broadstuff

This is the obligatory Royal Wedding linkbait post - but watching my Twitterstream has been most entertaining this morning, as people from across the globe either settle down for a good ogle, a good snark, or pretend to feign indifference (it's really OK to watch it you know - so long as you do it ironically .

It is definitely The Biggest "Social Object" I have ever seen on my Twitterstream (even though many posters are objectors...). This is the only social object i have seen so far that allows all parties to party happily. And you don't even have to turn your avatar purple....let's face it, no one does pomp and ceremony like the British Royals.

I, of course am writing a blog post instead - bah humbug* - but I think every republican (in the general sense) is thinking that there may be something in a bit of gloss**

The one thing I will watch is the Household Cavalry, there is something magnificent in masses of well trained men and horses in the gear of a bygone era (picture above).


*OK, OK I admit I checked the Prediction Markets to see when the divorce was. Nothing as yet....

**That's where Cromwell got it wrong.

You know you are on your way to a Bubble when investors in startup companies use their media arms to write about those companies (anyone recall Messrs Blodgett and Meeker last time round?). Latest play in this space is TechCrunch editor Mike Arrington, who has defended covering the stuff he is investing in:

In 2009 the accusations of conflicts of interest by our competitors became somewhat distracting, and for a couple of years I discontinued investing in startups completely. That policy has now changed. Over the last several months I have begun investing actively again. We’ve noted these investments in Shawn Fanning’s new startup and in Kevin Rose’s new startup. I have also become a limited partner in two venture funds, Benchmark Capital and SoftTech VC. I am considering investments in a few other venture funds and a couple of startups as well, but have nothing further to announce yet.

Lest anyone forget, after the dotcom bust Investment Banks and their Analysts were forced apart, as it seemed the "Chinese Walls" between them had been paper-thin to the point of transparent, leading to certain - ah - over-estimations of companies' values in the analysts' coverage. Now, Kara Swisher points out that leopards don't change spots so to an extent you know what you are getting with Mr Arrington....

While I was first irked–because it was an appalling show to many of us cranky standards-insisting whiners–I soon realized Arrington had made a good argument about who he is and, frankly, who he has always been. In other words, it’s a kind of there-he-goes-again thing, vaguely icky but hardly surprising and completely genuine.

However, it would seem that TechCrunch owner AOL is a tad concerned as well, as it seems no other AOL editors are allowed to make investments in subjects they cover. (I assume that applies to other TechCrunchies as well?)

To me it's never mind the ethics, look at the economics - its just a classic case of Bubble behaviour. In normal times, any news organ investing in the companies it covers would probaby be roughly treated (as TechCrunch was in fact, so Mr Arrington stopped in the late 'Noughties). In Bubble times, however, these basics are tossed overboards as everyone jumps on the yellow brick road (just look at the comments on the TechCrunch piece, Gecko would be proud ).

Update - Ya gotta admire him - Mr Arrington comes back swinging, pointing out that people in the Meedja have all sorts of non investment special relationships they don't disclose. Two wrongs clearly make it alright.....

Los Angeles — where the cars are magnificent but the roads atrocious. Interesting article in the Spectator by Rory Sutherland about how we pay for gadgets but not data, in fact as the utility of the information incresaes we are willing to pay less and less for it:

Given the entrepreneurial feats achieved online, this free-market enthusiasm isn’t altogether surprising. The only problem is that certain aspects of the digital economy actually show the invisible hand as being slightly arthritic.

The problem arises, I think, with Darwin. We have evolved with an inner bias which gives us a high readiness to pay for tangible, scarce things which we can hold and own outright — while we tend to undervalue those things which are ethereal, abundant and enjoyed communally. For the first few million years of our existence, this instinct made sense. But in a digital, networked world, it may cause us to misdirect our spending.

