TechYob

Looking for gold at the end of the Web 2.0 rainbow?

Today GigaOM reported on this MTV video post which provides an insight into the practice of Gold Farming, using Chinese and lower income nations to collect and sell gold on popular gaming sites to their richer brethren in western nations.  This is in a similar vein to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk where people are paid to do repetitive online tasks such as classifying shoe colours.  The producer of the video cast Matt Sunbulli asserted that 100’s of millions of dollars were spent last year on trade in World of Warcraft gold, characters and items.  He also reported that in game virtual markets were to surpass $9 billion by 2009.  Even if it is a fraction of this amount, it still suggests that virtual economies are coming of age. 

Like its real-world equivalent, globalization 3.0, virtual Gold Farming starts at the bottom of the chain by leveraging large numbers of low paid workers to do the grunt work of repetitive game tasks.  Another take on this phenomena has been coined Human Computation, which uses games to get people to solve real-world problems for free.  Luis Von Ahn invented the genre with his famous ESP game where, as a consequence of playing the game, people categorise large libraries of pictures - something that is traditionally very hard to do automatically.  He estimated that within a period of 4 months he could have the entire Google Images library labeled.  Google promptly licensed his tech.  Check out his video for some inspiration about how to leverage the untapped brain-power of people with too much time on their hands!

In a previous post I mentioned the burgeoning real-world economies of Second Life and Cyworld, and drew a tongue in cheek analogy between this new world order and that of traditional property development that is dear to the hearts of most Australians.  

Ive now upgrading that vision to one in which virtual stock exchanges and brokers become the new new thing.  Find a way to insert yourself, like IGE, into a virtual economy.  Truly, the online equivalent of eBay, but without the logistics nightmares. 

Think of any job or occupation today, and be sure that it will have its online equivalent in decades (years?) to come.  We may have started with virtual hard-labour today, but tomorrow we will see virtual legal specialists, futures traders, nurses, politicians and artists.  Some would argue we already have.  

So.  Im starting to build a catalog of businesses that boom in tomorrow’s virtual economies:

• The Property Developers - those that can build and churn properties that attract a crowd and then reinvent themselves like today’s nightclubs
• The Exchanges - like the ASX or NASDAQ, except they trade in ideas and concepts 
• The Actors - more on this later…