Out there perhaps, but nearly 40 million cell phones out there, and an increasing proportion are blue tooth and/or internet enabled. Add to that the fact that wireless broadband is expanding and becoming cheaper, and the fact that a lot of people probably don’t have anything productive to do while sitting in a taxi (they’d probably welcome the diversion), and there’s definitely a business model there in the not too distant future.

The flip-side is open-source collaboration, where people give [without an alterior profit motive, quite often] their time and resources to create something beneficial to society. As you well know, education is starting to see the benefits of this, as are other public-interest institutions.

It’s quite strange how ‘free’ can potentially be both our worst enemy and our greatest ally. I suppose it’s just how we use it that will decide which one it eventually plays out as.

@Eve and Max and Lebogang: Brilliant – I wonder what triggered us simultaneously? Great articles, I’ll post my comments there directly.

@Richard Catto: 1. In fact Tada Copy is Japanese, not Chinese.
2. The fact that people demand attention all the time, and now have more and better means to do so is exactly why this is such an important issue – it’s not going away, and it’s getting more problematic.

3. Just because you haven’t thought of a way to make a particular service free, it doesn’t mean that it can’t or won’t happen. I mentioned some services that don’t exist yet in order to stimulate thought around future scenarios. And, yes, in fact I could see a advertising or e-commerce subsidizing transport to some extent.

@South African: You’re right, value needs to be transferred at some point. However, the money spent on retail advertising in the US has been larger than their profits for the last few years. There are people theorizing that the gold standard of currency (which has become meaningless), is being replaced by an attention standard. It’s, of course, more complex than that, but I hope to elaborate on it in subsequent posts.

thanks for the post(s)

I didn’t realise you spoke Mandarin.

If we don’t start to budget our focus, and treat attention spammers as we would thieves

Say what?

That sounds like nonsense. People demand attention all the time. That is not going to stop until we are all extinct.

Free phone calls, I can see because many countries already enjoy free local calls, but free taxi rides?

How would that work? Even if the vehicles were solar powered, how would the taxi company receive revenue?

Is all (future) revenue to be derived from advertising?