Digital music is perhaps the starkest example of this bias. In terms of what economists would call ‘utility’, digital music is a great improvement on the tangible kind. It takes up no space in your luggage or your home, you can buy songs one track at a time and you can find music in seconds, rather than grovelling around for hours squinting at the illegible spines of CDs. Yet our willingness to pay for intangible music is much smaller; in fact, where we can, we try to get it for free.

And if its bad for audio streaming, its going to get a lot worse for video

[Re niche BBC programming] Ten years ago I would have missed almost all of it. Has anyone suggested this extra utility might justify a slightly higher licence fee? I don’t think so. Even your Spectator subscription shows this same distortion of value. Now, once you subscribe, you can sit in a café in Shanghai on a Wednesday afternoon and read the latest issue on your iPad or laptop two days before it lands on your doormat back home. There is a searchable archive going back years. Yet all this is given away free. It’s the tangible, paper copy people pay for.

Why is this a problem? Because it means all the money gets spent on ‘things’. We all end up with shiny new iPhones, but won’t pay for mobile data, meaning that the mobile data networks on which our phones depend are usually appalling. It’s the technological equivalent of Los Angeles — where the cars are magnificent but the roads atrocious.

That is in the "Anglo Saxon" economies of course - elsewhere Governments have become far more instrumental in ensuring the buildout of the road network, and it shows. The US and UK rank pretty low (compared to their GDP etc) in average internet speed surveys.

It was once a rite of passage for a wannabee geek to have the SETI screensaver running on your PC, so you too could contribute to the communal greater good and play Spot The Alien (see above) but now itts closing, due to lack of funding and results - S F Mercury:

Lacking the money to pay its operating expenses, Mountain View's SETI Institute has pulled the plug on the renowned Allen Telescope Array, a field of radio dishes that scan the skies for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations. In an April 22 letter to donors, SETI Institute CEO Tom Pierson said that last week the array was put into "hibernation," safe but nonfunctioning, because of inadequate government support.

Of course, they wail, this is awful timing as there is most certainly going to be Jam Tomorrow:

The timing couldn't be worse, say SETI scientists. After millenniums of musings, this spring astronomers announced that 1,235 new possible planets had been observed by Kepler, a telescope on a space satellite. They predict that dozens of these planets will be Earth-sized -- and some will be in the "habitable zone," where the temperatures are just right for liquid water, a prerequisite of life as we know it. "There is a huge irony," said SETI Director Jill Tarter, "that a time when we discover so many planets to look at, we don't have the operating funds to listen."

A large reason for the drop off is simply funding cuts, both state and private donors. Apparently it only needs $5m or so a year to run, so let's see if any other of the Silicon Valley super-rch step up. However, one of the commenters probably has the correct answer:

I'm glad they finally realize that aliens have a right to privacy, too!

Broadstuff can reveal a deeper secret - the Aliens themselves have asked the Illuminati to influence the US Government to stop it owing to their privacy worries

I just don't believe these numbers on advertising from “The Mobile Movement: Understanding Smartphone Users,” a study from Google and conducted by Ipsos OTX, an independent market research firm, among 5,013 US adult smartphone Internet users at the end of 2010 - Google blogs:

71% of smartphone users search because of an ad they’ve seen either online or offline; 82% of smartphone users notice mobile ads, 74% of smartphone shoppers make a purchase as a result of using their smartphones to help with shopping, and 88% of those who look for local information on their smartphones take action within a day.

Or more accurately, I don't believe the face value. I'd like to see the underlying definitions, for eg how often the 71% who search because of an Ad actually do search, and what the 88% "taking action" means. . While reading the whole thing (below) I also became aware that many of these were probably generic facts, ie applied to nearly any comms device - so I replaced the term "smartphone" with "dumbphone" and found the results still made nearly total sense, ie these are generic "this is what people do on phones" stats (The`y still made quite a lot of sense when I replaced smartphone with "carrot".....). I have also added a few "watch out for misleading wording" tags in [square brackets].

General Dumbphone Usage: Dumbphones have become an integral part of users’ daily lives. Consumers use dumbphones as an extension of their desktop computers and use it as they multi-task and consume other media.

