The web economy blog

Archive for October, 2010

One of the key concepts to get your head around, which is probably as important as any strategy that you can learn or study, is how to manage the variance. Make no mistake, a career in any poker tournament, you have days or weeks, you fly where all your tractor hit, you win all your races and you get treated just the right cards at the right time. At the same time, there will be days and weeks where nothing goes, and the only thing you can be sure of is that you leave with an unprecedented ego and its tail between its legs.

I have seen too often in an explosion of new players on the scene, running ridiculously good for a short period of time, to have higher levels and be back by the battery faster than you can say &”all-in”. The reason for this is the variance. Every poker player has been beaten by the stick of the variance, and each player will be affected by this new. Poker is a game of probabilities and averages so that the record should be square, and we must prepare for the roller coaster.

So when the poker gods decide to release the curse of the variance on us, how we face, so that we can learn something and come out the other side a better player? Although most of the time, we slow down we just put it in a race accident, the first thing to do is stand back and assess your game.

A common theme amongst successful players is that when they experience a period of success, complacency can sometimes set in (usually at higher levels to what the player was used to playing as he now has more money and can afford these games), and mistakes can creep into their game. This could come in the form of playing too many hands pre-flop, being a little trigger happy with the all-in move, or just using those high-risk, high-profit moves too much, and they just aren’t sticking like they were a few weeks ago. If you assess your game and find this to be the case, then you probably just need to go back to basic ABC poker for a few sessions and let things iron out. It is also a good idea to use effective bankroll management principles and drop down to smaller games.

The other problem I find when being on the wrong end of variance is your mood and attitude to the game. When you are constantly getting your chips in with the best hand only for your opponent to get lucky and eliminate you, it’s hard not to feel the whole world is against you. It harbors negative feelings towards the game and you lose your focus. This has a snowball effect as you start to make bad decisions and lose your edge over the game. It is sometimes a wise move to stop registering and even take a few days off to refresh, get the negativity out of your head and come back with a clear mind hungry for success at the top of your game.

There is always no matter what you do, no matter how well you play, you are still only to be broken. Unfortunately, this is only part of the game and as long as you keep what you have to manage – you can focus and attitude – it will eventually turn around and you’re sitting on top of the new world.

Respect for the variance, and reconcile with it. It is part of this great game we play, and by being aware of it, and having positive and the wheel turns in your favor over time, will help go a long way in a poker career with long-term success.

Social Bookmarking websites are principally the sites that store and categorize ‘bookmark links’ for a specific website with specific tags. Most of the people go to social bookmarking web-sites and search for a specific information. The main idea about social bookmarking is to put the links that land on your web-site on those social bookmarking sites. Afterwards, you specify the tags which will be categorizing your web-site.

Some Bookmarking software is designed for making social bookmarking easier and more effective. In general, social bookmarking is too time consuming and tedious. Bookmarking Software solves those two problems and helps you to increase adsense income, product sales and affiliate commissions. The price for the software is the lowest on the market. Bookmarking Software also does not require any monthly fees and the updates are free of charge.

One of the users of the Bookmarking software, Jeffery, says: “automatic social bookmarking software have a powerful randomization system that helps to randomize all descriptions and incoming anchored links and even set the customization level. This beat the crap out of those expensive social bookmarking submission services. The ability to add my own scuttle social bookmarking list is a bonus.

The public is fuming that the economy still isn’t emergent fast enough to create any substantial number of jobs, in next month’s election; the Republicans are expected to take control of the House (and possibly the Senate)

No matter who is elected in November, the economy is preordained to a slow, agonizing, relatively jobless recovery. Their political victory isn’t likely to translate into any noticeable improvement in the economy any time soon, however.

It’ll take years before the unemployment rate drops to an acceptable level, years before the banking system is fully functioning, and years before the crippled housing market returns to health.

That’s not to say that the right government policies couldn’t make a big difference, it’s just that nothing the Republicans have proposed would help much, even if they could enact their economic platform on their first day in office.

And that’s not going to happen. President Obama still has the power of the veto. The more likely outcome of the election will be further gridlock, with neither party able to change public policy at will. That’ll mean more uncertainty, not less.

