Accounting is finally the future of something

At least that is what the BBC is writing in an article about peer to peer networks undermined by users downloading files without redistributing anything. The solution: an imaginary “currency” that would enforce good manners, and a whole of bean counting to go with it of course!

Peer-to-peer networks can become sluggish if too many users download content without sharing with others.
Using bandwidth as a kind of currency helps to encourage better habits said Dr Johan Pouwelse [who] has been working with associate professor David Parkes to add an accounting system to Tribler to encourage users to upload as often as they download.

Link

Good to see accounting finally do a bit of good for humanity ;)

Lesson in the Value of Hype

Here’s a suggestion to every Internet executive: take a Post-It note, write “EBay wasted $3 billion on Skype” and stick it to your monitor. Stare at it the next time some hot social whatever-2.0 company comes by and talks about growing fast and finding a revenue model later.
Link

The NYT is hitting Ebay with a tough headline now that the Skype deal officially resulted in a $1.43B loss. This deal – who made me and many others quite skeptic – seems to have created value for only one industry: Swedish private banking.

When was the last time your heart went boom?

What was the last time you saw something that dropped your jaw on the Internet? I’m not talking about the evolution of dance or laughing baby youtube video, I am talking about new apps, new ideas, new business models. What’s exciting these days? As we are putting the finishing touch to the LIFT08 program, that’s the question I am asking around here at Picnic.

Amazingly this question puzzles most of my interlocutors, triggers a long silence, and usually ends with a unenthusiastic “Facebook” answer. It seems Techcrunch is filled with clones of clones announcements these days (that’s not a knock on Techcrunch but on all of us, the entrepreneurs and innovators).

Where is the excitement? Where are the digg, twitter, facebook and second life of tomorrow? Nova (LIFT’s editorial manager) and me have some ideas, but I’d like to know what the readers of these blogs think.

Internet and the stresses of rapid modernization

The IHT published a report on the increase in the number of suicides in South Korea, a consequence of the stresses of a (too) rapid evolution worsenen by new technologies. Modernization has brought many uncertainties and weakened the traditional family references while the Internet provides an easy way for suicide candidates to get together or get lethal drugs.

The increase in suicides in South Korea has been especially steep in recent years, almost doubling from 6,440 in 2000 to 12,047 in 2005, according to the National Statistical Office. [...]

The government does not compile figures on how many suicides may have been inspired or aided by the Internet. But in an analysis of 191 group suicides reported in the news media from June 1998 to May 2006, Kim Jung Jin, a sociologist at Korea Nazarene University, found that nearly a third of the cases involved people who had formed suicide pacts through Internet chat sites.

Link

Asian societies seem to be particularly vulnerable to this phenomena. Are these countries paying the price of their fast-paced transition from third world traditional societies to modern superpowers? Or is it a wired society problem happening in Asia first, which means our European countries will soon have it too?

Africa: mobile phone vs internet

Despite a good penetration of mobile phones, Africa is on pace to miss the benefits of the Internet age. The number of internet subscribers is incredibly low.

Africa remains the least connected region in the world, and the digital gap between it and the developed world is widening rapidly.

“Unless you can offer Internet access that is the same as the rest of the world, Africa can’t be part of the global economy or academic environment. [...] The benefits of the Internet age will bypass the continent.”

Link

We really need to find some speakers from this continent for LIFT08.

Swiss Internet Professionals Index going strong

The Swiss Internet Professionals Index – the first project I launched when I started this company – is going strong. More than a hundred companies and professionals are now listed, the site gets around 60’000+ hits a month (sorry I don’t have the more relevant page views figure), and at lunch the other day a friend working for the United Nations told me their procurement department was using it as a resource to find companies to send their request for proposal to.

So if you are active in the Internet industry in Switzerland, feel free to add yourself to the wiki listings at liftlab.com/sipi

Whisher is out

Whisher is out! It is a project I have been following for quite a while, as it is coming out of Swisscom in a similar way than coComment. Deemed a FON competitor, it is an interesting piece of software that allows users to engage in social activities around one main thing: Wifi access points.

Whisher has a different approach than FON, and differs on one crucial aspect: you do not have to flash your router or do anything that requires deep technological expertise to use it at home. Download the software, let it work its magic, and you’re good to go.

I will test Whisher in the coming days, and actually the FON router I got for free at Leweb just arrived in the mail today, so I have all I need to make my mind. I’ll test both, and let you know.

UPDATE: GigaOM has mixed feelings, CNET is quite impressed. The discussion goes on.

Disclaimer: Whisher is sponsoring my conference and will offer free Wifi to all attendees.

The mess is the message

Wired talks about the emergence of video on the web and comes up with the quote of the month: “the mess is the message”.

A Guide to the Online Video Explosion

We see, amid the flood of content and competing delivery services, a new medium emerging, one with fewer gatekeepers, more producers, and – somewhere – something for everyone. And that’s the point: The mess is the message.

Link (via Pedro)

694 million people use the web

Top 15 Online Populations by Country, Among Visitors Age 15+
March 2006, in unique visitors (000), excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafe and, access from mobile phones or PDAs

North America (170M) has a small lead over Asia (160M), with Europe (130M) a close third. What will these figures look like in five years with China and India continuing their growth?

Data fight ahead

Online data storage is coming back again soon (again is for those who remember the early days of oodrive and xdrive), with Microsoft and Google fighting for the lead.

Managing personal data will be a huge market. I just wonder if I want Microsoft or Google to own all my data.