E-Money?

Wired has an article that poses the idea of a completely cashless society.  The article heralds the benefits of getting rid of paper money and coinage, to instead, go all-digital. 

The idea of all-digital money sounds awesome.  As is, I hate cash.  I never have it, and when I do have it, I spend it.  On the other hand, converting to all digital money might make it easier to spend money.  Look at the credit cards, and how much fun we already have with not real money. 

To me, there is something being able to hold my money, or valuables.  I don’t know that I’d completely trust digital money.  I feel like the ability to pirate, or hack or even (gasp) computer glitch would be too high for me. 

Especially with our economy in the crapper, I’m interested to see where real money, and emoney will end up in the future.  

Is Boxee right?

Boxee is gearing up to piss off television networks. Boxee is free software that allows users to watch Internet content on their televisions. The reason this is upsetting to television networks, is because there are free services like “Hulu” or iTunes-which isn’t free, but is very cheap to download an episode. The networks are concerned that people are going to stop watching real time TV, even more than they already are tuning out with Tivo and DVR devices. This will further diminish the ad dollars, and then the networks won’t be able to fund the shows.

So let’s talk about the ethics of all of this. Is this wrong? I don’t think so. Boxee is free now. My guess is that at some point when it becomes a necessity-it will probably start charging for its services. Also, all that this is doing is helping the inevitable switch to digital programming move faster. I think that television networks instead need to figure out how to monetize online content.