- 81% browse the Internet, 77% search, 68% use an app, and 48% watch videos on their dumbphone
- 72% use their dumbphones while consuming other media, with a third while watching TV
- 93% of dumbphone owners use their dumbphones while at home

Action-Oriented Searchers: Mobile search is heavily used to find a wide variety of information and to navigate the mobile Internet.

- Search engine websites are the most visited websites with 77% of dumbphone users citing this, followed by social networking, retail and video sharing websites
- Nine out of ten dumbphone searches results in an action (purchasing, visiting a business, etc.) [90% action rate - I suspect etc includes "visiting a website"]
- 24% recommended a brand or product to others as a result of a dumbphone search [If a purchase is made, fine - if not, very unlikely]

Local Information Seekers: Looking for local information is done by virtually all dumbphone users and consumers are ready to act on the information they find.

- 95% of dumbphone users have looked for local information
- 88% of these users take action within a day, indicating these are immediate information needs [what does this mean - look for a place on a map and go there?]
- 77% have contacted a business, with 61% calling and 59% visiting the local business [with what frequency - ie how does this differ from any 'phone?]

Purchase-driven Shoppers: Dumbphones have become an indispensable shopping tool and are used across channels and throughout the research and decision-making process.

- 79% of dumbphone consumers use their phones to help with shopping, from comparing prices, finding more product info to locating a retailer [how often]
- 74% of dumbphone shoppers make a purchase, whether online, in-store, or on their phones [*or* on their phones? I suggest the statistics for the latter are tiny and overall data for carrot eaters are similar]
- 70% use their dumbphones while in the store, reflecting varied purchase paths that often begin online or on their phones and brings consumers to the store [statistic does not justify conlusion]

Reaching Mobile Consumers: Cross-media exposure influences dumbphone user behavior and a majority notice mobile ads which leads to taking action on it.

- 71% search on their phones because of an ad exposure, whether from traditional media (68%) to online ads (18%) to mobile ads (27%)
- 82% notice mobile ads, especially mobile display ads and a third notice mobile search ads
- Half of those who see a mobile ad take action, with 35% visiting a website and 49% making a purchase
- 71% search on their phones because of an ad exposure, whether from traditional media (68%) to online ads (18%) to mobile ads (27%)
- 82% notice mobile ads, especially mobile display ads and a third notice mobile search ads
- Half of those who see a mobile ad take action, with 35% visiting a website and 49% making a purchase

So, after a few sections of "well they apply to anyone " data, it is that last section that I really struggle with. Those action rates are an order of magnitude (at least) higher than any Ad responses I've ever seen, and the behaviours reported here look nothing like anyone I asked about it (granted that is a small sample). Do you fit the profile here?

Given that it is (i) Planet Mobile (famous for exagerrating/misleading data) and (ii) self serving for Google, I'd approach those latter numbers with a large pinch of salt and a healthy dose of scepticism. Anyway, there is a webinar tomorrow with (hopefully) more details.

There is a lot of Sturm und Drang about Amazon's EC2 "Cloud" system collapse over the last 2 days. the main thing it shows me is that most people fundamentally misunderstand networked system reliability. Allow me to make a quick calculation:

- there are c 356 days in a year, 24 hours a day, that is 8544 hours in a year
- a "Five Nines" reliable system like a voice telephone network, with massive investment and decades of operating experience will be up 99.999%, ie you need to expect about 0.09 hours or c 5 minutes of total system failure a year.
- Cloud systems are nowhere near Five Nines reliable, even Broadband isn't there. In my 10 years experience with web hosting/ASPs I'd say that 99.9% reliability would be a great target to aim for still, ie you need to assume c 8 - 9 hours of total failure every year.
- You can back this up by parallelling systems, but to be truly redundant this needs to be in a different datacentre, preferably in a different country, ideally with a different operator so there is no problem bleed and error buildup. In such a perfect case, you can assume you will get two systems of 99.9% reliability ensuring one of them is up 99.99% of the time, ie only one hour a year when both have crashed at the same time.

