virtualeconomics

Don't bother turning off electronic devices

A couple of weeks ago the New York Times ran a piece pointing out that while plane passengers are asked to turn off their mobile phones during take-off and landing, no-one knows why. The Times speculated that if just 1% of American plane passengers secretly left their devices on, that meant 11 million flights a year somehow managed to stay in the air even though someone had left their phone on.

The 1% number was just a guess, though. So last week I got the guys at my company, Holiday Extras, to run a poll and ask our customers. We run our polls on the "welcome back" email we send to customers, so we know that all of our respondents have just flown back from a holiday.

Stop following me!

Scott Adams wrote recently about the increasingly poor online shopping experience. Every time you buy anything online you need to register, enter discount codes, work out shipping costs, struggle through endless attempts to sell you extra things you don't want...it's no longer possible to meaningfully comparison shop because every online retailer hides the final price in different ways, and it's already easier to just go to a damned shop.

My own frustration shoping online is with ad retargeting.

BT Fon simply doesn't work

When BT first took an investment in Fon I thought it a great innovation. The ex-monopoly doing something innovative and useful that would leverage its assets (near-universal coverage) and provide a real consumer benefit.

Problem is, it doesn't work. I've tried using Fon when I'm away from proper wireless access a couple of times and it does one of three things:

(1) works until the connection just vanishes indefinitely

(2) works but requires you to log back in every few minutes or

(3) works but requires you to turn the connection on and off every few minutes

I lost and manually reaquired my Fon connection twelve times in the course of writing that last post. It isn't even a very long post and I wasn't doing much else at the same time.

Of course it's a bubble

Marc Andreesen argues it's not a bubble because the big tech companies - Google, Apple - still have sensible P/E valuations and anyway it can't be a bubble if everyone calls it one. Let's look at some counterpoints.

Facebook, Zynga, Zipcar, LinkedIn, Demand Media, Twitter, iwantadoor.com (yes indeed) and yesterday's big story, Groupon.

What makes all these companies signs of a bubble? Everything is priced as if this market has no losers. Everything is priced to win, win big, face no competition, face no meaningful downside risk and not "do a MySpace". 

Oh what a lovely bubble!

LinkedIn doubled in the first day of its IPO, Facebook is heading to $100 billion before it even floats, higher education might be a bubble, silver had a stab at being a bubble, commodity prices have become uncoupled from demand and China is hoarding rare earth metals. But if you're looking for the perfect bubble, Bitcoin looks like a great bet.

If you don't already know what Bitcoin is, it will take several minutes of reading largely inpenetrable articles to find out. Here's Wikipedia. Here's an explanation from Tim Lee. Here's Tyler Cowen. Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer virtual currency that's better, in various arguable ways, than other virtual currencies like Beenz or e-gold or Azeroth gold coins. A handful of technophiles accept it as payment. There's lots of ways to trade it. It's an internet currency that fulfils the standard criteria for being considered money and you can buy some right now, if you want.

Startup100 riggers just Wronga

By now you'll have seen Mike Butcher's piece on TechCrunch about the results of last month's Startup100 awards. Wonga was voted the winner, but at the last minute Spotify was jobbed in to win the prize. So far so nefarious, but the worst bit is that the vote was only rigged because some of the people running the award are apparently too stupid to understand the benefits of short-term lending so don't want to be associated with it.

The folly of rigging your own awards ceremony has been sufficiently addressed by Mike (and it is telling that the Telegraph's reponse to this is basically to wash their hands of the whole affair, little more than "a big boy did it and ran away"). It is the apparent misapprehension of the organisers that Wonga is doing something disreputable that I wish to address, by looking at the basic economics of short-term lending and the small amount of research that has been done on this market.

And we thought only Bill wanted to run a charity

Microsoft is buying Skype for c$8bn. Lucky eBay, which finally makes its money back. Lucky Zennström and Friis (again!). Lucky VCs and Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board (yes, apparently). 

And poor Microsoft. $8bn to buy a platform that exists only because the traditional market is overpriced. Buying Skype is like buying Craigslist or buying PirateBay (or maybe buying YouTube) - gazing out over them thar interwebs and saying "wow, that thing's popular. Let's get us some of that and later we'll surely figure out how we can make it make money".

Salaryshare and the data opportunity for jobs aggregators

It always worries me when I see companies launch that it seems any one of a dozen other companies could trivially kill with a few days dev work. I wonder if I'm missing something.

SalaryShare lets you see what your friends/colleagues/random strangers earn by pooling salary data anonymously from anyone who chooses to share it and then revealing the range of salaries disclosed to all participants. Nice idea. I have indeed occasionally been curious as to what other people earn.

Thing is...if people want to know that badly, can't one of the jobs boards (or more usefully jobs aggregators) simply store data on the salaries that were listed on historical job ads and make it searchable?

Crazy Twitter spam de jour

Crazy Twitter-spam presumably intended for shut-ins:

"Sick of Hayfever? Simply lock the POLLEN OUT OF YOUR HOUSE with WindowFilta as seen on TV (I am omitting the link)".

Yup, assuming I never left my house that would solve the problem an absolute treat. I hope they sent it to me because I mentioned hayfever in a tweet, not because I tweet so much their behavioural targeting software can tell I never go out. I have a smartphone damn it! For all they know I could be tweeting from a party on a frickin yacht.

"So many people they crashed the website!"

Twice this morning the BBC's news presenters claimed that something had become so instantly popular that its website had crashed. One was some coverage by the BBC itself for the royal wedding; one was the Action for Happiness website, which was mentioned on the show and at time of writing is still down.

For some people, having a website crash appears to be a badge of pride - it is paraded as proof that the cause or the publication or the thing in question enjoys such widespread popularity and support that the whole internet has come to join the party.

Of course, it proves no such thing.