World for sale

I come from a family of entrepreneurs. Despite rebelling against this in my teens and going to University (I like to think of myself as the white sheep of the family), I occasionally feel an uncontrollable entrepreneurial urge welling up inside me. However, having witnessed the hard work involved in turning a good idea into a profit, I usually see sense and divert my creative energies towards my day job.

There is one idea I had a while ago that just won't go away, so I thought I'd spill it out here.
Here's the pitch:

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Imagine that the whole world is for sale.

Every square metre of land on earth is up for grabs, and anyone can buy it.

A 16 metre square plot cost only 1 cent.

You can put anything you like on your land. Each 4 metre x 4 metre plot supports a 64 pixel x 64 pixel image. 10 cents should buy you a decent sized picture.

You'll probably want to buy up the land your house is on first. You could put a picture of yourself on it, or maybe your email address.

It might be a good idea to buy up the land that your company's headquarters occupy before someone else does. Maybe buy up your competitors headquarters and put your logo there, just to wind them up a bit.

Strapped for cash? No problem. We'll give you an interest free loan to buy your land. You can pay us back if you sell it on to someone else.

You could buy up some famous places. Like Piccadilly Circus, or The White-house, or Old Trafford. Someone will want them for sure. They'd definitely pay more than a few cents to put their stuff on those popular spots. Well, it's up to you to set a price. It's your land. All of the profit is yours to keep.

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Anyway, you get the idea. It's basically 'the million dollar web-page' meets 'Google maps' meets 'buying and selling land in Second Life'.

It's a sure fire winner, I'm sure of it. All I need to do is rework Google maps via the API, install a decent e-commerce system, get some scalable image-server capacity and do a bit of viral marketing.

Fuelled by easy credit, the global virtual real estate free market economy will explode like an electronic antidote to real world recession.

Right, back to the day job.