The day of charging directly for goods may be back! People are scrambling to figure out ways to make the new mobile phenomenon lucrative and with apple ingeniously associating a credit card and account for each individual along with their iPhone to handle all transactions apple has masterminded the perfect segway to this new consumerism cost structure. With all your credit info on file apple makes it easy fora business to accept a users purchases with no overhead. A business can focus on thier ocntent and thier app and apple takes care of sales a distributions allowing companies to sell apps for only a few bucks and hopefully make up for it all in the amount of churn these simple apps produce. Sort of the same way charging 99cent for a song instead of 15$ for an album in a store apple now has people spending hundreds or even thousands a year on music, the same can go with the new micro payment model for segments of applications and content introduced withe the latest iPhone sdk 3.0.
Now with micro-payemnts that concept of the neo consumer is refining itself yet again. Imagine getting high quality content where more in depth info only costs an additional 10cents. Yeah you’re paying for content when it may have been free but less ads, greater focus and the ability to pick and choose you whats important to you on an adhoc level is way ore costefective and simple the buying a whole newspaper form a stand for over a buck and throiwng half of it away since you only want the sports section. 10 cent is a sneeze for most people and you dont have to open your wallet or input your credit information. Maybe this is what PayPal envisioned for their future in their earlier more mobile days.
Imagine breaking up cost points by actions where an in depth graph can be download and send to your coworkers for 50 cents, extra weapons in games to help defeat your opponents and extra dollar or ecards that costs only pennies on the dollar. Your finances for all purchases are funneled through a single source and sent as a weekly or monthly statement. Pick and choose what content work best for you and pay almost nothing for the thing you specifically want. This could be an interesting revolution in the online charge model.
Sean Shadmand 