US to prepare user's data confidentiality regulations

Web Privacy Efforts Targeted
Facing Rules, Ad Firms to Give Consumers More Control

The threat of new regulations involving Internet privacy is prompting Web advertisers to give consumers more control over how their private information is collected and used online.

In coming weeks, a group of advertising, media and Internet trade groups plan to announce new guidelines for Web sites that they say could better protect consumers' privacy online.

Among the measures is an icon that would appear either on Web pages or ads alerting consumers if their activity is being tracked. Clicking the icon would reveal information on the activities that a site collects about visitors, along with a list of companies that use this data, said an official at an ad trade group.

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Sears

A Sears Web page. The retailer settled with the FTC this month over allegations it didn't adequately inform visitors about its monitoring.
The trade groups behind the effort include the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Association of National Advertisers, the Direct Marketing Association and the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

The groups came together last February to develop privacy guidelines for the industry in response to growing scrutiny by the federal government over how Web advertisers use private information they collect. Congress is drafting legislation that would give consumers more control over how such information is used.

The possible legislation comes as the Federal Trade Commission is taking on a more active role in policing online privacy. Earlier this month, the FTC reached a settlement with Sears Holdings Corp.over allegations by the trade watchdog that the retailer failed to adequately inform consumers the extent to which it was monitoring their activities on the Web.

"Congress has industry's attention at a level that it has never had before," said Mike Zaneis, vice president of public policy at the Interactive Advertising Bureau. "The industry understands that there is a legislative threat out there right now."

At issue is the ability of marketers to tailor ads to consumers based on personal information gleaned online.

Regulators are focused on a technique called "behavioral targeting," in which a company tracks consumers' online activities, such as the searches they make, the Web sites they visit and the products they buy. Marketers then use this to present ads based on consumers' likely interests, such as showing ads for diapers to people who have visited Web sites on raising children.

Several popular Web sites are likely to redesign their pages around the new guidelines from the trade groups, according to an official at an advertising trade group.

The plan for the icon that consumers can click to check what data is collected and by whom would include an easy way for consumers to choose to not have their data collected, this person said. Marketers also could include a similar icon on the ads that they targeted to consumers based on their Web surfing, this person added.

Internet and ad companies also are finalizing practices related to data security and retention, including how long companies store information about their customers, the groups say. Also under discussion is creation of an industrywide Web site that would show consumers what information is collected and how to opt out.

The measures are an attempt to preserve what many ad executives say is the future of the industry, both online and in other media such as TV.

"The less information we are able to gather from consumers regarding their interests and their behaviors, the less likely it is that a marketer can provide more timely, relevant and targeted ads to consumers," said Marc Fleishhacker, a managing director Ogilvy, an ad agency owned by WPP.

But whether the industry's preventive measures stave off regulators remains to be seen.

"The jury is out on whether or not self-regulation is going to achieve the desired state here, which is for consumers to receive clear notice that information is being collected and meaningful explanation of what that information is and what it is being used for," said Eileen Harrington, a deputy director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection.

complete article here

Right People Interview on RadioBFM

Listen to the interview here

why users will soon freak out about data privacy

Two signs about this article form the NEw-York Times:

- it explains that privacy and users concerns about privacy now reaches email confidentiality and usage.
- this article has been rated as the one most emailed to friends on the NEw York Times website.



Here is the article:

Typing In an E-Mail Address, and Giving Up Your Friends’ as Well.

I THOUGHT it was a little strange when I received separate e-mail messages from two people I knew only slightly asking me to click and see their photos on a social networking site called Tagged.

I ignored them at first, but then thought maybe I should check it out. After all, I should keep up on what’s hot in the social networking world, right? This could be the new Twitter.

That’s when I started doing everything wrong. I obligingly typed in my e-mail address and a password to see those photos. Well, the photos didn’t exist, but I had unwittingly given the site “permission” to go through my entire e-mail contact list and send a message to everyone, inviting them to see my “photos.”

I found this out only when I started receiving e-mail back from people agreeing to be my friend. I quickly realized what had happened and shot off an apologetic message explaining why I inadvertently spammed them.

As friends’ responses started rolling in, I heard from some who had received similar e-mail. Others told me about the same problems with Web sites like MyLife.com and desktopdating.net.

This wasn’t along the lines of someone stealing my bank account information or Social Security number, but I was annoyed and embarrassed.

“They’re using your good name to establish a connection,” said Peter Cassidy, secretary general of the Anti-Phishing Working Group, a nonprofit organization with representatives from law enforcement, industry and government.

