Wonga this

In the middle of an economic crisis that has certainly taken its toll, one would think that investors would be extremely cautious on where they put their money... well, an "interesting" company called Wonga.com just got a $22 M second round of funding... and Wonga's business? Simlplified, transparent, short term lending at "2689% APR", consituting what they call "responsible lending". The VCs investing in it are not small names - Balderton Capital, Greylock Ventures, Accel Partners and Dawn Capital - that does give one plenty of food for thought.

Whether wonga.com turns out to be a giant online "payday" loan provider, or just another way of encouraging people to live outside of their means (live for the present, they say) - or is it going to replace the pals, the parents and the grandma - the typical sources people tend to borrow money from?

While wonga did success in getting a big round of funding, Umair Haque calls this the "Worst Business Model in the world" - he does outline in his article; he goes on to say that their Wonga is an investment that is bankrupt in the economic, strategic, competitive and ethical scheme of things. I was particularly tickled by the other proposed investments including this one:
"A global marketplace for people to sell their organs. It's like eBay meets ER"

Interesting things to think about... meanwhile, wonga this, I mean, enjoy this :)...

App Store changes everything???

With all the (justified) hype around the runaway success of app store (for Apple, and a few of the app store developers, anyways), it seems that all the other Mobile OS vendors/ handset manufacturers are following suit (see link). Nokia launched their "Ovi" store, Microsoft is really repurposing its storefront to be the "Windows Marketplace", Android marketplace will now have paid apps, Palm is doing some stuff, as is RIMM with the Blackberry store ... heck, even Samsung is doing something here.

From the vendors point of view, the key question is whether their app store business models will prove to be sustainable enough to a) support the investment and b) foster customer loyalty. Since Apple does have a vertically integrated strategy, I believe that there will be room for 2-3 other vendors, which means there will be some consolidation similar to what happened on OS platforms.

From a software developer's or apps provider's perspective, I think we will see something the same set of developers developing and porting their apps to the different platforms - initially, those will mean complete re-writes of these apps... in time, there will be more standardization. The viability of many of these apps is still debatable, given the infancy of the model (see Letter to Steve) - more standardization on the platform side will definitely help.

One other impact that the app store model might well have is on the PC - does this mean that we will have an iTunes for all Software that we use on our PCs? The micro-payment infrastructure might actually help traditional software app providers to re-think everything....

Hopefully this is some food of thought for you... as you try to digest this, here is something on a lighter note (my contribution to Dilbert.com and the corporate world)...