I’m playing Virtonomics, an online business game. Here I’ll report every now and then on my proceedings

In my previous post I had some growing pains.

Stable money stream

After nearly going bankrupt, described in my previous posting I worked hard to get a stable situation going on. I might not always be around to micromanage every aspect ( some traveling needs to be done sometimes ) so with my warehouses and factories I wanted to get to a point where they would almost run automatically, me only needed every few other turns to fix the supply stream on one or two points. This can by now be considered almost done

Economics of scarcity

In Virtonomics certain companies (mostly raw material companies like mines, farms etc) can only be bought with ‘real’ money, converted into virts in the game. This means that only a select amount of people will be controlling these; the ones willing to pay for an online game (and the more addicted). The effect of this – interestingly – is clearly visible in the economic model.

In stores it’s not a such a price competition in most product, but more the battle who can fix the most supplies at the best price/quality in order to retail profitably. This is where warehousing comes in handy. Usually I now have 4-5 times the amount of contracts standing out than what I would need on any turn. In case one factory or the other might ship something at a good price.

It shows more in my factory business. The underwear division had major problems getting the daily shipload of raw materials in order to produce. Not producing is losing money and thus losing ground so you need to accept almost any offer. That’s where the power of the raw material producers come in.

Other trends

Since last report the turnover more or less ten-folded. Due to a lot of expansion, pushing most of my factories to 5000 workers and opening a few new stores.

Norway revenues indeed became a fraction of what they were due to severe competition both in price and quality. Now it’s on par with the stores around Turkey, amounting a small amount to the profits but functioning more importantly as stable sales outlet for my factories.

And I’m waiting again for my stats to increase so I can support even bigger factories and more personnel.

Signed from the boardroom,

CEO of Calaeyosis business prospects ltd

I’m using Aircrack-ng on my travels to reap the benefits of lingering wifi connections abound. Airodump-ng is a nifty tool for checking the exact strength of open connections instead of the vague indicator Ubuntu has.

The big problem I’m having the last months somewhere since a new Linux version came out: it’s not working anymore!

This is caused by some kind of bug in most network drivers or aircrack itself. Whatever. Most online solutions include compiling stuff into your kernel.

As a traveler I’m both very dependent on my netbook and I usually don’t have much time or opportunity to figure out complicated linux stuff on bad and slow connections so I want a fail-safe solution. Not something that might kill my netbook/wireless driver and me needed to figure that stuff out in an internet cafe of the sorts.

After a gazillion hour or searching for something that would be easy to do I stumbled onto the solution below. It works for my Ubuntu and maybe I can save some searcher as clueless as me about this problem some time.

sudo apt-get remove –purge aircrack-ng
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
sudo apt-get install subversion
cd ~
mkdir aircrack-ng
svn co http://trac.aircrack-ng.org/svn/trunk/ aircrack-ng
cd aircrack-ng
sudo make unstable=true install

You just have to add this option : “–ignore-negative-one” at the end of aireplay command

I’m playing Virtonomics, an online business game. Here I’ll report every now and then on my proceedings

In my previous post I went to expand into Norway.

Expansion

With the steep profits I’m making in Norway I’m able to invest in two big warehouses in Lithuania together with a few laboraties to invent my technologies. I’ve guessed right that with time passing more players would go into Norway setting something off that looks like a price war. And thus happened. Margins are still high and stable, but not what they were before.

Warehousing

With the warehouses in place I can start building a solid stream of supply without having to click through 9 shops individually to change suppliers when others are better or simply stop delivering. This helps saving a lot of time, better spend on the expansion

Nearly bankrupt

Do not underestimate the incredible investments sometimes needed to make a factory work! After building an underwear factory the startup losses where so big I lost a staggering 16 million in one turn – three times my weekly profit – and almost sent the whole thing down. Solution was to put the factory in holiday mode (nothing gets done, nothing costs ) and wait for some more funds to get around.