Given their built-in advantages this year, Republican candidates have been understandably vague about their plans to change economic policy. Many Republican candidates have endorsed John Boehner’s “Pledge to America,” which is full of lofty principles but short on policy details. Read more about the pledge.

Big government’s fault

Inspired by the tea party, the Republicans are pledging to become fiscal conservatives again, to limit the size of government, and to reduce taxes and red tape. In the Republican view, there’s nothing wrong with the economy that isn’t the fault of big government.

However, many of the Republican proposals would actually hurt — not help — the economy if they could be enacted.

Slashing government spending right now would be crippling to an economy that doesn’t have any other source of demand. Keeping taxes low for the richest Americans wouldn’t create many jobs, and would keep the deficits growing. The Republicans’ pledge to repeal the new health-care law and other government regulations would only add to the uncertainty that businesses say is keeping them on the sidelines.

The Republicans say they want to reduce government spending, but they are vague about exactly what should be cut, except to say that discretionary, non-defense spending should be rolled back to pre-recession levels. That category includes only about 15% of all federal spending, and isn’t the part of the budget that’s the problem.

If the deficit is an ocean-sized problem, the Republicans have proposed a solution that would fit in a thimble.

Being vague is probably good politics. A recent poll by Bloomberg News shows that 55% of likely voters agree that the deficit is out of control, but most voters are against specific measures to reduce it, especially the big changes that would be needed to bring the budget into balance.

It turns out that we like the things government does for us, and we also don’t want to pay the taxes necessary to buy those things.

California Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina wouldn’t name a single program, or identify any entitlement program that should be scaled back when asked repeatedly by Chris Wallace of Fox News what she’d like to cut from the government. Instead, Fiorina leaned on that old standby of political hacks: “waste, fraud and inefficiency.”

Web Economy will change its face, as Computers will do a lot of the time-consuming work that people still do today, because  Information in a Web 3.0 world will be much easier to access.

It’s like saying “the economy needs jobs”—100 percent correct, but 99 percent useless as a guide to what we should do next. Our political and business leaders talk a lot about innovation being our economic savior, but what can we do with such platitudes? Where will we find long-term solutions to the problems of the economy?

I’m up to the innovation challenge. I’m just a small entrepreneur, but the technology I work in offers some real and specific opportunities for economic improvement. It’s broadly called Web 3.0, or the Semantic Web, and it’s the next generation of the Internet. Each of the earlier Web generations was pretty transformative, and this next version will be too.

Web 3.0 is a smarter Web, giving computers better ways to share information. This has enormous benefits for people who need to search for information, automate processes and transactions, and make logical connections between similar concepts and things. Information in a Web 3.0 world will be much easier to access, because computers will do a lot of the time-consuming work that people still do today.

Here are specific suggestions for ways that Web 3.0 innovation can have a positive effect on the economy:

1. In health care reform, Web 3.0 is an ideal technology for creating electronic medical records (EMRs), by merging the personal information that exists in disparate databases all over the health care system.

2. Data.gov is a comprehensive database of government information from a vast array of sources, all powered by semantic, Web 3.0 technologies. This transparency provides incentives for reducing government waste and improving the accountability of government agencies, procurement processes and contract awards.

3. In biotechnology, Web 3.0 provides tools that cut years of research down to days. New information is incorporated into the R&D process, drawing connections between related concepts and visualizing the results in graphs of merged information. Seeing these connections enables researchers to make better predictions about the spread of diseases, calculate a patient’s response to treatments and assess the risk of drug side effects.

4. In the financial sector, money will be saved through advanced fraud monitoring systems that are made possible through the real-time linking of financial accounts, transaction data and customer information. This can scale globally, so regulators and analysts can understand the risks of portfolio structures and counterparty transactions, preventing future financial crises.

5. Sustainability decisions need the right information quickly, and that information must be based on science and fact. One Web 3.0 solution links a pesticide database to a database of organisms and one of weather patterns, to fully understand the balance of positive and negative consequences of our environmental choices.