Also, the sorts of datacentres operating consistently (ie are prepared to sign a service level agreement - SLA - with penalties) at even "Three Nines" are pretty high end, your average cash starved startup sitting on a standrad deal on one cluster of a virtual shared hosting service like Amazon (as far as I recall they don't have an SLA, just Best Endeavours to hit 99.95%*) is probably not going to see even that level of reliability. Assuming they see something like 99.5% reliability, that means you must assume c 2 days of outage a year. Even a fully redundant system like I have described above, at 99.5% will give about 1 days complete outage a year.

In other words, these swans are going to be Black, and they are entirely predictable.

I'm afraid the Cloud industry tends to oversell it's capability for reliability somewhat (what's .499% between friends - well, about 2 days outage a year actually) , you will know its got to Telkco utility levels of reliability when it's provided by massive telecom utility type providers, not run off the back of companies' whose main business is doing something else. If you ever read Nick Carr's book The Big Switch you will see we are in the equivalent of where the 1920's was for electricity, where the industry is moving from fairly unreliable, non standardised services, run by people selling off spare capacity, on to dedicated service providers. No reason not to have Cloud now, (just as no reason not to have electricity in 1920) but you wouldn't bet an entire livelihood (or the farm) on it.

The one thing that Amazon needs to learn though, is telling customers what is going on early and honestly - survey after survey over the last 20 years shows that customers are much more confident, and ultimately happier with you if you tell them - even if it is just that something is wrong - and put in place a comms update plan. Amazon's Cloud apostles dropped off the Twitter radar for hours as this happened, and the initially company clammed up, except for rather legalese communications it seems. No datacentre operator worth their salt wouldn't have system healthcheckers in place so that at least they could tell customers where faults were very quickly, and what their disaster recovery procedures were going to be.

(For the record - we have an Amazon instance, but we don't host the blog or website on it. Our advice remains to use the cloud by all means but also to have your own systems running in hot backup and able to do short term switchover and be able to run the system at normal mean loadings - and ensure any data that you need if it goes down is mirrored)

* I was wrong, one can apply for credits now - but it's money off the rental cost, not business damage.

Update - and here come the Cloud snow jobs - this one is just too (sadly) funny for words but fortunately it's petard is well hoisted on Slshdot - it's on O'Reilly, which does surprise me.

Welcome to the Web 2.0 Mall! My name is Doc Pangloss, and this little tour guide is to help you find your way around - smile for the camera as it takes your photo and posts it on YouTube - thank you. Now, here we are at the entrance, you can see the helpful TV screens that show you where everything is. Of course, Web 2.0 TV is a bit different - it watches you back.

Now, like all malls we have a few signature shops - over there is Yahoo, its a venerable department store, has lots of stuff in it but despite the continual revamps it's all a bit old fashioned and the cool kids don't really go there anymore.

The other signature shop is Facebook, you just have to fill in all your personal data to enter - there you go - and in we go. I know it feels a bit odd with all your friends always popping up telling you what they've bought but you'll get used to it. What's that you say - you don't like how it's telling everyone what you're putting in your basket? Hey, it's the future, get used to it! Anyway, here is the gaming arena, . No you don't put coins in, you buy credits by handing over more personal data. And the games are designed to make you really enjoy handing the data over. Cool hey! Anyway, time to leave, more to see. What, get your data back when you leave? No, they don't give it back, you agreed it was theirs when you signed in. Oh, you didn't read the T&C. Well, more fool you.

Now over here is the budget store, it's called Groupon, its a coupon store. Pile 'em high, sell 'em cheap and cheerful, that's the idea. It's just the hottest new thing here, worth billions they say. Yah, I know all the brick and mortar coupon stores downtown are only worth a pittance, but hey, this is Web 2.0 man. It's all different here.

