Have you ever wondered how strange your online life is?

Something that we saw at SIME Barcelona today is what would happen if you extrapolate your online world offline, and the result was the video below.

We are having a great time at Barcelona, bringing together CTO of Amazon, founder of Flickr, serial entrepreneurs, investors, marketing experts to discuss the digital landscape. The morning session has been all about

1. Making marketing click  - how marketers operate today? And how has the consumption of information changed? From rich media ads to performance marketing, iPads to mobile phone, consumption of information and content has become ubiquitous.
2. CTO of Amazon had 3 golden principles – institutional YES whereby any idea is by default gets a yes or go ahead, and if someone wants to oppose it, he elaborates the reasoning as why not to implement the idea instead of the other way around. Second is, product development begins with an internal press release and a customer FAQ document since then you can come back to what you have promised and what you think you have delivered. And finally, motivating developers through pizzas.
3. The Panel on serial entrepreneurship was about finding the passion and motivating teams to drive towards a larger vision. With the life span of tech companies being very less (M&A booming in the market conditions), the market has a lot of 20+ and 30+ serial entrepreneurs who still go back to building their company instead of playing golf. And if you are still in your job, are you questioning your assumptions every day or are you connecting your passion to opportunity?

Looking forward to the rest of the day!

The State of the European Digital Economy!

How does the European digital economy look like? 2010 was clearly the year where two words dominated the scene – mobile and social. Mobile mainly due to the Android story, the 590M$ Advertising revenue, the ever increasing mobile ad impressions and the launch of cheaper hardware and more sophisticated software. Social due to a new seamless layer that is being added to everything we touch and do. From games to communities, its all about staying connected, multi-tasking with your friends, adding your location  etc. To look into the future, its good to see how far we have come.

The highlights:

1. The most time spent in Europe was on facebook followed by local stars Mail.ru and Poland’s Nasza-Klaza.pl
2. Search still dominated the usage pattern, although the budget spent on SEM decreased in 2010
3. Photos, Communities and Social Networking experienced the most growth
4. Social Networking accounted for greater portion of ad. revenues, predominantly due to Facebook’s phenomenal growth and the movement of digital dollars into engagement rather than pure display
5. The Social Commerce Movement spread like wild fire due to the adoption of services like Groupon and its clones.

(Data from ComCast)

The Return of IPO in 2011!

[From Strategyeye Digital Media's Predictions]

Facebook won’t yet, Demand Media definitely will, Skype wants to, LinkedIn might, as may Zynga, Groupon or even Twitter. Tech IPOs look set to come back with a vengeance in 2011. Or will they?

For all the speculation stoked during 2010, concrete commitments for going public this year are harder to identify. And companies are now looking at other ways to raise money.Hulu is a good example of a candidate supposedly poised for an IPO that now looks less certain. Enter Facebook and the USD1.5bn “special purpose vehicle” it created with Goldman Sachs. Via this, the social network will increase its shareholders to more than 500 and will have to disclose its financial results, but it doesn’t necessarily need to go public. Will other companies follow this strategy? Facebook may eventually IPO regardless, but if it does it will be in 2012, not 2011. The only certainty is that there will be more IPO activity this year than last, with Russian search engine Yandex, some more Chinese internet firms, Betfair, Pandora and Glam Media also ones to watch.

All in all a great time to pick tech stocks especially through concepts like Sharespost.

Infographic on who owns Facebook

Facebook, the social networking giant has snowballed into the social glue of the internet today. And as Christian Hernandez mentioned during his keynote at SIME Stockholm, Facebook is all about making the web social, enabling discovery of interesting networks and content. With a rumored IPO coming in April 2012, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Zynga have all got the attention of wall street investors who want a piece of the action. The recent valuation of 50B $ testifies to how far the idea has come along. Here is the infographic of Facebook’s ownership structure.

Dear Brands, build fanboys and not customers

The attention economy demands you build fan boys and not customers.

If you had a care-o-meter, most of your average mass marketing messages do not elicit enough attention from most if not all consumers.

Apple has fanboys who will kill for their brand. It’s even part of pop culture called mac envy

Walmart might be considered too cheap, but they serve their market exactly well. So do budget airlines.

The key is not what everyone thinks, but what your actual consumers think and then take their experience to a delightful new level.

At SIME, we asked marketing managers of the major brands today, what and how they built their fanboys. And we collected their response in this video below as part of the SIME Brand Stories collection.

So what’s your story?

