These days the usual talk is about the economy. And it's a gloomy talk. Now, I cannot stop thinking that economy is mostly like the weather, as both are chaotic systems that make predictions an extremely difficult task. The main difference is that clouds don't read the met, while we actually do. So when the met says "a hard rain is gonna fall" us clouds may well end up believing it... Anyway, nothing is 100% nice or bad, not even a recession.

When working on a technology start-up under a pending recession prediction one has to focus on reality (the market, that is) much more than he usually would. In good times you are easily driven to think that just having a good idea is enough, and if it takes 2billion terabytes of file-space to make it... heck, so what? Progress will be here soon. By the time I'm over with coding anyone will afford that little space expansion.

Now... this is where the digital divide grows. Because good times are good times for the west, usually. Everything else falls under the label "areas whose government/markets are bad". Who cares about those nasty troglodytes? The market is west, that's where I wanna sell.

Today's predictable shrink in western spending capability per capita forces people to think of start ups that can reach out for the widest possible market. All of a sudden, troglodyte money doesn't stink any more. If a smaller percent of the western market can afford my product I can reach a break even point if and only if I can reach out for the planet.

The immediate candidate for a good recession-proof start up is called localisation. And not just localisation, but most of all "easy localisation". Something that can accept a DIY way of life without imposing any specific technological knowledge and immediately project your product out to the wider audience. Too bad that localisation is NOT just a matter of strings.

When you say localisation the usual geek way to interpret the expression is "Big Mac written in Chinese ideograms". Now... maybe the Chinese do not rate Big Mac as their typical food, and when you just translate that string you generate an expression that has lost basically all of its original meaning. Meaning is the product of daily experience: if I say Big Mac to a westerner he/she recalls a lot of things he/she associates with fast food, but a Chinese reader may associate a completely different picture. Simply translating is not enough.

If you have an idea and you want to deliver it intact to potential consumers who live in another culture you have to make sure it reaches them in a form that will generate a good sale. You want something that people will fancy (no, you don't care much why they fancy it, as long as they pay, but you DO care for your wallet, don't you?). One of the things this crisis may end up in generating is at least some minimal start of cross-culture marketing, which is a totally new thing. It's also a good career chance for you, if you have just been fired as a marketing specialist and have cross-culture experience.

This is not going to affect much minority languages, but if it can break the English-only mindset monopoly and lead sellers to, at least, think Spanish, Hindi, Chinese and Russian from their early planning stages it will be a decent start for a new World Marketing Order.

The second important detail that is usually missing from the geek idea of localisation is the local infrastructure. This side of the Shengen wall we can use mobile phones much more easily than Credit Cards. We can send money from our telephone to another, and pay a bill like that. It's largely used, since it means no tax-man will ever have a clue at what's going on.

Meanwhile, our ADSLs largely run on soviet cables, and while paying good money for a large bandwidth we all actually get little more of what a decent modem on a commuted line used to give me in the west, when I still lived there. Large areas have bad or none GSM coverage and no internet at all. Also, we mostly pay-per-traffic and our non-national network traffic is either limited or extremely expensive, while the recession is adding to this an ever mounting deluge of banking commissions for just any payment we make (up to 15% in many cases, already). Another planet, right? And this is still Europe. I know people in Argentina who are requested to pay 50 euro as minimal commission when they get sent... 100 euro.

Let alone the trouble with payment systems, I cannot even think of many technologies that based intensively on bandwidth saving. Most people approached their bandwidth needs in terms of "the future will soon be here". Yet probably the one and only real engine for the expected progress in this field has been the porn industry. They are the ones who immediately had a product that

• almost everyone wants and will pay for (even just by staying connected to free resources),
• has little or no localization needs (basically it all boils down to a usable interface for payment)

They are those who immediately had a massive planet-wide reach and they are the ones who had to fight hard to squeeze zillions of video-taped fake orgasms into rotting pre-tech phone cables. It's THEM who made CDs a world-wide standard and made the basis for today's on line TVs. Funny as it may seem, from a strictly infrastructural point of view Linda Lovelace helped Africa getting networked much more than Wikipedia has done and will ever do. And hundreds of porn starlets are those who made the basic investment behind any of the current ongoing religious video podcasts...

Partly this is because people like siliconed bodies more than they like culture, sure. But it's also because no matter how idealistic the people behind them, most "respectable" applications simply do not give a damn about foreign "poor infrastructure". The market in the west was fat, so why should they have cared? Alexa won't give you points for planet-wide accessibility, and what even charities need is fancy things for an effective fund-raiser. Political correctness is surely a nice thing, but in the end charities need to pay their bills just as anyone else. Can you blame them for this? I cannot. Nothing would have ever changed in this mechanism, if the economy had not started to sink.

Yet, now the western centric days are probably over and their end is market driven, rather than ideology driven. Now everyone must be interested in a wider reach and in coping with poor infrastructure, because in the current economic trend you can hardly expect major investments in public infrastructure to happen (especially for us troggs). Yet all vendors now need every possible penny, and need it badly. Which implies that they need our pennies just as well.

So bad weather is not necessarily a negative thing. The market can well use the upcoming recession to get rid of tons of high bandwidth users and to become less biased towards western needs and habits. If it can produce a push towards a more sustainable networked computing it's something we should actually applaud.