Stabile

For now the company is stable and slowly I’m working on advanced qualifications ( sort of leveling system ) and expanding my current factories and shops to places way bigger. From 400 to 5000 employees per facility. And of course building a buffer to prevent heavy fluctuations in the future.

Signed from the boardroom,

CEO of Calaeyosis business prospects ltd

I’m playing Virtonomics, an online business game. Here I’ll report every now and then on my proceedings

In my previous post I explained why I restarted. Read how I build a base for Turkey and stormed a new emerging market with 2000% margins – Norway

After my first company burned in inefficiency hell I decided to take things more slowly. Not hiring hundreds of employees at once and over-investing but building slowly to my clothing and retail kingdom.

I focused for a bit on the Turkey market opening in total 3 stores in the market of clothing and groceries. Slowly growing I bounce around profit and loss every turn, because every increase in purchasing causes a small loss the day next ( buying more than selling ) and after that a higher turnover – and profit.

Slow but steady rise in value

A week lingering around Turkey, the bosses of Virtonomics decide to add a whole new country to the game, creating a new fishing industry. Exciting! I decided to enter the country before it becomes swamped with other competitors and this turns out to be a golden move. The turkey market is alright with profit margins around the 30% but the prices are sharp and besides I have a supply problem since suppliers with good quality and prices keep running out of stock, don’t deliver or cancel the contracts.

Profiteering like a proud Ferengi

On the other hand in Norway a good shirt costs more than gold, because not a lot of competitors entered the market yet. For instance in Ankara I have about 100 other stores selling shirts, which would go for anything between $200 and $400. In Norway I’m one of 3-4 selling the same shirt for more than $2000 with no big difference in the supply prices.

The Norway market is more cut-throat in the sense of quality. While the prices stay high though it’s a sound investment cashing out on more expensive quality stuff.

In other news, the company is expanding to Baltic Lithuania for research options, my current lab is still busy doing secret stuff and I’m slowly expanding factory output. Lot’s of investments to go, but the sky looks bright for future business.

Signed from the boardroom,

CEO of Calaeyosis business prospects ltd

Lately I have been surfing a lot of those connections with my Asus EEE pc and that’s when you notice how annoying it can be some websites don’t take this group of consumers in thought when they design their websites. Some simple tips to avoid common pitfalls. This will increase the happiness visitors feel when visiting your site and might just make it more preferable than one of your competitors.

Imagine sitting in a sweaty 32 C internet cafe in the heartlands of Peru. 26 computers in as much square meters with half of them blaring counterstrike action. The owner advertises with 512 Kpbs superfastcool speed (shared by all computers). The browser is Internet Explorer 5.5 unpatched and you only want to check your mail and search for a nearby vegetarian restaurant. This takes about a hour since websites are clogged with unneeded crap, intro’s, google maps and more. Even worse the browser crashes four times because it cannot handle the memory ubsurp and the computer is nearly dying. What kind of site would you go for? *

*true story

Compliant, scalable makeup

HTML and CSS are there for a reason. Compliant HTML serves many purposes, one of them to be able to make sites scale to the size of the clients screen. A lot of websites today don’t make good use of this by hardcoding for instance the size of the site. This makes sidebars and other information drop from the screen. Remember that a most netbooks only have 1024×678. Use CSS to set relative sizes and test how it looks on smaller screens.

I just want to login!

Frontpage don’ts

- Don’t use introduction pages like it’s 1999. Most people know how to surf the web, most people know why they come to your site and what they are looking for. Just show me the information and let me do where I came from thankyouverymuch. A total waste of valuable bandwidth and time.

- Flash and video content. Do not load them onto the first page people get to see. On a weak processor it gets horribly slow and in 99% of the cases (until visiting Youtube or so) I don’t want to see it! The new couchsurfing site is a good bad example. Only load these kind of content when as user more or less expects this. This way there is a choice if the current situation is good enough to even want to go there.

