Out of the Ether |
Read about Ether this morning on Techcrunch:
Service providers set up an account by providing some personal information and a phone number that they would like to be called at. Any service that can be provided over the phone is a perfect match for Ether. “Sellers” set their price, from free to anything (on a per minute or per hour basis). They can tell Ether the hours they are willing to take calls. Every seller is issued a toll free phone number (with a dedicated extension), which forwards to their phone.
The TechCrunch review also indicates that it handles digital content (like software delivery):
Sellers can also sell any type of digital content through Ether as well. The buyer is able to access the content only after paying the agreed upon fee. This content can be emailed out to people, or accessed via a link/badge that can be placed on a website.
I’m definitely interested in actually using this service (not only reviewing it for Hmm) and tried to sign up for the beta. Uh oh, the beta invite didn’t like my email address.
On the beta invite form they aren’t accepting the + in emails which can be used effectively in some programs like Gmail. I realize that technically speaking it doesn’t conform to the RFC 2822 specs, but it is a handy function in Gmail for sorting mails into folders. I reported this issue on their technical support contact form (Update: this form doesn’t accept emails with the + in it, either, I told them that) and pointed here so they would be aware of this issue.
I’m curious about this service, particularly since I’m working on several things that concern digital delivery and could see where Ether might come in handy. Their 15% fee isn’t as aggressive as some third party processors.
Fellow developers, does this service sound like a potentially useful additional distribution channel? Non-developer readers, does this sound like a service you might use to buy products and services?
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I just signed up for the beta (no “+” here!). A lot of my work is small pieces of code or advice for other software developers, so it would be pretty cool if this turns into another channel for me. I’ll let you know.
Comment by Sterling Camden — March 1, 2006 @ 3:15 pm PST
[…] I missed collecting my private beta invite back on May 3 (got filtered into spam bin). Did you get yours, Sterling? And if so, what do you think? I’m in there and listed now and plan to be trying this out over the coming weeks. It’s strictly a BYOC (Bring Your Own Client/Customer) setup, there is no search engine for listings yet. I’ll be surprised if that doesn’t change once they get enough people in there. […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Ether zeta arrives — June 23, 2006 @ 7:58 am PST