So what’s going on here? I turned to Michael Argast, a security analyst with Sophos, an Internet security company based in Boston, to find out.

He told me that this kind of thing has been happening for quite a long time in various forms, but has really caught on in the last three to six months. It’s not the same as what’s known as phishing — fake Web sites masquerading as real ones to get personal information. These Web sites really exist.

Instead, this is generally called contact scraping. Once you enter your credentials, like your user name or password, the company sweeps through your contact list and sends everyone an invitation to join the site.

How do the companies benefit? They are expanding their user population, Mr. Argast said, which they can use to attract potential investors or advertisers. Whether those users are willing participants, or people like me, is another question.

“There are multiple shades of gray,” Mr. Argast said. “Some social networking sites, like Facebook, are pretty straightforward in asking if you want to share information about your friends. Others are far less scrupulous.”

In the case of Tagged, my friends received a perky e-mail saying: “Alina has added you as a friend on Tagged. Is Alina your friend?” Then you click on yes or no. Even more insidiously, it adds, “Please respond or Alina may think you said no,” with a sad-face icon next to it.

I apparently also offered to share some photos; some annoyed friends even told me to resend the pictures because they couldn’t find them.

“It’s using the chain mail psychology,” Mr. Argast said. And he’s right. My friends got guilt-tripped into signing on.

It’s easier for these sites to get information from Web-based e-mail accounts, like Hotmail and Gmail, than from local Internet provider services, like Verizon or Comcast, but nothing is absolutely secure, Mr. Argast said.

I spoke to Greg Tseng, founder and chief executive of Tagged, to ask him what happened. He said all social networking sites invite you to e-mail your contact list to join up or discover which of your friends are already members, but that a software glitch meant an unusually large number of accidental invitations went out recently.

He said the company received almost 2,000 complaints from people who didn’t intend to send invitations to all their contacts — a fraction of the three million people who registered in the month when the problem occurred.

“We immediately pushed the pause button,” Mr. Tseng said. “This business lives and dies by the good will of people.” He added, “We took immediate steps to rectify this problem and improve the user experience on Tagged.”

Mr. Tseng said Tagged was the third-largest social networking site after Facebook and MySpace, with 16 million active users and 80 million registered users. And guess what? I’m counted as one of those registered users now.

A colleague, Tom, received a similar “invitation” from an acquaintance inviting him to join MyLife.com about a month ago. He clicked on “yes,” and started receiving e-mail from people on his contact list thanking him for inviting them.

“At first it was amusing, but when I realized that it was mining my address book, it wasn’t so funny anymore,” he said. MyLife.com was formerly Reunion.com, another site that stirred up numerous complaints regarding contact scraping.

Jeff Tinsley, founder and chief executive of MyLife.com, said that his company was constantly improving its registration system.

“We register more than two million users a month, and the complaint rate is very small,” Mr. Tinsley said. “It’s very important to make the process very clear, but that said, sometimes people are going with the flow and not paying attention. It’s impossible to just take someone’s address book. An individual has to give us his credentials.”

Tom, however, said he didn’t recall typing in his password, so he was not sure how his address book was accessed.

In some cases, buried deep within a company’s terms of service or privacy policy is information about sharing e-mail addresses, but few people ever get that far.

“We don’t think the consent is meaningful or transparent,” said Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a public interest research organization. “People don’t know how their information is being used.”

Donna Tapellini, senior editor for Consumer Reports, which reported on this in its June issue, said such practices raised privacy issues. “It’s your private contact list and you should be able to protect it,” she said.

Such actions may also violate the federal antispamming law — officially known as Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act and unofficially as Can-Spam — which regulates unsolicited commercial e-mail, prohibiting, among other things, false or misleading information in a subject line, said Eileen Harrington, deputy director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection with the Federal Trade Commission. Ms. Harrington emphasized that she was speaking in general terms.

“We’re now fully in the era of Web 2.0 and under many circumstances, consumers may be providing more information than they realize,” she said.

The problem is, it takes a long time for people to learn the tricks. So here are some words of advice from Mr. Argast.

First, don’t supply your user name and password from one site — say Yahoo or Gmail — to a third-party site. And don’t use the same user names and passwords for different sites. That’s good advice that most of us — myself included — often fail to follow. He told me some 80 percent of users his company surveyed reuse their passwords.

The problem, of course, is remembering different user names and passwords. There are programs or tools that provide an easy way to remember multiple passwords, like 1Password, Sxipper, Keychain or Firefox Password Manager.