- Welcome layovers. See intro’s. Argh. Usually it’s a kind of lightbox / flash banner that slows everything to a grind, then displaying something stupid like ‘register’ (which I hardly ever want) or any other generic message distracting me, my connection and my few resources from getting where I want. Personally I don’t open sites who do this.

Cut back on Javascript

Don’t do client side Javascript what you can do server side, like loading images, setting to client settings like country or language prefences and pretty much everything else if it can be avoided. Clients are notoriously unreliable in what they claim to be, besides all the scripting eats at the capacity of slow machines. They might not even load scripts well or at all.

Embedded video, live map backdrop makes my computer walk like a dinosaur.

Content breakdown of couchsurfing frontpage

Don’t use AJAX for everything!

AJAX is the deity of Web 2.0. and while it can be handy and -yes- enables a new generation of sites but it also uses a lot of processing power and bandwidth. One of the most annoying things are AJAX-compliant site without any progress bars or indications something might be loading. That’s of no issue on your 2-seconds load time but if you have to wait 20 seconds for every page it becomes confusing. Did I click it? Is my connection still up?

Another annoying thing is waiting for a site to fully load before coming useable. For instance the new notifications bar on Facebook. It shows a number ( I got a life! ), but before being able to see all the new love I have to wait for the damn thing to load all the way, if it ever finishes loading.

Think if you really need to use AJAX or could withstand with a simple link or any other simpler solution.

Automatic dynamic refreshing?

An increasing amount of sites poll frequently if any new updates occurred on the page. Like Facebook, twitter and a lot of news sites. This is particularly worrisome on slow connections. As a consumer I have to choice which sites to leave open in the task bar for later use and I usually close sites who use this technique. That means if you are not the current CEO of Twitter I might forget about your site or spend less time on it because I notice my other queries are slowing down. Think if your information is so urgent I would like to offer bandwidth to check often.

Lean and mean output

Increasingly, website software systems like blog software, CMS software and so on tend to clog the output, especially if a lot of plugins are used. The reasoning appears to be ‘better loaded in vain than causing a rare error somewhere’. Of course, this way the amount of data needed to travel increases, making it slow. And even worse all the scripts firing up while maybe not even being used gobble must-needed memory.

Often check your sites source output for unneeded stuff and remove it. Disable or even remove plugins when they are not used.

I’m not loading one site I’m loading 32 sites! ( Zoetemeernieuws.nl which often kills my connection )

External sources

This is not always to be avoided, but be aware of how many site requests your page needs before it’s loaded. Think about querying google for it’s analytics or ad-words, a sub-domain for images, or – god forbid – content hosted externally showing on your site. Every request takes ages and usually I can write down the site names before any of those DNS-requests gets through. Try to limit as much as possible to your site only. Once the bits start flowing, maybe the whole thing is there a bit faster.

Lowlands.nl: I’ll make everything dynamic and dance. Shut up, I kill you!

Checklist

- Frequently check your code for compliance to standards
- Only use rich-content (flash,video,lot’s o images etc ) when the user can expect this and try to limit it when possible
- Keep Javascript, Ajax and other consuming techniques to a minimum
- Check your own site on a slow connection and on a small screen.
- First load main content, then load sidebars.
- Limit waste like unneeded content, scripts and loading from external sources.
- Webpagetest is quite handy. So is the W3 validator

Basszje has been doing this for about ten years so maybe he’ll call himself an expert in his vain days. By no means is this page checked or optimized for any of above hints

Do you have stuff you will strongly recommend? The comments are open!

I’m playing Virtonomics, an online business game. Here I’ll report every now and then on my proceedings

After a bold start described in my previous post it soon went down the drain. It looks like you need some skills to hire more than 500 people at once

After an enormous hit on productivity and the cost-price of about everything skyrocketing I notice quickly this is probably not the way to get my virtual riches.

In the game ‘efficiency’ is king. With that dropping everything turns to shit. Efficiency is partly based on your qualifications. See this as ‘levelling’ in RPG-based games. So I overspent my hand since my qualification is next to zero.

