Options
Why free coin collecting software?
dingodog
Posts: 273
My little software company spent over $700,000 over the past several years developing what we felt was the ultimate coin collecting software. I have run a small software company for many years writing software for major manufacturers, banks, insurance companies, oil companies, defense contractors, governments and the like. Most of the time most of my programmers were gainfully employed but if ever any of them had any free time, I had them work on my dream program. I dreamed of helping to bring the coin industry into the modern age. Coin dealers operate on a twelfth century economic model with only very few concessions to today's world. Eight hundred years ago a tinker would load his pots and pans on his mule and trudge from town to town hawking his wares. Today's coin dealers, eight hundred years later load their wares on a modern mule (a jet airplane) and trudge from town to town (coin shows) hawking their wares. We live in a computer age. Do coin dealers realize that? Can't they see that loading their wares on a modern mule and trudging town to town to hawk their wares is inefficient or downright expensive? A lot of the dealers travel 48-50 weeks out of the year. That is 48-50 weeks of traveling that only adds to the cost of their coins. If they didn't have to buy 48 - 50 round trip tickets, or hotel rooms, or rent-a-cars a year couldn't they cut us a break on the price of that 1888 Indian Head we really need?
Well, I thought I had a solution to help you get your 1888 baby. We wrote a complete suite of software programs to automate the coin industry (reputed to be $160 Billion/year!). Sorry airlines and hotel! All the dealers had to do was use it. There would be many benefits, not the least of which would be already reduced expenses. Last time I checked, I could get an airplane ticket to go from the north end of DFW to the south end of DFW for about what a nice Morgan Silver Dollar costs. Without all that money and time wasted on travel, prices would surely come down and more people would buy more coins. Coin collecting would boom as more and more people came into the hobby and the increased buying pressure would raise the prices back to where they were in the twelfth century mode. The software really is good enough to automate the entire industry but our friends are still thinking like they used to a millennium or two ago. Roman Centurions didn't use computer, say they! Why should we? Look around, we say. See how computers have taken man to the moon? Aha! But there are no coin buyers on the moon! Ok, look around some more, look how businesses have grown and prospered using computers. Aha! But we're doing ok and they serve free peanuts on all those airplanes! You could spend a lot more time with your kids, we say. Aha! //censored//! Your life would be a whole lot more comfortable, we say. Aha! Well, no one else uses them, you don't mean you want us to be the first, do you? How can we win?
OK, we say, we'll give you the software for free - now do you want to use our software? OK! You've got a deal, soon as all the other dealers are using software, we'll use it too! So we turn to the collector. There are millions of collectors if we can believe the U.S. Mint. They (the U.S. Mint) claim that there are over 100,000,000 coin collectors in the U.S. alone. They define a coin collector as someone that throws a couple of Statehood quarters in their sock drawer. That is a beginning. As long as those Statehood quarters remain in their sock drawer they are only going to benefit some coin dealer in the far future when some grandson knows he can't spend them because they won’t function thru his head-embedded electro-static transfusing communicating device. Young great-x7-grandson finds a coin dealer and brings his 1999 Silver Mint set to local dealer who explains that the five silver quarters are equal to $1.25 purchase units on his cell phone and offers to take them off his hands for $0.50 'cause they won’t work in his h.e.e.s.t.c.d. either and besides, he's a good guy! Now if that kid were running our software he could have looked up the numismatic value and found out that way back a couple hundred years prior those quaint little silver discs were much closer to $500 purchase units than $0.50. At the very least the kid will have a little more respect for the old but not forgotten gent.
Buy what about today, why would anyone want free coin collecting software and if you really did pay a lot to develop it, why would you be willing to give it away? If you can't sell it, you can beat yourself over the head with it and you still won’t be able to sell it. If you think about it, software is a tool, not a goal. The software by itself is a shell, it needs data to be useful. What kind of data would make coin software useful? Prices for one. Current prices would be even better. Automated prices that automatically update the values of your collection to the current price better yet. And data about the coins, like how to identify they, and to recognize errors and varieties (that are rising much faster in values than any other class). Historical information so you know about the coins in the past, where they were made, what materials, what techniques, who were the artists that created them, and the new coins coming down the pike. There is lots of data that needs to be continually updated as coin collecting is a changing thing. A vision begins to emerge.
Hmmm! We can't sell software because it doesn't do anything, but if we can add data, especially current data, maybe we can sell that. Viola! Prices are changing every day! New coins are being issued every year! New errors and varieties are being discovered, or identified all the time! Solution: give the software away and sell the data. The software is a vessel, the data is the fruit punch! OK, here's the plan: We give the software away with the current set of data. Then we produce and release price updates on a monthly basis and we sell those price updates at a nominal charge on subscription. You need them, buy them, you don't need them, don't buy them. Simple as that. The data? Oh, yeah, there is new data coming out all the time also so we release that as it become available and sell it with the price updates. By giving the software away we will be able to give it to a lot of people. New people will see the value of the software and the data and they will buy some of the data, just that data that they need when they need it. They will have different perspectives and may come up with some new features that we can incorporate into the software. They'll tell us and we'll incorporate the new features into the software. We'll compensate them (with prices and updates) for their suggestions, and we will add their suggestions to the new updates. That will make the software better. We'll release the prices and new data more frequently and that will make everything better. All we have to do is give away two copies the first day, four the next, eight the day after that, and so on. We figure that maybe 3% of the people that get the software free will buy the updates. After a few months (or years) we might actually be making money. A wonderful thing to look forward to, eh?
