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Let's look at a common problem: you're a large retailer or manufacturer and you've got a whole heap of excess stock sitting in a warehouse that you need to quit in order to generate some cash.

Right now you could discount the product and try to sell it through your existing bricks and mortar stores or website, supported by some expensive advertising. The problem is that there's quite a bit of cost and work involved in doing this -- so there has to be a better way.

You could throw the stock onto an internet auction site but that would mean finding a bulk buyer (at greater discount) or starting a myriad of auctions -- then managing all the questions and other hassles that might result.

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Well here's the next logical step in online retailing...

What's needed is a point-of-sale (POS) applet that can be installed on any page of any site.

Thousands, or even millions of this applet (not unlike the 7am.com news ticker of old) would effectively provide the operator with a huge window on the web and, if properly designed, this applet could serve a wide range of roles.

By having full control of this little piece of a million webpages, the operator could operate a conventional ad-network -- charging advertisers on a per-view or per-click basis and rewarding those sites similarly. Of course this is no different to Google AdSense and a thousand other ad-networks -- so there's no real value there.

But imagine if you could also (thanks to Flash, Java, Active-X or whatever) perform a greater level of interaction through that small patch of webspace.

Let's go back to our warehouse full of (say) brand-name running shoes. Perhaps we have 10,000 pairs of size 9 trainers that will soon be last-year's style and so need to be flicked off really quickly.

The seller could come to the network operator and simply tell them to sell all those shoes and that they want a minimum of $30 per pair.

Within a few minutes, those small bits of webspace (especially the ones on sites related to sports or fitness) could be carrying ads for those shoes at a price of $49.99, still well below retail. Once again, this is no different to a regular ad-network -- but the real potential of this idea is about to be unleashed.

When a buyer sees one of these ads and clicks on it, they're able to interact and transact the sale on the spot -- without having to go to another webpage.

They pay their $49.99, which comes to the Network operator. The operator then credits the account of the website concerned with $5 (10%), pockets $15 and passes the seller's $30 on to them, along with the details of the order.

And now, since the operator knows that a pair have been sold, all those ads around the web are immediately updated to show "Just 9,999 pairs remaining". In fact, on a "hot" item, potential buyers can see when an item is selling well which gives them extra impetus to buy now before they sell out.

But this concept isn't just limited to traditional fixed-price selling. The applet could instantly turn into a window on an auction -- allowing bidding on items offered. As the bids increased, all the other applets displaying the same item would instantly show the change in status, thus hastening the bidding process and allowing virtually real-time operation.

Let's examine the benefits of this system to the parties involved:

The customer (the most important player) gets access to products at a great price and can buy on the spot.

The seller gets a method to clear his stock at a good price by minimising the cost and capital investment required to sell that inventory -- ie: no advertising or special promotion costs.

The network gets to clip the ticket of every sale making (in the example cited) 30% on a transaction without having to stock or ship any product.

The website owner gets to earn a healthy commission for doing nothing other than offering a small part of their webpage. Even better, unlike other affiliate systems, they don't lose visitors who click on the applet -- the entire deal is transacted on their own page. Indeed, if properly designed, there's nothing to stop this little applet from acting like a complete online catalogue to the entire list of products being sold through the network.

This is an idea with potential because there's some very real and equitable value exchange going on between all the parties involved. Everyone gets some real benefit from this arrangement.

Of course this is just the most obvious way to turn this syndicated webspace concept into revenue, but there are many others -- some subtle, some not so subtle.

The key to this idea is the development of that page-window applet -- a piece of code that effectively allows a page within a page on the web. Of course there's also a significant amount of back-end stuff.

Think of this as an online store and auction house with a million windows to the world.

But wait, there's more! This webspace could also act as a survey form, a poll, an interactive multi-player game -- in fact almost anything, and that's its real strength and difference to existing networks.

As some of you have probably guessed -- this was the ultimate goal of 7am.com and the job of the news ticker was simply to establish a toe-hold on as many webpages as possible. Once that relationship was established and cemented (as it was on more than 250,000 webpages), the commercialisation phase was to turn those pages into the windows to a powerful e-commerce network such as the one I've just outlined.

Due to inept management by investors, 7am.com is gone -- but the idea remains very sound and it's only a matter of time before we see it implemented by someone. Affiliate schemes and the original news ticker proved the soundness of the value-exchange concept and the ticker also proved the power and value associated with controlling a small piece of a large number of webpages.

Any starters?

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