virtualeconomics

Rogue caption writer at the Globe and Mail

With thanks to @timhardford and @stevesilberman, just recording some of the work of the rogue caption writer at the Globe and Mail for posterity before they notice and take it down.

The full gallery is (was) here, and using a celeb gallery to raise awareness of Occupy Wall Street is funny. Hats off to the guy, who is presumably now looking for a new job.

All my money's invested in planning permission. And so is yours

In Britain at least, most people's biggest asset is their house. We are, we like to think, investors in bricks and mortar. Or even investors in land - they are not, the old trope goes, making any more of it. Bricks and mortar and land sound like such wonderfully safe things, such solid things, to imagine your money being invested in. And anyway you need to live somewhere, and you need somewhere to keep your stuff, so it's only sensible to put your money into bricks and mortar and land. We all do it.

This is, of course, not quite true.

Last time I bought a house it was valued at about £350k. For insurance purposes it was necessary to find out how much it would cost to rebuild the whole thing from scratch, and that was estimated at about £120k. For not very interesting reasons I looked into what it would cost to buy a bit of the garden next door and got back an estimate of a few tens of thousands, at most. This is, needless to say, a patch of land in central London which in every practical sense is big enough to build another house on. It just so happens that it's a bit of someone's back garden and there is no planning permission - so it's worth little more than the same size patch of land in Yorkshire or the Outer Hebrides.

Do the maths with me. The land qua land was actually worth say £20k. The bricks and mortar were worth £120k. The "house" was worth £35ok. Mostly what I was buying was planning permission. Something a bit short of a quarter of a million quid of it. For the privilege of being allowed to have a house worth £120k on a patch of land worth £20k.

Look at it another way and everything's fine. Anything is worth what the next guy will pay for it: I was willing to fork over £x and the next guy will fork over roughly £x too. Why worry?

I guess I worry because a society or an economy whose members generally hold the majority of their assets in the form of planning permission might not be in such good shape, even if few of them articulate it in quite that way. Bricks and mortar sounds nice and robust. Land sounds solid. The administrative whims of planning functionaries at the local council...not so much. 

(Photo from Woodleywonderworks on Flickr)

Competitive analysis in the social media age

Last week my team and I were looking at some new software. No reason for it to be a secret - we were looking at Vocus, a news/PR/social media monitoring tool. It was...pretty good. We liked it.

My next question is always - who are their competitors? Sure, we could buy this, but what else is out there? Is it any good? Is it better?

Having spent a few years selling software in the City, this question always fascinates me. When you're selling one of half a dozen systems into a small market, you know who your comeptitors are - you bump into them every day, your customers are forever thinking about replacing your system with one or another of theirs and there are competitive pitches going on all the time. But from the point of view of someone buying a system, it's surprisingly easy not to know that one or more of the half dozen options out there even exists. The sales guys at company X aren't going to tell them that company Y has a great piece of kit too; they might ask their competitors what they use but hey, they're competitors and who wants to look clueless in front of competitors?