But wait! There's more! If we can double our users every day that would give us 2, 4, 8, 16, 24, 48, 96, 192, 384 - Wow! that's a binary progression! Just like in computers! By the 30th day we'll get 1,073,741,824 new users that day alone, and in the first 30 days we will have a total of 2,147,483,646 users! The next day we get 2,147,483,648 new users for a to-date total of 4,294,967,294 total users, so we'll have to move to India. We'll have the neatest telephone support: push 1 for English, 2 for Spanish, 3 for Hindi, 4 for KuoYu, and so on.
Just think, every one of these 4.294 billion people will be on the same sheet of music (so to speak) and all will be talking about coins, and all will know the same price for all of the 1.6 million plus coins we track. There will be no war as everyone will be trading coins! Just think of the cash flow - we'll be charging only $5.00/update on a monthly basis. That will generate approximately Twenty-one trillion, four hundred seventy million a day! Then we start giving back. We could make everyone in the U.S. a millionaire and a week or so later, everyone in the world. And everyone of those millionaires will be trading coin.
See the method to this madness? See why giving our software away and just selling the updates is going to insure world peace?
How can we lose?
Well, I thought I had a solution to help you get your 1888 baby. We wrote a complete suite of software programs to automate the coin industry (reputed to be $160 Billion/year!). Sorry airlines and hotel! All the dealers had to do was use it. There would be many benefits, not the least of which would be already reduced expenses. Last time I checked, I could get an airplane ticket to go from the north end of DFW to the south end of DFW for about what a nice Morgan Silver Dollar costs. Without all that money and time wasted on travel, prices would surely come down and more people would buy more coins. Coin collecting would boom as more and more people came into the hobby and the increased buying pressure would raise the prices back to where they were in the twelfth century mode. The software really is good enough to automate the entire industry but our friends are still thinking like they used to a millennium or two ago. Roman Centurions didn't use computer, say they! Why should we? Look around, we say. See how computers have taken man to the moon? Aha! But there are no coin buyers on the moon! Ok, look around some more, look how businesses have grown and prospered using computers. Aha! But we're doing ok and they serve free peanuts on all those airplanes! You could spend a lot more time with your kids, we say. Aha! //censored//! Your life would be a whole lot more comfortable, we say. Aha! Well, no one else uses them, you don't mean you want us to be the first, do you? How can we win?
OK, we say, we'll give you the software for free - now do you want to use our software? OK! You've got a deal, soon as all the other dealers are using software, we'll use it too! So we turn to the collector. There are millions of collectors if we can believe the U.S. Mint. They (the U.S. Mint) claim that there are over 100,000,000 coin collectors in the U.S. alone. They define a coin collector as someone that throws a couple of Statehood quarters in their sock drawer. That is a beginning. As long as those Statehood quarters remain in their sock drawer they are only going to benefit some coin dealer in the far future when some grandson knows he can't spend them because they won’t function thru his head-embedded electro-static transfusing communicating device. Young great-x7-grandson finds a coin dealer and brings his 1999 Silver Mint set to local dealer who explains that the five silver quarters are equal to $1.25 purchase units on his cell phone and offers to take them off his hands for $0.50 'cause they won’t work in his h.e.e.s.t.c.d. either and besides, he's a good guy! Now if that kid were running our software he could have looked up the numismatic value and found out that way back a couple hundred years prior those quaint little silver discs were much closer to $500 purchase units than $0.50. At the very least the kid will have a little more respect for the old but not forgotten gent.
Buy what about today, why would anyone want free coin collecting software and if you really did pay a lot to develop it, why would you be willing to give it away? If you can't sell it, you can beat yourself over the head with it and you still won’t be able to sell it. If you think about it, software is a tool, not a goal. The software by itself is a shell, it needs data to be useful. What kind of data would make coin software useful? Prices for one. Current prices would be even better. Automated prices that automatically update the values of your collection to the current price better yet. And data about the coins, like how to identify they, and to recognize errors and varieties (that are rising much faster in values than any other class). Historical information so you know about the coins in the past, where they were made, what materials, what techniques, who were the artists that created them, and the new coins coming down the pike. There is lots of data that needs to be continually updated as coin collecting is a changing thing. A vision begins to emerge.
