What’s up with BitCoin?

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You may have been hearing a lot more about bitcoin these days. It’s being lauded as a completely anonymous and (for ease of terms) decentralized currency. In essence, sending someone bitcoins for an online purchase would be similar to handing someone cash. There are no banking fees and no ways to link the money exchange to any specific transaction. Revolutionary, right?

Possibly not. Adam Cohen, an Internet Economist for SeatGeek, recently weighed in on Quora:

Bitcoin is a ludicrously bad idea. It is a scam. A Scam. It is not a currency. The economic assumptions underpinning the Bitcoin ecosystem are laughable, and ignore hundreds of years of accumulated understanding of how currencies work with each other.

The rest of his answer, as well as his follow up on Hacker News, go on to support this claim. His arguments include the way in which bitcoins are initially distributed, built in deflation, and no convertibility. All of which are complete common sense points for even us non-economists.

So much for toppling the world economies, huh?

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The Internet Crisis

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It is obvious that the government is out of touch with current technology. Governments are frantically passing net neutrality bills and overly strict cookie regulations while seizing domains without warrants and attempting to censor search engine results. The government is going about things all wrong. If we’ve learned anything from the RIAA’s struggle against music piracy, it is that companies and governments need to work with current trends rather than fighting against them. This seems obvious to everyone except the government officials proposing these bills.

But, on the other hand, what happens when internet companies become more powerful than the government? In an interview with The Guardian, Eric Schmidt says that if the United States passes a law that would require search engines to remove select search results, they would refuse.

There are two things to this story that should shock you (and I’m not usually one for scare tactics). The first would be the US Government proposing a bill enforcing straight up censorship. The second terrifying aspect is that Google can simply refuse to cooperate with any bill deemed unfair without any real ramifications. When you really think about it, what can our government do do a company like Google?

So, what would happen if Google turned evil? Let’s not forget the big scare where everyone was reporting that Google was teaming up with Verizon to censor your internet. While this wasn’t actually the case, Google, like any company, does have the potential for evil and we must not forget it.

We desperately need a regulation board to help monitor the internet giants while still promoting openness and internet freedom. Unfortunately, this appears to be impossible at this time for a number of reasons:

  • Government officials lack the overall knowledge of current and future technological trends and therefore cannot propose and implement properly informed regulations.
  • Technological innovation occurs at such a fast pace that it is next to impossible to follow current and future trends without being an active member of a company that is currently shaping the digital frontier and having a distinct bias.
  • The idea of a regulatory board seems counterproductive to many people currently impacting the industry. One should not stop innovating to be a part of an organization that slows innovation.

Many would argue that a regulatory board is unnecessary and that the internet is great due to its absolute freedom. This is an extremely over-idealized viewpoint. What if Apple really did decide to track your every movement and sell that information? What if Google started providing your employer with your personal browsing history? Just think about the potential privacy violations the future holds.

The Internet created a whole new world, quite literally. One can build, destroy, interact, and create. At this moment in time, it is (almost) a lawless domain. We’ve already seen the Lord of the Flies effect (a la 4chan.org) as well as the rise and fall of giant civilizations (geocities, digg, et al.).

New territory is beginning to take form from chaos. We need to establish our ethics and morals as well as ways to punish those who go against our freedoms. We need an overarching organization that will fight for our liberty and provide unbiased regulations to companies who have outgrown the need for public and government approval.

Unfortunately I offer no solutions at this time. I only request that people remain open to the possibility of a future with an altruistic digital governing board and that companies, in the meantime, stick to Google’s old slogan: “Don’t be evil.”

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Is Social Media Valuable for Businesses?

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Business Insider posted an article by Peter Shankman completely ripping apart “social media experts.” Here’s a brief excerpt from his article:

Being an expert in social media is like being an expert at taking the bread out of the refrigerator. You might be the best bread-taker-outer in the world, but you know what? The goal is to make an amazing sandwich, and you can’t do that if all you’ve done in your life is taken the bread out of the fridge.

While Peter definitely makes many valid points in his article, I think that it is unfair to completely downplay the role of social media as a marketing strategy. It’s also unfair to assume that all people who specialize in social media for companies lack business sense. Sure, blindly entering the social media landscape without clear goals is pointless. It can even be detrimental when hiring a social media expert who “can’t string a simple sentence together.”

But as more and more people use different social media outlets on such a regular basis, it would be foolish to ignore the potential for new and more loyal customers. At the very least, social media is about brand recognition. Simply interacting, in a constructive way, with different communities increases company awareness. Arguing that all social media is worthless is similar to arguing against, say, magazine ads that feature people laughing and partying rather than focusing on the product or brand. Everything works towards the image of the brand. Hell, one of the most iconic television commercials simply featured a woman throwing a sledgehammer at a large TV screen.

