A Day in Paradise

http://www.open-realty.org/
http://wiki.open-realty.org
http://openrealtytemplates.awddesign.co.uk/listingview/55

This is a response to Lukas’ post over here… I hate blogging about comments I make on other blogs, but I also like to keep semi-coherent blog entries under my roof, so that I can have them should I ever need to refer back to them.

I am not a stock broker, but spend all my working hours with them.

There is nothing wrong with the stock market, the problem is simply with capitalism and greed.

I can’t agree with you on condemning the stock market for bad company decisions. Once you have opened your company up to private investments it is truly out of your hands. Although I do agree that it’s the very big players who make the power moves and the small players who loose the money.

A typical example of the volatility of the stock market was the crazy last week. A lot of the best stocks got hit the hardest, not because there was anything wrong with the company but because some big players lost a LOT of money on other stocks, and had to sell off their earning stocks to cover their margin calls. This sent perfectly good stocks into free fall and lost a lot of small investors a lot of money.

Yay capitalism!

I forgot who said this, but a great investment is to buy a lot of gold, and bury it in a hole (that’s actually not that good advice… since you’re going to pay a lot of tax… better go with a gold ETF).

Don Dodge coined Web2.0 as “Web App + 2 Founders + 0 Revenue”. Funny, and not too far off the money.

Don goes into detail about the various ways that Web2.0 firms are funding their efforts. This goes from Freemium (free basic membership with paid premium package) to Subscriptions to simple Advertising.

One thing that he doesn’t mention is the “community-in-a-box” business model. A community in a box is not about selling any specific product, it’s simply about creating an exciting product creating a buzz around it, and then delivering eyeballs and mindshare to a larger company.

Let’s face it, despite their best efforts Netscape’s Digg clone failed miserably. Google couldn’t do nearly as good as YouTube despite of the grotesque amount of money at their disposal. Yahoo’s Image Gallery could never do what Flickr does. Nokia could have never attracted a userbase the size of Twango. And whoever pays $x Billion for flixster (or the next social media site) is not going to care about monetizing the site they are going to care about the community they are getting.

One of the main differences between this boom and the first technology boom, is that, like Dan states, Web2.0 can survive as an idea + 2 young enthusiastic founders. All we need to build a community-in-a-box is a good idea, and a couple beat up servers somewhere and a couple hours a night spent cranking out some slick PHP or Ruby code.