This would work very well for memory/computation intense algos with relatively small input and output. For example, a semantic analysis engine that accepts a U

This would work very well for memory/computation intense algos with relatively small input and output. For example, a semantic analysis engine that accepts a URL and returns the extracted meaning from a web page. Input several bytes. Output less than a k. I think this is totally feasible and worth it as long as customers can monetize the output. To me a service like OpenCalais is AaaS. Sure they have software but the hard part of what they do is semantic analysis.