I’m not saying that you should start pouring all of your marketing funds into simply interacting in social media communities. But it can be used as a good tool in addition to tried and true marketing strategies. Having an adverse stance to hiring a knowledgeable individual to get your company involved in widely used social media websites is similar to having a stance against email marketing in the mid-90’s.

A “social media expert” should be a mash-up of numerous roles within a company. Not only should they be aware and active in online communities, but they should also have marketing skills, sales skills, copy writing experience, and a customer service background. A proper social media presence for business should have the ability to make sales as well as relevantly assist current and potential customers. Business may be all about the money, but social media allows companies to get personal. Every individual client counts.

At the end of the day, running a business really is all about making money. If you lose sight of this goal, then you really are being brainwashed by the people taking advantage of this second internet bubble. When your “social media expert” starts begging the twitter-verse for new followers, it’s time to let him/her go. But when you use twitter to reach out to people who are already discussing your business or to create a more personal relationship with existing customers, then you’re starting to tap into the potential of this new medium.

People “follow” and “like” companies for a reason: they want to be involved. To ignore this obvious opportunity would be a shame.

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Why Chromebook is the Future and Apple Finally has Competition

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With the announcement of the Chromebook, I can officially consider Google to be a competitor to Apple. It’s about damn time.

Rather than trying to create an “iPad killer” which is simply a blatant rip-off of Apple’s iPad, Google has finally released something innovative! Enter Chromebook: a laptop with only one application: Chrome. No other software, no desktop, nothing else. Just the internet. Which can do a hell of a lot these days.

Up until recent years, this would have been a pointless product but Google has done a pretty good job working towards eliminating the need for a computer. Need storage space? Google provides tons of free storage. Want to edit a document? Google provides Google Docs free of charge. Want to manage your photo library? Google has Picasa. Music? Google just announced Google Music.

That about covers everything that the average consumer needs in a computer. Access to the internet, documents, photos, and music. These are the features of Chromebook. Google has cut out anything superfluous. There is nothing else to worry about. No viruses, no updates, no backups, no headaches.

You may remember me mentioning, in a post about Net Neutrality, that Google presented a new and innovative vision of the future at their 2010 I/O conference. Rather than a world based around Windows or MacOS, Google predicted a digital world existing entirely online, using web applications rather than computer applications and using cloud storage rather than hard drives.

Google was correct, judging by the technological advancements we’ve seen in the past year. Apple’s rebranding of the iPad as a “post-PC” device is a prime example. And the release of the Mac AppStore partially moves software into the cloud (by allowing users access to all purchased applications on authorized computers). However, while the apps still need to be downloaded and the iPad still needs to be tethered to a computer in order to activate and update, the Chromebook is completely unchained. The Chromebook is an actual post-PC device.

But don’t run out and sell your computers just yet. Those of us with iPhones and iPads still need to sync our devices. And PC gamers, computer programers, and web developers/designers won’t find much use for the Chromebook at this point.

But things may be different in the not-so-distant future. Once your must-use software moves online there will be no need for an operating system. Once your smart phone syncs to a cloud, you won’t need the cords. All you will need is access to the internet.

Jump online and your entire digital life will be right there.

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Technology For The Masses

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Conrad Wolfram (of Wolfram|Alpha) made a great TED speech about how kids should be taught math. Definitely worth a watch if you have 17 spare minutes.

If we are to start teaching kids to perform math using a computer, like the real world does math, then there needs to be an affordable way to bring computers to students. On this front, I’m extremely impressed by a man named David Braben. You may know him as the creator of the Rollercoaster Tycoon series. In his latest project he’s created a $25 computer. Yes, twenty five dollars. From Geek.com:

Braben has developed a tiny USB stick PC that has a HDMI port in one end and a USB port on the other. You plug it into a HDMI socket and then connect a keyboard via the USB port giving you a fully functioning machine running a version of Linux.

The goal being to literally give students a computer. One that could be used for classes, one that could easily be built upon, one that may inspire the next ground-breaking computer scientist.

With school budgets constantly stretched to the limit, this is a much better option than giving kids iPads. Plus, Braben’s computer is much more open to innovation and development by the motivated student. Open source software and exposed hardware encourages students to literally build upon the device. The iPad, while a great learning tool for numerous topics, fails at inspiring budding computer scientists due to its closed structure. You can’t get into the iPad and change things. You can’t see how it works. You can’t even change the battery.

Thank you, David Braben, for your $25 computer. We’re definitely making steps in the right direction.

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Terminate With Extreme Prejudice

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An interesting difference to note. Taken from The Atlantic:

The decision to kill bin Laden outright was the clearest illustration to date of a little-noticed aspect of the Obama administration’s counterterror policy. The Bush administration captured thousands of suspected militants and sent them to detention camps in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. The Obama administration, by contrast, has focused on eliminating individual terrorists rather than attempting to take them alive.

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