Craigslist meets Wall Street

Thanks Chris for this one.

This appeared on Craigslist

What am I doing wrong?

Okay, I’m tired of beating around the bush. I’m a beautiful (spectacularly beautiful) 25 year old girl. I’m articulate and classy.

I’m not from New York . I’m looking to get married to a guy who makes at least half a million a year. I know how that sounds, but keep in mind that a million a year is middle class in New York City, so I don’t think I’m overreaching at all.

Are there any guys who make 500K or more on this board? Any wives? Could you send me some tips? I dated a business man who makes average around 200 - 250. But that’s where I seem to hit a roadblock. 250,000 won’t get me to central park west. I know a woman in my yoga class who was married to an investment banker and lives in Tribeca, and she’s not as pretty as I am, nor is she a great genius. So what is she doing right? How do I get to her level?

Here are my questions specifically:

- Where do you single rich men hang out? Give me specifics- bars, restaurants, gyms

-What are you looking for in a mate? Be honest guys, you won’t hurt my feelings

-Is there an age range I should be targeting (I’m 25)?

- Why are some of the women living lavish lifestyles on the upper east side so plain? I’ve seen really ‘plain jane’ boring types who have nothing to offer married to incredibly wealthy guys. I’ve seen drop dead gorgeous girls in singles bars in the east village. What’s the story there?

- Jobs I should look out for? Everyone knows - lawyer, investment banker, doctor. How much do those guys really make? And where do they hang out? Where do the hedge fund guys hang out?

- How you decide marriage vs. just a girlfriend? I am looking for MARRIAGE ONLY

Please hold your insults - I’m putting myself out there in an honest way. Most beautiful women are superficial; at least I’m being up front about it. I wouldn’t be searching for these kind of guys if I wasn’t able to match them - in looks, culture, sophistication, and keeping a nice home and hearth.

it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

PostingID: 432279810

This is the answer

Dear Pers-431649184:

I read your posting with great interest and have thought meaningfully about your dilemma. I offer the following analysis of your predicament.

Firstly, I’m not wasting your time, I qualify as a guy who fits your bill; that is I make more than $500K per year. That said here’s how I see it.

Your offer, from the prospective of a guy like me, is plain and simple a crappy business deal. Here’s why. Cutting through all the B.S., what you suggest is a simple trade: you bring your looks to the party and I bring my money. Fine, simple. But here’s the rub, your looks will fade and my money will likely continue into perpetuity…in fact, it is very likely that my income increases but it is an absolute certainty that you won’t be getting any more beautiful!

So, in economic terms you are a depreciating asset and I am an earning asset. Not only are you a depreciating asset, your depreciation accelerates! Let me explain, you’re 25 now and will likely stay pretty hot for the next 5 years, but less so each year. Then the fade begins in earnest. By 35 stick a fork in you!

So in Wall Street terms, we would call you a trading position, not a buy and hold…hence the rub…marriage. It doesn’t make good business sense to “buy you” (which is what you’re asking) so I’d rather lease. In case you think I’m being cruel, I would say the following. If my money were to go away, so would you, so when your beauty fades I need an out. It’s as simple as that. So a deal that makes sense is dating, not marriage.

Separately, I was taught early in my career about efficient markets. So, I wonder why a girl as “articulate, classy and spectacularly beautiful”

as you has been unable to find your sugar daddy. I find it hard to believe that if you are as gorgeous as you say you are that the $500K hasn’t found you, if not only for a tryout.

By the way, you could always find a way to make your own money and then we wouldn’t need to have this difficult conversation.

With all that said, I must say you’re going about it the right way.

Classic “pump and dump.”

I hope this is helpful, and if you want to enter into some sort of lease, let me know.

WTF? Stamp

Could be useful if one has a lot of documents to reject in order to save time. Just stamp the document and send it back

(via ffffound)

iPhone will catch up in the business segment

The iPhone is in my opinion still a fancy, glossy, slick device which properly fulfil basic daily needs like making phone calls, sending text messages, listening to music or do some  surfing etc. Which is fine for residential customers. Nevertheless, iPhone lacks of some essential features compared to devices from Nokia or SonyEricsson, to say the least - not to think about push technology. Now a survey made by ChangeWave, however, shows some interesting facts about company’s device plans for the future. It seems that Apple’s iPhone will be close on BlackBerry’s heels ; )

Apple will soon take the second place slot in business smartphone ranking, according to ChangeWave, with 11 percent of respondents saying their companies plan to purchase iPhones.

Read the full article here.

Cramer Sweeney’s Smart Marketing Game

I had 16 out of 20. How good are you?

The world’s most expensive beer

This is the world’s most expensive beer! The beer has been brewed by the Danish brewery Jacobsen Brewhouse and is named Vintage Nr. 1. It comes corked and wax-sealed in a slender, misty green bottle, just like a bottle of vintage champagne. To sip this delicious beer one has to table not less than 2008 DKK (393 USD, 434 CHF) per bottle!

