I'm calling this Bubble 2.0, and it's ready to burst
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Re: I'm calling this Bubble 2.0, and it's ready to burst
#2I've been written a summary about all bubble theories here: http://blog.trejdify.com/2012/05/summary-do-we-have-new-tech...
Re: I'm calling this Bubble 2.0, and it's ready to burst
#3Interesting article, Mr. Stross. I think it's great to see so many people hungry for the next new thing, out hustling and working hard to try to make it happen.
As awareness of startup culture grows, it is necessarily going to attract some goofiness. That's OK. Not every idea is a good one, and not every good idea is going to work. We need these stories to make the successes stand out so much brighter.
You may be right, but I hope you're not. I see things like Pebble's success on Kickstarter, Amanda Palmer bringing more attention to the idea of crowdsourcing funding for something that is every bit today's poetry, and see the spread of the paradigm shift we all already value (or else we wouldn't be here). I think it's right to be nervous, but I am cautiously optimistic that hacker/maker/startup culture is an attractive alternative to the existing production model.
I always appreciate your thoughts, but nowhere near as much as I would appreciate a new Laundry novel. Thanks for the good times.
Re: I'm calling this Bubble 2.0, and it's ready to burst
#4Interesting article, Mr. Stross. I think it's great to see so many people hungry for the next new thing, out hustling and working hard to try to make it happen. As awareness of startup culture grows, it is necessarily going to attract some goofiness. That's OK. Not every idea is a good one, and not every good idea is going to work. We need these stories to make the successes stand out so much brighter. You may be rig…
"but nowhere near as much as I would appreciate a new Laundry novel"
So very soon, July last time I looked on Amazon.
Re: I'm calling this Bubble 2.0, and it's ready to burst
#5Unfortunately I'm starting to agree with the bubble 2.0.
Last year I didn't believe it that much, but this year I'm starting to see crazy company evaluations, highly inflated that don't generate any revenue at all, so I don't know how can they be worth billions of dollars, but I know math and little about economics.
But if bursts, it's a good thing. It brings perspective, a thing that's missing a lot these days, where every social app or thingy that's the hottie of the week is evaluated on > $400M.
Re: I'm calling this Bubble 2.0, and it's ready to burst
#6Saying that something is going to happen is easy, as in astrology easy. The meat of any prediction is in the timeframe. If you know for sure that the bubble is gonna burst in n months, you should bet against it in the stock/future market.
Re: I'm calling this Bubble 2.0, and it's ready to burst
#7Am I missing something? The example of a "poetry startup" is obviously meant to be an extreme case, but doesn't prove anything about a bubble -- rejected from YC, miles from funding, no product, no customers. If this idea just closed a $500K seed round, it would be a different story. But people have been coming up with silly business plans forever... What makes this one a particularly convincing bellwether of the imminent pop of the 2.0 bubble?
Re: I'm calling this Bubble 2.0, and it's ready to burst
#8Im 19 I've Spent $100 on Facebook ads, and when ads are mobile, i'll probably spend more, and if I had a disposable chunk of 100K I will definitely try to promote on Twitter Trending Topics, as the startup culture continues to grow, college students like me will be willing to throw money on Facebook,Twitter, and other sites rather than you know drugs and alcohol ;)
Re: I'm calling this Bubble 2.0, and it's ready to burst
#9Bubble or not:
shoe-shine boys offering stock tips - Happens in all markets, even in really bad ones.
Re: I'm calling this Bubble 2.0, and it's ready to burst
#10Interesting article, Mr. Stross. I think it's great to see so many people hungry for the next new thing, out hustling and working hard to try to make it happen. As awareness of startup culture grows, it is necessarily going to attract some goofiness. That's OK. Not every idea is a good one, and not every good idea is going to work. We need these stories to make the successes stand out so much brighter. You may be rig…
I was in the web/dotcom 1.0 biz from early 1995 through late 2001.
I am reading the news these days with a strong sense of deja vu for late 1999.
Kickstarter and crowdsourced funding is great news for artists, but I don't see it scaling much bigger than AFP and "Iron Sky" without attracting fraudsters. Again: hacker/maker culture is great, it has brought us great things in the past, and I expect great things to come of it in future, but it's not delivering huge new industries on the scale of a Google or Facebook or Apple. (Making stuff with atoms instead of bits is intrinsically slow, energy and matter intensive, and hard to scale up exponentially.)
But this isn't about artists making a living. If this guy was talking about crowdsourcing to fund his next book of poetry I'd be all in favour. But instead, he's talking about building some kind of bullshit hosting/purchasing storefront with the idea of raking off a percentage of gross from a market that died of natural causes three quarters of a century ago.
Thinking you can set yourself up to rake off a chunk of the value in each exchange in a particular field is the sort of wishful thinking that gave us the Feb 2000 bust.