of vaults…am i way off on how this would work?..sorry, bit of a simpleton when it comes to the dev stuff…
The connection to specific IPs is for joining the network in the first place, same as with SAFEnet now.
Retrieval of a list of droplets might be by your client accessing a clearnet site. Droplet IPs and ports could be changing constantly. The “name” of the network you join might be an alphanumeric string that your client gets from the clearnet as a paying client, which the droplet accepts and then bridges you to the actual network.
Ahh…I’m with ya now! Clever!