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Admin
Is it any coincidence, that the ‘managers’ of the economy had done the same thing?
Oh btw, FIRST!!
Admin
A 'virtual' story?
I had a boss once who would often say, "Anything is possible - with a sense of humor and a checkbook"Admin
this one's a bit boring, guys. it's not a wtf, it's how management works.
oh, and.. THRID!!!
Admin
Virtual Current Exchange....like, ocean currents?
We must get our technology advisors on this idea and monetize off it.
Admin
FIFTH!
Admin
Classic Sixth!
Admin
How management "works" isn't a WTF? You're kidding, right?
This is a total WTF. It just happens to be one we've seen hundreds of times in scores of different guises.
If you've been in the business for 5 years or more and DON'T have a story like this of your own, consider yourself very lucky.
Admin
Decent story I suppose, although I was hoping for the system to get off the ground and then spectacularly crash when inevitably the corporate card ran into an issue
Admin
The (mis)management story that I ran across a while back that gave me a chuckle:
http://www.weldreality.com/ehauststraighpole.htm
Disclaimer: I am more closely related to the welding/fabrication business than the IT business, so this story may not actually make sense to someone else.
/I'll go ahead and say TRWTF is the guys website.
Admin
Yeah, that Virtual Currency Exchange called PayPal sure is sucking....
To bad the company scrapped the project--it might be nice to be able to book travel at a site that didn't require my credit card.
Admin
Admin
6x6x6 Rubik’s cube: http://www.olympicube.com/pr_6.php
Admin
(You know what else would be convenient? Using your CueCat to visit the Beenz site.)
Admin
I enjoyed this guys story, but I have to wonder why he thinks this kind of thing could only happen in America?
Admin
It's enterprise software. You can never have too many features, layers of abstraction, virtual things, or middlemen in enterprise software.
By the way, I still have a CueCat. Does it work on Web 2.0 websites?
Admin
Paypal is NOT NOT NOT a virtual currency exchange. It is a service to e-businesses...especially ones like ebay shops, and small businesses that cannot afford the overhead of providing every imaginable payment method to a customer.
They provide transactions in real time, without any contrived monetary exchange system. That is like mixing up the credit card reader at Home Depot for a currency exchange.
And as far as the travel booking sans credit card...keep dreaming. As sure as the sun rises, you will need a credit card to travel anywhere these days. And even if you didn't I'm sure that a virtual currency exchange wouldn't be the answer. There's a reason they were gone with the likes of NetGrocer and WebVan. It's contrived, it's inconvenient, it's counter-intuitive...and it there are a million easier ways to solve the presented problem.
Admin
First thing I would have done if I used these guys would be to raid the mini bar and wash down a $15 bag of peanuts with those little $20 bottles of scotch. Nice little system they have there.
Admin
Admin
Is that why it takes them four to six days (real time eh?) to actually transfer money from my account, while Home Depot can do it in a half hour or less? And if they don't do any sort of monetary exchange, why was I able to pay one ebay seller 4.99 GBP and another 25 AUD the other day, while transferring USD from my bank account?
Admin
"consumers were perfectly content with using real money for online transactions. That meant credit cards"
credit cards = real money?
Admin
"credit cards = real money?"
Careful with the sarcasm. People will look for any reason to believe it's not.
Admin
Card processors are at least regulated. I don't know what the hell Paypal is.
Admin
"...There is no wealth, just representations of wealth..."
I am very conservative with my money which is why I'd never buy into enterprise software unless i was the one coding it :-)
There are enteprise stories like this about everyday, we know that. The "entprise solution" vendor promises their software will fix or automate everything but what is funny to me is the smaller companies that follow that fix/patch the orignal software to make it what it should have been. For a fee of course.
Admin
None of that makes them a virtual currency exchange. The same thing is accomplished when you use a CC machine at the store. Any store in the world, and the Credit Card company handles the currency exchange.
I don't think you're clear on what a virtual currency exchange is in this context. In the literal sense of the words, sure...paypal is an exchange of currency, in the virtual world. But there are some big differences between that and what is being referred to in this article. The latter business model was destroyed with the bubble.
If you want to split hairs all day, I'm sure there are plenty of people around here who'd be more than happy to humor you.
My point is that comparing paypal to the concept in today's WTF is comparing apples to baby wolverines.
And "real time" may not have been the best descriptor, I was getting at the fact that you are exchanging money, not credits, through paypal.
Admin
Because only in America can you be as dumb as you want to be and still get ahead.
Admin
They are both really tasty in a pie.. er i mean... nevermind. Poo.
Admin
I don't know if Paypal is virtual currency or not. What I do know is Paypal acts exactly like an online bank except that they swear up and down they're not a bank. In order to use their service, you have to agree as part of the TOS that they are not a bank.
