Last night I attended the first of a series of events related to Google Open Social scheduled for this week in Buenos aires, This first event was labeled as "Open Social for Marketers" and was clearly intended to promote Open Social and social networks among marketers, advertising networks and brand agencies. From my point of view, I would have expected much more from this event, taking into account that Google was taking part of it. I wanted to listen to things most of the audience last night didn't know already. I think most of the attendees might have felt a bit disappointed about the content of the presentations (not to mention the fact that the place, Barhein, didn't have a wifi Internet connection and Patrick Chanezon from Google could not show any live example of Open Social Apps). Maybe it was my fault and I was attending the wrong meeting but I had the chance to talk to many other people last night (and follow some twits recently) and the feeling of disappointment was shared. The intended audience (marketes and agencies) was not present (only a few raised their hands when the CRO of Sonico asked: "how many of you work in marketing agencies?"). Instead, a community of Internet power users and entrepreneurs was there, all anxious to see and listen to somenthing new. But that didn't happened.
The good thing was that I could meet with colleagues and friends I hadn't seen for a couple of weeks since the last Palermo-Valley-related meetings (PVNs and SMUA) and get to know new people. The other good thing about this event was that it made think about how this market is going to evolve in the next years and who the players will be in this game. I think this a game of three: social networks, advertising networks / brand agencies and web2.0-opensource-oriented software development companies. This is a good thing to know and it renforces the road we are following at Zauber with our services offer: agile methodologies, web standards, open source technologies, semantic web, microformats, open id, and many other cool things.
The last good thing about this event is that it gave me a great reason to get back to writing, something I was missing.
Today everybody is talking about this. In a desperate effort of Microsoft to defeat Google in the Internet business battle, the company founded by Bill Gates offered an astronomic amount of money to aquire Yahoo!. You can see Yahoo Press Release and Microsoft Announcement for further details.
At least in my case, hearing of this caused great surprise, specially after reading the news about Yahoo! laying off 1.000 employees (7% of the company staff) last week, after announcing a 23 percent profits decrease in Q4 2007. Maybe it is no surprise Microsoft striking again against Yahoo!. Now that the company has admitted this profits fall, they consider the company value is less than a couple of months ago. No matter what, today Yahoo! stocks has risen almost 60% in Nasdaq.
What will happen next ? What will the Board of Directors at Yahoo! decide ?
The author of this video was quite right...many of us would blog about it inmediatly after seeing it.
It's no news that the growth of Internet projects these last years and the sudden and surprising success of many of them (i.e. Flickr, YouTube, Facebook) have given place to a new rush of web startups and a new version of the web...Web 2.0. VCs and young entrepreneurs are moving fast to come first with their ideas and projects and the challenge is quite attractive.
But many others still remember the dot-com-boom in year 2000 and forecast a new ending for this Web 2.0 excitement. Clearly, the author of this video is one of them, isn't he ?
A couple of weeks ago, one of my partners at Zauber suggested to visit TED.com, a site whose objective is to broacast through the Internet great and inspiring talks held during the last years by the most important thinkers and doers worlwide. Among its themes, TED.com features talks about Techonology, Business, Science, Culture, Global Issues (such us poverty), Art. I personally liked best those related with Technology, Science and Business but found indredibly interesting talks about Global Issues too. Every week, at least two new talks are posted on the site, each of them with an average duration of 15-20 minutes.
The first weeked I had the time to take a deep insight on this site, I found myself watching talk after talk for nearly two hours. I had the chance to listen to Jeff Bezzos, the founder and CEO of Amazon at a talk in February 2003 exposing his view about innovation on the Internet and comparing the dot-com boom to the Gold Rush and , the founders of Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin, at a talk in February 2004 commenting on how Google works and how their products are developed. But so far the best and most inspiring talk I watched was one by Iqbal Quadir about his venture in Bangladesh to help fight poverty and his belief that businesses and private investment are a better tool than humaniritarian help to poor countries. I really recommend this talk, which I am also embedding.
Try this site and tell me what you think...maybe you will realize that you no longer need cable TV if you have an Internet broadband connection (well...I guess most of you are already feeling that, don't you?).
