Look after the pennies, and...

...the Net will take care of the rest

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By Perttu Karppinen
     
      Come on skinflints, hand on heart, admit it. Do any of you really believe that tired old adage about taking care of the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves, or the one about how every cent is the start of a million dollars? No conclusive evidence one way or another has been presented so far.
      But not for too much longer.
      Vantaa Internet café proprietor Mikko Kiuru and TV video editor Ville Räty from Helsinki have embarked on a two-year project with the ambitious aim of turning an initial nest-egg of one cent (EUR 0.01) into a million euros.
     
The entire thing will be done, naturally, over the Net, and the pair's progress can be followed in the latest style through podcasts and regular blog updates.
      The first steps in "reality make-a-fortune" were taken when Kiuru and Räty put up a one-cent coin for auction on the Finnish huuto.net online portal, and invited bids.
      The sweetener for the winning bidder (who will also be expected to appear in an online interview video) is that the sellers promise to buy back the coin at any time between the end of the auction and May 1st, 2008 for one per cent of the sum that they have collected by this stage.
      If they make their million, the cent's owner stands to collect EUR 10,000.
     
Ingenious, eh? Well, a shade derivative, but a nice copy anyhow.
      Last July, a Canadian called Kyle MacDonald decided to amass the funds to buy himself a house based on an original stake of one red paper-clip.
      His golden idea was to exchange the red paper-clip for something more valuable, and then trade that item for something still more valuable, and on and on, trading up until he has the deeds to the house in his hands. Or if not a house, then an island of his own, or a house on his own island.
      In just under a year, MacDonald's paper-clip has morphed into a fish-shaped pen, the pen has been traded for a bizarre doorknob, the doorknob became a barbecue stove, the stove a 1,000W generator, the generator was traded for a keg of beer, and then on to a snowmobile and variously through air tickets to a 1995 Ford Van, and so on, and so on. Right now, Kyle is looking to trade a [paid, credited, and speaking] role in a Hollywood movie.
     
Another example of a successful Internet-economy entrepreneur is British 21-year-old student Alex Tew, who managed to sell advertisements - pixel by pixel - on his website to a value of USD 1,000,000 in the space of four months. Just by announcing that he wanted a million dollars - to pay for his studies and avoid taking out a loan.
      German String-Emil is another kettle of fish altogether. He has supported himself for some time now by posing in extremely skimpy underwear in the strangest of places - outside the grocery store, in a sauna, at a used car show, astride a garden tractor, you get the idea - and placing the pictures on the Net. He has many dedicated fans, who spread the word by buying merchandise, like T-shirts with Emil and his strings emblazoned on them.
     
The business logic behind all these is roughly that the first person to come up with a new idea does better than well out of it.
      The original euro-cent of Kiuru and Räty has already been bid up to EUR 70.00 (the auction for Phase I of their project closes on the evening of June 13th).
     
It nevertheless probably says a good deal about the nature of Finnish society that whilst similar stunts have been looked on with a wry approving grin in other corners of the world, the reaction hereabouts has been to question anxiously whether the whole exercise requires a lotteries permit. Or could it even be an illegal gratuitous money-collecting scam?
      Advice has already been sought from the Ministry of the Interior, which handles such things as public lotteries, and on the message-boards somebody has boasted of having filed a request for criminal investigation by the police.
      Much ado about nothing.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 11.6.2006


Links:
  Turning a cent into a million euros (in Finnish only)
  One Red Paper-Clip
  The Million-Dollar Homepage
  String-Emil (beware, man in thong underwear and Hot Stuff midi sound-effects)
  Thongs for the Memory - The String-Emil Shop

PERTTU KAUPPINEN / Helsingin Sanomat
perttu.kauppinen@hs.fi