Herve Cuviliez

More and more people are bored by facebook. I’m not sure that a new design will change that, no?

Facebook has released its new home. Should we rename facebook to twitbook. at least, they will give twitter some credits

with 514m$ raised, Facebook is so innovative. they are able to copy twitter but change twitter light blue into a Facebook dark blue. Waouh

I hated the new HP of facebook, too crowded too messy, and u kinda lose ur way in there

I agree with the FB fact,i’m one of those who are getting bored, their new look? dont even care plus they are copying twitter

now facebook wanna be like twitter. clearly twitter is market leader and facebook is trying to catch up.

facebook has clearly accepted that twitter is the future and they have to just follow the direction of twitter

I’ve certaiinly stopped using facebook as frequently as I did. Suspect you are right - new design won’t bring me back.

Twitter success is because of the real time intimate conversation (include support of this through apps and desktop widgets) and the age of next generation reporting as a cause of this. This is why Facebook copied Twitter.

I watched on techcrunch a couple of weeks ago the future of search by Google. It impressives me, not only because they will team up human rating with pagerank but also because it will create new sources of traffic creation for all of us (your name is visible on each comment & rating made). Google was already taken something around 75% of our attention, it will become with this 99%.

It made me realize that Microsoft will never catchup on web search. They are too far behind, even buying Yahoo won’t solve the problem.

Having said that, Mr Balmer should look at emerging countries and learn from their “jump to the next generation” attitude.

When you start traveling there, you realize they’ve chosen not to catch up but to invest into the next generation infrastructure and it’s a winning strategy: Estonia (called  E-stonia), Macedonia (wimax covered), Africa (mobile applications stronger than web ones), UAE (150% mobile penetration rate)…

That’s why should focus on the next big thing: Mobile.

Mobile is the big thread for Google (my previous post on this here).

Why? because with mobile will come new usage patterns. Today, everything start with google but tomorrow nobody knows what will be the entry point on mobile internet.  Google already working on it with Android and their strong presence in the iphone.

Of course, it’s easy to say not easy to do, but with Microsoft cash-flow, it should be doable.
My humble opinion

A couple of months ago, I have created an account on Kiva.org. Kiva enables you to loan to small businesses in developing countries.

You can see my lender page here.

I’ve helped among others 2 projects, one Internet cafe (Loan Requested: $975.00) in Ayacucho, Peru and one bookstore (Loan Requested: $975.00) in Agoe, Togo.

Small Amount of money to be honest ($100 + $10 donation to Kiva). It was a trial to verify by myself if the social business concept is really effective.

The answer seems to be yes because i just received the first repayment from both projects.

It’s a great feeling to see these projects becoming a reality and more important repaying their debt to give others the opportunity to been also helped.

I spend a lot of time talking, thinking about the evolution of advertising. I even get pay for that.

for a lot of peoples, Nike or Apple are the champions. In a way, it’s true. They have great products, they are really strong in innovation and their communication is really best in class.

But Google is the real champion as a brand and as a media.

1) Google Brand reaches the Top 20 (source: Interbrand Best global brands 2007) in less than 10 years without buying any media. For that, they have created the first business case of every advertiser dream.
How did they do that ? one key word: Innovation
Strong buzz around products: Gmail, they offered 1Go storage capacity by invitation only when others offered only 25mb then 250mb in reaction. Bottom line
Open Culture: Google maps, every website can use them for free, a real service and Google gets its logo on every page
Entertainment: how hasn’t play hours with google earth. Bottom line for them, you have called all your friends about it and spent hours with a Google logo in front of your eyes.

2) Google is the center of the advertising world
Having a website google search compliant is now mandatory,
they have redefine the advertising model by introducing remuneration based on performance, first online but TV is next to come (read here).
With Adsense, Google have provide a lot of startups their first stream of incomes. In a way, Google is also the most active business angel

To me, Google will be the spark that divide she advertising market into two worlds.

The “performance model” one where you will pay only for results based on its ultra dominant system Adwords. I’m not talking only for advertising but for all kinds of media, especially TV because of TIVOs systems and Catch up TVs.

It will the largest share of the market in term of revenues, but not in term of profit for the industry except for google of course.
This world will be good for generating sales, driving traffic but not to create brand or create your reputation. This last point introduce the second world in the advertising industry : the advertising on demand world.

Born with the Internet, the on demand advertising (ODA) can be define by one rule: if you have to buy ad spaces to promote it it’s not ODA.
ODA is and will be more and more about creating Branded Entertainment, Application or online services that people want to see, use even pay for it.
Need examples other than Google Earth? M&M’s e-commerce, Burger King Video games, etc..
Isn’t one of the best form of advertising to have people downloading your product, playing with it or spread the world about it?

ODA market will be small in term of market share by definition (remember no media buying) but will be the most profitable segment for agencies

Everything between those 2 worlds will disappear especially the good old $1 millions 30s TV commercial, but it seems that the industry is stunk in the old good “pay per view” model even Yahoo, so Google will have for years a bright blue sky in front of them.

