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| Digital tills are ringing to the sound of an unreal Christmas | Victor Keegan Virtual goods are flying off the virtual shelves. It's time we started taking this new market seriouslyFlirtomatic, a London-based company, claims to have sold 100,000 gifts during the past four weeks in the run-up to Christmas. This wouldn't normally be of interest but Flirtomatic is a social network on mobile phones and the goods sold were all "virtual". They range from roses – which only exist as pixels on a screen – to a virtual "supersnog". The bestselling item is a Christmas stocking filled with goodies for which up to 2,000 users a day are prepared to pay the equivalent of 75p. On other sites people have been prepared to pay up to $20 for a virtual rose. Yes, the same generation of people not paying for music downloads from the web are paying real money for unreal goods.If all this seems barmy, hang on, as we may have to rearrange our prejudices. Flirtomatic.com, which also sells ice cubes that melt when they reach the recipient's phone, is but a minnow in a potentially revolutionary change that is happening to the economy beneath the radar of politicians and most adults (including economists). While international trade in physical goods has been in deep recession, the trade in virtual goods is in a runaway boom with no signs of abating.The key feature is that, unlike physical goods, it costs almost nothing to produce extra copies, so there is unlimited supply to meet unlimited demand, an economist's nirvana. Virtual output could also restore a level playing field for the west, because companies don't have to outsource actual production to Asian countries with cheaper labour costs.Another recent London startup, moshimonsters.com, an addictive game for kids which can cost their parents £5 a month, claims to trade a million virtual items every day – many included in the subscription. In the multiplayer game Entropia Universe, user-to-user transactions reached $420m last year. The virtual world Second Life, which has faded from the headlines recently, expects to nearly double trade in virtual goods this year, to over $500m.But the really interesting stuff is happening in the social network Facebook, where the cartoony FarmVille has more than 75 million active users trading farm animals or buying virtual tractors or whatever. It is owned by a company called Zynga, which makes an estimated $250m from virtual goods on Facebook. This week it raised $180m from Russian investors in a deal that values it at up to $3bn, according to analysts: all based on virtual goods. One of the reasons for this success is that it is now easy to make payments on a mobile just by typing your telephone number in, using companies such as Zong, which claims a turnover of $15m in the eight months since it started.How big is global trade in virtual goods? It is impossible to say, partly because statistics are not collected from the hundreds of gaming silos and partly because of the difficulty of defining what is virtual. Plus Eight Star has valued the market in Asia, where virtual goods trade is very advanced, at over $5bn; but this is probably an underestimate as one company in China alone, TenCent, earned over $1bn last year almost entirely from virtual goods which are rampant in Korea and Japan.If you count virtual games such as RuneScape, of Cambridge (the second biggest online multiplayer game in the world), and World of Warcraft, plus the explosive growth of casual games, then the global value of the market probably rises above $15bn. And if you include text messages that's another $5bn. The difficulty is knowing where to stop, and whether to add Google's searches or iTunes music downloads or the Guardian's new iPhone app. The important point is that trade in virtual goods, if aggregated, would be bigger than many countries GDP.It is time for politicians to take seriously the emergence of a sector that might compensate for some of the jobs lost in the recession. But first we will have to break through a psychological barrier and take virtual goods seriously. After all, which is more "real" – a virtual rose that can sit on your mobile phone for years, or a piece of chocolate that melts in your mouth and is gone for ever?Virtual worldsGamesEconomic policyAlternate reality gamesComputingFacebookGlobal recessionGlobal economyVictor Keeganguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Italian tax amnesty raises 95bn euros Beating forecasts, Italy's tax amnesty raised 95bn euros (£86bn; $137bn), the country's Finance Ministry says news.bbc.co.uk |
Police make arrest in Canadian pipeline bombings VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) -- Police arrested a man Friday in connection with a series of oil and gas pipeline bombings in northeastern British Columbia.... hosted.ap.org |
