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

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