Month: March 2005

  • Are bankruptcies useful to society?

    Recently I was reading an Article that was talking about venture capital funds and their need to rapidly invest or return big sums of money that they have sitting in their bank accounts. The VCs apparently either have to invest the money (about $25 Billion) OR return the yearly management fees on the money (about $3 Billion). The catch is that the money doesn’t have to be invested wisely or responsibly, it just has to be invested. The theory then goes that this will lead to another boom similar to, but perhaps smaller than, the 2000 boom.

    Whether this will happen is difficult to guess, but a thought did occur to me as I was reading the article. Booms, bubbles and bankruptcies can be a way of comercially funding things that need to be built but aren’t, strictly speaking, viable in a financial sense.

    There are lots of examples of this, the internet infrastructure is one and the British railway system is another. In each case investors were enthused with the idea that vast fortunes could be made in the chosen area, the investors where driven into an investment frenzy and the infrastructure was constructed (typically at vast expense). The bubble then collapsed, but crucially the infrastructure was still there and still usable. A bit of restructuring and some fiancial fiddling and now there is lots of shiny new stuff.

    The investors of course have lost their money by this stage, but hopefully the more speculative investors have sufficient reserves and everyone should always be following the key rule:

    Never invest money in a risky venture that you can’t afford to loose

    I suspect that this topic has been written about already so I’m currently doing research to see if there are more examples of it.

  • The Spielberg of Hereford

    The Spielberg of Hereford

    includes a steam-train chase, several laser gunfights and an original score by a full symphony orchestra. Not bad considering his total budget was £20,000.

  • Bricks and Morter Vs. Online for buying music

    I’ve been thinking recently about music buying. When I can buy music online from the iTunes music store why should I want to buy it in a physical store? With the online store I can experience a sample of any track and get to listen to the music immediately. If I buy it offline I have to carry it home, convert it to mp3 and only then can I listen. I suppose a music store offers some browsing capability and there are some music stores where they have friendly staff who can offer suggestions, but I don’t really tend to see that kind of customer service very often and the browsing that experience online is often superior, especially with recommendations from other users.

    So what is my conclusion? On the surface the online services have every advantage over the bricks and morter store. Unless the bricks and morter stores work very hard to catch up they’re going to fall behind. But where can they go? Bookstores are introducing cafe’s and relaxing chairs, but does a cafe make sense in a branch of HMV or Virgin? I suppose I can see a bar, maybe, but a cafe?

    With bookshops I actually enjoy going to browse, but then with books you can really browse, reading the books as you go. No music store offers the ability to sample all of the music in the store, although it doesn’t seem insurmountable as a technical challenge, so maybe that is one direction to go in.

    But I become increasingly disappointed with physical music and DVD stores. I go and then I wander around for a while looking vaguely for something worth buying. So I suspect that more of my business will be heading online unless something drastically changes.

  • Binary Thoughts is back

    Binary Thoughts is back!

    I probably should have remarked on this before, but Dhruba’s weblog “Binary Thoughts” has reappeared. He was moving servers so it went down for a bit, but it has now returned. Which is really great news.

    Plus of course the fact that the presentation of Binary Thoughts is so much better than Angus Thinks that the comparison really isn’t funny. Curved corners are definitely in right now and the theme and extras are much better.