A case study of BidRivals.com

Today I came across a website called BidRivals (www.bidrivals.com). I consider their's to be one of the most cunning business plans ever.

Let me explain their business model first. So the home-page displays some 16 products. Some products right now are a PS3 slim 120 GB, Nokia N97 unlocked, Canon T1I. This is an auction site. So each product starts with a minimum price of 1 cent and with every bid that you make, the price goes up by another cent. There is a timer which starts counting down from 15 seconds once a bid is made. If at 0, no one outbids you, the product is yours. Simple, right? No potential for evil here, right? Wrong!

Let me give you outcomes of some recent bids - an Iomega 2 TB HD sold for $1.26, and iPod nano 16 GB sold for $1.63, a blu-ray disk player for $1.12. Surely this is a hoax, you tell me. No one sells an iPod for less that 2 dollars. What if I tell you it isn't? And that this is a perfectly legitimate website and if you were the person who bid for 1.63, then you will definitely get the iPod. In fact, I think the company would at that point be willing to give you the iPod for free.

To explain why, let me present the Canon T1I worth $900 on sale right now. I have been observing the bidding for the last 60 minutes. When I started observing the bid was for 17.46 dollars. I said what? No way! A T1I for 18 dollars? Where is the bidding button. I want to register. And then I googled a bit, analyzed the data a bit. And started writing this blog post. And I have not even bid for the camera, yet.

So what makes the whole process evil is that you have to buy bids. Yup. Each bid costs you 60 cents. That's all. If Alice made the winning bid for the T1I at 17.46, that would have cost her 17.46+0.60 for the bid. But this is where the fun part begins. Because Alice is not the only person bidding. So every time Alice bids, someone else has 15 seconds to outbid you. So after Alice bids, Bob comes into the picture. Sees the price as 17.46 and outbids Alice. Price become 17.47. The price went up by 1 cent, but Evil Co. pocketed 60 cents. This goes on and on, Cal joins in, followed by David, Ethan, Alice decides to bid again and you get the picture.

The T1I is at 22.37 right now. Which means 2236 bids have been made on the product. Evil Co. has made $1341.6. In the past 60 minutes, there have been 490 bids = $294. There are 16 products on the home page and the same pattern is being repeated everywhere. So $4704 per hour. Say I am wrong by 50% in my calculations, that makes it $2352 per hour. Or close to 20 MILLION dollars in 1 year. There is more. This is just the US website. They have 18 websites for different countries, each with different products. Say each country earns them 10% less than the previous, that is still 170 MILLION(!) dollars. Even if this company lasts for a year, the founders will have made enough to last many generations.

So the question to ask is - should such a company be allowed to run? It is not much different from gambling. Or from insurance companies. Yet we consider the first to be evil, the second to be good.

While you think that, I will go back to bidrivals.com and wait for that perfect moment to spend the 1 free bid I got for joining on my DSLR. Who knows? I may get it for $50 (a 94% discount for me, a 233% profit for the company). Now isn't that a win-win situation!

Remove those annoying quiz messages from your Facebook Homepage

Hello all. After months of tolerating those annoying quizzes, then blocking them left-right-centre, blocking people from my notifications and then giving up and then starting the process all over again, I finally decided to do something about them today. Wonder why I didn't think of this some time back. Laziness has its disadvantages too.

So here's what you must do to remove those quizzes, tests, and other annoying apps from your notifications once and for all* (* more about that later in the post).

1. Start using Firefox. If you are still using Internet Explorer then, well, you are an idiot to say the least. The previous comment is directed to people who know what Internet Explorer is. For those who don't here's a brief explanation. Things like Google, Facebook, Yahoo are called websites and need a web-browser to display them on your computer. Internet Explorer (IE) is the browser that comes installed with your computer. Microsoft is the company that makes IE. Firefox is another browser. It is free, and it is much better and faster that IE. But most importantly, given our frustration over those silly quiz notifications, Firefox allows you to add small programs (called ad-ons) to your browser. These programs will enhance your experience on the web. For example, there is an ad-on which will remove all ads from most of the pages you browse. Yes! No more ads flashing up on your screen when you visit CNN-IBN's website. So given this background, time has come for you to download Firefox. Go here and on the "Download Firefox" button on that page.
2. Now that you have installed Firefox (now referred to as FF) (congratulations! btw (which means by the way btw)), you need to install one of those ad-ons I was talking about in the previous point. The one that you need to remove those intensely moronic quiz notifications (don't forget our main goal now) is called Greasemonkey. Now what Greasemonkey does is to allow you to install small useful tools which will read the webpage that you have loaded and make small changes to them (like removing those at (most) times racist, sexist, downright irritating quiz notifications from your notifications!). So what you need to do is to go here, and press the add to firefox button. After a few seconds there will be an alert asking you if you want to install Greasemonkey and like all things that you usually agree to without reading the text completely, you will press install. Greasemonkey (GM from now... yeah you are getting the hang of these abbreviations already) will be installed, it will ask you to restart FF, which you will and voila! GM is installed.
   
