Author: adrianbye

Ebay is on a slippery downward slope and will become irrelevant if they are not careful.  “super CEO” Meg Whitman hasn’t been able to solve their problems and whoever their new CEO is, they haven’t done much of a job either. (I don’t have much respect for Meg, I think she was just coasting on the momentum the original founders got for the company).

Its interesting to contemplate because ebay has been such a standard powerhouse on the internet.  But they may not be in the future.

There was some interesting posts on Digg today, linking to this article on the consumerist “It’s Now Completely Impossible To Sell A Laptop On Ebay”:

http://consumerist.com/5007790/its-now-completely-impossible-to-sell-a-laptop-on-ebay

Go read it.  Its about how pervasive fraud is now on ebay, making it very difficult to sell things.

And this post on Digg really made me think (excuse the language; I’m posting as it was written):

+287 diggs   by RevJonathan 9 hours ago
Dear Google,
Please make an eBay competitor for fucking fuck’s sake.
Thanks,
View 10 replies to this comment (most popular has 49 diggs)

http://digg.com/business_finance/It_s_Now_Completely_Impossible_To_Sell_A_Laptop_On_Ebay

People trust google more and want google to make a marketplace that actually works.  This whole market is wide open again.

I think this is fairly easily solved by Ebay.  Yeah, I know, I’m a consultant living in the Caribbean and don’t know anything.  Well try this out:  ever heard of the concept of a “distributed trust network“?  No?  Ok, what it means is that trust can be distributed around a network of objects.  It was the basis of Google’s success – before google existed, search engines returned results based around text on the page.  Google looked at links to pages and used those to determine the overall relative importance of a page.  It was a major breakthrough and is now known as “pagerank”.    A site like Linkedin is based on it – I am able to see people 3 degrees of separation away, and know that there is some level of trust since they are friends of friends of friends.  They’re the backbone of friend of a friend sites like myspace, facebook and hi5.  We use the same principle in the real world all the time when we ask a trusted friend for a recommendation.

Distributed trust networks are a foundational concept on the internet.

Ebay never bothered implementing a distributed trust network on its feedback mechanism and its time they did.  Basically this means applying some kind of social networking – “friends trust each other” network for feedback, both for buyers and sellers.  Therefore if a new user comes on to the system and has 100 positive feedbacks, but they are all from overall untrusted people, it has little value.  If a new user joins the system and is immediately trusted by 10 really important people, it will have far more weight.

If Ebay can’t find a way to do this, the entire ebay ecosystem will move over to sites like facebook, where trust is implicitly built in.  We *know* who our friends are.  And maybe our “trusted” friends will include 5 levels deep, so we can get a variety of things to purchase and sell.  And if one of your friends starts selling fradulent things on it, you’ll hear back about it.  Just like in the real world.

And do you want to go adding friends on facebook that are Nigerian and want to buy laptops? (per the above link).  I don’t, nor do I want to introduce them to my friends.

I recently interviewed the founder of Shopit, Matt Hill.  He is tackling this exact market, and may really have something on their hands.

I just spoke with someone who used to work at the FTC and knows a bit about email marketing and the FTC side of things.  I continue to be annoyed that it is legal to resell email addresses.

An example:  you can sign up to my list on the top right corner.  If I include in my (hard to find) privacy policy that I reserve the right to resell your name, you could legally start receiving viagra advertising in your email just for joining my list.

So I asked why that is allowed?  He suggested it was to enable commerce and is MY PROPERTY as the list owner of that data (ie your email addresses).  So I asked him to give me an example of where it is good for consumers for that to happen.  He said it was very good for commerce.  I asked again where its good for consumers.  He started giving me an example of being a camera site and how they might resell their list to someone making some new camera equipment and that it would be good for me to find out about the new product by being emailed a promotion.

I wasn’t impressed.

FTC:  Its time you stepped up and fixed the spam problem permanently.  Stop allowing people to resell email lists.  Email is NOT the same as postal mail lists.  The only reason we don’t get 5000 times more spam is because technology is doing a decent job at blocking it.  Thank god for google mail, they block around 2,000 spam messages daily from getting into my inbox.

In the past month two people have spoken to me about someone being a "genius".  They referred to the (different people ) as being simply better than other people.  They spoke about them almost with a sense of awe.

With all the interviews I do on meetinnovators.com, I am exposed to smart "genius-like" people very frequently (we do one interview per week).  So I've started to get some strong feelings about "geniuses".

"Geniuses" are normal people just like you and me.  They just happened to have hit the things in my post about internet entrepreneurship.  That is, using their natural abilities in their market, filling a market need, passion for the market and focus.  And there's one more thing they have: good strategy.

But, its a tricky balance.  Once that good strategy goes away so does their success.  Strategy is critical. 

An example:  Microsoft's strategy isn't working as well today as it used to.  The stock is far below its levels of 2000.  Fake Steve Jobs has a great summary of why Microsoft is going downhill

But does this mean Bill Gates is or is not now a genius?  No, its just that his strategy isn't on track like it used to be.  Locking users into various platforms worked great in the 80's and 90's, and today it doesn't.  Google doesn't lock users in, ever, and people love it.

It takes a magical balance to get things to work properly.  Once you have it, you have to ride it as much as possible.  But it doesn't last forever.  And even if you get it, you still won't be a genius in my book.  You'll be a smart guy who got it right.

Alan Weiss says you need 3 things to succeed in business:

– be competent in the market

– for there to be a market need

– be passionate about the market

I think these three things are critical.  When I talk with entrepreneurs who are having problems, invariably one or two of these are missing.  And when I look at the things I’ve done that haven’t worked, its due to the same reason.

