The day was organized by the Retail Management Institute of the university St Gallen. So many Retail and eCommerce guys attended. IRM also announced a new study where a friend of mine was one of the authors. This retail and eCommerce guys were a completely other audience compared to other conferences, barcamps etc. But several CEOs (Migros, former Metro, LeShop, Amazon and many more) attended.

Major parts of all presentations showed many insights and new aspects. But this none geek but business only audience triggered funny parts in some presentations: A guy from Google explained for example “how to use adsense” and that next to the search results there are ads and that is how google makes the money. or about 200 people tried to not fall asleep during a company overview of ricardo.ch (eBay competitor). It was like 5-10 years ago. At least there was no “This is Web 2.0″ presentation.

 
 
The presenters showed business models and success factors and that you could make money, although if your are not leading edge in technology. This was very interesting for me .

Google as well as the BMW Head of Digital or the founder of iTaste gave very good hints and predictions of how they see the future of the market. Frog Design (they designed a Mac, Sony WEGA etc) showed some examples of how online and offline could work together.

Ralf Kleber the German CEO of Amazon gave a very good overview about how the developed their business model and how to do it right. One of the best presentation of the day. I thought that this what he explained is already common sense (customer is king) but it is not.

The major point for me was a really strange comparison between online and offline views of the future.

Some people really are still not believing that we will have a, call it “internet of things” or “ubiouitous internet” etc in 5-10 years. Sure there are people without internet in the future too and people will still buy some newspapers but the growth of the markets are not offline or in more general: not without innovation.

My Recommendation is to check out www.itaste.com very cool word of mouth recommendation page for restaurants and places.

 The whole Kresge Auditorium was full:

Here are the speakers:

Tim Draper – a big Venture Capitalist (Founder and a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson ) in the Silicon Valley and a blogger. His partner Steve spoke yesterday at the ChurchillClub Event. On Tim’s blog entrepreneurs could get some insights about the life of a VC and what’s important and what’s bullshit. I prefered to read Guy Kawasakis blog on VC but I will give him a chance one page one (of 25 with 500 other blogs on my Netvibes). He also stated to have Tweet Experiences but I couldn’t find him.

Michael Moe – Blogger and author of “How to find the next Starbucks”

+  Founding Partner, ThinkPanmure, and Author (Finding the Next Starbucks: How to Identify and Invest in the Hot Stocks of Tomorrow)

and Tony Perkins – CEO of AlwaysOn. Also a blog which I read nearly daily.

From the homepage:
As part of the Entrepreneurship Week closing finale, find out what the hot entrepreneurial opportunities are today and tomorrow, as three of the most forward-looking and insightful thought leaders in Silicon Valley weigh in. They’ll debate, argue and discuss their way through an analysis of where technology is going and where to start placing your bets
 

Short summary, long version will follow tomorrow!!!

The next big things among other things is:

Definitely the overall No 1. with a current validation of $250 million – Twitter.com

In my opinion, spoken in Gartner HypeCycle words:

We are on the Peak of Inflated Expectations now. Let’s remember: 2 years ago, we all had a ”Second life”. I also wrote my thesis on virtual currency taxation - This was nearly the same Hype as it is with Twitter today. Also every VC or analyst  talked about virtual worlds at this time. Today, only view people are interestd in virtual worlds. But like always:Second Life was the first attempt of Virtual Reality online and many more will follow soon and will arise from the through of Disillusionmnt.

So this could be the way Twitter goes to. But it is not such a highly technical tool and very addictive. So the “Through of Disillusionment” could be short. Technical problems we already had last year and seems to be solved.

It is more for fun and to be a wannabe micro celebrity and there for it is great and good for wasting time while wating for the bus and do some viral marketing.

More information:

Facebook will make “Deals” to get money in. Hm, this could be perhaps an ad deal in the end!

Youtube and Hotmail are marketing tools for Google and Microsoft. They were not bought to make money but to save marketing costs.

