David Meerman Scott has posted a video on YouTube which is based on his promotional campaign for his new book, World Wide Rave. More than 100 people from seven continents contributed to the campaign. One of the pictures my brother and I took in Lindvallen, Sweden, in December 2008 can be seen in the video (1:54 min). Thanks for including it David!

I have embedded his video below:

David Meerman Scott is a thought leadership strategist and online marketing expert. He is also the author of three books on marketing including the bestseller ’The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing and online media to reach your buyers directly’. David is now in the news with his new book, World Wide Rave, which is due to be released on the 3rd of March.

I had the opportunity to meet David during a workshop he did for the EMEA Marketing Team at Dow Jones in London back in June 2008. David is currently promoting his new book and he approached me and some colleagues at Dow Jones a few months back and asked if we could help him out by putting up his poster somewhere interesting in our respective countries. His aim is to get a bunch of countries, cities and locations around the world represented.

My contribution to his campaign can be found below. The photos are taken in Lindvallen, Sweden. The first two represent David’s poster together with my brother Carl-Johan’s dog Pukko. My brother also helped me with taking the photos.

Update: David has now posted one of my photos on his book’s blog.

Click on the photos for a High Resolution version.

More information on David’s new book can be found here.

BusinessWeek, a business periodical, has published its ranking of the world’s 50 most innovative companies. The list, which was compiled in collaboration with Boston Consulting Group (BCG), features Apple, Google, Toyota, in first, second and third place, respectively.

Here are the 10 most innovative companies in the world according to BusinessWeek and BCG:

1. Apple
2. Google
3. Toyota Motor
4. General Electric
5. Microsoft
6. Tata Group
7. Nintendo
8. Procter & Gamble
9. Sony
10. Nokia

An interactive table of the full ranking of the 50 most innovative companies, a breakdown of the most innovative companies by industry and region and a full methodology is available here.

I recently wrote a report in a course called Management of Human Resources at Cass Business School on General Electric (GE) and its Human Resource Management (HRM) practices. When researching for this report, I came across a very interesting article published by The Economist, a news and international affairs publication, on golf and the game’s importance in business.

GE, for example, is famous for being a ‘golf company’. Jack Welsh, the company’s famous ex-boss, is according to many the best golfing CEO of all times and golf has over the years become an essential tool within the company for any manager looking to move up the career ladder. The Economist claims that Welsh used the game as a character test to see whether a person had the guts to work for his organisation. Many other organisations value the game very highly too. For example, John Mack, the boss of Morgan Stanley, is said to have made it a habit to appoint golfing friends to the board.

The Economist addresses a very interesting and important issue in the article. Is it possible that there’s a correlation between the very low number of female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and the fact that they don’t get the opportunity to play golf with the male counterparts (e.g. because of mens-only clubs such as Augusta National in the US)? On the rare occasions when women get to play golf with their male colleagues, they play off a different tee. At the time of print, there were only eleven female CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and sadly, I don’t think the number has increased dramatically since then.

What’s your option? Do you think it’s possible that there’s a correlation between the very low number of female CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies and the fact that they don’t get the opportunity to play golf with their male counterparts?

You can read the original article here.

There has been a lot of speculation in the media during the last year about Internet’s latest phenomena Facebook and its profitability. An article by the Economist published in October 2007 suggested that Facebook might generate revenues of some $100m this year. Microsoft later paid $240m for 1.6% of the company – which valued the company to as much as $15bn – an amount many experts think is mad.

It now looks like the finances of the private-held company finally have been leaked onto the Net. Kara Swisher at AllThingsD.com, part of the Wall-Street Journal, has published the following financial metrics – which she claims comes from a meeting held by Facebook’s CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg, yesterday:

• 2007 Revenues: $150 million
• 2008 Revenues: $300 to $350 million (projected)
• 2007 Headcount: 450
• 2008 Headcount: 1,000 (projected)
• Capital Expenditures: $200 million (i.e., servers)
• EBITDA*: $50 million
• 2008 Cash Flow (EBITDA – Capital Expenditures): negative 150 million

*EBITDA = Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization

Sounds like a fantastic investment opportunity – doesn’t it? But of course, the figures can change dramatically if Facebook would make a breakthrough in social network monetization – such as their very own version of Google Ads.

Read Karen’s article for more information.

I have just started to take a course called IT for Business at Cass Business School. The course touches upon everything from IT Management issues to Web 2.0.

Ron Young delivered the first lecture yesterday and talked about Knowledge Management (KM) and technology. Ron is the CEO of a company called Knowledge Associates. He is acknowledged as a leading expert in KM and has worked with leading organisations in the US, Europe and Asia Pacific.

Ron outlined five key challenges that he reckons companies will face within the next 10 years:

• Companies need to substantially increase the productivity of knowledge working, at least by a 50 fold
• Companies need to exponentially develop global knowledge sharing networks and relations
• Companies need to radically innovate
• Companies need to dramatically improve quality
• Leadership must be aligned to the timeless business principles (increase sales, reduce costs, increase profit/value)

For more information, visit his blog on the URL below:

km-consulting.blogspot.com

I found a great magazine last week called Entrepreneur. It is an American magazine but can be found at selected bookshops such as Borders in London. The magazine offers some great information and interesting reading on sales and marketing, management, technology and business strategy.

The November issue features an interview with Guy Kawasaki, known as the former chief evangelist for Apple. He has recently launched a social media site called Truemors and shares his start-up experience so far.

