In these days, I am thinking about how web services can be provided without shutting down.
An answer I got is keep it small.
Small services can be provided without maintenances.
For example, the Formula (http://formula.s21g.com/) has been provided for more than a year. But it had virtually neither maintenances nor updates.
But it is used by someone sometimes.

The cost of keeping such services is about $50 a month.
It consists of only the cost of an EC2 instance.
An instance can offer several such services, so the cost would be shared by them.
So thus the individual cost becomes more low.

Suppose the cost is $20 a month,
we can gain it by a fund of $4800 if it earns 5% a year constantly.
If it is possible, it can be a new way for providing services such as the Formula.

昨日のRails勉強会でMaihaさん、Yuguiさんと話してましたが、
PayPalが日本円でのマイクロペイメントサービスを開始したようです。

PayPal、日本円でもマイクロペイメントサービス開始

米eBay傘下の決済サービス大手PayPalは22日、少額決済を行える、いわゆる「マイクロペイメント」サービスを拡大したと発表した。米国だけでなく、日本円など19通貨にも対応した。

この業界でB2Cサービスを展開してる会社にとっては、結構大きな出来事じゃないでしょうか。

See Also

• MicroPayments

I attended the event called OoO, which is an offline meeting for offline renderists.
The word renderist means people who are making renderer or interested in it.

The contents of the event is as follows.

• Keynote by Toshiya Hachisuka
• Report of SIGGRAPH 2008
• An introduction of DEMO scenes.

These were all attractive and interesting.
And talks about the Larrabee also were ubiquitous.

I have a long standing issue.
The issue is if providing server-side offline renderer itself is able to be a business going concern.
Once I had tried at 2003, but it failed.
I thought it was too early and it would need a time of 5 years.
So I gave up the business and switched to make a web application.

And the 5 years went by...

The gang's all near.