“Zynga is giving away Farmville dollars as a promotion for people shopping for vegetables at supermarkets. So, if you buy a zuchini at the supermarket, you get Farmville dollars which is a virtual currency which you can then use in Farmville on Facebook to grow virtual vegetables. Those vegetables trade on the Zynga virtual cash exchange for hard US Dollars. That’s a naked long.

So, the spread between naked short sales and naked long sales is enormous. A naked short sale of a credit derivative makes Goldman Sachs billions where a naked long sale of a virtual vegetable on Farmville makes somebody two dollars. The naked credit default swap is worth about the two dollars it takes to print nonsense on a piece of paper. The naked long virtual Farmville currency is worth two dollars in hard money after you spent 20 hours viewing ads on Facebook. So, why are the naked long people making $2 for twenty hours viewing ads, and the people at Goldman get two billion dollars for manufacturing credit default nonsense because they’re hooked into the US Government.”

On the other side of the blogosphere, David Harvey has spent years promoting the idea that the capitalist system has mainly become concerned with creating money out of money. Keiser’s views on the Facebook/Zynga virtual economy fits in with Harvey’s theory. Essentially, these fictional markets are really just imaginary stopgaps so we can all pretend that we’re achieving the 3% growth per year to keep the wheels from falling off the status quo.

Keiser calls these fictional markets a zombie economy. Whether you’re an individual trading virtual goods over the Internet or an investment bank selling derivatives of derivatives of insurance on derivatives, you are participating in a fictional market where what’s being bought and sold has no actual value. The virtual goods are just as worthless as the mortgages written and sold to finance now empty houses built in Detroit during the housing boom. While online virtual markets are more benign ecologically than zombie housing, both are socially and economically useless and attempts at feigning wealth.  In the 1500′s, the Spanish learned this lesson the hard way. They conquered parts of the New World and imported tons of gold from their adventures. The biggest tangible result of this effort was that people in Spain owned more physical gold which caused 300% inflation. The general thinking is, if economic advancement isn’t backed by real innovation and improvements to the society at large, all you’re really doing is pretending to be wealthy.

Ultimately, creating virtual currencies and goods, fictional markets and zombie economies are equivalent to expropriating gold from tribal nations, printing dollars, or betting against credit default swaps. These are all misguided attempts by poorly evolved mammals at being acquisitive and maintaining power. If things proceed as they are, we will continue moving away from production, thrift, and savings towards a post-economic economy where all goods and money are virtual and nothing real is really worth owning.

We at Fusion are about to embark on a new adventure with a brand new product – Stream.  Before we begin this expedition with you, we want to share a few predictions about what we expect to happen along the way.

1) THROW AWAY YOUR FILING CABINETS:

Fast forward ten years into the future and imagine what a small business in 2020 will look like.  Do you see an office cluttered with paper invoices, catalogues, fax machines and servers? Hopefully not.  The emergence of SaaS (software-as-a-service) as the preferred method of delivering software will turn small businesses of the future into agile and highly-responsive organisms that use the Internet as a platform for delivering higher quality service and smarter decisions.  The physical clutter that currently weighs small businesses down will disappear as more and more of our daily activities move off our desks and into the desktop. Stream will give you the ability to store and edit all your business data online so you can drastically cut down on clutter.

2) BUSINESS AT THE SPEED OF INTERNET:

Over the last ten years, we have been migrating away from old forms of business communication. Snail mail gave way to the fax machine which has given way to email. So why do we settle for enterprise solutions that behave like excel spreadsheets when consumer products like Twitter and Facebook give us real time updates and communication tools? 2010 will be the year that the speed and user-friendlessness of popular consumer products merge with enterprise products, and clunky, on-premise solutions are thrown into the ash-heap of history forever. Stream will make real-time collaboration with your employees, clients and suppliers a must-have competitive advantage in 2010.

3) BURN DOWN THE SILOS:

For those of you who have dabbled or made the leap onto web-based software, you know what a disaster it can be. For starters, most existing software solutions are so narrowly focused on solving one problem that you end up with 10 different solutions running at once. Not only is this expensive and learning intensive, but all your business data ends up being siloed because none of these solutions are connected. This has to come to an end. The purpose of a good enterprise solution is to make your business more efficient, not more choatic. With Stream, every activity in your business–from CRM, to collaboration, to project management–is brought together into one real-time, filterable stream of updates.

4) WHERE YOUR BUSINESS GOES, THE STREAM WILL BE:

The beauty of web-based applications is that they are always available, regardless of where you are or what hardware you happen to be using. Over the years, people have been hesitant to do business online because they are worried about security. The truth is, web-based transactions such as online banking, credit card processing and data storage are typically more secure than their offline alternatives and are becoming more secure every day. In 2010, we will continue to make Stream more secure and more mobile with the launch of our mobile application.

5) THE STREAM AND THE BUSINESS WILL BECOME ONE:

At first, Stream will simply be a tool that businesses use to become more productive–a bridge from the chaos that plagues businesses today to a new paradigm of online business management. But eventually, as more and more tools move into the browser, the line between the stream and the business itself will become blurred, ushering in a new era of immersive enterprise tools fit for the 21st century.

We are excited to have you aboard on this journey. If you have not had an opportunity to sign up for a free beta account of Stream, please sign up here.

Welcome to the world of Stream,