crisis

Leading venture capitalists are inciting Silicon Valley companies to switch to survival tactics. Om Malik on GigaOm writes that

Sequoia Capital, arguably the smartest venture capital investor in business, is sounding the alarm and asking its portfolio companies to buckle down for what could be the worst economic downturn of their relatively short lives.

GigaOm is not the only one to report these developments. Mike Arrington at TechCrunch reports that angel investor Ron Conway, who has backed start-ups such as Google, sent a letter to his portfolio companies suggesting they lower their burn rates.

Are the prospects for the Valley, for web2.0 and virtual worlds companies gloomy?

My social web life seems to go down the drain because of the banking crisis, which makes me work day and night covering the endless stories of banks going bust, regulators and politicians scrambling to save them, the doom and gloom spreading and making consumers and investors extremely nervous.

It makes me aware of the fact that connectedness has its idealistic, hopeful face, like one can experience in the online Connectivism course but also a more ugly face, of spammers, griefers, online communities which seem to deal in hatred and stupidity.

Relating this to virtual worlds, I think there are some interesting similarities between banking, society at large and virtual worlds and communities.