BEST OF THE WEB: The tech bubble that never happened

A large portion of the tech industry has been speculating on whether a bubble is about to pop. The LinkedIn float seemed to spur on proponents of that theory, who believe that tech stocks are simply too overvalued for companies that aren’t offering much other than a large user base.

But in a new piece on TechCrunch, Sarah Lacy examines a number of theories about the current thought of a tech bubble, including the position that last week’s market crash actually saw it pop.

If a psychological bubble is when people get emotionally wrapped up in a phenomenon where wildly overvalued things seem fairly priced, this was a case where people got emotionally wrapped up in fear that prices we are seeing could be wildly overvalued.”

“We may need a new word for what we just saw. An event of widespread hysteria wailing about something that wasn’t happening that had no widespread economic repercussion. I mean something other than calling it a monster hiding under the bed,” Lacy writes.

This is a fascinating piece on one of the biggest issues in tech right now, especially for its discussion on the difference between an economic bubble and a psychological one.

Who will win the social media war?

The launch of Google+ has sparked quite a lot of debate about whether it or Facebook will survive in the long-term. And much of that has been pushed along by MySpace founder Tom Anderson, who has been writing a regular series of articles on TechCrunch about social media and in particular, the competition between these two websites.

His latest piece on whether Google+ is prompting Facebook to innovate is definitely worth reading. He puts forward that the competition is a lot more complicated than some may think.

“FB’s trouble may seem like a positive for G+, but it’s not that simple. It’s a virtual certainty that Google will launch a platform (and not just a games platform), but how they do this is critical.”

“We don’t want a repeat of Facebook’s cycle – where Facebook promised the world to developers, gave them free reign to build the hype, then cut off their marketing channels and destroyed their businesses [an oversimplification yes, but read this harrowing tale from Paul Allen] – so G+ needs to carefully balance the needs of developers with the health of the overall community.”

This is the first battle for control in social networking – it will be interesting to see where it leads.

Sending receipts online

There’s been a lot of talk lately about mobile and contactless payments, but there’s another aspect of digital shopping that hasn’t been spoken about a lot – paperless receipts.

In this new piece on the New York Times, retailers talk about how they’re ditching paper and are instead emailing customers their receipts. These are big names too – Kmart, Sears and Whole Foods among them.

Nordstrom president of direct sales Jamie Nordstrom told the publication that “as the technology has started to evolve, we saw the opportunity to create a better experience for the customer, wherever they are in a store”.

“A customer’s in a dressing room, they try on a bunch of things, they say, ‘I want to buy this and that.’ Now, we’ve got to take them out of the dressing room, wrap all that stuff at the wrap desk, use the cash register somewhere else.”

This is a trend that is definitely worth following up. If you email your customer a receipt, there’s less chance of them losing it, and that saves a lot of hassle for everyone involved.

Getting new gadgets

There’s a big problem with e-waste all across the world. With the lifecycle of gadgets falling as the rapid improvement of technology increases, concerned tech experts are warning that we need to be able to keep on to our devices a little longer before updating to the next big thing.

In a new piece on The Atlantic, Rob Walker writes that as the gadgets we discard aren’t necessarily broken, the philosophy around consumer products has changed.

“A dealer in vintage home-entertainment equipment recently convinced me that it used to be possible to buy a top-notch stereo system that really would function admirably for decades. Imagine, by contrast, that tomorrow some company unveiled a cell phone guaranteed to last for 20 years. Who would genuinely want it? It’s not our devices that wear thin; it’s our patience with them,” Walker writes.

But as Walker points out, those products are then available for people to buy at a lower cost.