Laughing Meme » money

Company Town

Kellan — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:24:19 +0000

“[New York] is the company town for money” – Richard Lefrak

Nostalgia

Kellan — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:49:11 +0000

You remember those dark days after the first bust?

You know the ones when all the MBAs left, and the people who loved the Web went on building it — building meaningful, crazy, artistic cool stuff, and the ethos of the social web was born, back before when that meant more then widget crazy/Facebook-tulip-bloom-madness. Yeah, that sure sucked.

Just thinking about it in the light of this week’s market silliness is enough to make me want to go back to SxSW again this year (where the torch was kept alight, like Ireland in the Dark Ages). And I’d sworn off it after this last year, but maybe budgets will be contracting again by then. And those projects that got started out in the darkness, say Flickr, and Upcoming and del.icio.us among others, wasn’t it all much better when the market got back involved and they got serious?

At least thats what reading Fred and Jason on “startup depression” reminded me of.

Link Tipping: interesting Amazon FPS backed micropayment tool

Kellan — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 18:44:59 +0000

For promoting/sharing links. (via rafe)

http://linktipping.com/

Simon has a really nice round up of personal finance blogs

Kellan — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 20:01:50 +0000

Similarly looking the gaping maws of 30 in the face, and noticing a desire to understand $$ a bit more.

http://hitherto.net/2007/08/10/finance-clarifications/

Wikipedia: Aga Khan IV

Kellan — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 04:02:46 +0000

NYT had an interesting puffy piece on this imam turned global venture development mogul (ala Soros). This is a note to do more research. Also reminded me of conversations in the radical community about the power of tithing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aga_Khan_IV

What can you get for $1.2 trillion?

Kellan — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 18:24:53 +0000

The opportunity cost of the war in Iraq. (via)

http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/3140

Amazon and Micro Transactions

Kellan — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 02:52:00 +0000

Having played with and thought about the costs associated with handling transactions and paying people (and we’re talking monetary|infrastructural costs, not social|spiritual, thats a different post), I’m always struck by how much overhead there is; overhead in fact swamping the value of many types of transaction.

Which is how I know I’m living in 21st century when I was able to buy David Brin’s latest work, with money I made filling in phone number information on a couple SF restaurant listing, and have enough left over to cover backing up the contents of my virtual server I just flashed.

No real insight but having just lived through it, it felt worth noting.

“If I want to beat Google? I would throw everything I have got at an AdSense killer.”

Kellan — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 18:57:00 +0000

Short, interesting take on how to build a better AdSense

http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/04/kill-google-vol-3.html

How many times..

Kellan — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 05:53:00 +0000

Is Matt going to get dragged out of the closet? Funny thing is I heard that WP had taken Polaris funding last September. Anyone else hearing that this is old news, poorly disclosed?

http://photomatt.net/2006/04/12/a-little-funding/

Anyone else hear the rumor that Viacom made an $800mil bid for Facebook, and Facebook said ‘No’?

Kellan — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 19:38:00 +0000

Z. is playing a very serious game of chicken with Viacom, but wow. update [2006/03/28] Yes other people have heard it

http://facebook.com/

SH: Most non-search online advertising is a bubble.

Kellan — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 18:43:00 +0000

So figure out how to get paid by Google

http://scott.heiferman.com/scott_heifermans_notes/2005/11/services_disrup.html

“it’s kind of fitting that one of the few startups in silicon valley to immediately go cash positive is a non-profit;”

Kellan — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 01:12:00 +0000

Firefox is making $30mil off of its Google search box. (old news I guess, but first I’ve heard it.)

http://markpincus.typepad.com/markpincus/2005/05/firefox_foxy_ca.html

Google for $5 month?

Kellan — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 05:22:00 +0000

Cheap at twice the price, if it got a bit more transparency.

http://37signals.com/svn/archives2/would_you_pay_5month_to_use_google.php

Blizzard, So Last Century

Kellan — Sun, 01 May 2005 01:28:53 +0000

Why is Blizzard charging for the World of Warcraft software? Or, barring the need to cover printing and shipping, why disallow me to use a copy I manage to acquire though alternative methods? How can the $40 they collect up front possibly compare the to recurring amount they would receive if they lowered the barriers to participation? Given that a troll pidgin is quickly becoming a viable 2nd language in this house, I’d happily pay $12/month fee to have an account for the occasional play, and I’d probably go on paying even on off months, to hold on to my limited progress.

How long would I let these low level monthly payments go on? It would roll right into my cost of being online without making a ripple, and they’d have already made their money and more. Dumb, or at least short sighted.

Money, Services, and the Changing Nature of Information Consumption

Kellan — Tue, 21 Sep 2004 04:54:00 +0000

Les is wondering how people are planning to finance and support services like Bloglines, flickr, and del.icio.us. It’s a question that can be addressed from two directions, both interesting. You can frame the question as, “What is the business model?”, or you can ask “How does a community support a resource it finds useful?”.

One line that jumped out at me at me was

I do appear to shell out at least $50 per month in internet services beyond my bandwidth bill.

That got me thinking. A few years ago this would have been an unprecedentedly large amount. The idea that we were all going to get rich selling online services was so firmly rejected that it became a commonly accepted truism that “people won’t pay for things online”, and yet, quietly, almost under the radar this seems to be changing.

Looking at my personal expenses online they can be broken down into: paid content, online tools, online services, personal hosting, and net facilitated donations.

Paid content

I maintain a Safari account (which after several years of comp I started paying for last year), I’m a Zmag sustainer, and in the past I’ve subscribed to several premium info sources. 90-95% of my daily information consumption is network mediated — blogs, online newspapers, email newsletters, and radio streams. The bulk of the rest of it comes from magazines. (which I either subscribe to, or pick up on the newsstand depending on whether I want to financially support the publisher).