You can also set up a separate e-mail account for registrations, which won’t have your contact list.

Also, just be alert. Look closely at the invitation. Are there misspellings, for example? Does something just feel not right? If so, e-mail your friend asking if he meant to send you the query.

Finally, I used this opportunity to clean up my contact list. I hope I’m too savvy to have this happen again, but if it does, at least that acquaintance I met in a seminar two summers ago and the British couple I haven’t spoken to in five years will be spared.

complete article here

why data confidentiality is a must

As Right People has patented and developped a thechnology that solves the confidentiality problem within social networks, we are very interested into political decisions regarding privacy and user's data protection.

France is ahead with the "Senat" publishing its guideline for the commitee preparing the laws for the next future.

The direction is that the user should be responsible for his data archives, which is exactly what our patent does.

Here is the complete white paper from the french Senat commission.
Here is the summary of the white paper from the french Senat commission.

This has been written to be also a guide line for the european community commission regarding internet privacy.

Right People to prepare a european fund raising tour

Right People will start next week a one month fund raising tour to close the current fund raising round.

Investors information request here

Right People financial analysis updated

Right People financial analysis has been updated and is now available on line.

Right People Financial analysis May 2009.

Why investing now in Right People Technologies?
The answers in the investors brochure.

Investing right now into Right People Technologies means investing into:
1. A company at the very center of the battle of the coming years fought on the Internet and mobile phones: the battle around the search for people.
2. A patented technology that allows the monetization of the booming social networks.
3. A company that, in time of crisis, is turning the enormous social networks market into a mutual aid tool of tremendous efficiency.
4. A company with the potential for becoming a leader in the Internet and mobile phones markets.
5. A company whose major risks are now at bay. The technology is mastered and patented. The product has been delivered. The teams are settled. The company has fulfilled all the financial and legal requirements for public offering. Revenues are coming in.
6. An innovative technology already confirmed by 10 innovation awards including a price from Oseo.
7. A company backed by renowned Senior Advisors and investors.
8. A company in which investment is eligible for FCPI, TEPA, ISF, PEA tax rebates.
9. A company that has already been through a successful IPO, proof of the attention and interest from stock shareholders.

Investment for institutional and qualified private investors only.

Investment brochure here

Should you qualify, you can ask for a subscription form at the current investment conditions and tax deduction papers at investors@rightpeople.mobi

The brochure also explains how french citizens can reduce their ISF taxes due to the TEPA law.

Right People to announce its first revenues

Right Poeple announced its first revenues coming both from Right People for CEOS and Riht People for COnferences and Tradeshows.

Our sale team has closed important deals with pharmaceutial companies and tradeshows organizers.

We expect Right People fo Conferences and Tradeshows to overperform our plans for next year.

why social networks are a goldmine

The Holy Grail of ads: word of mouth


We're on the verge of a major rethinking of advertising's fundamental premises. One of the biggest challenges facing advertisers is ad credibility. Consumers typically rate advertising as their least credible information channel. However, businesses have continued to invest in advertising because they could compensate for the lack of credibility through broad distribution and high-impact messaging.

Today that trade-off is being turned on its head. Word of mouth—peer opinion—has consistently been rated the most credible source of information. But traditionally there's been a limit as to how widely you could distribute a friend's point of view. Readers of a certain age will remember the Fabergé Organics commercial from the 1970s depicting a shampoo user who "told two friends," who in turn "told two friends, and so on, and so on." Three decades ago, telling a lot of friends wasn't nearly as easy as it is now.

Credibility now has a channel for mass distribution. It's called the Web and it particularly thrives in social networks. Such distribution will have profound implications for how we "advertise."

Obviously, we can use social networks to reach friends. But social tools woven into various sites can deliver the opinions and reviews of a group—"people like me"—whose views may be just as credible as those of my friends.

Say I'm a chief information officer. I may find the opinions of fellow CIOs I've never met every bit as credible as the ones I know—perhaps even more so, in that I'm less willing to denigrate the opinions of people I don't know. After all, I know the biases and shortcomings of the people in my friendship circle.

complete article here

Social networks valuations increasing

As Right People is currently in a fund raising period, it is interesting to see how financial analysts and institutional investors are considering investing in the sector. From Business Week analysts:


"
The guessing games over Facebook's worth are back on again. They were reignited by the news on May 26 that Facebook has accepted a $200 million investment that values the company at $10 billion.

Much of the discussion centers on the ability, or lack thereof, of Facebook and other social networks to sell advertising and deliver advertising results. People get on Facebook to socialize, not hunt for products—or so the argument runs.

