random things i learn today

8:30am – Subway is selling 6 inches sub for $3.90! Get a Spicy Italian for breakfast and feel it is so much healthier than McDonald’s for some reason.

9:30am – I find out that my tutors do share my ideology of running the courses the way I am, and they understand the value of learning about technologies in association with problem solving and business strategy. Well, I realize they work for me so in some way they may say stuff that I like to hear… let’s just stop at that! I really like to have some support in this lonely journey of teaching IT to students in business degree.

10:30am – Sky City has made an announcement saying there is an unnamed buyer indicating an interest of a 100% ownership of the casino company by paying off with cash. Even no information on the proposed takeover price yet, the share price goes up from $4.35 to $5.22 for a 20% gain. So I guess the market has sort of decided how much the buyer should pay without needing any valuation, how convenient.

12:00pm – Watch YouTube for a while and in a particular talk show there is a concept pretty funny: working for a job that you dislike is just like working as a prostitute; oh you are a high-paid doctor right? That means you are a top-graded prostitute if you don’t like what you do but only for the money. Luckily, I still like what I am doing

1:00pm – Two students call for a meeting with the BBIM director, coordinator and some staff to discuss their idea of having a social-networking facility for our degree serving all the students and staff. I think we collectively have done a really good job to make the students feeling comfortable enough in expressing their interests and ask for support from the faculty in situation like this, despite of the outcome. This feels even healthier than my morning sub! I gave them some of my suggestion and hopefully they would not feel any kind of discouragement, coz deep inside I really admire their passion and wish they can implement the tools they believe in.

2:00pm – Congrats to Brian and Espen for winning the Spark 10k competition!

3:00pm – Just find out from Lotta that in Sweden they have a name for every single day in a year and if a person’s name is the same as a particular day’s name, then that day is the named day for that person to celebrate. Very interesting!

3:30pm – While I am blogging about everything I learn today, I just notice it is about time for me to leave. Not just because it is a Friday, but mostly because I work in Uni. Hahaha!

facebook and ticket scalping

Well I don’t think they are directly related, just wanna talk about them (separately I guess).

Joined Facebook a few months and not particularly active with it. Originally I thought they’re a popular platform for researchers (at least in US), and also a bit curious on how they make money by providing yet another social networking service. After “been there” for a while I can confidently confirm that they are not for work purpose at all (unless I count that some previous students adding me as their friends is “work” related). Very soon I get invited from my families, relatives and friends as well. My sister-in-law “bites” me in Facebook and turns me into a zombie, while others want to “fight” or “gamble” me. Yeah, I think we all become kids again.

Besides from the functionalities offered by Facebook, they allow third party add-ons to be “plugged” in seamlessly as native components. There are like thousands of those and some of them are pretty interesting. For example I can do a movie quiz by giving ratings to 30-40 movies, and see how much I match with my friends in terms of movie taste. Or I can identify all the countries that I have been to so far in my life on a map. While I am filling in all kinds of information about me just for fun, suddenly I realize it is not just my friends who would be seeing them. All the data would be sent back to the companies who produce those add-ons, and perhaps Facebook would have a pretty good idea of who I really am by all the information I supply, volunteerly. Perhaps this explains how Facebook generates its revenue – acting as a platform of personal information, where each of those third party add-on is a company, capturing and trading data of all kinds for their own purposes. It is a brilliant C2B business model. I probably would never answer a survey about a list of movies and rate them separately; but if it is a quiz to show how compatible I am with my friends then I’ll spend the time to do it.

So what about ticket scalping? Recently heard a discussion about it among the hosts in radio and they were talking about ways to avoid people to resell tickets to concerts or sport events etc. People in general hate ticket scalper because they inflate the price of tickets and make them less affordable. Some even argue that they are both immoral and illegal.

Wait a minute – why do we have ticket scalping in the first place? It is because there are people believing the price set for the ticket is lower than it should be. So what should be the “right” price? It should be at a level where supply meets demand. Now, for whatever reason that the event organizer has to set the price lower than the equilibrium price level, demand exceeds supply and so not everyone who really wants to go to that concert can go. Ticket scalping is actually a mechanism for allowing the price of ticket to be more market-driven, is a way to “correct” the mistake of pricing the tickets in the beginning. Besides they are taking away some risks that the event organizer have originally, there is really little reason for them to publicly criticize their “business partner” here. “Selling the ticket below normal price to honor the fans” is just BS. Ticket scalping is simply a predictable activity in a free market, and price control is exactly the opposite of it. Changing the law to incriminate the activity would only promote it to go underground. The real problem is not ticket scalping, is the pricing of the ticket.

Hmm… maybe Facebook and ticket scalping are somehow related – people judge them by their apparent appearance, rather than their real nature!