An obligation to account | Kamila Shamsie and Philippe Sands Britain should act under international law if Libya will not resolve Jaballa Matar's disappearanceIn Saturday's Guardian the novelist Hisham Matar wrote of his Âanguish over the continuing Âdisappearance of his father, the Libyan political dissident Jaballa Matar, who was taken from his home in Cairo in March 1990 and imprisoned in Libya. The Libyan government has never acknowledged his imprisonment. The only news his family has received directly from him has been via two letters smuggled out of prison – one written in 1992, one in 1995.Recently the family received word that he was seen in a prison in Tripoli in 2002. Human Rights Watch has recently raised his case. A group of nearly 300 writers, including JM Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith and Orhan Pamuk, wrote to David Miliband last week urging the government to seek information about the whereabouts of Matar and others. The foreign secretary responded swiftly, acknowledging concern about the human rights situation in Libya, and stating that Hisham Matar "has my full support in his quest, on behalf of his family, to find out what happened to his father". It seems, however, that the Foreign Office has not raised this issue with the Libyans.This is not only a story of a family's quest, in which the UK government can play merely a supportive role. In 1988, in the landmark Velásquez RodrÃguez case, the inter-American court of human rights ruled that "the forced disappearance of human beings is a multiple and continuous violation of many rights". It is now accepted in international law that disappearing a person is an act of torture, not least for those who are left behind.The act of disappearing a person is a continuing crime: it persists until the whereabouts of the disappeared has been fully accounted for. The Velásquez RodrÃguez judgment concluded that prolonged isolation and deprivation of communication are in themselves cruel and inhuman treatment. The case supports the principle that forcible disappearance gives rise to torture. The judgment confirmed the legal obligation of a state to prevent such violations and, where it is too late for prevention, to launch an "effective search" for the truth.Matar's initial disappearance violated international law; his continuing imprisonment without communication with the outside world violates international law; his disappearance over nearly two decades violates international law; the failure by the Libyan government to effectively investigate his case violates international law. These violations expose individuals within the Libyan government to the risk of criminal action. What this means is that Hisham Matar's rights are being violated. As a UK national he is entitled to expect the ÂBritish government to intervene directly with Libya to bring the torture to an end.This is not mere theoretical possibility. In 1998 the Lords ruled in the Pinochet case that the former Chilean leader was not entitled to claim immunity for torture allegations occurring after October 1988, when the 1984 torture convention became binding on Britain, Chile and Spain (the country that sought his extradition). An English magistrate accepted the proposition that the continuing disappearance of about 1,300 people whose whereabouts had not been established by October 1988 meant that for every one of those individuals an allegation of torture could be made. In May 1989 Libya became a party to the torture convention. The risk of individual criminal liability under the 1984 convention, the right of Britain and other countries to assert jurisdiction, and the absence of the right to claim immunity are all confirmed by the convention.The new "Libyan model" is heralded as an example of what can be achieved by diplomacy rather than war to bring a pariah nation back into the fold. But, last month's Human Rights Watch report makes clear that "this transformation in Libya's foreign policy has not galvanised an equivalent transformation of Libya's human rights record". Disappearances and other continuing crimes have to be cleared up, properly addressed. That is the consequence of the new world of human rights, that Britain helped to put in place after the second world war. The obligation to account, the need to avoid impunity, means that others also have a role to play. Not only the British government, which has played a significant role in Libya's rehabilitation, but also the many UK-based companies – such as BP, Shell and Ernst & Young – that have new and expanding investments in Libya. The British government and each of these companies has an interest – and, some would say, a duty – to assist Libya in bringing an end to outstanding injustices and continuing crimes.LibyaHuman rightsTortureKamila ShamsiePhilippe Sandsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Urgent need for tent cities for Haitian refugees PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) -- The collapse of much of Haiti's capital has a large part of the nation struggling just to find a place to sleep.... hosted.ap.org |