You want your mobile net business model? Here's your
mobile net business model.
First, check out today's news:
http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/010318/business_markets_astroeconomics_dc.html
Yes, astrology. No, it actually doesn't matter that
astrology is no better than a dartboard, because
the average dartboard outperforms most mutual
funds. Even when it's a monkey throwing the
darts:
http://www.monkeydex.com/articles.htm
But you can't send people random investment
advice and tell them it's random - you have
to *systematize* the noise to get some
cognitive camouflage. Luckily, astrologers
have been doing this for millennia.
The mobile aspect of this is key: with
location-tracking, you can send people
precisely the investment advice they need
for precisely the patch of sky they happen
to be under at the moment. We're talking
down to the arc-second, here, OK? Plug
that tech mystique for all it's worth.
Of course, you might have to make up an awful
lot of new astrology to explain why being directly
under Epsilon Eridani 6 means "sell half your
shares of Raytheon and pile heavily into GE."
But making stuff up hasn't been a real obstacle
to astrologers in the past. Or even now:
http://www.fullmoon.nu/astrolog.htm
Still, this is making stuff up on a grand scale.
How do you do that, without employing
all past U.S. presidential press secretaries?
The sheer volume of recommendations
required as the system scales up might seem
daunting, but there are excellent star catalogues
on line. E.g.,
http://www-gsss.stsci.edu/support/rcat_form.html
And all paid for with tax dollars, can you imagine?!
These catalogues are replete with dozens of
physical parameters that could be "correlated"
with any investment strategy, given clever
enough statisticians. Wall Street is going to
be dumping a lot of these "gold-collar knowledge
workers" on the street soon, so paying them
enough will be the least of your worries.
To really do this safely, though, you should
step back a short distance in the service supply
chain - don't sell astrological investment
recommendations, license *engine* software
that can model any particular astrology needed.
"Meta-astroeconomics.com"...let's see now....hah!
NOT registered yet!
This absolves you from any direct responsibility
for sending somebody's life savings down the tubes,
and facilitates automation of one of the oldest
investment-advice scams still in use: supplying
conflicting advice in differently-branded channels, so
that you can almost always point to a channel that
seemed to be right most of the time.
"There," you can say, "*those* astrologers
*really* know how to use our product."
Astrologers themselves have been using this
strategy for ages. Why fight it?
In short, I believe this idea has exactly what it
takes to make it in today's new, tough wireless-
net market space: scalability, human interest,
excellent demographics (52% of Americans believe
in astrology), an exit strategy that doesn't even
require that you exit (just that you execute it
continuously), limited liability, and location-
based provision of personalized information with
time value.
Hey, don't everybody fund me at once, OK?
-m
leap@gol.com
[ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Sun Mar 18 18:13:58 2001