Scene #1: Bad Games in the U.K. According to the BBC, criminal fraud cases in the U.K. are up by 14% in 2008 over 2007. The top crooked games are boiler room scams, credit card fraud, tax cheating and identify theft. The Beeb says the total yearly cost to victims is over 504 billion Euro. Analysis: First of all, it’s a statistic, so there are several ways it can be read. Maybe cheating is up, but it’s just as likely prosecution is up 14% while crime remained steady. Or maybe crime has dropped by 5% but prosecution is up 19%. And this is the crime we know about. Maybe the crime we don’t know about is up 200%. Who can tell? We don’t know about it. My guess, just from what we’re learning daily about the games the financial industry has been playing, is that crime we don’t know about is hockey-sticking. This would make sense, because in the Networked World, we are involved in more transactions where money and information change hands than ever in history, and players are naturally exposed to more crooked games than ever before, many of them of the cyber variety. So it’s more important than it has ever been to see the underlying game of the scene you’re in. Crooked players can be incredible improvisers, and it can take a good improviser to spot one. People who sell toxic products are often amazing improvisers. They have to be. It’s the only thing they have going for them. They know how to get a lot of strong agreement going in a scene, really get it rolling. The agreement happens on the emotional level. (”This is your lucky day!”). The agreement is always over something a victim wants to believe (”We have found your lost dog.”). And there is always urgency to it. (”Tomorrow will be too late.”) The best antidotes to any kind of fraud are knowing who’s in your scenes with you, and being sophisticated enough to spot the scammy games. But even that is no guarantee against getting hacked.
Scene #2: Battle of the Video Microblogs. Web Worker Daily reported last week on the fairly fresh phenomenon of video microblogging. Sites like Seesmic, Phreadz, Utterz (tagline for its blog: “Be Herd”), and ViddYou let uploaders pop short personal videos from webcams and phones into online channels. Analysis: Like every other app, one or two of this genre will break away from the pack to become established brands. These brands’ potential, beyond the fact that this is how a certain number of people are willing to spend a certain portion of their time, cannot be honestly quantified. Early in the life of scenes like these, only two things matter: 1) Has a productive game (the ‘vision’) been identified? and 2) How strongly do players commit (with patience, stamina and money) to it? Give me commitment over vision any time. If the commitment is there (and players are good in their roles) the vision can be improvised into existence.
Scene #3: InBev Buys Annheuser-Busch. After months of posturing by both sides, Belgian brewer InBev acquires the American beverage giant, Annheuser-Busch Co., for $52 billion and change (pending approval by Annheuser’s Mexican partner, Grupo Modelo). Analysis: This is big news in St. Louis, home of Anheuser-Busch, because it means a fast-playing team of Europeans are going to be giving a team of slower-moving midwesterners their new objectives; the rest of the world has bigger concerns. Besides, cheap beer will always be a staple of the marketplace, and InBev certainly didn’t acquire the company to see Budweiser pull up lame. InBev’s fast ponies (Stella Artois, Bass, Brahma, et al), brands more in sync with the evolving tastes of the global marketplace, beat the big horse to the wire. It is an ever-more-familiar scenario: A company designed for the fluid economics of the Networked World out-performs one whose approach to business is rigid and Industrial Age.
Tags: Annheuser-Busch, Boiler Rooms, Budweiser, Business, Crooked Players, Fraud, GameChangers, Games, Honesty, Improvisation, Improvisation for Business, InBev, Networked World, Phreadz, Scams, Seesmic, Tax, Utterz, ViddYou, Video Microblogs