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Facebook and its IPO are not that interesting

On Friday when Facebook IPO’d I posted the following to Facebook: 

A Facebook IPO isn’t cool, ya know what’s cool? space exploration! This doot Elon Musk is about to send the first private spaceship to the international space station. That shit’s real cray! T- 18 hours

Why did I post that? Because in the grand scheme of things I don’t think Facebook is very cool, nor very innovative. I find Elon Musk and SpaceX sending the first private spaceship to the international space station extremely interesting and innovative. Let’s look at the difference between these two situations. 

The internet started gaining commercial traction in the early 90s. As the user base grew, content became better and connection speeds increased the internet essentially became a new frontier. The internet (the infrastructure and ideas about what make it run) is very interesting. As this new frontier was established service providers rushed in to fill needs. The same sort of phenomena occurred in the 1840s as migrants moved west to get rich from the California gold rush, the west was a new frontier (they built stores to provide goods to gold miners, they built better tools for mining, they offered different types of entertainment to migrants). Since the 90s we’ve seen the same sort of activity on the internet. We needed ecommerce stores, people built ecommerce stores. We needed a directory of everything on the internet, Google, Yahoo, Baidu took care of that. We needed a way to pay each other, PayPal and some other people took that on. And finally we needed a phonebook, Facebook took care of that. A phonebook is not very interesting or innovative, it’s just filling a need presented by a new very interesting frontier. A phonebook in the longrun also doesn’t create much value. Yes, facebook is making money, but in the longrun how much value will it continue to create financially and how will it transform society? 

Space exploration is downright crazy. Very few of us ever wake up thinking about going to space or even thinking that possibility might ever exist. Elon Musk should probably be considered a bit crazy for pursuing private space exploration, but that craziness is actually pretty genius. Just as the internet was a new frontier in the early 90s if Elon Musk can open space up to a larger swath of society space can become a new frontier. If space opens up and becomes a new frontier who the hell knows what we’re going to find. *That* is interesting. 

Here’s another article I read that kind of echos my thoughts.

Mobile Access in Moz/Kenya

I just read a couple of articles on HumanIPO about internet access in Mozambique and Kenya. 

Mozambique

Last week Mozambique added a 3rd mobile network operator to the mix. Movitel joined incumbent Vodacom Mozambique and Mcel. From my perspective the market already seemed pretty saturated with Vodacom and Mcel, but with mobile penetration in Mozambique at 39% and internet penetration at 6.7% I guess there’s still a market to fight for. However, the reason why 61% of the country does not have mobile access may have more to do with the fact that they can’t pay for the luxury of having a mobile device and buying  mobile credit than an absence of access to services. A third operator may bring more aggressive pricing to the market, driving average hardware and mobile bundle pricing down, making mobile access accessible to the 61% of Mozambicans that currently don’t have it. Maybe.

A couple of interesting things: Movitel is a joint venture between a Vietnamese and Mozambican company. They’re dropping $400M to set up their network infrastructure. That number is pretty crazy. If they’re dropping $400M into their infrastructure what sort of revenue are they expecting to generate? It’s mind boggling to me that in a country as poor as Mozambique there exist industries that can produce that much revenue.

Kenya

The Kenyan government just announced that it will have a 4G LTE network online in 47 counties by March of 2013, for the whopping price of $500M. It looks like the government is putting money up for the network and will be leasing access to the network to the major carriers (Safaricom, Orange, Airtel, Yu). Kenya has about 70% mobile penetration with most of those users accessing internet on their phone (which is pretty crazy). Having such widespread access to 4G technologies will probably give rise to a whole new class of mobile applications. Kenyan devs have proven to be some of the most creative in the world, so this should be something fun to watch.  

Hemingway Shorts

Having gained “Lost Generation” momentum in reading F.Scott Fitzgerald shorts I decided to read a couple of Hemingway’s shorts (from Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway | Note: if you’re interested in reading short stories by the Lost Generation most of them are available through Amazon as a free download since they’re for the most part in the public domain). 