OK, now this is the food hall. What's that - you can't see any food? Of course not, they don't actually make and deliver food, the operators in this food hall all want to facilitate your food experience by telling your friends what you ate, telling you what they all liked most, and the shops here add value (to themselves) by interposing as middlemen between you and the actual food makers. Yes, you could just order the stuff yourself from the actual food makers but that's anti-progress, baby, and no banker is gonna give millions of dollars to anyone who actually makes stuff..

Moving on, here is the bookstore - Amazon - got a great reputation by stocking all those hard to find books when it opened, now it wants you to buy electronic books to read on its own book reading device. No, of course you own the book, its just you can't copy it onto any of your other readers and they get to take the book back again anytime they want. You want to lend the book to your friends? Boy are you old fashioned, get your friend to buy her own reading device and book! They also run a lot of the other shops down this here Cloud Hall. Yes, they can shut them down if they don't like them, we had these guys called Wikileaks here last year but we don't like to talk about them.....

(Oh cr*p - the power has shut down again, we better ask Quora about the problems with basing your business on someone else's infrastructure - when Quora comes back up again....)

And OK, there used to be other book and news stores here, but they've all gone now, and I know that store just full of classified ads and this one full of PR releases is not telling you what's going on in the world, but hey we have to fill the retail space somehow y'know. Besides, most people don't gove a F8ck about what's going on in the world so long as you can show them pictures of cute kittens and let them tell their friends what they ate for lunch. And listen, over there is a little kiosk that has a list of causes you can support, to help you it shows you which celebrity supports each one, and a coloured band you can wear to show solidarity while you shop - ain't it great!

Now, up the escalators to the next level - here is Apple, and yes there is always a queue to buy some new thing or another. But it's a great place, look at all these cool devices. Ok, they are a bit expensive compared to that grungy geek store down the road, but think of the experience you're having here! Now here is this real kewl device, its called an iPhone - it's so smart and seems to know you so well you'd think it was recording everything you do all the time. And you can buy all this cool music at Apple too. No, of course you can't share it with your friends, get with the Program 2.0! When we say "share with your friends" in Web 2.0 we mean your personal data, not the actual stuff you buy! When we say we "sell" the content we actually mean "loan" you see.

OK, so here we are in the main court - and as you can see, the Mall is very big and there are lots of stores, to find the thing you want we use the system on the information consoles here, its called Google. You type in what you want, and it shows you lots of people that will pretend to point you to where you want to go, and fill the page you see with advertising. Why don't Google just tell you where to get the stuff, you said? Well, that's just plain dumb, because that way no one would make any money from the Ads and then where would we all be? It's all part of the New Eco-System you see. Hey listen, smartass, Google have got lots of smart people who tell us its not a problem, so just STFU OK?

Sheesh, some people, they just don't Get It, y'know.

Right, just along here is the Banking Court. No, there are no actual banks. We have these ones here that lend micro-loans at very high interest rates. No, we don't call them loan sharks, we cal them "exctiting and entrepreneurial new initiatives in digital finance". And those payment facilitation guys - no, they are not covered by the banking consumer protection codes, yes they want far more data than is necessary for making a payment, and no you are not protected if things go wrong - jeez, what d'you want next - ability to pay anonymously with e-cash? No, I don't think there is a conflict of interest with a payment provider being owned by the guy who owns the open air market. All is for the best in this best of all worlds 2.0!

OK, so thats the intro - now y'all have got an hour to wander around and get what you want, we're going to give you these tablets while you go - don't worry, you won't get lost, they are telling us where you are all the time, and besides the mall are so full of cameras tracking the way your eyeballs move and so on, believe me we know you better than you know yourself - we can guess where you are before you get there. If you want to talk to each other just use this button, its called a Tweeter. It's lke SMS only everyone gets the message not just one person. Oh, just ignore his tweets, everyone else does but he pays Tweeter lots of money to get his stuff promoted. Need cash? Of course not, everything is free here, all you have to do is deposit some more personal data into the databank for our dataminers to work on. Busy, busy, busy - you know.

