Electronic Markets. Remember the lesson of tradewars. Purely electronic markets over the Internet are the stuff of dreams in 70s and earlier. Now they are available to almost anyone.

a) instant trading b) ease of membership c) program trading

program trading is the really powerful part, if you're trying to scrape dimes from many many transaction. What are the electronic markets of today?

a) each sizable nation or group of nations has its own electronic stock market b) currency markets

thats all i can think of, stocks and currency. there are other, private electronic markets such as the electricity markets between the power producers in the US. Enron was somehow trading bandwidth in discrete units on an electronic market. A garage sale is a market, but its not electronic. It was fun to see the commerce at the last garage sale at my house.

The lesson of tradewars was to change markets. Find two markets that trade in the same thing and be a bridge between the markets. In stock markets, thats not possible. Only NASDAQ trades EBAY and the shares of ebay I may have are no good anywhere else. Currency on the other hand is traded in more than one market. I dont have any experience with online currency brokers. Its definitely a smaller and shadier arena.

This leads me to a "Human Tradewars" PDA game. What if each of your friends were a 'market' so to speak. You play a game by negotiating something every time you meet, and you execute the deal by trading credits or whatever via IR, phone to phone, or possibly SMS. Check out midlet.org. Midlets dont suck as much ass as I thought and J2ME is far and away the only reliable program environment for phones. I sure wish the Hiptop's java were compliant with some standard. Instead they went with some Danger-foo java.

thats all for now.