Vintage Nr.1 is the only contemporary beer produced in JC Jacobsen’s original 1847 cellar today, the unique brew possesses a complex mix of flavours. Further, the beer has 10.5 per cent alcohol by volume and by ageing six month in Swedish and French oak the beer has smoky caramel and vanilla aroma. Vintage Nr.1 is limited in edition and as a consequence only 600 bottles has been produced.

(via wallpaper)

The development of tech companies’ logos

Alex from Neatorama recently posted an interesting article about the evolution of tech companies’ logos. To create a corporate design and most of all the logo of the company is exceedingly difficult which I experienced by myself when we formed our start-up company Join4Music.com. A logo has to express the core message in an easy way, has to be clean and functional, has to show the key benefit (which also comes with the name), has to be timeless i.e. not following a current trend and so on. As you can see; to create a logo includes a bunch of criteria to fulfil. Here is the development of the IBM logo:

More logo evolutions: the evolution of tech companies’ logos

Orange and T-Mobile To Trial Mobile TV Service in UK

Pretty cool! … unfortunately I am no longer in London : (

The idle 3G spectrum in UK has been the subject of idle speculation for some time, and mobile TV trials have been promised, and now Orange and T-Mobile UK will jointly pilot a new mobile TV service in West London using NextWave’s TDtv solution. The pilot, scheduled for the second half of 2008, is supposed to show how mobile operators share widely-available unpaired 3G spectrum and a TDtv broadcast network. A similar trial has been done in Bristol in UK before, with four operators (Orange, Vodafone, Telefonica and 3).

During the six month trial, users will receive 24 high-resolution TV channels along with 10 digital radio stations.

(via moconews and streetinsider)

Camden fire aftermath

With many businesses bemoaning the loss of their usual Sunday trading, this pub hoped to make the best of a bad day.

(via bbc)

India generates 40% of Vodafone’s mobile usage volume

This headline in the Economic Times really caught my eyes. The 7th biggest country in the world generates 40% of Vodafone’s mobile usage volume! If we take into consideration that Vodafone serves 30 countries worldwide this figure is even more impressive. Let’s take a closer view: For Q4 Vodafone globally recorded 115.7 billion minutes of usage, out of which India accounted for 43.3 billion minutes.

Especially for Q4 India was virtually responsible for Vodafone’s minutes increase of 10.9 billion minutes. Consider this: Globally, for the Vodafone group, the mobile voice usage volume rose by 10.9 billion minutes during the quarter-ended December 2007. India has contributed 86% of this increase. Put simply, cellular usage volumes increased by 9.4 billion minutes in its Indian entity alone. Not surprisingly, India is now ahead of Germany as their largest customer base and at the same time the highest potential for expansion.

(via economic times)

What the customer really needed…

This comic is a real classic and I can remember that it even was on a slide at the university when we had customer relationship management. This clearly is exaggerated, but to catch the customer’s need is not as easy as many people think it is… but essential. (click to enlarge it)

IKEA: Bedrooms

Ikea does a great job when it comes to online advertising. You may remember the legendary advert of their dream kitchens where one can virtually turning around the “show room” or the second one of kitchen series.

Now they launched an ad for bedrooms, where you can have an insight into various life and of course bedrooms. The bedrooms scenes are filmed in slow motion as a contrast to the hectic working day.

Meeting creatures

This entry of randsinrepose made me smile. I bookmarked it with Google Notebook a while ago… So these are the typically creatures in a meeting:

The Anchor
Slogan: “It’s all about me”

The Anchor is the big cheese. This is the person that everyone is talking to and this the person who will decide on whatever needs deciding. When this person talks, everyone in the meeting is listening.

Meetings are power struggles between those who want something and those who don’t want to give it to them. If you’re walking into a meeting and you need something, your first job is to identify this person. This person is the reason the meeting is happening and if you don’t know who they are, you’re missing essential subtext. It’s actually pretty easy. Just wait for someone to say something controversial and see who everyone looks at.

There are two major things to be wary of with your Anchor. First, make sure they know their job. For standing meetings with the usual suspects, the role is obvious, but for one-time meetings, you can’t assume The Anchor knows it’s all about them. A clear agenda which anoints The Anchor right out the gate is the best way to make sure everyone knows who the decision maker is.

Second, you’ve got to know what to do when there is no Anchor present. You’re fifteen minutes in and you know the Sr. VP who is actually going to help here is not present. Sure, there are eight other people here that sure like to talk, but the best move is a reschedule. You’re wasting time.

Laptop Larry
Slogan: “Pardon me, what?”

Larry is easy to identify. He’s got his portable in front of him. That’s him right there. If the portable isn’t somehow not enough, just look for lots of intense nodding from Larry… that’s him not listening.

