Can we build a virtual Silicon Valley, via social networks ?

“Why Japan, like other developped economies, needs to embrace the economy of creativity”

Hiroshi Okano is professor at the Graduate Business School of Osaka.

He is a specialist of creativity. According to him, Japanese companies have always been good to procuced very nice technological state of the art products. Nevertheless, they integrated too seldom the creativity, design and cultural inputs which give, today more than ever, the value to new items.

Toyota, once the champion of innovation in the world, is now facing a huge crisis due, for a part, for its inability to start from the customer’s taste and cultural sensitivity instead of giving the key of innovation mainly to engineers, who draw very efficient cars but too light in terms of emotional attraction.
Nowadays, however, Japanese cultural productions are becoming very popular all around Asia.

Will the economy of Japan rely more, soon, on cultural soft products than industrials outputs ?

Jeremy Rifkin: “We are more and more connected in our biosphere as we are in the blogosphere”

Media: the rise of “content in the cloud”

“Enterprise 2.0 is shifting from buzz word to reality for a growing number of companies”

Stuart McIntyre is a British consultant, expert in the Enterprise 2.0 concept.

“Enterprise 2.0 is not anymore a buzz word : it is becoming a reality in a growing number of firms, says Stuart McIntyre. Today, collaboration, knowledge sharing practices via new internet tools (a.o. social softwares) are helping companies to improve their productivity and, above all, their innovation capabilities, in their day to day live”.

“However, Enterprise 2.0 is not only a matter of using online social tools, underlines the consultant, who was speaking at Blug 2010, a IBM Lotus conference in Brussels. Enterprise 2.0 needs a cultural shift, new behaviour and the support of the leaders at the top of the organisation. Involve the leaders is critical in order to turn a traditional firm into a true enterprise 2.0. It is a managerial challenge”.

If Enterprise 2.0 can drive innovation up, it won’t erase the R&D department, though.

“Nevertheless, a company should evaluate the cost of not tapping into the ideas of the people working in other departments within the organisation, either be it the marketing, sales, HR or finance units...”

Opera: “Cloud computing is not enough. The web of things will have a greater impact…”

Facebook is taking over Google : it sounds like the Web is becoming truly social

Everybody has noticed it. It is no anecdote :

Facebook has taken over Google as the most visited website in the US.

(source : http://www.sneijers.net)

There is no reason to believe the trend is to weaken. As far as Facebook keeps growing (above 400 millions users nowadays), the biggest social network in the world should soon takes the crown of world n°1 website off the head of Larry & Sergey’s search engine.

The web is already social, and Facebook sets the pace

As a matter of facts, the shift has occured, yet. The web is truly social.

Whereas Facebook grows in size, the social network remains far in the shadow of Google in terms of revenues. Those could reach 1 to 2 billions dollars in 2010,… twelve less than the latter.

Though, Facebook runs in the tracks of its forerunner. The Facebooks ads service sounds like a terrific, very accurate, advertisement tool that could become very popular in the years to come.

Moreover, today, lots of discussions, conversation, content sharing or news posting take place directly on Facebook. Companies have skipped the stage of setting up their own blog and rely solely on a Facebook page and/or Twitter account for their digital marketing.

Google Social Search and the race to catch up with the social web

So far, Google hasn’t lost the game. Despite its backfire in China, the search engine remains strongly armed.

However, recent initiatives induce Google is in a defensive position.

The company had to strike a financial deal with Twitter in order to index its content in its search results. Google has been challenged by internautes regarding the instant search.

Recently, Google announced a number of move toward more social search and actions. Not always succesful, so far.

Social network Orkut has hit in a limited number of countries.

Google Buzz hasn’t been a very big hit, useless to say.

With Google Social Search, the company of Mountain View is touching its core business.

The service, still under beta version, demonstrates how the social web is now taking the lead as opposed to the historical web.

Google Social Search relies on the social graphs the company has an access to, via Gmail and other logged in tools.

Hereby, though, Google implicitely recognize that social recommendation is more relevant than its search algorithm.

There, it is not sure Google is in a better position than Facebook…

Tariq Krim : “You don’t pay for using Gmail or Facebook. Why should you pay to use an operating system ?”

The usage of social media in the B2B world

Business schools do not teach the startup spirit, so we launched a Startup Academy

Alex Barrera is the co-founder of the Tetuan Valley, a network of web companies based in the North of Madrid, in Spain.

According to him, no business school in Europe teaches the spirit neither the vision of a startup runner.

“In Business Schools, we learn to replicate a business model that works elsewhere. Not to be and entrepreneur inventing something new. Operate a company is easy to learn. That is no rocket science. Starting a company requires another set of competences, though”.

That is the reason why Alex Barrera (who has his own startup, Inkzee) has launched, along with other, a startup academy.

It brings coaching, vision and entrepreneur solidarity. Here is his interview

Globally connected, our life will change

Why companies need to create online content

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