In case you missed it, the high-profile eG8 Forum took place in Paris last week. The two-day forum was arranged by the French President Sarkozy and attended by some of today’s leading digital entrepreneurs and executives (Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Google’s Schmidt and News Corp’s Murdoch to name a few).

As reported by the Wall Street Journal, the aim of the gathering was essentially to advise and inform policy makers such the US Commander-In-Chief Obama and the French President on how to regulate our dear Internet going forward. Industry leaders responded and advised against an over-regulated Web. For example, Google’s Schmidt stated that “technology will move faster than governments, so don’t legislate before you understand the consequences”. O’Reilly Media used the following headline to summarise the event: “At the eG8, 20th century ideas clashed with the 21st century economy – The eG8 shows online innovation and freedom of expression still need strong defenders”.

Another article by O’Reilly Media quotes the American author Tapscott on what he thinks about eG8 and policy makers trying to regulate the Web as we know it:

“Predictably, old style political leaders comfortable with the industrial age are dazed and confused, and many feel threatened. A new communications medium is causing disruption, dislocation and uncertainty. And leaders of old paradigms with vested interests fear what they do not understand, and react with coolness or even hostility. Rather than innovating and opening up they often hunker down, trying to strengthen old outdated rules and approaches.”.

There are definitely interesting times ahead. Will policy makers tighten online regulation? If so, what impact will this have on innovation and growth in the digital space? What’s your thoughts on online regulation? Leave a comment below and let us know.

If you were not invited to attend eG8 – don’t worry. Many of the briefings, interviews and presentations from last week were recorded and are available for the general public to consume on-demand. I have embedded one below featuring my favourite Swedish digital entrepreneur Niklas Zennström on everything from innovation to Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Skype:

More videos are available on the eG8 Forum’s official Web site.

I recently wrote about today’s Internet usage from a financial perspective. McKinsey Quarterly (the world renowned consultancy’s business journal) reported our interactions with the Web to be worth an astounding €150 billion euro a year. The business journal has now published an article on new research by McKinsey Global Institute looking at the Web’s impact on economic growth, employment and productivity.

The study, which addresses the Web economies of thirteen countries (the G8 nations and five other nations including my home country Sweden), found that the Web today accounts for a significant portion of the world’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and more and more plays an important role in economic growth.

Here’s a summary of some of the most interesting findings highlighted by McKinsey Quarterly:

• The Web accounts for 3.4% of overall GDP in these thirteen countries. More than 50% of this relates to private usage (mainly advertising and online purchases). The Web economy now exceeds sectors such as agriculture and energy.
• In the mature countries studied (the G8 countries plus South Korea and Sweden), McKinsey found the Web to have accounted for as much as 21% of GDP growth between 2004 and 2009.
• McKinsey found most of the economic value of the Web to fall outside the technology sector with 75% of the benefits captured by the more traditional industry sectors.
• In Sweden (the country where the Web economy has had the biggest contribution to GDP growth), the Web economy contributed to as much as 15% of GDP growth between 1995 and 2009 and 33% between 2004 and 2009. Germany comes second with 14% between ’95 and ’09 and 24% between ’04 and ’09.

Overall, a very interesting read this bank holiday weekend for academics and professionals alike. If you’re not spending tomorrow (Sunday) at Wentworth like me watching Manassero do a McIlroy and Edfors shoot a 64 to beat Donald for the €750,000 pay check, you have no real excuse for not digging into the full report of the study (which was recently presented at the high-profile e-G8 Forum in Paris) during your morning coffee.

NB: The Internet/Web economy is defined by McKinsey Global Institute as the “sum of Internet consumption (services, access, e-commerce, etc.), private investment, public expenditure, and the trade balance in Internet-related goods and services”.

McKinsey Quarterly recently published a very intriguing piece on the consumer surplus created on the Internet today. The online journal found that we, perhaps not very surprisingly, today obtain considerable value from our interactions with the Web, whether it’s from using sites like LinkedIn for professional networking or services like YouTube for streaming videos. What’s more remarkable is that this usage is estimated to be worth a staggering €150 billion euro a year with a net benefit for consumers of approx. €100 billion euro a year (after subtracting elements like subscription fees, pop-up ads and privacy issues). This figure is expected to grow further to €190 billion euro by ’15, e.g. as new wireless services become available and more people get access to high speed Internet connections.

Some interesting stats from the article:

• Four online services (e-mail, search, social networks and instant messaging) generate 52% of the consumer surplus.
• The business models with the highest consumer surplus are those based around communications (44%) followed by Web services (38%) and entertainment (18%).
• The online services which generate the least amount of consumer surplus are blogs, games/gambling and directory services.
• Only some 20% of Internet users today pay to use an online service.