Hmmm! We can't sell software because it doesn't do anything, but if we can add data, especially current data, maybe we can sell that. Viola! Prices are changing every day! New coins are being issued every year! New errors and varieties are being discovered, or identified all the time! Solution: give the software away and sell the data. The software is a vessel, the data is the fruit punch! OK, here's the plan: We give the software away with the current set of data. Then we produce and release price updates on a monthly basis and we sell those price updates at a nominal charge on subscription. You need them, buy them, you don't need them, don't buy them. Simple as that. The data? Oh, yeah, there is new data coming out all the time also so we release that as it become available and sell it with the price updates. By giving the software away we will be able to give it to a lot of people. New people will see the value of the software and the data and they will buy some of the data, just that data that they need when they need it. They will have different perspectives and may come up with some new features that we can incorporate into the software. They'll tell us and we'll incorporate the new features into the software. We'll compensate them (with prices and updates) for their suggestions, and we will add their suggestions to the new updates. That will make the software better. We'll release the prices and new data more frequently and that will make everything better. All we have to do is give away two copies the first day, four the next, eight the day after that, and so on. We figure that maybe 3% of the people that get the software free will buy the updates. After a few months (or years) we might actually be making money. A wonderful thing to look forward to, eh?
But wait! There's more! If we can double our users every day that would give us 2, 4, 8, 16, 24, 48, 96, 192, 384 - Wow! that's a binary progression! Just like in computers! By the 30th day we'll get 1,073,741,824 new users that day alone, and in the first 30 days we will have a total of 2,147,483,646 users! The next day we get 2,147,483,648 new users for a to-date total of 4,294,967,294 total users, so we'll have to move to India. We'll have the neatest telephone support: push 1 for English, 2 for Spanish, 3 for Hindi, 4 for KuoYu, and so on.
Just think, every one of these 4.294 billion people will be on the same sheet of music (so to speak) and all will be talking about coins, and all will know the same price for all of the 1.6 million plus coins we track. There will be no war as everyone will be trading coins! Just think of the cash flow - we'll be charging only $5.00/update on a monthly basis. That will generate approximately Twenty-one trillion, four hundred seventy million a day! Then we start giving back. We could make everyone in the U.S. a millionaire and a week or so later, everyone in the world. And everyone of those millionaires will be trading coin.
See the method to this madness? See why giving our software away and just selling the updates is going to insure world peace?
How can we lose?
U.S. coin collector since 1943. Have tried desperatly to keep every coin that has come to hand, but unfortunately, some got away.
0
Comments
ditto.......BTW, you have a most interesting writing style. I enjoyed reading your post.
If not, why not?
We gave away the software and charged for the number of transactions that went
through the switch.
At first, I thought it was kinda stupid, but they're still in business and making wads
of money.
Do you have a version of the software that's available to look at?
It has to be better than most of the software I've looked at so far...
-------------------------
Good trades with: DaveN, Tydye, IStillLikeZARCoins, Fjord, Louie, BRdude
Good buys from: LordMarcovan, Aethelred, Ajaan, PrivateCoinCollector, LindeDad, Peaceman, Spoon, DrJules, jjrrww
Good sale to: Nicholasz219
I have used your software since the beginning. I love the software, but when my hard drive crashed I lost everthing..Didnt have it backed up dah!!! So I didnt reload it because I couldnt recover the serial number as required to move the software... So needless to say I am in need of a new copy.
Don
Email TwoDollarDon
Sorry late answer - been chasing my tail. Please go to download link and fill in the "Create New Account" screen. If you have any problems email me to email. I'll be interested in hearing your take on our software.
My dad fought alongside Chesty on Pelalau (sp?) - I'm a USAF Vietnam Vet with a CIB (ChuChi and a few other memorables).
Best regards
Jan Schwenk
Thanks!
Jan
Thanks!
Jan
Yes, if you will go to my web at link you will find a link to download the software. I'll be interested in your comments and suggestions. Thanks!
Jan
Sorry to hear about your crash! We now have a new feature that allows you to backup your data to our servers where data is backed off to tape daily and to dvd once a week so if your hard drive crashes again we can send you your data. Were you able to recover your hard drive at all? There is a slim chance the data is still on your hard drive if the recovery was successful. Depending on the last time you updated the software (we recommend monthly now!) we had added a facility to write a backup copy of your data to a special section of the hd where you might be able to recover it. Also, I just checked and I can send you your registration numbers if you like, I show you have two (one home one office?). And/or you can go to our web, click download and register again. There are lots of new features and we're adding more all the time.
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Rgds
Jan email
It just occured to me, we've written one of the version in "ASP.NET" I think we might be able to compile it for the MAC. I will check into this and let you know what I find out. I sold my last Power MAC some time ago. Is there much of a coin collecting community among MAC users?
Rgds
Jan
That's "Peleliu." I wasn't there as I'm a little young but I remember my USMC history.
I'll check your software out after the weekend and get back to you, thanks.
Sorry for the booboo!
Thanks!