Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Charging for free services that have computational needs

I love the way wolphram alpha does it....

Note that I have already done the search once - and got the right result ($17T approximately).
It seems that the service recalculates as opposed to serving cached results.
The service gave answers to several questions that seemed to require quite some time
(google+apple) gave me lots of outputs  - when I added every single mega sw tech company since the PC era that I could think of....

it then gave much fewer data points - still taking some time to answer.
So 
- point 1: the idea of allowing free usage but when your computation requires more than X - instead of , kicking the user out, penalizing everyone, making the user wait for ever, you provide the option to pay and use more resources...  
It reminds me the chess AI idea of greg to allow chess players to use an chess-player-assist program to play against their opponent (who also uses the same program...)  - and either people can pay to get more resources - run the alg at diff depth or both be limited by the # of funds that are being bet on the game - they can use the funds to get help - essentially reducing their potential earnout
 - point 2 : I really want to see the Market Cap of companies created the last 20-30 years as a % of the total over time since 1900 - do the same using the HQ address location etc... (e.g. bay area generating 2+Trillion dollars of market cap growth in 10-20yrs). 

No comments:

Post a Comment