Chatroulette Craze

I recently read yet another article about Chatroulette, a web site set up by a 17 y.o. Moscow kid that lets you have video chats with random people.
I find the hype around an unsophisticated video chat truly ridiculous. While I appreciate that investors are looking for the next big thing to invest in, I'm somewhat stunned by their being head over heels with the site. Sweeping aside the issues around the audiences the site attracts, there is absolutely no tangible IP behind it; essentially it's a video conferencing / chat web site, of which there have been a bunch. The only novelty the kid has introduced is the script that picks up a connection randomly. Is this difficult to implement? Nope. Hence, the barriers to entry are extremely low. Actually, there are now a number of web sites that claim to improve on the idea. From the business operation stand point, I wouldn't want to run such a venture. Which brings me to valuation: the numbers that have appeared in the press - from c. $14m up to c. $50m - are absolutely unfounded. Monetization of the web site's "user base" is a huge question and is, to my mind, a pie in the sky.

Back to Books

Much to my chagrin, it's been a while since the last time I read a book, any book. Nothing to write home about, I know. The sad fact about being a banker is that you get so little time for the bare necessities, such as spending quality time with your family / friends or sleep, that reading a book becomes a luxury. Sure, there is the commute time in the morning to get to work but that could be spent catching up on sleep or taking care of emails that miraculously piled up in your inbox in the couple of hours you were dead to the world. Anyway, this is a somewhat tortuous way of saying that reading books is difficult.

So being on vacation, I hit a bookstore today and spent some time checking out the business section. It's pretty amazing (or predictable, really?) how many books tackling the financial crisis in one way or another have been spawned. I picked one that attracted my attention - "Traders, Guns and Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives" by Satyajit Das. I've started reading it and it's quite interesting and funny. If you're into the likes of "Liar's Poker" or "When Genius Failed", you will enjoy this one, too.

The next one on the list is Stiglitz's "Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy". Hopefully, I'll manage to read them before the end of my vacation.