The Web is Dead! Long Live the Internet

Michael Wolff and Chris Anderson co-wrote a very interesting and slightly controversial piece on why the web is dead, but the internet run by services and apps will continue to live on. You can read the article here

Two decades after its birth, the World Wide Web is in decline, as simpler, sleeker services — think apps — are less about the searching and more about the getting. Chris Anderson explains how this new paradigm reflects the inevitable course of capitalism. And Michael Wolff explains why the new breed of media titan is forsaking the Web for more promising (and profitable) pastures.

In summary, they present a case where:

- we are living in a world dominated by few people. The top 10 sites in the US account for 75% of page views in 2010.

- Google isn’t able to wield its magic in this world. May be AdMob is changing that a little, but the search spider hasn’t made its stronghold in the app world yet, partly because of the disconnection and defragmentation of the Internet world

- every company is a media company, partly because of the relationship, partly because of the business model (ads dominated), partly because of data content and channel strategies

- the future of this media world looks a lot like traditional media, because it was born out of the same embryo but has taken a different path. If Apple is dominating this media world, it was because Jobs and hence Apple have always aligned themselves with the traditional media (Think Pixar, Disney). And hence, iTunes, Apple TV and iPads all make sense in this new age of consumption.

I think its a fantastic case in point capturing the dawn of the world where unconsciously and unseemingly we have welcomed a new friend and consumption mechanism amongst us.

Infographic: Facebook Mobile Growth – Hysteric!

Crossing the Technology Frontiers with Om Malik (Giga Om) at SIME Stockholm

Technology has undoubtedly become the fundamental pillar of today’s business. Advertising can be tracked to the dot, databases have gotten more meaning and so have Business Intelligence, CRM and enterprise IT, thanks to the invention of the cloud architecture. With traditional revenue models crumbling and new subscription and service models emerging, what is the next big breakthrough?

Featuring technology expert, leading blogger Om Malik from Giga Om, we go on a ride on new technologies and concepts that are helping businesses take the leap. We also feature 3 special workshops on choosing the right technology partner, the new technology frontiers and the best practices for finding and retaining developers.

Read the detailed agenda

Welcome to SIME Stockholm and your very own Technology Track.

About OM Malik

Om Malik, Industry Commentator, GigaOM Network

Om Malik is the founder of GigaOM Network, where he is currently a senior writer. He has worked as a senior writer for Forbes.com, Red Herring and Business 2.0. He is the author of Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist. Om blogs about baseball, life and music on his personal blog, OmIs.Me. Follow him on Twitter @om

Opportunity Radar at SIME

Large companies are finding ways to stay relevant for users and advertisers, and as part of the strategy they are looking at new opportunities and concepts they want to partner with. Payment Solutions have become ever important than before and so has licensing content that users want to know more about. Entertainment has become the core of the proposition and online trust is important than ever before.

At SIME, we have invited one of the top trend watchers and researchers to talk through about new concepts and innovations that we should watch out for and, for CMO’s and decision makers to take notice of to partner or build or acquire. We think its going to be interesting to see what figures in. Are they the usual suspects like location based, geo-tagging, augmented reality .. or are they new innovations no one has heard about? Only time will tell.

Very welcome to 2 days of opportunities and trends at SIME. Very Welcome to SIME Stockholm.

TED Talks – Stories worth telling at SIME

The TED conference  started in 1984, but it was with the power of the internet, beginning 2006 that the world started to understand the power of gathering a set of thought leaders to talk about their vision, futuristic thinking and forward looking outlook. And as we know TED today, its become the nucleus of inspiration, knowledge and all things good about man kind, intelligence, power and connecting ideas with opportunities.

Simply put, its a classic case of good ideas spread, and great ideas catch on like a virus. TED has become the story of the decade and with chapters like TED Fellow, TED India, TEDx all around the world, the ideas have been exported to become talking points at branding and knowledge sessions at work to dinner tables at home.

At SIME, we want to bring the art of story telling to you.

And we have invited Bruno Giussani, EU Director for the TED Conferences to share some of the most inspiring stories that are worth telling.

We invite you to this tale of inspiration and knowledge. We invite you to 2 days of SIME Stockholm full of energy, adrenaline and inspiration.
Warm Welcome

Bruno Giussani, EU Director TED Conferences

Bruno Giussani is the European director of the TED conferences (www.ted.com) and a writer (his works have appeared in many publications including the NYTimes and the Economist). He has authored several books, including “Roam: Making Sense of the Wireless Internet “(Random House), and is a member of the Boards of Tinext, a Swiss Internet consultancy, and of the Knight Fellowship at Stanford University. He’s producing the TEDGlobal 2010 conference http://conferences.ted.com/TEDGlobal2010/