Monthly cost: ~$15

Online tools

I use a large number of online tools in my daily life, from the ubiquitous Google, to the essential Bloglines. I currently experimenting with using Gmail, having tried nearly all of the webmail products at one point or another over the years. Currently I’m a light weight user of Use Tasks, for online managed tasks, and used to be a regular user of the Anyday.com hosted pim service (I also was an Anyday developer)

For a while I was using All Consuming to facilitate my book reading habit, and in its heyday I was a heavy user of BackFlip, a dotcom era del.icio.us. (I feel like I’m forgetting a handful of key tools here, I’ll have to back fill them later)

Beyond my text editor, most of my work (and most of my day) happens within the confines of a Firefox window. Currently the only tool I’m paying for is Use Tasks.

Monthly cost: ~$4

Online services

Hard to split online services from online tools really, but I guess I’m thinking of net facilitated services. Netflix is a good example, as is the iTunes Music Store. Pobox mail forwarding is a slightly murkier one. Automated clipping services like PubSub are largely indistinguishable from tools. You could argue that webmail, or a provider like Fastmail should actually be in this category.

A chunk of the my monthly online spending goes to this category, mostly Netflix, with handful of change going to various more obscure services.

Monthly cost: ~$27

Personal Hosting

The cost of maintaining an online presence. My primary web and email hosting are covered as a side benefit of some of the tech activism I do, but I do pay for a hosted dev box (a VLS really), and have been contemplating setting up a new solution for email.

Monthly cost: $10

Donations

I make both regular and irregular donations to a number of online services. Some of the donations are towards tech activist projects like Riseup, or Activista. Some are for funding drives for web commons projects (e.g. Wikipedia, or Mirror Project), or blogger bailouts (e.g. the Daring Fireball pledge drive)

Of all the discussed categories, this is my largest expense.

Monthly cost: ~$35

Running the Numbers

Works out to something like $90/month above basic connectivity. (with the single largest line item being Netflix, so embarrassing, I really need to learn how to use Bittorrent) Might sound like a lot, but if you calculate that I spend anywhere from 10-14 hours a day online, thats about $0.25 an hour for a service that provides personal and work communication, information and professional development, news and entertainment. Its significantly less then I spend monthly on food, rent or transportation, and yet I’d say its at least as fundamental to me as any of those. It’s about what I spend on books (a bit less), but given I’m not in school currently that isn’t a good indicator.

Some obvious places to be spending more

It is odd to want to spend more, and frankly, I don’t. In particular the problem in spending more on services means you need to either figure out how to have services swell, and shrink with changing income, or you get stuck having raised the minimum you can live on, which is a dangerous relationship to get into with capitalism.

Still, I really should be spending another $5-$10/monthly on personal hosting in order to get a more functional email setup, as a person who lives largely online spending so little to maintain the presence seems….off.

I really should be paying more for online tools. Another $5 monthly for Bloglines at least in a no brainer. Some amount of money to a meaningful and useful social software/collaboration tool is burning a hole in my pocket. And a good hosted pim/tasks/reminders service still needs to get (re-)built.

Noticeably absent from the list are any self supporting community or discussion spaces. I’m not sure I believe in virtual communities, which doesn’t seem to stop me from being involved in a ridiculously large number of them. Most exist in a nebulous hybrid mailing list/forum/irc space, none of which ever seems to get paid for, and none of which ever seem to improve and become more useful. I know several people, like my brother, who participate in incredibly specialized and erudite online communities. A way of striking a balance between getting the right people into the community, and supporting growth needs to found.

Lastly independent media is still doing a lousy job of developing models to deliver information both locally and globally using the internet, and doing an even worse job of figuring out how to use the net to engage meaningful participation and support. Right now most of my net mediated media consumption is filtered corporate media, the filters are important, interesting, and useful, to a self sustaining alternative it ain’t.

I’ve totally failed to answer Les’ question, but I thought it might be worth re-examining our received wisdom about people’s online spending habits, or at least mine.

Doing some rough calculations based on current income levels, amount of value I’m deriving or wish to be deriving, and looking at the above list, I’d say there is about $150-$250/monthly that I should be spending in one of these 5 categories that I’m not for lack of a meaningful place to spend it.

That said, as we move towards more and more hosted/online services and tools, its going to become increasingly important to develop new models of engagement, and transparency. What do the ideals of free software mean in the context of a hosted service? How do I fork if I don’t like where things are going? What is the role of collective ownership in these projects, or is it assumed I’m simply a consumer? Thats a whole other essay, and one I’m too tired to start right now.

And TeleDyn has an excellent essay Living with Webservices, which seems to be closely related in ways my brain is totally refusing to articulate right now. Good night.

A New Mac Laptop

Kellan — Wed, 04 Jun 2003 19:24:57 +0000

So I’m having a capitalist flashback this morning.

I called my stock broker (I didn’t know I had a stock broker!) at Salomon, Smith, & Barney and closed out my money market account (I didn’t know I had a money market account!) and I’m gong to take that check and spend it on a shiny new Mac laptop. I’ve also made a resolution to read more carefully my mail which ends up at my parents house, as I’ve learned all sorts of amazing things. Including I have a little cash left other from a buy and sell stock trade from my days as a Palm wage slave. Interestingly, I think I used a chunk of that transaction to buy my last laptop 3 years ago.

I’m torn between the sensible 12in iBook, and the extravagant (we like to call it “planning for the future”) 12in aluminum Powerbook.

After all, at the stroke of midnight my little capitalist fantasy will be over, and I’ll go back to being a struggling coder/activist. Decisions, decisions.

Advice?