the webthinking blog

I had the privilege of attending a business breakfast this week. The speaker? Patrick Pichette, Chief Financial Officer of Google.

What an amazing way to start a new day! I have summarized a few soundbites worth sharing:

• There are two types of economies: a regular one and a digital one.
• Facebook accounts for 5 per cent of all Internet traffic.
• Everything that was offline, will be online.
• Everything will be localized to you.
• Search is be personal. The focus is you. See my previous post - right on!
• If everything is in the cloud, Chrome OS should be fast. Not more going down for coffee until the computer reboots.
• Innovation is dirt cheap!
• The only bottleneck is …imagination!

A mind-blowing reality: Google has the power to change the world through innovation. That’s the power to Think Infinite.

What do social media and economics have in common? Turns out all social network leaders got together in one room for a powerhouse panel in Davos to discuss how social software is changing society.

I have summarized a few sound bites from this session that went on for almost two hours.

George Colony, Forrester Research, on customers interactions:

• 1% of consumers consult a corporate blog
• 8% of consumers follow or fan companies

How will “social” change leadership? It creates an obligation to listen. You should be good, because in the future everyone will know about you.

Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn, on social networking themes:

• How do you get robust connections between people?
• How do you get transparency of information?
• How to think about web 2.0? What happens when every person has an online identity and is a participant?

Owen Van Natta, MySpace:

• Distribution of content is happening much more through people, as opposed to a limited number of portals

Gina Bianchini, Ning:

• In 2009 people spent three times the amount of time on social sites than they had in the prior year

Don Tapscott, author of Wikinomics:

• Young people are giving away their personal information too much
• Thousands of people will not get their dream job this year because their employer did the reference check on Facebook

Evan Williams, Twitter: Twitter is looking to do three things:

• filtering and discovering engine
• generating of content and having influence over others
• building relationships of all types

Tim Berners-Lee:

• We need to study web as a scientific discipline, we need people to study social networks
• It is fascinating how a meme spreads across Twitter.

…it is, indeed. Here’s the full session on YouTube:

I have almost finished reading Ahead Of The Curve by Philip Broughton. Since “change” was an important buzzword in 2008, I want to capture an interesting definition mentioned in Broughton’s book:
Change = function (Dissatisfaction * New Model * Implementation Process) + Error

I have pulled out some interesting usage charts of the two main social networking tools – LinkedIn and Facebook.

Turns out most active day of the week among my LinkedIn connections is Monday. Makes sense for a business tool.

Everyone needs some fun and relaxation by Wednesday, which seems to be the most active day on Facebook.

Good. Folks, just don’t let Facebook take over your week-end. Or entire week. Please :)

If you have met me, you probably know by now – I am sold to LinkedIn and its benefits.

Here is something to think about: Goldman Sachs made the headlines quite often over the last few months. Have you ever wondered why Goldman Sachs does not have a list of job openings on their careers web site? Because they know talent does not hang out every day on their corporate web site.

Now, why do you think they have recently acquired a stake in LinkedIn? Aha. That’s why. They know they need to be present in this place, listening and watching for skilled prospects. And Goldman Sachs is not the only company.

When did you last update your profile?

Looks like Startbucks just entered Twitter land. Barista – a caramel macchiato and a tweet, please! Thanks!

I’ve been a Nokia junkie for years… Howdy to my friend, Lucian, over in Finland!

Michael Dell: Today there are about 1bn people attached to the Internet. Everyday, about 500,000 new ones come on the Internet for the very first time in their lives. So that means, the Internet population in 3-4 years is roughly gonna double. About 85% of the growth comes from emerging countries.