If that phrasing sounds a little weird, let me explain. Over these last three days, I’ve been watching Dharmesh Shah’s really great presentation on what he knows about startups, in which he talks, amongst other topics, about the attention economy vs. the wallet economy. If you haven’t already, you should really check it out!

The attention economy is based on eyeballs, on non-paying visitors to your site or users of your app that, through some magical reasoning, will translate into clicks on advertising, eventually leading to income to you the entrepreneur. I call that magical because no one I know of actually clicks on adverts.

The wallet economy is based on eyeballs with little hands reaching out of it that hold cash with which they pay you. I serve product A, it costs $20, you pay, I just gained $20 (minus cost of goods sold). The feedback is instantaneous and you don’t have to wait for X000 customers to land on your site and 0.000X% of them clicking on adverts.

This is pretty much the way the world has always worked, with the exception of newspapers and, arguably, the internet is one big newspaper (seriously lacking in editors).

It’s very easy to go the attention route, because it’s very easy to build soft-/webware in the first place. When you start a business in the real world, you make real investments, usually with the help of external funding like banks, that want to see a real return on their money. When you start a “digital” startup, you need a PC, you need to know some code, you need to spend $20 on a domain and $10-50 per month on hosting. The pressure isn’t there to really push for every dollar of income, because you aren’t feeling the banks et al. pushing down on your back. As a matter of fact, you can just set up a service, and go pursue another career, waiting for it to magically attract enough eyeballs to make you millions.

It’s nice, in theory, but it’s not what entrepreneurship is about. Entrepreneurship is like the film “There will be blood.” Life is tough, you have to fight for every drop of oil, people hate you and you will probably end up killing (=divorcing) a member of your family in the process.

And that kind of work deserves the instant gratification that cash for your product provides.

The end. Have a nice weekend, y’all!

Vincent

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Uf!

My faith has been restored: we live in a civilized business world where everybody can be a winner, sky is the limit etc.

More specifically, as far as the 700Mhz part of the sky is concerned, the breaking news are that there are no breaking news and no disruptive solutions:

Winners

US government has won

~ 20 billions of declining US  $.

AT&T has won

the C-block and the pride of carriers being carriers.

AT&T’s lawyers have won

significant fees and gem experience from lawsuits concerning the Openness clause.

Google has won

• the right to patch their apps on (carter)mobiles,
• access to the mobile advertising market (~ 3 billions d.US $)
• and saved ~ 5b.d.US $ to invest on their core business and on P&L  communication (partnerships and lobbying)

Consumers have won

• a stable thus fitter-happier-more productive market
• having the actors empowered and doing their best to focus on client satisfaction with the cease of this corporate battle
• a monetization of their mobile clicking
• federal income

(others)

… you’re welcome to brainstorm.

Geometry: Symmetry and a 3D market that moves in balance.

The equilibrium of this auction is a piece of art.

The main financial flows are organized symmetrically, in analogy of size.

This is my oversimplified prism:

• Big still pay the Big (B to B) : AT&T pays FCC
• MicroPlayers AKA “consumers” pay attention that pays Google (MP to G)

The notorious interoperability in telecommunications could actually apply to business models as well , since each one has found its place in this multidimensional world.

As you can see above  the 700 MHz space has been defined in 3D :

Little red axe: MP to G

Big red axe: B to B

The long red tail: their future interactions.

I commit to review my proposition to do away with auctions as sales procedures, taking off my hat to these infamous Google game theorists.

Hey guys, would you care to take a look into tougher games once you’ve finished with business peace?

Georgia

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After writing about noise of web 2.0, I began to think more about the amount of noise in my everayday web experience. In comments of that post, Cecil pointed me to Nat Torkington and Linda Stone and their concept of continuous partial attention. The stuff is from 2005, but the CPA is even more real today. And then I realised something…Why is my IM list empty?

After talking to couple of my friends, I started to recognize a trend. More and more people were starting to take advantage of “Appear as invisible”-setting. On of the major reasons was that “when I’m online, I don’t want to be constantly harassed by people sending me IM.”, some went so far as telling “I don’t want to send IMs, if people want to talk to me, they can call me”. These findings seem to offer an explanation to why the only people visible in my IM client were those who didn’t live nearby – people who didn’t have many real-life connections to their friends.

I confess, my default setting on Live Messenger and others was Away until couple of weeks ago. Maybe I didn’t want other people to think how much time I spend online. Maybe I didn’t want other people to send me messages. I don’t know. It took me a while to realize all this, but now my default is Online/Available again. Because, when you start to think about it, what’s the use of using IM if you’re using it to show other people that you’re busy? What’s the use to be invisible? Ironically one new feature in Live Messenger seems to have accelerated this behavior: “Offline messages”. A standard feature in all other messaging protocols, this feature arrived just recently to Live Messenger. Now you don’t have to worry about people being invisible or offline as the message gets still sent. A feature which was supposed to enable us to connect better with our friends in fact enables people to hide themselves and making IM seem like… e-mail. No availability information and no knowledge has recipient received your message. With this realization in mind I started to look at how sites like Facebook operate messaging. What Facebook et al do, is that they maintain a image of sorts of our social network until we login again …just like e-mail. You receive messages when you want to. Of course, the problem with this approach is that people create a habit to check their e-mail or login to Facebook every 5 mins. A problem instant messaging was invented to solve in the first place. Are we looking for refuge from cell phones and IM? Don’t people want to be online? This is actually a very important question. The whole premise of web 2.0 is ubiquitous social online presence. Is the reality that this only still appeals to the geeks?

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