Read a very interesting article on social media in Business Week.
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/feb2008/db20080219_908252.htm
In summary, Business Week published a cover story in a 2005 issue of the magazine describing influence of blogs on the world, on corporations and the way people connect. They find that that 2005 article remains one of their most widely read articles on social media and so they decided to refresh the same article with fresh ideas and latest reports on social media and re-published it in the last Business Week issue.
The article talks about how social media is changing rules in people’s lives, in corporations and how some bloggers have teared down corporate hierarchies, created new ways of networking and changed the global communication ecosystem. There are bloggers who get more links than Businessweek.com itself and several media powerhouses have had to adapt or change their attitude to social networking to still be relevant. May low level employees have created new business models within corporations gaining a new kind of influence against the upper buttoned-up types. Well we are active bloggers so we could not agree more. Our own blog has been getting very high hits and we have gained a new visibility in the world with people contacting us from all over for all sorts of mobile and technology ideas and discussions.
We are starting our twitter service soon to experiment with this micro-blogging service.
We believe in social media and feel that this will continue to create upheavals in the corporate and consumer world.
MT
June 1, 2008
Success of Facebook ( www.facebook.com started by Mark Zuckerberg, erstwhile student at Harvard) has inspired a new generation of entrepreneurs at Harvard University to drop their quest for high-pay jobs and instead try a start up model using Facebook as a role model. Many students in Harvard are starting their ventures while on campus and some of them are shifting to Silicon Valley right after school or some even while in school. Read the full report at Wall Street Journal Online at :
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121124707865805855.html?mod=hps_us_editors_picks
Some interesting startups to come up from Harvard since Facebook are : iLike (http://www.ilike.com/), Scribd (http://www.scribd.com/) and drop.io (http://drop.io/).
We hope this culture spreads to other campuses. Who better to create innovative startups than the fresh minds on campuses around the world !!
MT
May 20, 2008
Google is very friendly with Yahoo these days. That is incredible, to say the least. These are cut-throat competitors in mobile advertising and search arena. Interestingly, the common enemy from Redmond is bringing these two firms together to drop the advertising competitiveness and try to work in complementary fashion. If it passes US anti-trust scrutiny, Yahoo is discussing a long term partnership with Google to source ads from Google and place them alongside Yahoo search results and emails. It seems Google ad leads to a much better pattern match and hence higher profitability than Yahoo model could achieve on its own.
If Google can sign a long term partnership with Yahoo, then Microsoft will be discouraged to make further bids. After all, Microsoft is interested in Yahoo with its intrinsic properties and search facilities (Yahoo’s internal search initiative is called Panama). A Microsoft bid for Yahoo which uses Google search technology in its search platform would not make any sense.
Both Google and Yahoo bottomline will benefit from the said partnership between the two, though, by going this route, Yahoo would essentially validate that Google is indeed the pre-dominant search technology platform. Yahoo will become more of an aggregator at that point in the search space rather than a search firm itself.
With a Google-Yahoo alliance, Microsoft will probably go after Facebook or other smaller social network portals to boost its internet offerings. There are rumors that Microsoft has discussed an acquisition with Facebook, the fast growing social network. Will Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook sell or should he sell to Microsoft ?
MT
May 9, 2008