Anyway long story short, I decide to file bankruptcy and start again. This time taking it more easy and slowly. Also it’s better to create a vertical integrated company ( production – retail ) than a random hand of companies, factories and then some. The new business started off in
beautiful Turkey.

By playing around with various game mechanics I’m close to break-even now ( about 10 turns, probably not the fastest player ) and ready to expand my shirt-business even further!

Signed from the boardroom,

CEO of Calaeyosis business prospects ltd

Anyhow a few blogs to follow when you are bored or want to see more of the world.

Hendrik is momentarily in Thailand, walking. He was my host in Goslar, Germany.

Then Jade’s site about all lot and nothing.

And last for now Traveltrousers is the site of a pretty cool photographer I met in Iquique and he makes to my opinion fantastic photo’s. He’s been traveling for four years and not done yet by the looks of it.

Do you know more blogs? Post them at the comments!

While browsing around a few days ago I stumbled onto the Russia based game ‘virtonomics’, which basically is Capitalism online where you can produce, sell, research virtual products to build an business empire. Of course while competing against other players from all over.

So of course I had to join in to see what it is all about. If you think games like earlier mentions Capitalism or Civilization has a slight overdose of report screens, wait until you take it online. You can spend ages clicking from report to report, but it makes it the more interesting for the near future.

Because of this and probably what will be my ultimate attempt to never attract girls again to this place, I’ll write on a regular basis ( as long as my internet connectivity lasts I guess ) about my exploits in this game.

(Note: if on basis of this report you’ll like to try play Virtonomics, please use this link to register, yes I will like you more then).

First weeks

So day one arrived. From a rich uncle I got a ‘random’ gift, which I picked since I like random things in life. I got a store with clothing, a factory produces ‘essential oils’, a mill who grinds grain to flour and an office. And for the lab rats a laboratory, which functions as R&D office. So I guess I’m in business on my way to become an apparel/oils/flour tycoon.

My first worry of course is with the randomness of my produce, but I decide to look around for a few days and then decide which strategies go out the window and with deserve investments.

After fiddling with my personal, paying them enough (socialist or not a socialist), hiring some people and finding suppliers for my clothing store it’s time to wait a bit.

On basis of marketing in the city of Nantes, France – where I’m based I’m taking a guess for football shirts and sports equipment, both of which have decent supplier ( cheap and good enough to set a competing price ) and promote my store for the bargains.

(Subdivisions) And the award for horrible manager of the year goes to…

The first week ( 24 hr in real life ) I make a decent 100K profit. Yeah! I get a bit overexcited and jolt my factory and mill to full staffing for extra production. Next week I get hit by a 400K loss. Whelp! It turns out my office is not equipped to deal with so many new people at one time, while ‘efficiency’ is king in this game. My production costs exploded 10-fold because of this and I have to swallow the beating.

So I restructure, open a new store in Paris to explore my football-shirt possibilities there. Ah if life only was a few mouse-clicks away.

Strategy for the next weeks is to stabilize my current undertakings, see how to max out profits and getting new funds invested in a few new stores. I found a few niches where supply is horrible. So a good time to step into a new line of production. I’m not telling which as of now, but I’ll keep posted.

In the comments please tell me how you like these reports and of course your own adventures on virtonomics!

Signed from the boardroom,

CEO of Calaeyosis business prospects ltd

Most sites will try to spam their pointless newsletters you with hardly any interesting information, just to tell you “I am here, use me”.

Free website-creator for the less tech-savvy out there, Weebly does it differently by sending a cutesy, almost sad email:

We haven’t seen you for a while, Basszje

It’s been 5 days, 3 hours, 3 minutes and 55 seconds since you last logged in, and we’re starting to get really worried.

We were just getting to know each other. You created 2 sites, 2 pages, dragged on 3 elements, and then… nothing.

We were really excited for your new website, it had so much potential!

If you ran into any trouble along the way, we’re here for you. Making your own website is fun, fast and easy with Weebly. Best of all, you will have a website of your own to show to customers, clients, family or friends.