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Category Archives: Thoughts

April 5, 2008 Ponzi Scam in Finland

The pyramid scheme named Wincapita made a few happy people and thousands of angry ones. According to some news, the happy ones are in Thailand. Angry ones are reporting to the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation, or silently cursing their losses. 

Here’s a good wrap-up of the issue. The scheme started in 2005 with the prop of Forex trading; the high interests for investments (400%) would come from currency exchanges. The Wincapita website went offline in March, company vanished and damage assessment began. Details are scarce as usually, but in essence top 50 or so got huge gains, 10000 or so lost packs of money. Estimated 50 million euros were invested to the company.

Interestingly, the brochure of Wincapita clearly stated that “Invest only the amount of money you are capable of losing.”

Internet has made the spreading of Nigerian letters and building of Ponzi companies easy. Nowadays, one can easily hire a person who under different fake names hoax the Ponzi company in newsgroups and message boards etc.

Why do people fall in to these traps, time and again? I’d see that at least some of the persons who give their money to these kinds of games know the odds, know the risks, and have a thought: what if I’m one of the inner circle winners, let’s try this, I might make a huge profit! 

As the pyramid scheme mechanism works, latecomers’ money goes to the top members’ – early adopters’ – pockets. Could the same happen in stock markets – in real estate business? Is the role of a latecomer always to make a loss?

[Update 12.12.2008] Yes, it can happen on stock markets also. WSJ article: Top Broker Accused of $50 Billion Fraud – His Investment-Advisory Business for the Wealthy Was ‘Giant Ponzi Scheme’

January 26, 2008 Radiohead – …

Crystal Set Radio - Neuron

… Learnings from The “On How The Brain Functions” Experiment.

You, the web wanderer, are perhaps aware that a bit over one year ago I posted my research paper about theory of how the brain functions. I also built a blog around it so that you, the brain researcher, can comment it with witty references to tin-foil hats. 😉

The current gain is zero remarks to tin-foil hats.

Seriously, though, I still stand behind the theory and see several strenghts in it. The question is: why I’m not building a working prototype as it only takes a few diodes, capacitors and coils to make it. Maybe it’s because I do not want to disturb the local neighbourhood with electromagnetic noise.  

And: I’d like to thank Joni Tuoreniemi and Paul Tudsbury for commenting it and creating conversation. Thank you!

January 20, 2008 Google Search Works in Mysterious Ways

The moment I saw the first prototype – my drawings in flesh – of the Deomo TV/HIFI unit (“tv-taso” in Finnish), I realized its potential and began marketing it. You can call it passion hitting when you least expect it – I’ve never been inclined in designing or selling furniture.

How do people find the great product (if you pardon these plugs)? Via searching the web, of course. So, the marketing plan is currently a simple one – it’s a start and one can build from there. Later on, the product will be on the shops at display and advertising moves on, the usual.

Selected a perfect name for the product. I chose the word “Deomo” because of its visual properties; it looks good and dynamic, and yet stands firmly. Say it out loud: the word starts sharply and ends landing softly giving nice contrast to it. And Deomo.com domain was available.

Then, I designed and built the Deomo.com website. Simple, once again. (I use Microsoft’s free Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition.)

The point (gripe) of this post is: the whole site is based around one product “tv-taso” – and yet, currently, it only appears on the distant page 13 of Google search results for that word. Some sites on the results prior www.deomo.com are not that relevant, e.g. they contain random, one-off “I’m selling my piece of furniture” ads.

The other day, it was on the first page for a while, then it dropped back to depths. My guess is that the site had an overload of the term “tv-taso”, and Google punished it for that reason and gave a meagre PageRank. An additional factor is that Google servers are not all in the same state, data-wise, and this inconsistency generates irregular search result ups and downs, high rankings and low rankings making the analysis more difficult. 

Well, I’d guess that after GoogleBot comes and scrapes the contents of this WordPress post, the Deomo site will go higher. Or not, or get even blacklisted – hmm… not really. Who knows – The Google Algorithm, are you listening? Deomo.com is not a typo. 😉

In mysterious ways, indeed. The mystery recipe of The Algorithm keeps us website creators/marketers humble and not capable of tinkering the machine, righteously so I might add. In the past, one of the main trade secrets was Coca-Cola formula, now among the secrets hides also the Google one.

December 28, 2007 I Am Legend – And I’m Driving a Ford

Just came back from watching “I Am Legend” movie with my wife. If you liked Spielberg’s “War of The Worlds”, you’ll probably like this movie also. They both decipit a ruthless, dismal and dark world with people turned to violent animals.

