Maounis Frangoulis

Do you know that the phrase that pops up the most in Google these days is “home safes”? People try to hide all money away from the banks. It’s a fact that there is an economic crisis and it’s true that we have not seen the bottom yet. But beyond this we can build businesses even in these difficult times.There are 1.4 billion internet users at this time with 200 million new users every year that shows this is a strong market to invest in. Not convinced yet? Add 3 more billion mobile users already connected to the internet from mobile devices like iPhone.

It seems that 30.000 blogs are created every day, 30 hours of video are uploaded every minute in youTube as well as 4.800 pictures are uploaded every minute via the picassa web service (not to mention flickr and other services). Now 1 out of 6 minutes spend online is spend on social networks and 3.000 businesses sign up for Google apps every day! Can these stats change with an economic crisis? In my point of view the answer is NO IF THIS CRISIS IS NOT THE “FIFTH BIG ELEMENT”!

Because time is compressing so fast I named some big history points that changed our lives as BIG ELEMENTS. The first four are: radio it took 37 years for it, television it took 15 years, cable it took 6 years and finally the internet that took 3 years. Changes are happening faster than ever. If you do the math, the FIFTH BIG ELEMENT is going to take ~1,5 year! If the economic crisis sticks there for so long it has to be this!

Time is compressing and this is not a new fact. If you look back 300-400 years, time compression has been a characteristic of globalization for many many generations before us. Moore’s law says that processing power doubles every 18 months, 10 times every 5 years and 100 times every 10 years. So what’s difference between now and 1998? 100 times more performance, broadband and networking. Imaging 10 years from now how it’s going to be like. Imagine and iPod in 2019. You could store up to 85 years of video! You will never be able to watch it. You will be caring around more video that you can consume.

Did you get the sense of the scale? People spend more time in social networks today than email! They think that email is too slow. They don’t even watch the news on television ..it’s too slow..the internet is so immediate. The web is all about speed and access and very quick manipulation and I think this is going to be true for many many years.

Get the scale and use it..!

An interesting point of view that someone thought to send me by email yesterday which clearly gives some brainstorming food. I wonder which company is closer to this…

The story is:

“Once upon a time in a village, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each.

The villagers, seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest, and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10 and as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their efforts.

At this point the man announced that he would now buy at $20 each. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again. Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms.

The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so limited that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch one! The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50 each!

However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on his behalf for him.

In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers, “Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at $35 each and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each.”

The villagers rounded up all their savings and bought all the monkeys. They never saw the man nor his assistant again, but there were monkeys everywhere!”

And now you have a better understanding of how stock market speculation works! Thanks Manos.. a real nice point of view.

Keep away from the monkeys (and any online monkey companies)!!

As in 1917 Russian revolution forced Russian government to give a big amount of money in many private businesses to support the economy, it seems that the history repeats itself. The same thing happened with Europe after the second world war and exactly the same happed with US, UK and eventually the whole world after the last economic crisis. If we could learn something from the FORTIS end up story, the UK banks and banks all over the world, that would be that this is a new way of war, an economic one.

 

Paul Krugman talked about this on Dec 2007 but no one seem to care then. Maybe that’s the reason he just got the Economics Nobel for his work in “global trade patterns”. Global trade patterns?? Come on…! I am not so sure he got it for this. I think they decided that he deserved it after the result of the crisis.Now what does the crisis has to do with the new economy? Unfortunetelly many startups fall down and venture capitals are not so willing to support them as well.  This is the first time that so many changes happened at the same time from too many countries.  It is true that activity in internet sales is down. No 1 selling items are “postponed”. eBay selles had better days and nights. Is Paypal safe? 

In my point of view we could answer these questions with safety after Jan 2009! Let New Year’s Day show us the way..

I’m worried a little bit about this:

At first sight it seems like an innovative service that can give much more development power. But is this dangerous? Not allowing background processes and forcing everything to pass through the Apple Push Notification Server is something seems like Google strategy to me. Think about all your data flowing through Apple and you will start to get the main picture.

Add to that mobileme (blackberry like platform for individual users), and you get another big brother. And the real bad thing is that this is not optional feature.  It’s the only way. With the iPhone, Apple is showing they want to keep control of everything (Not what exactly Eric Schmidt is supporting for user data).

Let’s wait until 11 July and see the kick off of all these services.

For serious ones definitely YES!

I my position I don’t think that you can discuss interesting matters without facts. So lets start. Fact #1: Users need mobility! Mobility is in our lives every day long. Human beings are mobile units that need access to information from every device anywhere. With new Apple iPhone 3G, Google engine, Android and many more this eventually will happen to all of us.

In the near future we will need only one device to visit any place, to get driving directions and find something in the physical world by just talking pictures with the embedded photo camera. This way we can see a replica of the world around us at a real time, using the web and an integrated GPS. There is huge database now with many towns and states in the US with pictures of streets and even more, there are services like Google Sky that users can use to see these kind of data. When all this comes up with some APIs I really have no idea what developers can do with so much information. It’s clearly powerful.

So get ready for it!

It’s been a while I know, but I can’t miss all the noise in Cloud Computing development area. MySpace Apps moves out of beta, Google Engine is here, Amazon Web Services still up and running and even Yahoo has now Search Monkey in private beta. Correct me but this sounds like all apps moving to a cloud! Maybe Eric is finally right when he says that we could send apps to each other by email. Ok I understand that all these can be in seperate platforms but don’t we need some integration tools we would like for a while or for some reason to the usual “platform hopping”? Why everyone started to give free apps to anyone? Is there something going on with the number of users that each one has?

Is there something else going on?

I keep reading articles about Google trying to mush up with Microsoft-Yahoo deal, unofficial phone calls from executives and many “Miami Vice” tricks to blow up the acquisition. On the other hand I have the filling that Yahoo is starting a new way of seeing things, since Microsft’s proposal to the board. Does this means that they gain power from all this publicity? Maybe yes. Ok I understand Google that wants many players in the game and not only Google and Microsoft-Yahoo, but lets face it. Yahoo is gaining some more respect here don’t you think?

Even me started to use Flickr to make sure traffic is going up!