Simulacra and Simulations on a Friday.

So I've been finishing up some very exciting accounting and legal docs. Mixed in with meeting with and working on existing enterprise clients, brainstoring/slacking with new ones, and twittering, movie watching and exercise. Just found out it's a long weekend in Melbourne, not sure what for ?, and this highlights another difference b/w startups and corporate : In your own business, you don't track public holidays. Upon finishing my "group (accounting/legal) assignment" I've been greadering the following links :

Yahoo Answer's neat new social networking features for Answers; "As you go through life, you quickly figure out who’s full of beans and whose advice is worth taking." (while Friendster is trying to patent social networking itself) TechCrunch also explore their updated MyYahoo RSS Reader, which was the first Web2 product I used and why I got into RSS. The IP Address part of this in prefilled content selection is very interesting, wonder what it is presenting downunder : "Instead of presenting a default set of content to new users to start them off, My Yahoo is now analyzing known data about the user (zip code from IP address and the areas of Yahoo that the user visits often) to create a customized version right at signup. So, for example, if the user tends to go to the Yahoo Movies property occasionally, a Yahoo Movies module will be auto added when they create a new My Yahoo account."

"If you say, I love you, then you have already fallen in love with language, which is already a form of break up and infidelity."
Jean Baudrillard

I love hyperlocal and been spending time looking at how structured blogs, mapping and high value verticals can play out. It's not just listings mashups, reviews and events that mapsmeets blogs are useful for. Platial gets Kleiner dough to explore; "The traveler in me has always liked maps. So, I've got a soft spot for Platial, an online mapping startup that enables its users to collaborate and converse about map-based projects." (their site here : i also have always like plazes and wayfaring btw)

“You need an infinite stretch of time ahead of you to start to think, infinite energy to make the smallest decision. The world is getting denser. The immense number of useless projects is bewildering. Too many things have to be put in to balance up an uncertain scale. You can't disappear anymore. You die in a state of total indecision.” Jean Baudrillard quote

Sex phone business on Skype ? I can see that working, will it keep Ebay happy though ? Nick Starr explores : "Want to run your own phone sex business? Maybe you are using it for something legitimate like…well who knows, but in the same line as the old 976 numbers, you can now charge for inbound Skype calls."

“The cities of the world are concentric, isomorphic, synchronic. Only one exists and you are always in the same one. It's the effect of their permanent revolution, their intense circulation, their instantaneous magnetism." - Jean Baudrillard quote

MyIphone is saying the iPhone will/may ? work with JaJah which is pretty kewl if true : "There was a lot of buzz surrounding the announcement that JAJAH VoIP will work with the iPhone... If you are making calls within their Free Global Calling network, you are not charged at all. There are two different networks; The first set of countries that this applies to are: the US, Canada, China, Hong Kong and Singapore. The second includes Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and most other European nations. This still raises the question of how JAJAH will actually help you save money. One way is on international calls; if you are calling someone in another country that is in your Free Global Calling network you will only be charged for a regular local call." (Lindsay Lohan has upgraded to the blackberry 8800 i want if it ever comes to this remote island.. i cant see how iphone will be a killer email/twitter device without qwerty board) Others are talking about what Apple should do with $12B. To VC or not 2VC that is the question...

Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.
Jean Baudrillard

The Future of Leisure Never Arrived according to NYT. (and Baudrillard died, wow, the postmodern pioneer, more readable than others, yet still not really readable) Well it's a long weekend here, so we'll just have to disprove that, even if they end up proving their point. It's not like this is work anyway ? Just as long as one doesn't have to do accounting day in day out. "If I loved accounting so much, I would have majored in it at uni."

“What I’m going to write will have less and less chance of being understood,” he said, “but that’s my problem.”

"Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.."
Simulacra and Simulations, Jean Baudrillard RIP