Will Smith does a marvellous job in portraying a man in the brink of insanity.

My wife’s reaction? Well, she almost puked. Too much exploding low frequencies and too little steadicam. Don’t go to this movie with your girlfriend. It takes all the fun out of your evening.

Product placement thanks go to Apple and Ford.

November 5, 2007 Thoughts on OpenSocial API and Social Applications

This week, Google introduced OpenSocial API. It is a set of common interfaces for building social applications. Scobleizer’s blog post led me to more information about the OpenSocial API, here:

http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/

I watched the Campfire One video – almost from beginning to end – and browsed through some Developer’s Guide docs. I appreciate Google’s simple and straightforward, hands-on approach. They have not created a “Meta-Reference Application Framework for Interfaces of Social Network Applications” and dozens of new acronyms. Instead, they show working code and the classic “Hello World!”, written with a vanilla text editor.

Why are Google and other companies allocating resources to social media? The way I see it, that is because their main revenue streams come from advertisers. Social applications are filled with data of people’s activities, interests, daily patterns, schedules, locations, networks etc. This data provides juice for building highly targeted marketing systems, which in turn generate happy advertisers.

The more data people put into the system, the better the system will serve the people. It’s a win-win for us all, don’t you think?

October 12, 2007 W3C – Let’s Extend The A HREF Tag To Convey More Information

Sig’s posts on Thingamy and RDF triples inspired me to “put the verb” back to this interlinked mass of documents we call the Web. In a simplified way. 

Here’s the official W3C recommendation and specification of links: 

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html

If you go through it, you perhaps end up in the same conclusion with me: There’s no simple way to define a semantic relationship between web resources.

I propose that we extend the A HREF tag so that it carries more meaning with it. Let’s borrow the PREDICATE concept from RDF and add that to A HREF tag. 

Here’s an example. On nokia.com, there could be a link like this: 

<A HREF=”www.nseries.com” PRED=”produces, sells, markets”>Nseries</A>

So, what would we achieve with this? It would be a way to provide more precise information, more knowledge for the search engines, etc… We would be closer to the Internet Singularity. 

July 30, 2007 Ridley Scott’s A Good Year – A Film of Sunshine, About Timing

After renting and watching scary Ils (Them) and uneasy Blood Diamond I decided to choose something more relaxing and better suited for my wife’s taste. So, Ridley Scott’s film A Good Year was perfect for getting into that sunny summer mood. (Raining outside, again). It was also interesting to see how versatile Ridley Scott is; light romantic comedy is a long step from Blade Runner and Alien. Of course, there are over 25 years between those sci-fi films and A Good Year.

In the film, the old snippet of wisdom was mentioned a couple of times. It roughly goes like this:

“What’s the most important thing in comedy?”

“Timing.”

And… 

“What’s the most important thing in buying and selling stocks?”

“Timing.”

Let’s expand that further. With perfect timing, can one achieve everything – be a master in all tasks? Do these work:

“What’s the most important thing in ice hockey?”

“Timing.”

“What’s the most important thing in dancing?”

“Timing.”

“What’s the most important thing in playing a piano?”

“Timing.”

“What’s the most important thing in playing poker?”

“Timing.” 

“What’s the most important thing in writing code?”

“Timing.”

“What’s the most important thing in marketing?”

“Timing.”

“What’s the most important thing in scientific research?”

“Timing.”

And finally the grand question: 

“What’s the most important thing in making love?”

“Timing.”

Et cetera. Some of the above do sound reasonable.

March 11, 2007 Where are The Pages of The Wired Magazine?

I’m browsing December 1996 issue of Wired Magazine. Paper version, that is, you remember what paper is, don’t you? And I’m browsing it with my hands, not with a browser. 😉

It’s got 312 pages.

February 2007 issue has 160 pages. Where are the rest? 

March 11, 2007 The Uniqueness of a Moment

Have you ever stopped to wonder the uniqueness of a moment? This instant here, now is unique – the world has never been in this situation before and it never will be again. There will never be again the current set of people living, building and communicating.

Keep this in mind when predicting and forecasting things. You can not think that “this has not happened before, so it can not happen now”. Or, “the economic slump has happened roughly every seven years, so it will happen in two years’ time.”

You can not think that “she can not start that career, because she does not have proper education and right diplomas for it.” Did Madonna go through a superstardom university before becoming Madonna?

Like they say in the financial brochures:

“Past performance is not an indication of future results”

So, be prepared to be surprised.