Malletrivia

My plan for becoming an Internet billionaire

I have come up with a Web 2.0 company that I believe will catapult me into the ranks of fabled technology entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Brin and Page etc.

Now, the first thing you have to figure out when starting one of these companies is what you're going to call it. Ideally, it'll be a hip, edgy, short name, like a word that's been written by somebody used to automatic spellchecking who has suddenly been deprived of that crutch. Flickr, Tumblr, Crp, that sort of thing. Alternatively, you can combine two [or more] words that contain fragments like "ix", "ytics" etc, and suggest, in some vague but oddly convincing way, that your company does Really Complicated Stuff That Requires Advanced Technology (TM).

In that spirit, I present to you: Bananalytics !

Bananalytics will cater to an audience that wants, nay, needs, deep insight and access to the bananasphere: the global, constantly-evolving and growing network of banana-related information. That's a huge, heretofore-underserved audience, and includes key demographics like ... monkeys. And baby-food makers.

Bananalytics will provide multiple lenses on the bananasphere, via a specialized search engine, a real-time high-density data feed, and a user-generated list of the most relevant banana-related content.

We will generate a rich, searchable index of all banana-related content on the Internet by sending out web monkeys [a proprietary version of the more conventional web crawler], that will swing from hyperlink to hyperlink, returning with bunches of delicious banana-focused pages to index.

Bananalytics will also work with major suppliers to embed sensors in each banana that will detect when a banana has been eaten. This will allow us to generate a real-time data feed that will piped to "lifestreaming" services like Twitter, Jaiku and the Facebook newsfeed: "Alex has just eaten a banana."

No Web 2.0 company is complete without user-generated content. Our website will contain a constantly-updated stream of user-generated banana-related news. To make it easy for users to submit stories, we will supply a web gadget that content providers can embed on their banana-related news stories, blog posts etc. Readers will be able to click on this "Bananalyze this !" widget and thereby cause the tagged content to be submitted to our proprietary Bananalgorithm ranking engine, which will choose the stories displayed on our homepage.

Since web users are now accustomed to getting everything for free, Bananalytics' main source of revenue is expected to be ads. We expect that advertisers like Dole, Chiquita, and the makers of non-slip flooring ["Never slip on a banana peel again !"], will realize the unique access to banana-minded people provided by our service, and be willing to shell out oodles of cash.

The domain bananalytics.com is unfortunately already taken, but I'm sure I can buy it for a few Bananalytics stock options. After all, who could resist the chance to get in on the ground floor of a rocket ship that's about to take off ?

To summarize it in the words of Gwen Stefani:

Let me hear you say, this sh!t is bananas
B-A-N-A-N-A-S
this sh!t is bananas
B-A-N-A-N-A-S
Again, this sh!t is bananas
B-A-N-A-N-A-S

... and so on.

Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia: you know you want in. Term sheet offers may be submitted to Bananas.About.Bananas@bananalytics.com. Special consideration will be given to offers submitted on, with, or by, a banana.

An inconvenient form of payment

There's a news story making the rounds in the local media about a local congressman's trip to Iraq supposedly being financed by Saddam Hussein. Ignoring all the non-essential fluff and diving straight to the heart of the story, here's the bit that I find the most intriguing:

"The indictment says Al-Hanooti received 2 million barrels of Iraq's oil as payment for his services"

Now, how exactly would one turn that sort of payment into cash ? It's not like you can just call up Exxon and say "Hey, I have 2 million barrels of oil, you interested ?" and not get asked a lot of potentially awkward questions [at least I assume you can't ...]. And I suspect that an offer to sell 2 million barrels of oil on Ebay, that fine disintermediating marketplace, would also lead to some scrutiny and headscratching.

Maybe this is the equivalent of being paid in Ningis, from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

"The Ningi [is] a triangular rubber coin six thousand eight hundred miles along each side. It is valued at the rate of eight Ningis to one Triganic Pu, but thanks to the Ningi's immense size (almost twice as wide as the Earth's equatorial radius), it is more-or-less impossible to collect enough to own one pu."

I hope somebody does a follow-up story on how/whether Al-Hanooti spent his payment.