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.

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:

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 :)

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?

So, here’s my story: Bell Sympatico DSL users have been experiencing major service disruptions in the Toronto area over the past few days. This affects me as well, living in Richmond Hill, always hitting a Toronto server and an IP address that had a reverse name as “basXX-torontoXX.dsl.bell.ca”.

I pick up the phone to call Bell and ask them “How much longer?” An extremely polite Dominique answers my call. “Sir, before we go any further, just in case we get disconnected, is there a number I can call you back?”

Uh, ah, I thought I was talking to Bell – the phone company. Why should I get disconnected?? Because the ‘net is not working for me?

So my question to the Rep was “Do you mind if I ask where are you located?”

“No sir, in Southern part of India”. Ahaa, just as Friedman’s stories from the book I’ve mentioned above.

After convincing the person at the other end (of the world) that my modem was actually powered on – I get a new challenge.
“Sir, how can you possibly experience connectivity problems related to the Toronto area when you are living in Richmond?”

Hmm – I get it. Now I have to convince him that I live in Richmond Hill, ON and not Richmond, BC.

Two days later Bell has not fixed the problem yet. I’m posting this through my BlackBerry. Lovely!

To Bell: in addition to all screen captures of modem types in use posted on that intra/extranet, you should make available a at least a Google Maps lookup tool, as well. :)

I have been evaluating and using Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for couple of months now as a back-up hosting service for iSPINIT.com and I will definitely use this service for the upcoming iSPINIT.com Premium edition.

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. That is applicable for large podcasting media files.

Let’s do the math first:

Libsyn’s highest package, Podcast Supreme, will set you back $30.00 per month for 800MB of space. Fair enough. This should cover the bandwidth costs as well.

Now this is what you would pay for Amazon S3:

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB – all data transfer in

$0.18 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB – data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of Amazon S3.
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 is free of charge

Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests

Using this calculator, you can get a price quote depending on you hosting needs. Let’s say you have about 1GB of data and 50GB (!!!) of files to ship out of the door every month: $10.36

Interested? This is what you need to get started with Amazon S3:

• an account with Amazon
• a neat Firefox plug-in – S3Fox (available on Mac and Windows)
• access to your domain DNS settings

Amazon S3 uses “buckets” as their terminology for “folders”. You can create your unique bucket – e.g. media.mydomain.com. After all, a domain name can be a folder name!

Next step: create a CNAME entry for media.mydomain.com to s3.amazonaws.com

Voila! Your cost effective hosting service is all set-up. The only thing left is uploading your data using the S3Fox plug-in in your browser. Firefox that is:

Enjoy paying only for what you use!

So, if you are an investor or an adviser, check out Renaissance Investments or Investissements Renaissance. There you go – you got my next step – getting some Google juice to flow.

I had the privilege of sharing the “cool table” with Chris Penn, Mitch Joel and Julien Smith:

Some quick facts worth mentioning:

• YouTube usage growth in Canada between April 2006-2007: 616%! [Mitch Joel]
• FaceBook usage growth in Canada between April 2006-2007: 2424%! [Mitch Joel]
• If MySpace were a country, it would have been the 6th largest country on the planet! Want to buy a banner on the homepage? Be prepared to pay $1.000.000 per day! [Chris Penn]
• Canadians spend 48% of their leisure time online! Is that the whole winter?! [Mitch Joel]
• “Google couldn’t care less about your podcast!” [Julien Smith]

More:

• PAB2007 on Flickr
• PAB2007 on Technorati

“We are making a responsible decision in recognizing the status of the record industry and the increasing impact of technology,” said Bobby Sniderman, the son of Sam Sniderman and present owner, in a news release. Via Toronto Star.

iSPINIT is a channeled music podcast that comes in several different flavours: (iSPINIT) Pop, (iSPINIT) Rock, (iSPINIT) Electronic and (iSPINIT) Jazz. You can subscribe to any one channel, depending on your taste, or get them all. Ella is hosting the rock and jazz shows, I get the pop and electronic/dance editions.
Since most of the music featured on the podcast comes from the Podsafe Music Network made sense for us to join the PodShow family.

Enjoy our hand picked “Naturally Famous Tunes”!