Category: General

Now that the housing market has finally turned we learn that many of the loans were written on questionable valuations of housing once people try to refinance those outrageous nuclear no money down interest only loans. And the LTV’s (loan to values) are now inverted almost across the board on these loan types. The article blames the appraisers, but where is the blame on the ethics and others in the marketing chain:

– The home builder selling extra houses during the boom making extra profits off increasingly lower quality houses.

– The mortgage bankers and banks making fees off of the loans and then reselling them. Will they take the coming credit loss themselves or will they try to pass it onto the American taxpayer and not back to their shareholders like they should. Remember when you used to put down 20% on a house purchase, there was a reason for it that we will soon be asking why it was abandoned.

– The publishers that made it all too easy to advertise without educating the consumers, many who had no idea what interest only or ARM meant.   

– Where were the reporters that write now on these subjects as if it’s new news of what drove the boom for the past five years? That silence was deafening.    

Are you coming? If so, please drop me a line, I want to meet you!

Today Ebay announced changes in fees for store listings.

They are having a town meeting at 4PM Pacific time on Thursday.

It will be interesting to see what people think about these changes. My first glance doesn’t generate an emotional response either way.

It would be a shame if I would have to start blocking people on my Skype list that weren’t friends already, but today, I got my first unsolicited spam message in Skype…you see the message below… 

[2:04:06 PM] 杨柳青 says: Nike shoes: we provide footwears  such as NIKE\ADIDAS\REEBOK\PUMA/PRADA,etc. .we also sell all kinds of stock  mobile telephone,mp3,mp4.
All our products are known for reasonable price with high quality.
Tel:008613959583863 联系人: Miss Zheng: http://www.shoescaps.com     MSN:yjxpt@msn.com
E-MAIL: yjxpt@yahoo.com .cn   
yjxpt@163.com
  SKYPE: yjxpt73    ICQ:324-401-461

(Presentation summary – first public speech on topic observed by David Dalka at Barcamp Chicago)
Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia founder launches campaigns.wikia.com

Put the demos back in democracy

“The ideal encyclopedia should be radical. It should stop being safe.”

Imagine a world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.

How big is Wikipedia Globally?

>>1MM English
>>400,000 German
>>200,000 French, Polish, Japanese, Dutch
>>42 languages >> 10,000
>>98 languages> 1,000

How popular?
Top 20 web site (Alexa)
Broader reach than
NYT
LAT
WSJ
MSNBC.COM
Chicago Tribune
~5.0 Billion page views monthly
200 servers

Compared about.com (flat line) versus Wikipedia.

“Accuracy” Incident caused massive traffic increase

Basic Ideas:
Broadcast Media leads to broadcast politics
Soundbites (samples)
Stirring images
Participatory media
Leads to participatory politics

Graph of participation in elections (dropping)

Wikis for campaigns
-The Dean campaign showed the effectiveness of Internet organizing
-But all that people did was organize, not formulate policy or shape the arguments
-Dean fell apart because of other reasons

Wikis for campaigns
– Wikipedia works because it is organized around a few central principles: NPOV and WP:NT central among them
– Other wikis work when they have a central organizing concept
– A campaign wiki fits the requirements for a successful wiki

Open and Closed
– Wikis are general perceived as being wide open and in a sense of course they are
– But real world successful wikis always limit participation to people who can agree with the broad organizing principle

What will not Work
– Tight, top down hierarchical control will lead to a wiki that might as well be a static html campaign site, unable to respond quickly with the time
– Anarchy will lead to trolling and vandalism from the other side

Who controls?
– On the official campaign website? Then candidate can be blamed for any thing some might say so campaign would need top down control -> failure
– Completely outside the campaign

What will work?

Broad, welcoming, inviting participation

Question: How do you get past the Echo chamber?
“I think those things are changing. I really don’t know. Senate campaign in Utah is using Wiki.”

Practical Uses
– Organizing meetups – just like meetup.com except more fluid and flexible
– Authoring whitepapers on issues from the point of view of the community supporting the candidate (wikis drive people to the middle, away from extremism)
– Responding quickly with intelligent answers to developing events

Local meetups
– Local meetups planned for around the world
– First one is Chicago July 29
Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Delhi, Hong Kong, Copenhagen, Amsterdam
Locations to be determined – critical requirements are convenience and beer
http://campaigns.wikia.com/wiki/Local_Meetup_Schedule
Spread to world via blogs and WOM

Very interesting guy. He was a financial services guy just like me. I keep meeting more and more in this space. It rocks! Glad I got to hear him speak. Seems extremely motivated to change the world.

I just got a sneak peak of  Metroproper (dead link removed) from founder Phil Tadros and Jason Pettus, a new Chicago-based web 2.0 interactive and social business network, voter based journalism and classifieds product that is launching this Saturday afternoon. This will roll out to other markets after a brief Chicago beta. There is a launch party with Motorola as event sponsor on Saturday evening at the Motorola Q store downtown.
So what makes Metroproper different?
– It combines elements of Craigslist, Linkedin, Myspace and Digg into a one stop shopping experience
– They have some unique, though as yet unproven, monetization ideas. It’s good to see someone actually thinking about this issue before launching a site. I have a few monetization ideas of my own for their platform actually…
– Though I didn’t get to surf it, the pages look very clean and hopefully it will surf as good as it looks.

The Metroproper login page
(dead link removed)

A screenshot of a Metroproper.com profile

(dead link removed)

Classifieds are a feature that figures prominently in the community.

(dead link removed)

While there is considerable competition in this space, there is certainly room for improvement. If unmet customer needs are satisfied with a world-class customer experience, the world may in fact beat a path to Metroproper’s door.

Speaking of beating a path to their door, you should do just that. Phil runs a coffee shop on the north side of the city called Dollop, it is located at 4181 North Claredon, the venture capital lines are open at 773.755.1955 – the wireless Internet is free, they are open late and Hoosier Mama Pies are quite tasty!

I wrote an aricle about Mike Domek, CEO of Ticketsnow, Jason Fried, CEO of 37 Signals, Lucas Roh, CEO of Hostway. The conversation was moderated by Matt McCall of Portage Venture Partners and was hosted in Chicago by the law firm of Gardner, Carton & Douglas.

Matt led a truly inspiring discussion at the recent Chicago The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) event! Understanding how each of these guys built their businesses in a unique way is such a great story. What is also awesome is that it proves that there is no one right way to do it as Jason Fried of 37 Signals was radically different in his thought as he sat next to Mike Domeck of Ticketsnow.

All of these success stories are exciting to me and it made me realize how much fun it would be to be a part of a high growth company again.Matt led a truly inspiring discussion at the recent Chicago event! Understanding how each of these guys built their businesses in a unique way is such a great story. What is also awesome is that it proves that there is no one right way to do it as Jason Fried of 37 Signals was radically different in his thought as he sat next to Mike Domeck of Ticketsnow. These leaders also demonstrate that Chicago is capable of being the Silicon Valley of the 21st century. More on that in another post sometime soon.

All of these success stories are exciting to me and it made me realize how much fun it would be to be a part of a high growth company again. You can read my full summary here on the Wiglaf Journal, a Marketing and Strategy Journal which I contribute to. If this is your first time here, please subscribe to my RSS feed and come back sometime. Thanks.