Look buster, I'm not going to argue business with you - it just works OK. Lots of cleverer people than you think these shops will all make money from your data, or at least they think other dumb guys will think they can, so they give the shops money to buy stuff to give away to you for free. All you gotta do is hand over your data and watch the popup Ads while you buy. MySpace? No, they closed down. Sold to some rich dude and he just didn't get it - kept on asking why the money wasn't in the tills at the end of the day. Fool!

Oh, ignore that dude there wandering up and down carrying the "Do Things that Matter" placard - that's just Old Man O'Reilly, he's been picketing the Mall since 2008......

Well, that concludes the tour, folks- and to send you on your way here is a little bag of cookies for each of you......and remember our catch phrase here in the Web 2.0 Mall - It's a Brave New World !

Have a Nice Day!



Post inspired by a one liner from this Bloomberg Businessweek article:

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."

Good Lord - a few days ago we published a note about how Smartphones are watching you (and listening etc) , but we had no idea it was this bad - the iPhone tracks your movement and timestamps it, whether you have GPS turned on or off, and saves it to a non encrypted file that it then uploads when you synch (again without you knowing). What worries me is not so much the tracking itself, but that Apple didn't feel it was necessary to tell its users that this was happening, nor to use a secure method of storing the data - i.e what was going on in their heads?. This feature is alluded to in the 15,000 word "terms and conditions" but fairly obliquely - "May track", "aggregated data" etc - not "there is a file on your phone tracking your exact moves and timestamping them, that gets uploaded automatically to any computer you synch to and moves from your old phone to your new phone". That is not a "may" or an "aggregated" or an off switch in any of that! I agree with Andy Ihnatko when he says your Smartphone is:

....a master key to pretty much everything we’ve got going on in our lives: where we’ve been, the people with whom we associate, what we say, and all of the things we’ve seen that we considered worth snapshotting. The phone maker should be both completely open about the data the device collects and should act as though disastrous things would happen if that data were ever to fall into the wrong hands. Because they would. The worst-case scenario of a lost or stolen or otherwise compromised phone is pretty goddamned bad.

Your personal Jesus Device is turning into more of a personal Judas device, betraying you behind your back - what I want to know is what Apple was going to do with the data to get its 30 pieces of silver.

I understand it only works on iOS 4, not 3.x, and works on the iPad too. A few other factoids from Andy:

- This database isn’t storing GPS data. It’s just making a rough location fix based on nearby cell towers. The database can’t reveal where you were…only that you were in a certain vicinity. Sometimes it’s miles and miles off. This implies that the logfile’s purpose is to track the performance of the phone and the network, and not the movements of the user.
- A third party couldn’t get access to this file without physical access to your computer or your iPhone. Not unless you’ve jailbroken your iPhone and didn’t bother resetting its remote-access password…or there’s an unpatched exploit that would give Random Person On The Internet root access to your phone.
- It’s pretty much a non-issue if you’ve clicked the “Encrypt iPhone Backup” option in iTunes. Even with physical access to your desktop, a no-goodnik wouldn’t be able to access the logfile.

But still! What a nervous can of worms. This is an open, unlocked file in a known location in a standard database format that anybody can read. If someone has physical access to your Mac — or remote access to your user account — it’s a simple matter of copying a file and opening it. And while the logfile can’t tell someone that you were at a specific house, it can obviously tell your boss that you went to the Cape on the day you called in sick.

In other words it is using the same technology all phones use for snooping, but it is storing it insecurely (And a Third Party attack is the most common security flaw) On the BBC news today we heard that there will probably be a rush to subpoena iPhones in all sorts of divorce and crime cases. You have been warned.....