Wtf is "virtual currency" anyway? Money is already pretty darn virtual these days. Every time you incure a debt to a credit card company and don't pay it off at the end of the month, new "money" is created through the debt that you owe to the cc company.
It's probably a Good Thing(tm) that the dot-com 'sploded when it did taking with it the VCE. Otherwise it would just be one more thing dragging the economy down right now along with credit default swaps and Mortgage Backed (in)Securities.
-- Furry cows moo and decompress.
Admin
Don't forget that PayPal merged with X.com early on. X.com was a marvelous real .com bank with some insane .com-era deals (like a free S&P-tracking mutual fund; I made back enough to break even on all my inevitable overdraft fees in my college days). Whichever company was healthier or had better systems, PayPal got an important boost to its credibility by association with a Real Actual Bank Doing Banking Stuff With Regular Currency at an important point in its growth.
Of course, soon after, they killed the X.com banking business because the PayPal business was far more profitable with none of the downsides of being an actual bank. [All X.com accountholders were swept into being PayPal users during the merge, adding at least a bit to PayPal's critical mass.]
Admin
In defense of the CTE, paying for hotel rooms with promo-bux is a lot more reasonable than my dot-com employer's strategy, which involved installing video-on-demand in agricultural combines.
I wish I was making this up.
Admin
Admin
Did you work for a p0*n startup???
Admin
I would so love to see that business plan; seems you could get 95% of the impact with dish network and a tracking satellite dish. (assuming that farmers actually want to watch HBO in the field).
Admin
credit cards = real money?
Well, virtually
Admin
A typical use case was where a group of people go out to lunch together and one person pays the bill. The others could then pull out their PDA's and perform a virtual currency transfers from their PayPal accounts to the account of the bill payer, which would be executed the next time they synched their PDA's (not much WiFi availability back then.) Each person would add virtual credit to their accounts with their own credit cards, etc.
Admin
Admin
The part of this that has had me scratching my head since I first read it is this: Reserve a hotel room through travelocity or equivalent. You pay them directly. When you get to the hotel, they ask you for a credit card to cover any incidentals (but don't charge you for the room which you already paid for). I don't know how long hotels have had this capability, but I think I first experienced it ca. 2000. I suspect that hotels have been doing similar things for a long time.
Admin
Another reason you have to use credit cards for travel is it's a form of identify verification. Skynet likes knowing where you are all the time.
Admin
I would find the whole story funny had I not personally worked on a similar website for a long, long time.
The idea was very similar: build one huge website that incorporated data from all the other traveling sites out there, and to make it better, allow hotels and alike to signup as well.
Of course, having a dozen other traveling sites out there signed up meant that making a reservation had to go trough their reservation interface. If you think PayPal is a hassle, imagine implementing about 50 different API's and keeping them up-to-date.
To make matters worse, the directors had the same brilliant idea about virtual money and wanted to charge users directly, then pay the intervening companies (like booking.com or Maintrack) who in turn would pay the hotels. Or traveling agencies which would then pay the hotels.
With me so far?
Neither was the company - it went bankrupt shortly after the site was deliverd. As did the company I worked for shortly thereafter, having grocely underestimated the amount of work it would be to implement dozens of different interfaces and keep them all bugfree and working.
Admin
An institution that just does one of these, but not the other is, by definition, not a bank.
Admin
Admin
Most hotels don't require the CC though, they just suggest it and will often block incidentals like room service or pay-per-views without one. You're still free to raid the mini-bar and then the hotel is stuck chasing you down for a $50 bill.
Admin
Just to point out, PayPal "was" an e-money issuer (as regulated by the FSA in europe) for a very long time. You pay using your credit/debit card or bank account, which actually buys "e-money", they seamlessly transfer this e-money to your recipient, who then converts it back to real money when they withdraw. So it is exactly the same as the case in today's WTF (at least in europe).
However, PayPal is "now" a bank, so I'm not totally sure how they operate. I suspect they have an account for each user and all the AML and regulation stuff that goes with it. The reason? an e-money licence restricts you to certain types of business (e.g. you can't provide credit). I suspect PayPal wants to make money by upselling, exactly how the banks do.
Admin
Oh yeah, read the article on the same site about the chinese olympic stadium. That's just scary (there is a link from the text on his homepage).
Admin
Admin
It's probably a good thing the bubble burst before they could implement this, once users realised that upcharges would end up on the agency's corporate account rather than the card they supplied the whole system would only have lasted until the next billing cycle. Effectively the agency was acting as a financial guarantor for every customer who booked with them... ugh. You'd have to have been insane to approve this design.
Admin