The new generation is called “The instant messaging generation” (aka digital natives) – compared to some years ago 5 of 10 US Top webpages got replaced by Youtube and MySpace etc. (6 out of 10 in Germany)

They were several more things like Green Technologies

Social Learning will be great

Mobile and Video stuff

Off Topic:

Free Trade was preached – There was a fear of protection in the room. I share this. Also in Europe there is a new movement for higher market protection. This could also be in a way of supporting domestic companies via money gifts. So they could offer there products cheaper. This makes the downwards spiral also faster.

Tim Draper mentioned: We need more nuclear plants. For me, as a greenenergy, guy: No, you are wrong. We need more innovation pressure to make Green energy more competitive. We do not want more nuclear material for our children. Tim didn’t get the acid fallout rain from Tschernobyl on his house when he was a child. This could be discussed on a higher level and more differentiated, for sure.

Here you coul see the (bad looking but famous) Google Homepage from 1998
http://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google.com/

or yahoo
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://yahoo.com
Sadly, Amazon.com is not working that one can see what was cool in 1998

I just changed the topic a bit due to the thing that i am doing nothing with opensource or virtual worlds at the moment and much more with Web 2.0 and the online music market and new online business models

Prediction in th epost” their influx will cause 40+ % annual growth in the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 capabilities ”

http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2008/01/22/digital-natives-making-enterprise-20-and-hamels-the-future-of-management-more-real/

http://techdirt.com/articles/20071121/083858.shtml

and J. Lanier

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/opinion/20lanier.html?_r=2&ref=opinion&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

 from New York Times talk about internet strategy and how to create revenue in the web.

There is a trade off between generating revenues with free content and ads  on the one side, and on the other side micropayment which are on the radar since years but are still not established.

In my opinion micropayments are not going to succeed in the end due to the several possibilities getting free content on the web. Also if all companies start introducing micropayments for the offering or in general for information it would be everytime an attraction for a vendor to deviate from this position and building a monopoly in a market niche with free ad based business model.

So if ad based models for virtual content is the future all real products should get more expensive. You can see this in music business. Since napster started 10 years ago the revenues from selling cds break down and so the price for attending a concert increases every year. Also DRM is no final solution. As you could see Amazon uses this to attack itunes etc. with lower prices and without DRM.

If this art of acting in the business is comparable to other solution we are going to see increasing prices for real products in the future. The revenue from these products are athwart subventions for the freee information in the net due to the thing, that the costs of marketing in the web and so the free web inforamtion have to be paid with this revenues. So there is a significant dependancen between survival of the internet companies which offer free content and traditional business. Also consulting companies, and in general, service companies could benefit because they are not directly involved in this business and could create higher margins with lower costs of prodcution and selling their products. Enough for the morning. Time for lunch…

Information Rules. A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy

http://www.amazon.de/Information-Rules-Strategic-Network-Economy/dp/087584863X

Scientific article from Shapiro and Varian

http://www.inforules.com/models/m-net.pdf.pdf

Nice overview

http://oz.stern.nyu.edu/io/network.html

Book from shy Oz: The Economics of Network Industries

http://www.ozshy.com/

16 pages pdf on that

http://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/00952/sample/9780521800952ws.pdf

Carl Shapiro :
COMPETITION POLICY IN THE INFORMATION ECONOMY

http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/shapiro/comppolicy.pdf

http://mint.com/

source Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Internet_map_1024.jpg

click for the BIG picture

explaination from wikipedia

Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses. The length of the lines are indicative of the delay between those two nodes. This graph represents less than 30% of the Class C networks reachable by the data collection program in early 2005. Lines are color-coded according to their corresponding RFC 1918 allocation as follows:

• Green: com, org
• Red: mil, gov, edu
• Yellow: jp, cn, tw, au, de
• Magenta: uk, it, pl, fr
• White: unknown

free under CC http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/