By BILL BEAN RECORD STAFF Greg Baker owns Research In Motion. He also owns Coca-Cola, Starbucks, United Airlines and Air Canada. With a mere $150, he bought all this, and the City of Cambridge, too.
OK, Greg Baker is not part of a shadowy cabal that runs the world. Greg Baker is really a Grade 7/8 teacher living in Hamilton. The Cambridge he owns is a virtual city.
The Research In Motion he owns is a virtual company. His acquisitions were done inside a cyberworld set up by a Montreal firm, Weblo. Sean Moore is the enthusiastic director of marketing of Weblo.
On the phone from his office, he expounds on the potential of Weblo to be The Next Big Thing, by allowing "the average joe" to make money selling virtual realities. Selling cyber-objects is not new. In some online fantasy games, players can acquire computer-generated items that can be sold to other players for real money.
Think of Weblo as an online Monopoly board, where every address and every contract from the real world, has an online duplicate that is for sale. The headquarters for Manulife Financial, the province of Newfoundland, and the management rights for Pamela Anderson, can be bought.
If you buy Guelph or the head office of the Vancouver Canucks, you get the rights to a web page for you to develop as you see fit. Post some facts and figures, some photos or a video. Start a blog. Develop a site that draws traffic.
According to Moore, users can make money by making their site attractive for advertisers, by taking a percentage from other Weblo users who exist within their sphere of influence (the owner of Ontario would get a percentage of any transactions involving Ontario centres, for instance) or by selling the site. Is Weblo, which had its official launch in December, The Next Big Thing?
The jury is still out. Some of the sites look pretty sad. Moore says it's in the interest of the siteholders to improve their properties (just like in the real world). I'd suggest potential buyers learn how to post video or images to the web. You'd guess that Tokyo or Vancouver would have advertising potential.
Someone might have bought Kincardine as a conversation starter. Sites for models and celebs may be popular, but I noticed no one has bid on Margaret Atwood. Certainly, no one is going to retire on the income from site ad revenue.
For instance, the site for Cuban cover girl Vida Guerra may have 50,750 hits, but all those visits have generated only $34 in revenue. Weblo seems to suggest the big money is to be made on "flipping" properties: Las Vegas sold for $2,300, after being bought for $430. Guerra's site is offered for $500.
Then there's Cambridge, which Greg Baker bought for $7.57, becoming, as Weblo puts it, the "virtual Mayor of Cambridge." You could have had Kitchener for $24.85 (now owned by a man in Montreal).Waterloo went for $50 (belongs to a man in Queensland, Australia) and Guelph led the market at $60 (someone in Owen Sound bought it).
The prices will be higher for the next buyers, assuming there are any. Baker got in because he was amused by the idea of owning virtual property. "I went through a phase where I was kind of addicted."
He bought Cambridge because "it was local, available and affordable." (The same reason commuters to Toronto choose it.) Baker doesn't plan to expand his holdings beyond the 30 he has now (which include Oakville, Best Buy, Haliburton and the contract for Bubbles from Trailer Park Boys): "I can only afford to spend so much on nothing." Is it really nothing? Every fad has a bubble, and then the bubble bursts. "It's sort of like a trading card," said Baker. A card is "just a piece of paper . . . the value is what others believe it is." He's hoping that people will believe in the value of a cyber-shadow.
So, is Cambridge's virtual mayor planning any improvements? A bridge across the Grand? Extended GO Train service? "I suppose I should. Or I might make a deal (to sell) if the right offer came along . . ." You too, could be the Mayor of Cambridge. Bill Bean writes for etc. every Saturday. You can contact him at 519-894-2231, ext. 2618, or e-mail him at
bbean@therecord.com.
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