Homage to Switzerland

My selection algorithm for picking Hemingway shorts to read isn’t very scientific. Since there are so many of them I usually just pick one with a title that’s interesting and go for it. Hence the first Hemingway short story I read was The Snows of Kilimanjaro. I decided to read Homage to Switzerland because I have a bit of a soft spot for Switzerland. I’ve never visited a country more organized, clean and peaceful than Switzerland. While it may not be the most fun country in the world it definitely has its merits. It was also one of Einsteins favorite countries and where he took citizenship after renouncing his German citizenship as a youth. So I was expecting Homage to Switzerland to be a romantic portrayal of the beautiful country. Instead it was a pretty funny story that I didn’t really get. There were three parts to the story. The first two were almost identical. An American in a Swiss train station waiting for a train hitting on the waitress and offering her money to sleep with her. I wasn’t sure if this was some sort of joke, a commentary about how crude Americans were to the service in Swiss train stations in the 20s or what? Either way it was kind of funny. The third part, and where the reader gets left, also takes place in a Swiss train station with an American waiting for his train. This time the American gets approached by a Swiss guy waiting in the train station who is over eager to tell him about his membership to the National Geographic Society. Again this was pretty funny, but I’m not sure if I got it. It seemed like Earnest was poking fun at the fact that Europeans got far too excited about membership to the National Geographic Society and that Americans just kind of scoffed at this.

The Capital of the World

Again, picked this story for its name. How could a story titled “The Capital of the World” not be exciting. Quickly: this story takes place at a pension in Madrid which a lot of the bullfighting riff raff like to stay at. Hemingway goes into detail about the flaws of each person that is sitting in the dining room (the bull fighters, the picadors, the priests etc). After spending a lot of time setting the scene the dining room is cleared and one of the waiters, Paco, and one of the dishwashers start talking about bullfighting. Paco thinks he could make a damn good bullfighter. The dishwasher says that he doesn’t have the courage that he would have “miedo” in front of a bull. To prove this the dishwasher puts some knives on the ends of a chair and decides he’s going to act as a charging bull for Paco to tame. The dishwasher charges at Paco, he does well on the first pass, on the second pass one of the knives penetrates Paco’s mid section and slices up his femoral artery. He dies. Moral: Spanish bullfighting is crazy, a lot of young Spaniards have foolish confidence about their potential abilities to be bullfighters and sometimes this leads to tragedy. Young Spainards should use more logic and less courage.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - F.Scott Fitzgerald

After starting Tales from the Jazz Age by reading The Camel’s Back I moved on to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is supposed to be one of the best stories in Tales from the Jazz Age and has also been made into a Hollywood film so my expectations were pretty high.

The premise of the story is that a baby is born with the characteristics of a 70 year old and ages backwards until he is in his 70s and dies as an infant. It’s supposed to be a commentary on the fact that the natural human aging process makes it such that we experience the best times of our lives when we’re young not when we’re old with time and perspective to enjoy them. However I don’t think it fully succeeds in arguing that we should all reverse age.

The main character of the story is Benjamin Button. From my perspective it seemed like his child hood was extremely uncomfortable (a 70 year old baby) and that as soon as he hit 50 (when his body and mind become adolescent) there was no way for him to reveal his true identity. His late 30s/early 40s seemed to be his sweet spot since he had the energy and looks of a 20 year old with the life experience of someone in their 30s/40s. This however also had it’s own set of problems, his wife started getting old, he started getting younger and more virile, he got tired of his wife and wanted to cavort around with younger ladies.

In conclusion: this was an interesting story, but not something that really gripped me or taught me any sort of profound lesson. I prefer The Camel’s Back to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.   

Academic Journal Articles — WTF is up?

These days almost all knowledge is free. You can teach yourself how to do most things with free resources. One of the few bodies of knowledge that still isn’t free is academic journal articles. From time to time I like to read in-depth papers on different topics surrounding economics. A lot of the time you’ll find a paper you want to read and it’s guarded behind some academic journal’s pay/subscription wall. Why? Who is making money here? The publication is probably making a little money, but not much. The author doesn’t need the money, they presumably have a decent salary at a university. So why charge for this stuff? If I was an academic I’d want my articles to be available for free so that as many people as possible could read them, enjoy them and give me feedback. In some industries people have started to use web based self publishing models that make better sense. Musicians can sell their music through different platforms for a fair price and or give their music away for free and ask for donations. Programmers freely share their code and in some cases solicit donations for their code. So why is something that is much more valuable on all levels while free being held behind academic journal pay walls? Make no sense to me…Academia needs to be reconstructed. 

Update: The World Bank will be making all of its research available for free under a Creative Commons license as of July 1st. AND Harvard is pursuing a similar initiative called the Harvard Open Access Project