I hope I will be wrong about that (no competition in front of google) but I doubt.

With a price ratio 1:20 comparing to PCs and a vaste majority of the population living with few dollars a day, it’s a no brainer to understand why mobile penetration is 10 times bigger in emerging countries.

For that reason, we will see mobile innovations coming from those countries in years to come.
Want signs of this?
South Africa is about to release a voting system through mobile for local, regional and even national election.
Bangladesh mobile operator Grameen Phone has gave information access (information is key for a farmer, for example. It’s helping him to know to where and when to sell his production instead of relying on local resellers) to poor people through 16 millions lines.
M-banking is the future of banking in Midle East & Africa (Etisalat has released last month a mobile wallet)

I see more and more mobile innovations coming from Africa (see dreamoval), middle east and of course India & china.

Kill cliches about tech innovation always coming from developed countries and remember

from the necessity come the creativity

If you know any others innovations there, please continue the discussion by leaving comments

I just finished the latest book of Prof. Muhammad Yunus (founder of the Grameen bank and 2006 Peace Nobel Prize) called “Creating a world without poverty“.

I’d liked his analysis of capitalism and more precisely his vision on the far too simple way we are dividing the economic world: On one side companies with only on objective, maximizing profit and on the other side none profit organizations in charge of taking care of poor people & environment.

You, like I first done, will object that now big firms have sustainable development and CSR programs. that’s true but at the end of the day what is the one and only indicator the market will use to rate a company : PROFIT.
So if a CEO has to choose between profit and doing a good action, he will choose profit in 99% of the time because it’s what the market expects.

You know what it’s normal and Prof. Muhammad Yunus find that normal also.

That’s precisely what is liked in his approach, he is not an anti-everything kind of guy but a very practical and realistic one.

He proposes to create a new business concept: The social Business. A social business will be have the same mechanisms as a standard business but with two major differences it’s first goal is poverty reduction instead of making profits and propose products and services that’s enhance poor people life.
They will not distribute dividends, the investors will only get back their investment that’s all. So it will help to low products and services prices.

Social businesses and standard businesses will compete on the same market and at the end, consumers will decide.

I think it’s a brilliant idea it will give talented people another option than “profit companies” without sacrifing their revenues (remember a social business will be pay the same salary as a standard business) plus it will leverage the money given to non profit organizations by giving them the ability to get back their investment instead of just spending it.

My only concern about social business is how do we ensure social businesses keep their structural costs sharp without the profit pressure from the shareholders (really important to be able to keep the lowest prices). The board members will have to play hard on this otherwise it will turn into an inefficient administration and then back to beginning.

I strongly recommend this book and to think about this social business concept, if you have any input or comment, feel free.
On my side, I have a idea for a social business, I work on it and I keep you updated.

While the vaste majority of us just getting tired of facebook, the Web 2.0 is entering into phase 2. I will say a more mature phase.
With phase 1, we learnt how to connect to each other, sharing basic information, etc… I’m talking about facebook, dopplr, linkedin, Xing and hundred of others.

With phase 2, we will learn to share informations with others forms of intelligence. I’m talking about artificial intelligence, I’m talking about robots, sensors, any kind of devices. Scared ?
To make it simple, everyday there is millions of information gathered by sensors that could be valuable for us: temperature sensors, mobile for localization, wifi hotspots, RFID chips, etc…
In fact, we are already surrendered by sensors collecting information and “socializing” between them.
This phase 2 will be the connection of this 2 kinds of social networks: us and them.
Don’t Believe me ? Need some signs ? Here is some

Tim O’Reilly at the ETech08:

the future of Web 2.0 will be applications driven by sensors

But in fact, the first person, i ever heard talking about this, is Bernard Benhamou that’s was a year ago and he made a interview (in french) about this in may 06.

and then start to google this there tons of pages on this: A good article on the economist

So what’s new ?
It’s getting real. In 2008, we will move from prospective to concreate applications.

Need another sign ?

Yahoo just released Fire Eagle (a way to share your location with sites and services online) that collect localization informations and centralize them in an unique application then you can feed this into your applications. Sources could be wifi hotspots, mobile, gps, etc…

I will continued to investigate that and invest myself and my money into this type of application.

To be continued…

I’ve found that last month in San Francisco, not in the Apple Store but at the theater!

Selling ipods like chocolate bars, i like this.

thanks Mr Jobs,

I just attended a keynote from Tim O’Reilly. It was amazing

He talked about hackers philosophy and why Emerging Tech conference is the place to be for them. Does that make me an hacker ? I hope so.

Hackers are people who try things that have never been done before
Hackers don’t know where is the business opportunity but do things because they love it, because it matters

they don’t know if it will be the next big thing, they just loved it.

to make his point he showed this picture : “Microsoft, 1978: Would you have invested?”

Don’t follow the ease path then you will be an hacker…