6. Open Energy Information (OpenEI) is a collaboration designed to share energy data, tools, models and knowledge. Web 3.0 technologies are used to share energy- related information and accelerate innovation, development and deployment of clean energy systems.

7. The Open Floor Plan Display/Exchange project is using Web 3.0 to provide interactive real-time data about building plans that will be used by emergency services, law enforcement and risk analysts to improve building safety.

8. Personal data lockers will form an identity ecosystem based on Web 3.0. You will be able to configure who gets access to your locker and in what context, depending on your role, intent and location. Applications will understand the relationships between people, services and objects.

9. Web 3.0 will deliver better customer experience because service providers will understand what the customer needs in real time and will take the optimal action. The results will include massive time savings, better customer retention, more effective up-selling and improvements in satisfaction. In summary, Web 3.0 represents a Web in which information is much better linked and more efficiently utilized, with the economy continuing to benefit on a greater scale.

Mark Zuckerberg the Facebook founder particularly said that “the era of privacy is over.” And the government wants to guarantee that, it seems.

An Electronics Frontier Foundation freedom of information request exposed a memo heartening agents to try to befriend people on an assortment of social networks in order to take lead of their readiness to share — and spy on them.

“Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuels a need to have a large group of ‘friends’ link to their pages and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don’t even know. This provides an excellent vantage point for FDNS to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities,” according to the memo obtained by Valleywag.

According to the website, the EFF wrote that “this memo suggests there’s nothing to prevent an exaggerated, harmless or even out-of-date off-hand comment in a status update from quickly becoming the subject of a full citizenship investigation.”

Electronics Frontier Foundation says the government is spying on other websites include Twitter, MySpace, Craigslist and Wikipedia.

Just a few years ago, the economic prediction for new nuclear reactors looked bright. The scene of growing electricity demand, probable caps on carbon-dioxide emissions and government loan guarantees encouraged companies to tell the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that they wanted to build 28 new reactors.

The economic slouch, which has driven down demand and the price of rival energy sources, and the failure of Congress to pass climate legislation, has changed all that, at least for now.

Constellation Energy’s announcement on Saturday that it had reached an impasse with the federal government over the fee for a loan guarantee on a new reactor in Maryland is a sign of how much the landscape has been transformed.

Essentially, the Energy Department argued that Constellation’s project is so risky that the company must pay a high fee or provide other assurances of repayment if it wants the taxpayers to guarantee its construction loans. Constellation said the government’s demand was “unreasonably burdensome.”

The government is hardly the only one to question the economics of nuclear power right now. The would-be builders of seven reactors around the country have deferred their projects in the last few months.

J. Scott Peterson, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry’s trade group, said the “pause” in nuclear building plans mirrors delays in other industrial projects. “It’s principally because of the economic situation,” he said.

South Carolina Electric & Gas of Cayce plans to move forward on its planned expansion of the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station in Fairfield County without a government loan. But its project partner, state-owned Santee Cooper, is reviewing whether to move forward because of lower energy revenue in the wake of the recession.

SCE&G has declined to speculate on what would happen if Santee Cooper reduces its 45 percent stake in the $9.8 billion expansion, though several other utilities, including Duke Energy and Progress Energy, have expressed interest.

A drop in energy demand is a major factor driving the cautious stance of both the industry and the government. Power demand dropped by more than 4 percent between 2007 and 2009. So far, it seems that demand in 2010 will be higher than last year, but not as high as 2007. These are big changes for an industry that is accustomed to growth on the order of 1 to 3 percent a year. With slack demand, there is less urgency to build new plants.

The plunge in natural gas prices has also made nuclear power far less competitive.

A return to strong economic growth would push up the demand for electricity and for natural gas, but even then, natural gas prices may remain low because a technology called hydraulic fracturing has vastly increased the estimate of recoverable reserves.

Also weighing on the nuclear industry is the refusal of Congress to pass climate change legislation that would put a price of some sort on carbon-dioxide emissions. Since nuclear power produces no carbon emissions, it would gain a competitive edge against coal and natural gas if a bill were passed. But while such legislation once seemed likely, sharp divisions in Congress and concerns about the tottering economy have stalled its prospects.

