TechYob

Ive previously riffed about one of the guys who invented Captchas - Dr Vohn Ahn.  One of my other favourite geniuses, Seth Godin, gives his take on how to commercialise it. 

Provide it as a free service, except instead of just random numbers place the highest paid advertiser.  Granted, you can already get it for free, but his take is original none the less.  I just love it how he puts this stuff out there. 

I recently bought Seths book Small is the New Big for a long time friend for his birthday.  Its the perfect ’thought of the day’ for people trying to bust out and make a difference.  Given my friend put me onto Unleashing the Idea Virus, it was the least I could do.  As Molly Meldrum would say, do yourself a favour and buy it. 

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. 

There has been a lot of hype about the struggle between new and old media in the Australian and International press lately.  In the weekend edition of the Australian Financial Review, the favourited breakfast reading of yours truely, was an article about traditional media failing to understand the new wave of consumer-generated content businesses. 

They obviously overlooked Girlfriend - the Australian teenie girl magazine with circulation circa 150k.  They not only understand Gen Next, they own it.  They tout that they are Australia’s number one web property for women, and I believe it. 

They are a great example of using your customers to build the value of your assets. Through online interaction, their readers get to decide what colour the next issue is, vote on who appears as the cover girl, contribute stories and meet friends on line.  Seth Godin would be proud. 

Keep an eye out for businesses such as Melbourne’s RedBubble that enable people to take their online creations to an offline world.   

Update: Techcrunch posts about JPG Magazine which turns user uploaded photos into print.  Just the beginning in a long line of cross-over plays by my reckoning. 

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…