Akkam’s Razor

New and used Blackberry’s like the Curve and Pearl as well as the iPhone seem to be going for drastically lower prices (the Pearl at $150, the Curve at $180, and iPhones in the $220s) on eBay than usual.  I guess all those displaced NYC iBankers are having liquidity issues.

The webcast is due to begin at 10:30 EST.  I can’t justify spending money for a new phone and a bigger data plan ($5.99 T-Zones and a 5-year old Nokia 3650 are fine by me).  Even the appeal of faster 3G connections is not enough.  $0.89 per DRM-free song from Amazon isn’t enough.  I’m just not ready.  I’d rather buy a used iPhone off eBay or wait for the second or third round of gPhones.

I’m prepared to be let down by the gPhone.  The initial leaked specs are a little weak - no video recording?  Really?  Most carriers free phones have video ability!  And no stereo bluetooth?  No inline headphone jack?

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I’ve been reflecting how trust works on the internet, and specifically the blogosphere.When people discuss ‘trusted computing’ online, it’s usually in terms of ‘being ‘an authenticated user, meaning that they are who they say they are.  Since much of the activity online is either anonymously (although no one is ever truly anonymous) or pseudonomous, then  reputation is based on what you do (or don’t do) and what you contribute to your given group.

To quickly sum up what this means, here are some of the reputation metrics that I scribbled down:

There's a lot of hubbub over Rapleaf, a company that datamines email addresses from MySpace, Facebook, and other places.  They are "supposed" to be about reputation monitoring (kind of like eBay's seller and buyer reputation) but they are also affiliated with another company, Trustfuse, that sells aggregate data but not emails.  You can view a sample of a typical Trustfuse-Rapleaf report here (PDF).  After they got spanked by the blogosphere, they altered their privacy policy and softened the language regarding the sale of data, but I suspect at this point the damage is done.  They have the following info regarding removing your profile on their privacy page:

The Class of 2008 is the first graduating class that has always had Facebook (well, at least since February 2004).  How is Facebook, or more appropriately, Social Networking as a whole, changing youth culture, and what will the affect be on the business world. Example questions…

• What will happen when "Rate my Professor" mutates into "Rate my Employer", or "Rate my Health Plan", or "Rate my 401K", or "Rate my Boss"?
• What happens when the ad-hoc networks that can form online between employees rivals official hierarchies (for effectiveness or legitimacy) from the Organization Chart or if it counters the official message or strategy?
• What will happen when employees become their own "digital deep throat" airing semi-anonymous dirty secrets and underlying assumptions that the Organization would best leave unsaid?
• What will happen when the innovation and entrepreneurship exhibited by some of the online creative class bumps into the rigid structures of the modern organization.  Will they comply, or route around them like data packets on the internet to their eventual destination?
• What will happen when the new graduate finds that their access to information and what they can do to it become severely limited in the workplace, as compared to what was available online?
• How will eBay's reputation model effect workplace acquisitions and business-to-business transactions?
• How can the positive network effects of online collaboration be harnessed in the modern enterprise?

I don't know that anyone has tackled any of these questions, but based on what I've heard in the media, the outcome has consisted of doom-and-gloom about people getting fired for something they did on MySpace. 

Knowing the sheer amounts of resources and insanely talented people online, isn't it also possible that there could be very positive outcomes as well?

I've been wondering how LinkedIn makes money.  This BusinessWeek article explains it: