I like 3, but I'm not sure how it would be executed but you would first need crazy volume. Please push forward on it! I'd love to brainstorm with you for fun. It seems like it would need to be one of those things that came as a side effect of something else you were building. Not sure.
You would have to do the tracking independent of the owners of the penny, of course.
And there is more value to this than providing a new negative feedback loop. If someone believes that the source of the money is just as important, if not more important, than the amount of money, then such a history is very valuable to them. For example, I'm sure there are some religiously organized charities that don't want mafia money for donations, especially if such money was going to fund construction for a house of worship, etc.
I see this as being potential very valuable in the oil-rich Gulf countries.
On 2, how is this different from salary.com. Maybe one of its competitors have an API you could use.
The problem with open education is that unless you are using it for self fulfillment or self-driven applications, the general public does not recognize or appreciate the learner's efforts. For example, I am considering to go back to school for a graduate degree but I have all of the courses that I want to take available for free online. Heck, there is even other non-university affiliated material on the web like free ebooks that I am really interested in studying. But the problem is no future employer will recognize my studies if I go the free open route. If I spend the next two years self studying, saving thousands of dollars in tuition and learning from the comfort of home, every employer would look at it as wasted time. But if I spent the same exact time commitment and had no part-time jobs but learned all of the material in an institution then in the eyes of the employer I didn't waste time and I productively went to school. This is annoying.
I guess what is needed is a free certification program that corresponds with the open education movement. But I don't want a certification program that looks cheap. I want certification that is prestigious and representative of my intelligence and hard efforts, just like as if I was to get a graduate degree from stanford.
Sometimes I use the diffusion of innovations curve for rough estimates. So what was the non-disruptive technology people were using before salesforce? What sort of customers could benefit from using Salesforce? That's an easier market size number to find, and it can be a single number (for example corporations that use some form of CRM), or a number you come up with yourself (adding different industries that you think could benefit by using salesforce).
After I get an estimate for that number, I then apply that innovators are 2.5% of the market, early adopters 13.5%, early majority 34%, and laggards 16%. I don't have a single market size number, but I have a number for 'size of innovator adopters for this technology', 'size of early adopters for this technology', 'size of early majority for this technology', etc.
Now think about market size as who are the innovators and how can you acquire them and what is the timeline, and etc for the other categories.
You would have to do the tracking independent of the owners of the penny, of course.
And there is more value to this than providing a new negative feedback loop. If someone believes that the source of the money is just as important, if not more important, than the amount of money, then such a history is very valuable to them. For example, I'm sure there are some religiously organized charities that don't want mafia money for donations, especially if such money was going to fund construction for a house of worship, etc.
I see this as being potential very valuable in the oil-rich Gulf countries.
On 2, how is this different from salary.com. Maybe one of its competitors have an API you could use.