Getting Your Tencent's Worth?

A great blog by Chris Skinner on QQ coins and their role in the future of money. The numbers are extraordinary indeed, leading me to wonder whether certain of the - ahem - "retailers" using the service aren't opening a unique account each time they issue QQ coins to fund a particular transaction?

One also wonders how well the service will weather the alleged Chinese government crack-down reported by Dark Diamond.

Somewhat nervously, I found it interesting to compare QQ coins to the characteristics that I told some RCA students would mark successful financial services innovation:

"1. The service is unlikely to be offered or facilitated by an entity that consumers perceive to be an “institution”;

2. The service solves the root cause of consumers’ critical need in the course of actual or desired activities, linking with trusted third parties to provide a comprehensive consumer experience;

3. The service leverages a shock amongst consumers who subsequently accept that the world has changed, yet helps them to embrace that change;

4. The service leaves day-to-day control of the management of money with the consumer;

5. The service improves rapidly with user collaboration, giving value beyond the facilitator;

6. The service will remain successful so long as the facilitator continues to invest in enhancing the service and meeting related consumer needs rather than seeking merely to enrich itself (i.e. preferring to meet the needs of stakeholders other than consumers);

7. The service is safe, easy to use, and involves communications that are fair, transparent (enabling ready comparison) and neither misleading nor patronising;

8. The service and its operator plays well with the regulators and public policy/opinion-formers."

I sense from Dark Diamond's numerous allegations that, if those allegations are true, QQ coins will prove a little rubbery in terms of 6, 7 and 8, pending the outcome of the alleged Chinese government intervention. But I guess PayPal weathered a similar kind of storm, and even eGold was entitled to remain in business, albeit subject to the laws it and certain of its directors had flouted.

So definitely worth watching that space, as well as how Tencent's western versions, like QQ Games are taken up.

Join the Quest for the Source of EU Legislation

This is the Last Straw. I've just seen "micro-enterprise" defined in a document called "2005/0245 (COD) LEX 797" as:

"an enterprise, which at the time of conclusion of the payment service contract, is an enterprise as defined in Article 1 and Article 2(1) and (3) [oh, don't forget 2(3)!!] of the Annex to Recommendation 2003/361/EC".

I'm thinking of launching a Quest to find those responsible for this latest gobbledigook and demand to know in plain English what "micro-enterprise" was intended to mean, without referring me anywhere else.

But where to start?

In 2005, the UK's Better Regulation Commission produced a fascinating, literal "map" of what we might really loosely describe as the 'European Union legislative process'. See especially page 14.

I'm not being sarcastic here. The report is a veritable base camp from which to begin the quest for the source and true meaning of EU legislation. It provides a guide, pack animals, tents, rope, torches and other basic tools. The rest of the specific search is down to good eyesight, a laptop or PC, broadband, physical fitness, strength, caffeine, food, and several towels that can be soaked in ice cold mountain springs and wrapped tightly around one's head. Oh, and a journey to Brussels. With a lobbyist.

Are you in?

It will be very crowded, but ours will be lonely work. Listening amidst the din of countless institutions and committees for the mystical whisper known as the "Social Dialogue". For it is only in that stream of semi-consciousness that we may dare to even hope to find the truth of the coded messages embedded in the "stakeholder input", "advice", "green papers", "proposals", "adoptions of proposals", "opinions", "consultations", "co-decisions", "common positions" and, ultimately the Regulations and Directives that emerge six or seven years later to drive us to distraction.

No?

Yeah, sod it. I'm staying in London to earn a crust.