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What is wrong with this story about a struggling rancher from a small town who wins a gigantic lottery? The comparison is made that this is almost straight from a movie script. Is this a good thing, a “success” story? How about this:
- He is over $3,000 in debt and spent $15 on lottery tickets. What if he didn’t win?
- Who did he win the money from? Millions of people like him who spent $15 on lottery tickets that lost.
- How much extra good does he get out of $232 million vs $23 million or $2 million?
- How is he going to manage his new wealth? Who is going to take a cut of it?
I think the huge jackpot system is extremely inefficient. Even this rancher is going to be losing a lot of his wealth to people who are lining up to take advantage of him now. A much better reward for a lottery (if we must have a lottery since people like to gamble) is to give many smaller prizes. However, this is not nearly as newsworthy and sexy as the huge jackpot. Perhaps we could sex up such a lottery with a more useful grand prize. (I would buy a lottery ticket with a grand prize of brunch with the president.) But in the end, I think it comes down to better education. (How about a grand prize of free college?)
Speaking of better education, I’m waiting for the day where I can upload how to fly a helicopter directly to my brain (from the movie Matrix). Or perhaps how to speak a new language, or how to play the piano. These may be extreme examples, but there are more and more tools that help give us new abilities. Classic examples would be cars that help us “run” faster, airplanes that let us “fly”. TurboTax has been helping me do taxes without an accountant for years. Now at my current company Seravia, we’re building tools to help people with law related issues. Going back to our poor rancher, one day he may save a bit of money on high legal fees with the service that we’re building. Stay tuned! (I know I jumped from education to ability, but are they that different? If we always have access to a calculator, what’s the practical difference between being able to multiply by hand vs being able to use the calculator? In fact, it’s less useful to know how to multiply by hand and not know how to use a calculator.)
Is China the future? Google trends shows news about “china” growing faster than “america” and searches on “china” decreasing slower than “america”. (The two big peaks in “china” searches were around the earthquake and the olympics.)
Just a lighthearted view. China is the future at least for me – I am relocating to Beijing to do a new startup – seravia.com. My two partners moved to Beijing recently and we’re just getting our new office set up and hiring a few key people. This has taken up most of my time in the last few weeks so I haven’t had time to write anything. In particular I left like.com, where I’ve been for the last four years. I’ve been lucky to have worked with such great people there and leave with wonderful memories. And now I’ll be leaving the Bay Area/Silicon Valley where I’ve lived for the past eleven years and the US where I’ve been since I was three. My parents were both born in China and incidentally, my move to China comes 60 years after my parents left China. Much has changed in the last five cycles of the Chinese zodiac – now what will the next cycle bring? I’ll be in China to find out.
Following up on the recent post on twitter’s fast growth, Zynga and Ning have grown just as much in the last year. In fact, Zynga has grown even more than twitter, having started at a lower base. Ning is a social networking site that lets users create their own social networks. Zynga is social/casual game company, producing popular games such as texas hold’em and mafia wars on the social networks. I hear that Zynga is doing very well selling virtual goods in the game world.
China is an economic superpower with the world’s third largest GDP ($4.2 trillion), behind only the US ($14.3 trillion) and Japan ($4.8 trillion). However, despite almost catching Japan in total GDP, China’s GDP per capita is only 1/6 that of Japan’s (and 1/8 that of the US’s). This sets China apart and means its future potential is huge, as is many things related to China.
Chinese have saved more than Americans, so they may be relatively better off in the current economy and have money to spend in the next few years. For those of us trying to sell to them, we just have to be able to convince them to spend. That’s the hard part. Let’s consider what the Chinese buy now. After a house and a car, what is the third item that the Chinese rank as the most important purchase? It’s a TV. And not just any TV, but a flat screen TV, the larger the better. I heard this stat at Berkeley recently.
