I’ve always been interested (and involved in) in the use of ecosystems and the development of platforms for businesses to propel off of . Writing about business development is something I’ve always found difficult, however. None the less, that’s part of what I got into with my criteria for innovation post. Before I write more on that, here’s 2 other examples that came to mind when speaking about market creators as the criteria for innovation:
Valve’s Steam. They did a fantastic job of this, to the same level of Apple’s AppStore + iPhone combo. If you’re not familair with Steam, it’s an application that you download that allows you to download games to your computer. But Valve took it a step further by creating a software development kit that developers can use to build new games. This sets them up so not only are they providing the tool to create the games, but they’re providing the platform for the distribution of these games. Great stuff.
A company called Viximo is taking a page out of Apple’s book, and is using the ecosystem concept and taking it to a micro level. What they’re doing is building an iPhone application that is more simple to develop for than the Objective-C language required for the iPhone. More than that, the only way you can add these new applications is if you have Viximo’s application to begin with. This means they’ll need to setup a micro-payment system, thus making it effectively a clone of Apple’s system. Clone or not, not a bad idea.
Edit: As per Dan’s comment below, they may already have the payment system ready. If so, that’s great, as those can be a bit messy : )
The way I understand it, Viximo has a monetization module for their virtual gifts already in place and could very easily port it to be in line with vixML.
http://viximo.com/publishers