Study from BlogHer - the BlogHer 2011 Social Media Matters Study - (as reported by Sherilynne Starkie)

The study was conducted to gather insights on current social media trends among women, both in the US general online population and members of the BlogHer community. It showed that blogs are playing an increasingly influential role in people’s purchasing decisions:

- Blog opinions matter: 53% of women blog readers have purchased a product based on a blog recommendation. That number soars to 80% of the BlogHer population.
- The top reason the general population trusts blog advice is because of their satisfaction with past purchases based on blog recommendations.
- The top three types of products that the general population seeks reviews and recommendations for on blogs are consumer electronics (35%), computer hardware/software (33%) and movies (33%). Among the BlogHer community, the priorities shift to food/beverage (67%) and clothing/shoes (67%), with movies coming in third at 62%.
- Almost half (47%) of blog readers tap into blogs for finding new trends or ideas, 35% for finding out about new products, and one in four for help with making a purchasing decision.

In addition, the study found that women see social networking as a way to preserve connections with family and friends. Specific findings include:

- Blog usage and Facebook usage continue to grow at an equal and modest rate year over year with women (10%).
- Tech love is all about connecting: 58% of women spend more or about the same time with their friends online as they do offline, yet only 5% feel that social impact has had a negative effect.
- When asked why technology makes women feel hopeful about the future, the top answer (67%) was that social media makes it easier to stay in touch with family and friends.

Picks up on a trend we have seen over and over again - people trust other people the most, women trust other people more than men do, so no surprises. Ad industry still chases youth and slebs, because thats what they did 20 years ago.

I eagerly await the day the Hello! magazine is full of Bloggers

Some time ago (in mid February) we released the Bubble-O-Meter, which stated that the 10 signs of a Bubble (in roughly increasing order) were:

1. There is a New New Thing that trancends the Old Economics, and you cannot value It the Old Way. This Time It will Be Different. Dumb Money companies start paying over the odds for New Thing acquisitions.

2. Smart people who have been there before start calling it a Bubble (or at least a "Frothy Market"), New New Thing apostles make ever more glowing claims of the dizzy heights available, while "Startup Networking Events" start to proliferate.

3. Companies with founders deemed to have "rubbed off the right stuff" (ie sons of, ex employees of, etc etc) get funded straight off at eye watering valuations for next to no product proof or traction.

4. There is a flurry of new incubators started by (newly minted) VCs (trying to buy in)

5. Companies start getting funded "off the slide deck" with no actual product

6. MBAs start leaving banks to start up companies

7. The "Big IPO" happens (Netscape et al)

8. The big Investment Banks start to make a market in the New New Thing, punting in your pension money, and have "entrepreneurial" options and divisions to retain les autres MBAs

9. Your Taxi Driver gives you advice on what stock to buy - you punt in your own pension money

10. A New New Thing darling buys an Olde Industry thing at Stupid $$$. This is the Top Of The Bubble.

At the time we estimated we were seeing Stage 3 behaviours in the main, with the start pf a few incubator types. Since then, in just 2 months, incubators have ramped up and now we are seeing signs of stage 5 froth, on receipt of this from the WSJ:

Several major venture-capital firms were vying to fund Uber, his fledgling company. While presenting his business plan at the offices of Benchmark Capital, Mr. Kalanick briefly excused himself to phone three other potential investors. His message: They needed to move fast.

One Benchmark partner, Bill Gurley, wouldn't have it. "No need to talk to those guys," he told Mr. Kalanick. "Let's get the deal done here." After two days of wooing, Benchmark provided nearly $12 million in capital for a 20% stake in Uber, pegging its valuation at $60 million.

That is just one scene in the latest gold rush to sweep Silicon Valley, where prospectors are now fighting over buzzy start-ups and companies are getting their pick of deep-pocketed backers. The momentum is driving a wave of deal envy and trash talking—complete with power plays, personal feuds and turf wars among Wall Street bankers, billionaire speculators and venture-capital veterans.

"Suddenly everyone wants to invest in Silicon Valley," says Mr. Gurley. "It's game-on all the time."

Fasten seatbelts......