McKinsey also addresses how businesses and entrepreneurs might more evenly divide the surplus between consumers and their Internet ventures, e.g. by charging more for content (like Rupert Murdoch did for the Times in 2009 by requiring people to pay to gain access to the paper online). But as mentioned by some of McKinsey’s readers, is this value really for online service providers to take advantage of? As stated by a CEO from Spain: “the moment you truly monetise the Web … is the moment you lose its biggest value: participation.”. As pointed out by McKinsey, online service providers operate in a market environment which allows them to generate revenues from e.g. both advertisers as well as their end-users (a scenario an economist might refer to as a two-sided market or network). As the value to the different parties in a two-sided market/network mainly depends on the number of users on the other end of the market, why try to restrict access when engagement and participation appear to be king?

On a side note, Harvard Business Review published a great article on two-sided markets/networks and network effects in ’06 which I highly recommend to anyone looking for further reading around these topics.

Fsavin.com has now been updated with a new design and Content Management System (CMS). It’s still work in progress and should be completed within the near future.

I will from now on mainly use this site to blog about Enterprise 2.0 (E 2.0), the topic for my dissertation. More specifically, I will be looking at E 2.0, a term coined by Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School in 2006, from the perspective of the millennial generation (also known as Generation Y).

Why the millennial generation and not today’s knowledge workers? My contemporaries and I will shortly be arriving in the workplace with a lot of familiarity with Web 2.0 tools that we have used privately outside the world of academia (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc.). This will of course affect our expectations on the type of communication and collaborative technologies that will be available to us in future employment. For example, it’s a big difference between being a digital native to a digital immigrate in terms of digital preferences etc. A lot of us prefer to use social software platforms instead of e-mail and other channels. I believe that our digital preferences will play an important part in shaping and defining the communication and collaborative tools of the future.

Dr. Martin Rich, Lecturer in Information Management at Cass Business School in London, has agreed to supervise my project. Click here to visit his blog.

Watch this space for analysis, commentary and information on E 2.0 and the User-Driven Web from the perspective of a millennial.

NB: As my time and budget for this project is quite limited, I will mainly focus on the use of E 2.0 within organisations. E 2.0 technologies and tools can also be used between companies and their partners or customers. See Andrew McAfee’s blog for a more detailed explanation.

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.

I have seen many students use Wikipedia as a source for academic reports. Perhaps even worse, many of these students have referred to articles published on the website in their bibliographies. Wikipedia is great for checking general knowledge you have forgotten and some articles do provide a good reference list. However, you shouldn’t under any circumstances use the online-based encyclopaedia as a source.

Wikipedia is what many refer to as a “wiki”, a server program that allows its users to collaborate in forming the content of a website. Companies can use wikis to create effective intranets and for Knowledge Management activities. A detailed article on the wiki concept and its pros and cons can be found here.

One of the primary concerns about Wikipedia is that it’s openly edited, i.e. anyone can change or update entries. Even the website’s co-founder, Jimmy Wales, has said that it shouldn’t be used as an academic source.

You can use a tool called WikiScanner to get an understanding of how inaccurate information published on Wikipedia can be. The tool allows you to cross-reference the IP address of thousands of Wikipedia edits made anonymously with the IP address of organisations from around the world. This result in a service which allows you to see which organisations were responsible for editing any article you choose.

Wired, an American magazine, has published a list of salacious edits made by different organisations. For example, an IP address belonging to Waggener Edstrom, Microsoft’s PR firm, edited a page about MSN Search to say that it was a major competitor of Google.

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 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.

Are you looking to learn more about a candidate you are considering for an opening at your company? Or perhaps you are keen on knowing how your company is described in the media? Then you should try a service called Google Alerts. The service, which is free to use, gives users the possibility of learning when and where a certain keyword, e.g. a person or competitor, is quoted in the media. Updates are sent via e-mail in either plain text or HTML format.

How to use the service:

• Create a new account on Google Alert’s website. This is very easy and not at all time consuming, especially if you already have an account with Google.
• Enter the keyword(s) you wish to receive updates on. It is possible to add/delete keywords later on.
• Enter the frequency in which checks are made for new results (e.g. daily or as it happens).
• Decide in which format you wish to receive the updates. I can recommend HTML for formatting reasons.

Google Alerts is relevant for a range of business activities, from HR to market research. Learn more about the service on the URL below:

http://www.google.com/alerts