MAYBE IT’S a celebration of the new €380 million convention centre in Dublin. Maybe it’s a sign of an industry that’s bucking the general economic gloom. Or maybe it’s exactly the opposite – that people are underemployed and have plenty of time on their hands. Whatever the reason, over the last year there has been an explosion in conferences and networking events taking place in the technology sector.

If a smart economy is built on the amount of talking a country can do about it, China, Singapore and even the US had better watch out. The Irish are coming and we mean business.

While the quantity of events on offer may have increased rapidly, the quality has not. Most of these conferences charge €300 or €400 for attendance, feature one or two star turns from the international speaker circuit and the usual suspects from Ireland making thinly disguised sales pitches for their companies, and seem designed to keep local event organisers in business.

A more welcome trend in recent years is the “unconference”, events where the attendees actually give the presentations and do most of the organising. They are predominantly attended by bright young web things who wouldn’t be seen dead hanging out with the suits at the paying events. As a result, they have much more energy about them.

Preferably they have a name that ends with camp (Bizcamp, Barcamp etc), take place at the weekend (because there are no boundaries between work and private lives), and involve a healthy dose of socialising (ditto).

Is it any wonder that someone recently joked on Twitter that they were thinking of organising a camp whose theme would be how to organise a camp?

With so many events taking place, it begs the question as to whether some in technology ever do any work or just spend their days updating contacts databases and sending LinkedIn invites to people met at conferences.

The irony is that technology was supposed to make the need for such meetings go away. Video conferencing technology may be ubiquitous and extremely useful in certain scenarios but, let’s face it, you can’t beat the chance meetings, overheard conversations and strengthening of professional relationships that come with face-to-face dealings at an actual conference.

I’m not suggesting that all conferences are a waste of time – just the eight-hour-death-by PowerPoint sessions that leave you vowing never to leave the office again. Meeting peers, discussing issues in your industry and hearing from acknowledged experts can be valuable. A day spent at a well-organised conference with speakers and attendees who challenge the norms is a day well spent.

But attend enough events in a single industry and you start to see the same faces cropping up in the audience and, even more worryingly, on the speaker panels. Fortunately there are signs that some event organisers are willing to break the mould.

The Dublin Web Summit, which takes place at the end of the month, is an event that has quickly risen to the top of the pile since it first elbowed its way on to a crowded calendar a year ago. Its organisers have managed to attract top-class speakers to these shores such as Craig Newmark, founder of classifieds service Craigslist; Matt Mullenweg, the man behind popular blogging platform WordPress; Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia; Wired editor-at-large Ben Hammersley; and Michael Birch, founder of once-dominant social network Bebo.

More importantly, it has managed to get local web developers, business people, investors and advisers to give up time and money to attend events generating that much-maligned phrase – “a buzz”.

This month’s event features the strongest line-up yet. Keynote speeches will be delivered by Chad Hurley, founder and chief executive of YouTube; Jack Dorsey, creator and chairman of Twitter; and Niklas Zennstrom, founder and former chief executive of Skype.

The Irish contingent is represented by people who spend more time growing their business than their public profile. These include Paddy Holahan from mobile software firm NewBay; Greg Turley of CarTrawler one of the world’s largest online distributors of car rental; and Fred Karlsson from classifieds.

Not content with the success of the Dublin Web Summit, organiser Paddy Cosgrave has undertaken an even more ambitious event, Founders, which will take place the weekend after the summit. An invite-only low-key gathering of 100 founders of some of the most innovative tech companies around the world, you could think of it as a Davos for geeks.

In addition to the tech “rock stars”, Founders will feature contributions from the wider world of business and politics, including Mary Robinson, Bob Geldof, Peter Sutherland and Taoiseach Brian Cowen.

Exclusivity doesn’t always fit well with the Irish psyche. Our gut response to an event that’s invite only is often Groucho Marx’s quip he wouldn’t care to join a club that would have him as a member. But an event drawing founders of leading tech firms to Dublin where they meet the entrepreneurs behind Ireland’s most promising start-ups and see what we have to offer has to be applauded.