January 2009 Archives

What a beautifully succinct way of expressing quite a complex system :-)

Wow, and an interesting business model too... Or interesting way of expressing the business model. I can imagine how this could be the beginning of a fair split of value in a post-IP world (as long as everybody knows what everybody else is in it for that could work...)

It's also a nice, scalable way to express the fruitful partnership between state-run monopoly and tiny creative shop (imagine if Orange and Shozu had decided to divvy things up like this, some beautiful experiences might have come out of it)

From the mashery site:

An API can unlock new distribution channels for your content and services. But creating an API is only the first step. Achieving long-term success requires management tools, security controls, built-in scalability, and community support.

A quality letter of complaint is a thing of beauty :-)

I'll bet Maya's forgotten about this old post but it cracked me up. Not only that but the online application (see AtomSmasher) is still live...

Bloody hell, never before has my trusty Powerbook spotted such a richness and diversity of wifi connections. And not one of them gives me connectivity :-(

Come on guys, lock your boxes down and monitor your traffic but leave the subnet open!

So I'd been watching money as debt trying to figure out how much of it was accurate or relevant and then the credit crunch happened.

I got me thinking, if you get a run on the bank in a fractional reserve system where financial institutions are able to lend more money than they hold in assets that can be pretty bad for the banks. If you have the same run on the bank where the fraction of the bank's debt that is backed by assets has become so tiny as to be for all intents and purposes nil that's an even worse thing.

Or, in other words, it's beginning to look like the gap in the banks finances is theoretically infinite. When the sum of money required by the banks to patch the system climbs above a certain limit it ought to make sense to not give the money directly to the banks (seeing as it's our money to begin with).

So here's my suggestion. Instead of pouring a trillion zillion squillion dollars (ie our future) into the unaccountable bottomless pit of bank finances, why not simply give every citizen 100,000 dollars? Those with mortgages can repay them (the banks getting the liquidity) and those who rent can spend it on sending their kids to college or buying a year's supply of something they need.

That seems like a much better solution to me. The estimated US population in 2008 is just under 400 million souls. So what's 400,000,000 × 100,000 = 40,000,000,000,000 ? Is that 40 trillion?

How far off am I to make this work? Apparently, the world's total GDP in 2007 was 57,000,000,000,000 (57 trillion) so it may be a little hard to score that kind of cash on short notice...

Overheard on the train this morning:

...but if people really don't like Big Brother, then they will probably be a market that Cooperative brother, one of BB's ethical competitors, will welcome...

Sweet ;-)

• Social Entrepreneurship - Change.org
  the "Nine Inch Nails Theory of Entrepreneurship":

  1. Love your clients/customers/stakeholders
  2. Find business models that accurately capture the value you're trying to create in ways that people respond to with joy
  The value an organization or a business creates is not static. In the music world, the way value is priced (the cost of music) has stayed largely static, despite the costs involved in reproduction and distribution dropping to almost nothing. This has (clearly) produced a backlash.

  3. Turn possible threats to opportunities to amplify brand love
  (tags: 2012 value co-creation collaboration riaa)

• Helitech - Headset Services Limited
  Headsets for pilots in noisy cockpits or... annoying open plan office phone conferences
  (tags: hd280, hmd280, headphones)