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Cloudflare’s Agentic Toll Booth
Stablecoins and Agentic Commerce are all the rage these days. Everyone is launching their own stablecoins, payments consortia, L1 blockchain, and/or agentic protocols. It’s a truly exciting time in AI and payments, but it’s also a land-grab, with everyone jockeying to become THE standard by which agentic commerce happens. Cloudflare & Coinbase’s latest attempt to dictate future standards with their NET Dollar and x402 protocol is an interesting development, and also a pretty shrewd and rational move… if you’re Cloudflare. It seems pretty obvious to anyone paying attention to AI these days that we’re about to see an explosion of AI agents doing all sorts of things on the Internet,…
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The Devil’s in the Details – Frictionless Checkout
Recently I’ve become a fan of Lot18, a flash sale site for wine lovers, which works much like Gilt Groupe for wine. Like Gilt, they offer quality products at a discount to standard retail, and their site features rich descriptions and photos. They’ve also taken advantage of some best practices in flash sales, including: Daily emails to introduce the latest offering and drive traffic Limited quantities Time-limited sales Countdown “expiration” timer after you’ve added something to your cart The last item is key, as I believe it’s one of the things that makes Gilt so successful: urgency. Items are reserved for a limited time (10 minutes) when you add them…