Larry pisses me off. He goes to regularly scheduled meetings that he knows are going to be 75% irrelevant to him, so he brings his portable so he can work. Turns out he doesn’t work because he’s spending half his time half-listening to the meeting proceedings. Go read that last sentence again. He’s not working and he’s not really listening which means he is actually a net negative when it comes to productivity.

Ask Larry to put his portable away. I mean it. If you can’t vivaciously participate in a meeting you were invited to, you should not be there. “Rands Rands Rands… I take notes on my portable.” No, you don’t. You take notes and when I use some proper noun you don’t recognize, you surf Wikipedia. If notes must be taken, designate one person to do it, I want you asking me what the proper noun is… not consulting Wikipedia.

A useful meeting is not a speech; it’s a debate. If I’m up there flapping my lips and you disagree or don’t understand, I don’t want you to nod, I want you to yell at me.

Motorola: Sales down a third

While market leader Nokia boosted its revenues by 67% in 2007, the handset sales of Motorola dropped in 2007 by one third. This mainly due to a poor product portfolio where their two cash cows Razr and Rokr models have not been generating enough revenues anymore. Understandable for me, with their antiquated user interface compared to SonyEricsson, Nokia or Samsung… not to mention the UI of the iPhone. As a consequence the appearance of the slim Razr alone is not enough and customers change their handset preferences. Motorola now expressed its indication to develop a fresh product portfolio which is much needed!

Fiat 500 launch on the London Eye

The new Fiat 500 has been winning award after award (e.g. european car of the year 2008) for its charm and retro look as well as for its reasonable roomy and security features. Now Fiat has chosen an extraordinary place to celebrate the launch of the Fiat 500: They placed one of the vehicles into a capsule of the London Eye where it will work circuits for the next two weeks. Great idea to show the size of the car. Does anyone know how much they paid for this? Or did they just take an special package of the London Eye offers?

Vans Finger Fracture for iPhone

Okay, I am probably not the biggest iPhone fan… But Vans Finger Fracture really caught my eyes and just for applications like this one I would consider to buy one. A perfect combination of in-game advertising, entertainment and utilising fully the capabilities of the large touch screen. Unfortunately, it is still in conception state, but maybe soon available. Check out this sneak previews.

(via trendwatch)

Facebook under pressure to remove Scrabulous

Mattel has asked Facebook to remove a popular application on the site called Scrabulous.

Based on Scrabble, the word game application has been downloaded by over 2.5m Facebook users, but Mattel which owns the brand in Europe has complained to the social network of copyright infringement.

Two young developers created the application, the pair reportedly earn up to £6,500 ($13,000) in revenue from it each month.

Campaign groups to save the game have already attracted thousands of Facebook users.

(via NMA)

Data portability between social networks

Data portability aims to have an open standard which allows the user to have one profile across all the social networks like Facebook, WordPress, MySpace, del.icio.us and all the others. Dataportability.org: “As users, our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between our chosen (and trusted) tools or vendors.” Dataportability supports APML (Attention Profiling Mark-up Language), a mark-up language which compresses all our “attention data”, quasi our meta data, into one file.

From the marketers point of view, I am not quite sure about the idea of data portability because I think the big players like Facebook have huge communities and most of all the profile details of all the users. Therefore, I do not think that they want to share these details with other communities. However, it could be a new way to even better detect customer’s needs and thus customize services.

Check out this cool video about data portability:

Facebook apps

Facebook has a vast amount of applications in store… but the vast majority is useless in my opinion. But the fact that all the application come from third parties is impressing and aligns completely with the idea of Web 2.0. Nevertheless, you already have a mess on your “dashboard” (when you logged in) if you have more than 20 active friends. However, with the announcement of Google’s OpenSocial more applications will come and most of all it will be easier for developers to create applications for various social sites such as Facebook, Ning, Hi5 and more by working with one single API.

With the rapidly growing number of social apps you better keep track of SocioApps, a London based web development team working on social application mainly for Facebook but also develops for other communities by using OpenSocial.

I am now going to remove the “Which Friends Character Are You?” because I do not think that I have the character of Monica

Consumer choice on wireless devices

It is no longer a secret that 2008 will be a good year for wireless devices as they will provide a greater playground for their users. That means less restrictions, more applications, better network coverage with a higher bandwidth and better price plans to encourage the usage. Personally, I would use the mobile Internet more often if surfing would be cheaper. At the moment I am using Gmail, Gmaps, ShoZu and some news sites.

There is an interesting article on usatoday.com:
Race is on for Mobile Web’s pot of gold

Bill Gates’ Last Day at Microsoft

How could Bill Gates‘ last day at Microsoft be like? He simply asked friends to prepare him for this historic day: Brian Williams, Jay, Bono, Steven Spielberg, Jon Stuart, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Gore and more.

This video was shown at his keynote speech at the CES 2008: