This strikes me as the heart of the issue, and I believe intelligent answers come from asking tough questions.  Today we have hybrid models for stores and books, but let’s really go to an extreme:

“How can a brick and mortar establishment showcase a virtual asset and be viable financially?”  

Whether or not we realise it, we’re being forced to answer this question.  I’ve seen countless people go into stores, use bar code scanners to look up the same asset online for a cheaper price.

I love the ability to discover stuff and browse in person. Financially I have to ask what can be done so this is viable.  I do think affiliate schemes, of some form or another are the answer.  But discovery – that’s also very important.  And I think a possible solution is to allow people to look at exhaustive content while connected to the stores wireless access point with a protected gateway.. maybe that would do it?

Opuss is a social publishing and discovery platform.  We want to make it easy for you to write and share your words with the world, online, in cafes and at stores.

What makes us unique is that we’re working hard to make it easy for mobile users to create content.  Mobiles and tablets are not just consumption devices anymore.  We’re hard at work building Opuss for additional platforms.   Which means we’re offering the ability for people to create more, not less, digital assets and allowing budding authors to engage with their fans.

http://www.boligan.com

Subsequently it has been found out that many major service providers such as Twitter, Instagram, Yelp and Foursquare to name a handful also ingress their customers contacts without any notification.

This outrage has spurred the US Congress to send an open letter to Tim Cook asking him for clarification. Today, Apple agreed with that assessment, and said that soon, apps that use address book data will require explicit user permission to do so.

I can’t help but think this is a little bit locking-the-door-after-the-horse-has-bolted but better late than never I guess.

With all this furore and what appears to be a very widely spread industry practice customers are rightly nervous that their privacy has been compromised and I thought it prudent and timely to state as clearly as possible what customer data Seamonster through it’s whole portfolio of products does and doesn’t store within its databases.

We have a number of apps live right now. The most “social” of these being Opuss – a service allowing people to share all the beautiful words in the world. This app and all our others do not and will not send your address book data to our servers and store them in the “cloud”. We value our users privacy and take every precaution to make sure Opuss is a place for people to have a positive, secure and enjoyable experience.

We don’t and never will abuse the trust that our customers place in us.

If you’re at all interested, Opuss’s Privacy Policy can been viewed here.

A platform for creating and sharing your inspiration for the written word.

When we looked at most apps out there we realised they were about sharing opinions, thoughts and statuses – but none around a passion for words. Opuss is for people who like to create and share their love of words: Jokes, quotes, short stories and poems.

Creativity happens – just not always in front of a desk. Opuss is a way for you to capture and share your inspiration on the go.

We started this project out as a proof of concept initially – we were huge fans of Instagram’s mechanics for user engagement. Then we realised just how many photo sharing apps there were, but none were focussed around words. We’ve since been shocked at the level of demand and engagement on the platform – but also the length of content. People have become much more comfortable writing on the go. We’re seeing a steady trend to longer content and this is evidenced by early betas of our iPad version due soon.

This is our first prototype and we’ve got big plans. We’re working hard on releasing a universal app to include iPad users – check out the demo here.

We’re also putting the finishing touches to an open API so other app and website developers can plug into the platform and grow the Opussverse.

We would love to know your thoughts, ideas, feedback and most importantly, your words.

Find out more at Opuss.com