Virtual Currency in Buenos Aires

Javier Goglino is an engineer. He created a bartering system, christened “Proyecto Mutuo,”or“Mutual Project,” in his community of Martínez, a Buenos Aires suburb.

Mutual Project is a system in which members can exchange goods and services instead of money. Each member of the community has the option to offer a service or goods in exchange for “merits,” which later help them to acquire new goods and services. The merits register virtually in the participants’ accounts.

Mutual Project already has 79 members, from translators and web designers to musicians and plumbers. It fulfills an average of 14 transactions per month, with peaks of up to 30. Members exchange about 1,400 merits per month, with peaks of up to 3,000 merits.

Social Currency Systems Emerge to Supplement Money in Argentina

Businesses Struggle to Keep Up with Change

Most business executives these days know they operate in volatile, fast-moving conditions and also know they are struggling to keep up with the pace of change. In fact, the volatile economic environment is seen as a bigger challenge than competition.

Dish to Unveil Blockbuster Streaming Service

Dish Network Corp. will announce pricing next week for its Blockbuster streaming-movie service, which will compete with Netflix. Bloomberg reports.

Though the service will be offered initially to Dish subscribers, non-Dish customers who only want Blockbuster’s offering will eventually be able to do so. Dish to Unveil Blockbuster Streaming Prices

The number of people watching video on the Internet is expected to nearly double by 2015 to 1.5 billion while the amount of video they watch on the Web is also seen doubling to more than an hour a day, according to Cisco Systems. 


Not all that video will be of the subscription sort, of course.  Cisco forecast

Google Gravity...Just for Fun

Just for fun, go to google.com. Type "Google gravity" into the search bar. Watch. Then enter a search term in the search bar. Watch. Do it again. Throw stuff around. Then go back to work.

Just how fast is AT&T's new 4G LTE network?

Earlier this year the folks at PC magazine performed a speed test in 21 major cities to see who has the fastest network. Verizon’s 4G LTE pulled in an average of 9.46 megabits per second down (with peaks hitting over 35 megabits per second!) and 1.35 megabits per second up. Keep in mind all such tests depend on how many users are sharing the network. A network with few users will be quite fast. A "loaded" network will provide a different experience.

AT&T’s 4G LTE network has been up for less than a week, so there aren’t that many people using it. Research firm Signals Research gobbled up nearly 90 GB of data over three days in Houston, Texas.

“The average downlink Physical Layer throughput was 23.6 Mbps with a peak rate of 61.1 Mbps. Both results meaningfully exceeded our expectations. The data rate also exceeded 40M bps for 8.6 percent of the time and 21 Mbps–the theoretical peak data rate of the operator’s HSPA+ network–for 38.2 percent of the time. Most importantly, the data rate was greater than 5 Mbps for 95 percent of the time.”

Don't count on that lasting. As more users get on the network, typical speeds will drop, and quite a lot.

Just how fast is AT&T's new 4G LTE network?

Is The Real U.S. Debt $211 Trillion?

What if U.S. debt isn't $14.3 trillion, but bigger by a factor of 14?

Bloomberg BusinessWeek, in "Why The Current Debt Crisis is Even Worse Than You Think," argues the true measure of U.S. debt ought to be the so-called fiscal gap. That's the present value of the difference between the nation's total revenues and its total obligations. That comes to $211 trillion.

Is Real U.S. Debt Figure $211 Trillion?

Facebook Dominant Social Network for SMBs

Among the 44 percent of SMBs using social media, more than half (59 percent) spend less than $100 on social media marketing, however. As we often say, social media in some ways does not take lots of money, but it can take lots of time.
Where it comes to online marketing, small and medium-sized businesses have their work cut out for them.

Time- and money-strapped, SMB marketers often receive light budgets and minimal staff to help them promote their business and generate leads across a variety of formats ranging from social media to search marketing.

As a practical matter, according to Zoomerang, the first priorities are the company website and email marketing.

Social media, however, is gaining in momentum: 44 percent
of U.S. SMB decision-makers have used or are using social media in 2010, up 10 percentage points from 2010.

SMBs are sticking predominantly to the three main social networking sites: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. 


However, SMBs were twice as likely to turn to Facebook (86%) as they were Twitter (33%) or LinkedIn (41%).

Facebook Dominant Social Network for SMBs