I’ll add one more thing:  you need to have absolute focus on what you’re doing.  As an example, google generally has focus, Yahoo does not.  Bill Gross from Idealab didn’t have focus; he spawned lots of fascinating business models, including what would become the revenue model for Google and yahoo, but didn’t focus on it, so he couldn’t take advantage of it.

I’m skeptical of guys who are running unfocused business models.  So even though I hear great things, I’m very curious to see if Ken Chan and Next Internet can really deliver.  I suspect they will end up overworked and stressed and have a lot of businesses which end up not being as great as they hoped.  Ken is effectively running an incubator with 6-8 companies simultaneously.  Ken is a nice guy and I talk to him quite often.  So I definitely look forward to being proven wrong!

The problem is that new value only surfaces for a short time.  Several entrepreneurs are likely working on the same problem at the same time.  If you don’t have the right combination of competence/market need/passion/focus, one of the other guys will overtake you, you can’t do it with a team of employees, no matter how well they are compensated.  The entrenpreneurs spark is critical.

I just got an email sent by a company I never heard of before called “shoplet.com”.  And it was sent to an email address I never have used *anywhere* before except with Amazon.com.  They have my first name, last name and email address (that I only registered with Amazon).

So is Amazon selling their customer list to third parties now?  Or did Shoplet.com obtain this through other means?

Given that I highly doubt Amazon would sell their list, I suspect shoplet got it via other means.  I hope they get caught.

UPDATE:  Amazon wrote back and it turns out they share email addresses with companies when you buy through Amazon marketplace.  I bought some tape or something via shoplet from Amazon.  Apparently this is against Amazon’s terms and conditions and is being investigated.  Here’s the specific part from Amazon’s T&C (their customer service response was very thorough, btw):

“Contact between parties must be courteous and limited to transaction

details.  Facilitating inappropriate or unsolicited contact is a

violation of our Community Rules.”

I just finished reading the book "Killing Pablo" by Mark Bowden.  Its the story of the hunt to take down Pablo Escobar, the Colombian druglord who was listed as the #10 most wealthy person in the world by Forbes magazine.  The book is an exciting read.

I was a bit astounded by the amount of violence described in the book however. Medellin was a really, really, really violent place.  It was almost a war zone.  Pablo Escobar had a Colombian presidential candidate killed, among thousands of others.

Yet, I lived in Medellin 5 years after Pablo Escobar was killed, in 1998 for almost a year!  And I lived to talk about it.  🙂

I'd finished my time at AIESEC International and didn't really want to return to Michigan State University to finish 2 subjects remaning for my undergrad degree.  I talked with the chair of my department and he offered for me to finish up in a Colombian university since I had spent some time there already.  So I enrolled at EAFIT university in Medellin and took some classes.

Reading the book and learning about just how much violence there was made me rethink if what I had done – I had no idea things had been so incredibly bad.  Brutal killings were happening on the streets of Medellin virtually daily in 1993.

While I like to travel to offbeat places, when I lived in Medellin I felt it was very safe.  The overall level of violence in the country had gone down dramatically.  People were travelling between major cities through 12 hour rides in buses, which meant that kidnapping was not happening.  And there was no violence in Medellin itself.  My rule of thumb is to always do what the locals tell me, even if its counter intuitive or things feel safe.  So I just hung out with the local people all the time, stayed in the cities, and didn't visit the Red Zones, which are dangerous parts of the country to the north, near Panama.  I actually met some Canadians who travelled all through the red zones by bus and said it was great fun travelling there and they had no problems at all.  I thought they were crazy for taking that kind of risk, the locals would never have done it.  I don't know any stats on the risk of travelling through the red zones, but my guess is that if you travelled through there on 100 trips, 99 times you would be safe, but one time you would be kidnapped.

I talked with my father about it yesterday (I'm at home in Tasmania for christmas right now) and it turned out he was pretty concerned that I had lived there.  He was worried that he'd get the cut off finger in the mail and have to pay a large kidnap ransom to get me out.

But it really just didn't feel unsafe.  At the time if you stayed in a large city like Medellin and didn't go out into the surrounding countryside, you were perfectly fine.  There wasn't bombings and there weren't people being killed.  Of all the thousands of people I met when I was there, I met one girl who's mother was a mayor in a surrounding area of Bogota and was killed as a result.  I didn't meet anyone else directly affected.  I would never have stayed there if I'd been seeing any kind of violence in the city.  There just wasn't anything any different to any other city.  I'm even hearing about carjackings in Sydney, Australia now, because people can't steal cars as much with good self-locking systems. 

Before I moved to the Dominican Republic I was considering moving back to Colombia instead since I knew the country well.  But people there told me how it was then (2001) unsafe to travel by bus between cities due to so much kidnapping and the only safe way to travel was by plane.  That was a pretty big sign for me that violence was on the increase and I decided not to go back to Colombia.  I also wanted to be closer to the USA for business travel.

I really enjoyed my time in Colombia, the colombians are some of the most hospitible people in the world.  If you get the opportunity to visit the country, I would recommend it.  Don't spend time in Bogota, its cold and not very interesting. Go to Pereira, Medellin and Cartagena, they are all very fun cities to visit.  Just make sure you ask the locals about the security situation and follow their advice to the letter.

So the local situation in Medellin is variable.  But if you go there at the right time, it will be safe to live there.  Just be careful and do what the locals tell you.

Gracias a mis amigos colombianos!