But that argument misses the point. The question isn't how advertising will work on Facebook but rather how Facebook and social networks like News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace are changing advertising. I'm loath to affix the 2.0 moniker to yet another phrase, but if ever an industry needed to be 2.0-ized, it's advertising.

Almost a century ago, retailer John Wannamaker is reported to have said: "Half of all advertising works, I just don't know which half." Today the percentage may be far lower. On the Internet, click-through rates have fallen precipitously as clutter has replaced clarity. These days an ad has performed exceptionally well if at least 1 in 10 people who see it click on it. Much of the time click-through rates that once approached 3% are more like 0.3%. "


complete article here

Investing into Right People Technologies and taking advantage of ISF tax reductions for French residents

Now is a good time for French residents to benefit from ISF tax reductions while investing into innovation companies. With this in mind, we have published a special brochure outlining the advantages of investing into Right People right now.


Investing right now into Right People Technologies means investing into:


1. A company at the very center of the battle of the coming years fought on the Internet and mobile phones: the battle around the search for people.
2. A patented technology that allows the monetization of the booming social networks.
3. A company that, in time of crisis, is turning the enormous social networks market into a mutual aid tool of tremendous efficiency.
4. A company with the potential for becoming a leader in the Internet and mobile phones markets.
5. A company whose major risks are now at bay. The technology is mastered and patented. The product has been delivered. The teams are settled. The company has fulfilled all the financial and legal requirements for public offering. Revenues are coming in.
6. An innovative technology already confirmed by 10 innovation awards including a price from Oseo.
7. A company backed by renowned Senior Advisors and investors.
8. A company in which investment is eligible for FCPI, TEPA, ISF, PEA tax rebates.
9. A company that has already been through a successful IPO, proof of the attention and interest from stock shareholders.

Investment for institutional and qualified private investors only.

Investment brochure here

Should you qualify, you can ask for a subscription form and tax deduction papers at investors@rightpeople.mobi

UK Survey shows marketers are willing to catch up regarding their usage of social networks

A study into the impact of social media and the way products and services are marketed to us shows that over half of the UK’s top marketing experts are not up to speed with social media and how it works as a marketing and communications tool. Two thirds (65.6%) of marketers in the survey admit they do not have adequate knowledge on how to use social media correctly in marketing.

The McCann Erickson UK Social Media survey conducted by the global agency’s Bristol office shows that whilst 86% of those that took part in the survey acknowledge social media is now here to stay and is not just a fad. Almost half (46%) of the senior marketing professionals that responded admit their companies’ IT department proactively blocks access to popular sites such as Facebook and Twitter – rendering them incapable of effectively monitoring what is being said about their brands. Those that do have access cited Facebook and Twitter as the top two most used social networking sites in the McCann Erickson Social Media index (table 1.0).

Table 1.0 Social media presence – UK Marketing professionals


Social media community / % of marketers with a presence

1. Facebook 72.8%

2. Twitter 42.4%

3. LinkedIn 40.2%

4. YouTube 28.3%

5. Flickr 14.1%

6. Google Groups 12.0%

7. My Space 10.9%

8. Bebo 3.3%

9. Plaxo 1.1%


Source: McCann Erickson UK Social Media in Marketing Survey 2009

The lack of understanding of social media as a marketing tool may explain senior marketers reluctance to grasp its potential. 67.5% of marketers in the survey thought that social media is used more by the youth market (under 25s) however, according to Nielsen, people using Twitter tend to trend older with 35 – 49 year olds making up 42% of traffic to Twitter.com with the majority (62%) accessing it only at work.

Opinion was split on how social media impacts on traditional forms of communication (e.g. telephone and face to face) with 48.2% agreeing that this new form of ‘keeping in touch’ has a negative impact on traditional communication methods versus 51.8% disagreeing.

Three quarters of those questioned (75.9%) did acknowledge that social media has a place in business, commercial communication and marketing activity. Those that are proactive in social media utilisation cite profile raising and PR purposes and their main reasons for use.

complete article here
http://www.mccannbristol.co.uk/news/?p=117

How Social Networks Are Changing Everything

An interesting article explaining why social networks are set to overtake the big portals , meaning becoming the entrance of the internet.