Another interesting anecdote is that many Chinese families want their children to learn to play the piano, so piano teachers are in demand, and soon as families get wealthier, pianos will be in greater demand too. In particular, the piano that will be most demanded will be a high quality inexpensive upright. Whoever can make this will win the piano market in China. And just like with TVs, as families get richer, they will buy the tallest upright (and then the longest grand) that they can afford.
Speaking of rich, China already has more high net worth individuals than Russia, India, and Brazil combined. Add in the over 200 million online users, and I would bet that selling luxury goods online would be a good business. (Current popular online goods: cosmetics and mobile phones)
 Instead of spending money on a date, you could spend money on your pet during this downturn. Tyson Foods thinks there’s a growth opportunity in the pet market and will be making pet food in addition to human food. In fact, they will be making high-end pet food that needs to be refrigerated (lucky dogs!), a market they predict will grow to $500 million in five years.
Those in the tech world are getting in on the pet action too. You can find numerous mobile applications for your pet. Anyone looking for a pet domain name? 0pets.com is available. I have 9pets.com (and speaking of domain names and mobile, i have some android names of that sort – 1android.com, android5.com, greenandroid.com).
 Surprisingly or not, dating sites and match makers are doing well despite the economy. A segment on NPR today reported that eharmony.com has more web traffic during stock market dips and that match.com has 20 percent more members this December than last. It must be true what they say – that sex always sells. I wonder if porn sites are also doing as well as ever. As a personal note, I registered a dating related domain name not long ago and just sold it to a startup that is getting into this space.
twitter has been growing like crazy. check out their amazing growth over the last few months. here’s a comparison of twitter traffic vs like.com traffic on compete.com.
top line is twitter. also, notice that compete.com is advertising their twitter page on the right.
the strong growth is fueling speculators such as Jason Calacanis who want to buy premium (ad) slots on twitter for $250,000+.
Update: Techcrunch has a nice comparison of the number of twitter followers and their web traffic.
Update 2: Techcrunch posted a similar story a day later.
This week, a whopping 93 percent of underwater google options were swapped by google employees participating in a program that allowed those holding stock options with strike prices above the current stock value to swap them for new options with a strike price of $308.57. Those holding that 7 percent must be kicking themselves. Hopefully their options’s prices are all close to the current share price. I wonder how many above water options were swapped.
Update: The swap also resets the vesting schedule, so it does make sense not to swap if your option price is only a little above the market price.
when twitter first came out, i thought it was the biggest waste of time. people tweeting about picking their noses and goofing off. however, amidst all the noise of useless tweets, twitter can be very valuable for a number of things:
- twitter search is actually a great way to find out what people are thinking and saying about a particular X, be it a business (competitor), a celebrity, or whoever you’re secretly stalking
- through either search or the people you follow, it’s a great way to discover news articles that are of interest to you
- search lets you find events in your neighborhood
- and of course, if you build up a large following, it’s a great marketing tool
Which one should I get? It’s mac vs pc all over again.
Last year about 14 million iphones were sold while only about 1 million gphones were sold. The iphone app marketplace is teaming with more apps (and buyers). But a recent report predicts that by 2012, gphones will outsell iphones. Android’s open environment is more appealing for developers (in the long term), but the iphone’s bigger install base is more attractive right now.
I’ve placed my bet on android so I just recently got a gphone. How’s the gphone? It’s quite similar to the iphone overall – wifi for web browsing, pretty powerful graphics processor for mobile games, gps, app store, camera. Plus it has a keyboard and a digital compass (both missing from the iphone). The look of the phone is not as flashy as the iphone, but that’s okay with me. (Also of note is that globally iphone sales are only around 1% of the mobile phone market for 2008 and many phone carriers are rolling out android phones in the near future.)
still undecided? or perhaps you’re skeptical about this whole smartphone thing. don’t be – it’s the computing device of the future. 162 million mobile phones were sold in the US last year, outselling laptops for the first time. soon those mobile phones will be replaced by smartphones, and after that, laptops will be replaced too.
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