:: Sense - The Way I Sense ::

Aah, Din’t take long for youtube to be snapped up for a staggering $1.6 Billion. Sometimes, am wondering if Google’s buying out companies to justify it sitting on huge piles of cash. But a look at the finer details reveals its an all-stock transaction. Well, yeah, it’s a free world and sometimes insanity comes with such fat tags attached

Considering the funny markets I track at work (electronic markets, in case ya missed it), I have been watching the development of the Sem India project with more than a bit of interest and excitement. With the Govt’s much awaited Semiconductor policy yet to take any shape whatsover, and the Govt having successfully scared other potential fab-starters what with their overbearing bias to the Sem India project, it remains to be seen if it is going to be one of those areas that India needs to sit back and watch how the Indian consumer becomes one of the biggest markets for imported chips ! Of course, for the record an assembly and testing facility is in the works at the fab city, again driving the image that labor costs are what drives companies to set up shop here . Came across this case study from Thunderbird on site selection for Fab companies, with Intel as the case in point. You can check it out here (PDF). In the meanwhile, if ya know anyone who’s hiring at Sem India, do let me in on that

Sometimes it really takes just a single site to prove that insanity has come to rule the online roost again. Take a look at a site called Weblo that was launched a few days back. This site allows one to buy, yes-for real $$$, any and every piece of real estate that they wanted to buy in the real world, but couldn’t afford it ! Essentially, you could buy cities, states, countries, the whole monty ! Same goes with domains and believe it or not, with celebrities ! You could have ads on each of your properties, and make money off them, and when you believe market is ripe, even go sell them or auction ‘em off, true ebay style ! Now, I am a big enough fan of board games and the like, but to take the whole concept of a board game, extrapolate it globally and throwing in real cash…Hmm…More than a bit disconcerting…To me, more than anything else, it brings up the legal issues that are likely to come up ! Say, I own Harry Potter (the character) and google.com, and make money out of both these, why should they sit idle? But having said that, this has the potential to go insanely viral and build up volumes quite fast ! And which is what I believe the site owners are targetting at. Make a critical user-base, monetise the site from day-one, and hope to be bought out before they are sued left-right-center. And all of a sudden, Mark Cuban’s comments on Youtube seem to be applicable to a whole host of sites