Tech – Page 20 – Abnormal Capitalist

Why WhatsApp Doesn’t Sell Ads

Back on June 18, 2012, WhatsApp’ founders/PR/younameit wrote this brillant statement about “Why [WhatsApp] [doesn’t] sell ads.”
Today, WhatsApp sold itself to one of the world’s largest advertiser.

Advertising isn’t just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it’s all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out… And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen.

Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.

→ WhatsApp Blog

The Flappy Bird Fiasco

Success may not be the only reason for existence, but if you make a game that people love, you damn sure deserve some.

→ Kotaku

Speed Traders Meet Nightmare on Elm Street With Nanex

The nemesis of Wall Street’s high-frequency traders operates out of an apartment-sized office above the Bliss Salon — manicure/pedicure $45 — on Elm Street in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka.

→ Bloomberg

Big Data’s Little Brother

Standard statistics might project next summer’s ice cream sales. The aim of people working on newer Big Data systems is to collect seemingly unconnected information like today’s heat and cloud cover, and a hometown team’s victory over the weekend, compare that with past weather and sports outcomes, and figure out how much mint chip ice cream mothers would buy today.

→ New York Times

The Bitcoin Bubble and the Future of Currency

Volatility is a serious problem, if you’re trying to put together a currency, rather than a vehicle for financial speculation. If the currency of a country ever fluctuated as much as bitcoins did, it would never be taken seriously as a medium of exchange: how are you meant to do business in a place where an item costing one unit of currency is worth $10 one day and $20 the next? Currencies need a modicum of stability; indeed, one of the main selling points of bitcoin was that it couldn’t be destabilized by government institutions. But that comes as scant comfort to people watching the value of a bitcoin behave like some kind of demented internet stock during the dot-com bubble.

In reality, then, bitcoin doesn’t really behave like a currency at all. In terms of its market value, it looks much more like a highly-volatile commodity. That’s by design: bitcoins were created to be the most fungible commodity the world had ever seen – to the point at which they would effectively erase the distinction between a commodity and a currency.

→ Medium