3. I have rid myself of IE, installed GM in FF, what next? you ask. Well, just one more step. You are now going to install one of those tiny tools to remove notifications using Greasemonkey. This tool (called script in computer lingo) has been written by a guy called Stephen Fernandez. If I can meet you right now Stephen, I would hug you and start crying. You are amazing. So this tool is called (very aptly) Facebook Purity. As he (SF) describes it

   If you are like me and are sick to death of seeing messages about quiz results and other silly facebook applications, then you have come to the right place!

   So now all you have to do is to click here. As usual click on install once you are asked for confirmation and let FB Purity install itself. It may ask you to restart Firefox. But worry not - all your open web-sites will be loaded back after the restart.
   
4. That's it! Nothing more to do. Just visit Facebook and those notifications are gone. Start dancing with joy.

Now to deal with that * and explain you how Facebook Purity works. Spoiler - some technical jargon here which I will not explain.

From what I understand, and I don't understand Javascript too well, is that the script calls an event once the notifications are loaded. First thing it does is to add a counter on the right-side panel of the Facebook homepage which keeps a count of the number of applications hidden from your feed and gives you an option to see them. Then it goes through each notification and hides all notifications from Facebook Third Party applications keeping only native Facebook apps like status updates, wall posts, links, notes, photos, etc. thus 'purifying' Facebook. How it performs this magic is by identifying all notifications with facebook.com/apps/ hidden in the code. That's it. Those bloody quizzes are gone.

The only caveat is that Facebook may change their homepage design anytime. This script totally depends on how FB names various blocks in their homepage and so can be broken very easily. The good news is that the developer seems to be active and constantly working to keep the script updated with FB homepage changes. According to him, the link I gave you in point 3 will always point to the latest script. So in case it stops working, just click on that link again. So please bookmark this post for future reference.

That's all for now folks. Hope you are able to remove the notifications and make your FB experience much cleaner and better.

Making a case for Binary Surveys

Do you like this blog?

Isn't that a easier question to answer than a question like "How would you rate my blog on a scale of 0-10?"

Am I not bound to get more truthful and accurate answer with the first question? After all, our minds can easily distinguish whether we like things or not, but it is very difficult to quantify your liking/disliking for something.

If I have 100 people taking a survey and then rating it 0/1, I can still come up with a 0-10 figure in the end by just taking a mean of the answers and multiplying by 10. Would that figure be any less or any more accurate than an average derived from making people give a 0-10 answer?

Feeding a 0-10 answer obtained by averaging 0/1 answers into a larger calculation might still work, but I think the basic inputs should always be binary.

Airtel's new "fair use" unlimited broadband policy

Airtel has introduced a new "fair use" clause which entitles them to curb your download speed if you exceed a certain threshold of data transfer per month.

Here are the thresholds for respective unlimited download plans:

128 kbps = 10 GB download limit per month
256 kbps = 15 GB download limit per month
384 kbps = 20 GB download limit per month
512 kbps = 25 GB download limit per month
1 Mbps = 150 GB download limit per month

After you reach this threshold, Airtel will halve your download speed keeping the unlimited data limit intact.

Suppose you are on a 256 kbps plan. This means that you should be able to download 256/8 = 32 kilo bytes of data every second = 2700 mega bytes of data every day.

The revised policy means that if you are downloading continuously, then you will reach the threshold after 5.69 days. After this you will get a speed of 128 kbps for the remaing 24.31 days. Which means that instead of the 65637 MB of data that you could have downloaded in the remaining period, now you will only be able to download 32818 MB.

So in all theoretical limit before threshold = 65637 + 15360 = 80997 MB
Theoretical limit after threshold = 48178 MB = reduction of 32819 MB or a whopping 40.51%

So you end up paying the same amount every month, but at a reduction of 40.51% of the service that they give you in return.

So all of you who are on Airtel's unlimited plan, please calculate how much internet you use every month. If it is more than the limit above, do get out of Airtel as fast as you can. For all those who are not reaching the above limits, consider going for another plan with limit data downloads, but higher speed, as you are not using your internet optimally anyway.

I think BSNL's Dataone should be a safe bet now. I have had Dataone for many years now, and have not had any major issues with it's connectivity. And they are less likely to throw bombshells like the one Airtel has thrown at it's loyal unlimited internet customer base.

Back once again.

Wow! A lot of time has passed since my last post! 

Here's a brief update of what all I've been up to since then:

July - Trip to Egypt for Wikimania 2009. Shifted to Bangalore to join Motorola

August - Settling in job. Made awesome friends! Trip to Madurai to meet Aloka during Rakshabandhan. Trip to Mysore. Settling down in Bangalore. Starting to love the place.

September - Starting to get the knack of things at work. Robbery!! at home. Laptop and camera get stolen. Bangalore not so great after all.

October - First trip to Ahmedabad after coming here. Feels good to sleep in a double bed. 

November - Work gets really hectic. Trip to Kabini river lodge with family for Diwali. Drive alone to Vellore to meet Mami.

December - First project deadline at work. Start working really late (as in 2 am). End of year trip to Ahmedabad for 13 days. Caught up with a lot of old friends. Nostalgia time.

January - Back to Bangalore. Last days of chilly winter here. Start working on new release at work. 

February - Birthday!! Get new laptop from Thammu uncle. Back to blogging (I hope)