On August 10, Facebook said it had acquired FriendFeed, the Mountain View (California) social aggregation service founded by Google alumni Bret Taylor and Jim Norris in 2008.
The deal, which The Wall Street Journal reported to be valued at nearly US$50 million in cash and stock, gives Facebook top talent and advanced technology in an area many see as the next great frontier on the Web: real-time search.
This month also a book released on the popular social networking site titled “The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal“.
Marketing has changed. We’re in the age of one-to-one marketing, where the customer actually has a role in shaping the messaging for your brand. Social Media–blogs, Twitter, Facebook, wikis, user-generated tools–have given her all she needs to effect whether your products and services do well in the marketplace.
Long gone are the 4Ps of marketing, these are the days of the 4Cs, a customer centric approach that includes the customer’s wants and needs; the cost to satisfy the customer; the convenience; and communication.
A key driving force in this new way of marketing is social media. An article on marketing with social media can be found here.
No one knows how the microblogging site and similar online social networks will make money, but investors see a new Web revolution: (the real-time Web).
When entrepreneurs and investors get excited about what they’re calling the real-time Web, they’re talking about services that combine immediacy and social connections in a way that makes them easy and even addictive (amongst others are twitter and facebook).
Real-time Web startups are providing everything from basic utilities and business applications to search and e-commerce. Here’s a look at this new generation. And at this webpage you can find an introduction to the real-time web.
In Mercer Consulting’s annual Quality of Living Survey, Europe once again dominates the list of 215 countries around the world. The top three cities are, by rank, Vienna, Zurich (last years winner), and Geneva. Like last year Amsterdam ranks as number thirteen on the list.
The U.S. fares poorly, barely making it into the top 30 with Honolulu and San Francisco in the bottom two places. The top city in Asia is Singapore, at no. 26. No cities from Africa or South America are in the top 30. The bottom? Baghdad once again comes in at 215. A complete overview can be found here.
Discussions about the public’s access to broadband often focus on which areas or countries have the most high-speed Internet connections.
However, with new demanding internet services on the rise what really matters is the speed of the internet connection. Akamai (AKAM) has published a report that ranks the speed of internet connections around the world. In the first quarter of 2009, about one-fifth of the internet connections around the world were at speeds greater than 5 Mbps.
The report includes broadband adoption data gathered from across Akamai’s network of more than 50,000 servers in 70 countries, and categorises internet connections by download speeds.
Three Asian countries are in the top five and seven European countries are in the top ten. A slide show of the top twenty can be found here.
Over the past three decades, a few titanic rivalries have defined the technology industry’s mega-trends, ultimately determining which products eventually end up in consumers’ and companies’ hands.
Now, adding to the annals of competition that include Microsoft’s clashes with Apple in the ’80s, IBM in the ’90s, and Google in this decade, the new defining rivalry in tech may be between Google and Apple. Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s resignation from Apple’s board on August 3 highlights the degree to which these companies are more foe than friend. Read more on this here and for an interview with Google’s CEO: Eric Schmidt please click here.
Economic and financial globalisation and the expansion of world trade have brought substantial benefits to countries around the world. But the current financial crisis has put globalisation on hold, with capital flows reversing and global trade shrinking.
Some analysts see the drivers of the recent globalisation wave getting undermined, with protectionism on the rise.
Even supporters of globalisation agree that the benefits of globalisation are not without risks—such as those arising from volatile capital movements. The IMF works to help economies manage or reduce these risks, through economic analysis and policy advice and through technical assistance in areas such as macroeconomic policy, financial sector sustainability, and the exchange-rate system.
This report (PDF) pulls together the IMF’s work on globalisation and includes links to key articles, documents, and background information.
Emerging market countries are facing increasing difficulties around the world because of the spreading global economic crisis, with demand falling for their exports, investment slumping, and cross-border lending drying up.
As the crisis becomes more prolonged, a growing number of emerging economies will find room for policy manoeuvre becoming increasingly limited, and large-scale official support is likely to be needed from bilateral and multilateral sources.
Overall, risks are largest for emerging economies that rely on cross-border flows to finance current account deficits or to fund the activities of their financial or corporate sectors. Countries with pegged exchange rate regimes may have little scope for interest rate cuts to the extent that the crisis has put sustained pressure on their exchange rates.
Foreign direct investment is set to slow significantly, given the fall in private equity assets, the lack of credit available to finance acquisitions, and sharply deteriorating growth prospects in emerging markets.
This report (PDF) highlights the main policy issues facing emerging market economies, and IMF action to support its emerging market members.
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