TechYob

Friedman is talking about the Flat World.  Bezos is building it.

Techcrunch lets the cat out the bag today about Amazon’s yet-to-be-released SDS Service - rumoured to stand for “Simple Data Service”.  This coincides with an article I read this morning over breakfast in the Australian Financial Review about Amazon’s web-services-as-a-service venture.  Rob Hof gives an insight into the tech offerings that may well position Amazon as one of the leading players in utility computing.  

Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud and Simple Storage Services just made it easier for kids to start their own Web 2.0 company with some loose pocket change.  Back in the dot-com boom when working for Accenture I remember the massive tier-3 architectures we’d build and deploy for ecommerce companies.   Now I can enter the game for 10 cents an hour for a server computer, and 15c per gigabyte per month for storage. 

This got me thinking back to a comment made to me by one of the respected wags here in Sydney over a couple of Pale Ales

“I can’t afford a million dollar house in Paddington.  But I can rent one!”

Bezos may have some doubters on Wall Street, but Im a believer. 

Im looking forward to STIRR Sydney next week and catching up on living, breathing Oz Web 2.0 talent.  Thanks to Mick Liubinskas for helping to organise.  As well as being Tangler’s marketing guy, he is also Bob the Trainer from the Biggest Losers twin brother - see the pics for proof. 

Looking for gold at the end of the Web 2.0 rainbow?

Today GigaOM reported on this MTV video post which provides an insight into the practice of Gold Farming, using Chinese and lower income nations to collect and sell gold on popular gaming sites to their richer brethren in western nations.  This is in a similar vein to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk where people are paid to do repetitive online tasks such as classifying shoe colours.  The producer of the video cast Matt Sunbulli asserted that 100’s of millions of dollars were spent last year on trade in World of Warcraft gold, characters and items.  He also reported that in game virtual markets were to surpass $9 billion by 2009.  Even if it is a fraction of this amount, it still suggests that virtual economies are coming of age. 

Like its real-world equivalent, globalization 3.0, virtual Gold Farming starts at the bottom of the chain by leveraging large numbers of low paid workers to do the grunt work of repetitive game tasks.  Another take on this phenomena has been coined Human Computation, which uses games to get people to solve real-world problems for free.  Luis Von Ahn invented the genre with his famous ESP game where, as a consequence of playing the game, people categorise large libraries of pictures - something that is traditionally very hard to do automatically.  He estimated that within a period of 4 months he could have the entire Google Images library labeled.  Google promptly licensed his tech.  Check out his video for some inspiration about how to leverage the untapped brain-power of people with too much time on their hands!

In a previous post I mentioned the burgeoning real-world economies of Second Life and Cyworld, and drew a tongue in cheek analogy between this new world order and that of traditional property development that is dear to the hearts of most Australians.  

Ive now upgrading that vision to one in which virtual stock exchanges and brokers become the new new thing.  Find a way to insert yourself, like IGE, into a virtual economy.  Truly, the online equivalent of eBay, but without the logistics nightmares. 

Think of any job or occupation today, and be sure that it will have its online equivalent in decades (years?) to come.  We may have started with virtual hard-labour today, but tomorrow we will see virtual legal specialists, futures traders, nurses, politicians and artists.  Some would argue we already have.  

So.  Im starting to build a catalog of businesses that boom in tomorrow’s virtual economies:

• The Property Developers - those that can build and churn properties that attract a crowd and then reinvent themselves like today’s nightclubs
• The Exchanges - like the ASX or NASDAQ, except they trade in ideas and concepts 
• The Actors - more on this later…

Not on earth.  Not in the universe.  Period. 

Just think about that.  Just for 10 seconds. 

It tells you something about life. 

All matter is energy. Energy is information.  Information can never be lost (not even at a black hole).

It just gets recycled, converted and exchanged.

According to John Dobson, there is no such thing as the big bang. There is no beginning or end, only particles and energy recycled on the horizon: 

Children will never believe that something can be created from nothing…If the changeless didn’t show through in our physics, we wouldn’t have inertia. If the infinite didn’t show through, we wouldn’t have electricity. And if the undivided didn’t show through, we wouldn’t have gravity and the attraction between opposites. Also, if the duality didn’t keep up the plurality, we wouldn’t have the atomic table. And if the plurality didn’t keep up the duality, we wouldn’t have atoms at all. That’s how I see it.

Poetry indeed. 

I am a property developer, my tools are my ideas.  In a post-Google world where information is free, imagination remains the untapped oil well of human endeavour. 

I am property developer.  Vision is my estate.  Character is my foundation.  My soul is my spirit level.     

The future of business is in property development, although the currency of trade is not buildings and fixtures; its about concepts trafficked. 

My goal is to expand my net of capture of the click stream consciousness. 

This is entrepreneurship in the world of Pipes and PCs.   

Your Honour, I present to you Exhibit A) Second Life where over US$600,000 in virtual objects are traded everyday.  Where the in-game currency, Lindens, has its own US exchange rate.  Exhibit B) Cyworld, where approximately US$300k is spent per day on in-world virtual items.    

And finally, Exhibit C) - YouTube, sold for US$1.6B.  A web site property that simply provided the infrastructure to take and serve other people’s digitized lives.