What I found most interesting with the interview was his comparison between the old internet start-up and his way of doing it – which I think applies to a lot of new internet based businesses today that does not require a significant amount of funding from VCs to get functioning.

For example, Guy launched his site without a proper business plan, with less than $13,000 in start-up funds, outsourced the development, worked from home and then hosted the site at an ISP rather than having his own servers to minimise costs further.

The “old-way” of doing it would according to Guy have involved frequent pitching to VCs to raise the funds required (some $1m over 6 months period), having 3-4 people in-house to carry out the development of the site for one year and to maintain 2-3 servers and have an IT guy to run them for a total cost of $100,000 per year.

Sure, there are still many technology related businesses that take millions to start, but there are many ideas that can be done using personal savings or credit cards by using great open-source tools such as WordPress to minimise costs. The model that Guy Kawasaki illustrated in the interview proves this.

EBay, the company behind the online auction and shopping website ebay.com, has written down its investment in Skype, an Internet telephone service, by £695m (nearly 50%). Skype has continued to add new users (its current user base is said to be 200m) at a fast rate but failed to produce the sort of e-commerce and advertising revenues that EBay had hoped for when it acquired the firm.

FT.com reports that EBay continues to insist that its long-term hopes for Skype remain unchanged and that it has no plans of selling the business.

At the same time, the two co-founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis have quit as executives.  According to FT.com, Mr. Zennström stepped down as CEO after missing out on a pay-day that could have earned him and other shareholders an extra $1.2bn. Instead, he will become non-executive chairman of the company and is expected to spend more time on other projects. The Swedish entrepreneur states in an interview with Di.se that he would like to spend more time working on Joost.com, an online video company he founded together with Mr. Friis after selling Skype in 2005, and on Atomico, his risk capital group.

It will certainly be interesting to see what the two Scandinavian entrepreneurs can do with P2P TV after having mastered the field of P2P file-sharing with Kazaa and P2P VoIP with Skype.

Read more on:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7023197.stm
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3a431624-7054-11dc-a6d1-0000779fd2ac.html
http://di.se/Index/Nyheter/2007/10/01/250671.htm?src=xlink (Swedish only)

I came across an interesting article in the Economist recently about the use of mathematical algorithms in business. An algorithm is essentially a procedure or formula for solving a problem. The speed and processing power of today’s computers mean that algorithms can execute tasks and solve problems at an incredible speed. Examples of algorithms used in business include the ones used by search-engine companies such as Google.

The Economist explains in their article how one can validate credit-card numbers using an algorithm called the Luhn algorithm. The algorithm, which was created by an IBM researcher more than 40 years ago, can be used to validate the numbers entered by consumers on an e-commerce site, for example, to keep processing times down.

Example (from the Economist):

Step 1: Take the original credit card number:
3 7 7 9 5 6 5 7 0 9 4 4 7 2 6
Step 2: Reverse the numbers
6 2 7 4 4 9 0 7 5 6 5 9 7 7 3
Step 3: Double every second number
4 8 18 14 12 18 14
Step 4: Add the numbers up (if more than nine, subtract nine)
6 4 7 8 4 9 0 5 5 3 5 9 7 5 3

The answer is 80. The credit card number is valid if divisible by 10.

The Luhn algorithm can be used in a number of programming languages such as C#, Java and PHP. More information and examples on how to use the algorithm can be found below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luhn_algorithm

Reference:

The Economist, “Business by numbers”, p. 81, September 15th 2007

Times are good in London. The weather is finally getting better after a quite cold start of the year. The economy in London as one of the world’s leading financial centres is not too bad either. This can be illustrated by all the brand new Ferraris quite annoyingly passing by my home just outside the Square Mile.  The Economist launched the Big Mac index in 1980s, perhaps its time to abolish the burgers and introduce the Italian sports cars. When a young banker is driving home in his extremely expensive car before 6pm on a Monday; you know times are good.

The management team at Google, the search giant, is perhaps not as cheerful and pleased as the workers in the Square Mile.  YouTube, one of Google’s main acquisitions last year, is facing quite a lot of trouble. Viacom, a media company, has announced that it is going to sue Google and YouTube for copyright infringement.

The media company is demanding $1 billion in damages after YouTube failed to take down a large amount of clips illegally uploaded to YouTube. Viacom says that 160,000 of its clips have been illegally viewed 1.5 billion times. It is almost impossible for YouTube to control the situation since the clips that they are taking down reappears on the site in a matter of minutes when other users upload them. YouTube has struck deals with media companies such as CBS and the BBC to minimize this problem. However, it has so far not managed to strike a deal with Viacom which owns companies such as MTV. The Economist reckons that Viacom’s move is just part of its strategy to get better terms in a very important deal for both firms.

YouTube has the traffic and brand image required to be successful over a long period of time. But is the company’s business model and strategy sufficient enough to please its stakeholders in the long-run? YouTube’s not so impressive revenues of $15m last year mostly depended on professionally produced contents, not user-generated. Large media companies have also started to create their own video sites to take on YouTube and Google. Moreover, Niklas Zennström, co-founder of Skype and Kazaa, will launch his next venture, Joost, later this year. Joost is an interactive IP-based TV software which will offer professionally produced contents to users for free – everything will be financed by advertisers. The revenue will then be shared with the video-content owners and the company will not let users submit clips until copyright and quality issues have been resolved.

At the end of the day, its looks like its going to be an interesting year for us consumers. The competition for businesses in the industry will for sure increase, but for us, it is a win-win situation.