When we talk about "gateways" to the Web, most of us tick off the names of four Internet companies: Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT)'s MSN, and Time Warner (TWX)'s AOL. Collectively (with Google in the lead) they account for or broker 90% of the gross dollars advertisers spend online. And they get huge amounts of traffic, in part because millions of users choose one of these four as their home page. Each of the sites continues to draw well over 100 million monthly unique visitors.
But a shift is under way--one that is ushering in the next stage in the battle for influence on the Web. Other players are becoming gateways, too, in a kind of evolutionary advance that will change the way we use the Internet--and alter advertisers' behavior.
The change is taking place on social networking sites, where new applications and cross-site partnerships are turning the likes of Facebook and MySpace into one-stop shops for hundreds of millions of users--platforms from which all the Web's offerings can be reached.




More important, in the next wave of development for such sites, new tools will allow members to take their social-media identities with them when they go to other Web sites. Once wedded to a single networking platform, a member's "social graph"--password, profile, list of friends--is becoming portable. In other words, as they surf the Web, users increasingly will be able to define themselves by their social network of origin.
That's big. It signals that Web companies are no longer in a race to build "destination sites" that attract vast numbers of users. Instead, social networking players are racing to extend their influence over the entire Web by exporting their social features to all sites.
Content, communications, commerce, and search have already ceased to be the unique province of the Big Four. Until recently, only "portals" offered free Web mail. Now MySpace, with its 300 million users, is gearing up to offer e-mail. It also has introduced a toolbar that lets members see "feeds" from friends--accounts of what they're seeing or buying on other Web sites. As for Facebook, having recently surpassed 200 million active users, it offers e-mail, instant messaging, photo posting, and video sharing. Members can also shop online without leaving the site and in some cases (with amazon.com, for instance) communicate with "friends" from their social network about what they're buying. Consider it a social variation on the news feeds provided by Google, Yahoo, and MSN. According to technology blog TechCrunch, such features enabled Facebook to add 40 million users in February alone. It now has 276 million unique monthly visitors--double the traffic of any of the Big Four portals, including Google.
As usage shifts to these networks, a social overlay is spreading across the Web. To varying degrees, Facebook Connect and MySpaceID both allow members to explore the Web using their social-network passwords and, in some cases, to chat with "friends" they find on nonsocial sites. Portals are doing their best to catch up. Google has Friend Connect, and Microsoft has a similar feature in its new Windows Live package of online services. Even ailing AOL is trying to get into the game, with portable "lifestreaming" (real-time updates from friends) and chat.
All these technologies make a user's social context portable to all sites. And this promises to transform the Web experience. Users are already asking questions about the privacy and ownership of their social-media profiles. That debate is likely to heat up. Advertisers, meanwhile, may eventually stop buying specific ad space on the Web and go after users, wherever they pop up, based on their social profiles and networks. And Internet companies? As this social Web emerges, the players that own and harness social applications will be positioned to reshape the Web in ways we can only imagine today. Google's oft-cited mission has been "to organize the world's information." The new goal is to organize the world's people.
Jeffrey F. Rayport is founder and chairman of Marketspace, a digital strategy and customer experience practice affiliated with Monitor Group. Rayport was previously a faculty member at Harvard Business School.

complete article here

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_20/b4131067611088.htm

Current sucess criteria for our market

This article from "Advertising Age" analyzes what currently works. It pinpoints what advertisers want in those times of crisis. It is interesting to see that Right People strategy is fully aligned with the major tips it contains.

Here is an abstract:
In a Time of Crisis, Sexy and Flashy Doesn't Count

Marketers consistently pick up their best lessons in times of crisis. We think differently about ROI. We act more intuitively. We become more agile and flexible. We "sense and respond." We really don't have much of a choice but to act and not allow yesterday's rules to justify complacency.

It enlights four key points for sucess:
- Empower Those Who Want to Help Others
- Make Search Really, Really Simple and Accessible
- Syndicate the Message
- Communicate in Multiple Languages


The name of the game of this article is to demonstrate that these benefits, which are among those of Right People platform, are what marketers and advertisers are currently looking for.

. Empower Those Who Want to Help Others
Right People transforms social networks into powerful mutual assistance tools.
. Make Search Really, Really Simple and Accessible
We have succeeded into creating a sophisticated search engine for persons that is as easy to use as 1-2-3.
. Syndicate the Message
All information and messages are aggregated.
. Communicate in Multiple Languages
Right People allow users to communicate through all existing channels, such as their desktop computer, their laptop, their regular mobile phone, or their iPhone.

Complete article here

Thank you

This is an official "Thank You" to the team for having delivered Right People for Individuals on time.

This is the biggest "Thank you" that I have ever sent, because I am aware of the pressure the team has been working under for many months.

This is a public "Thank You" to a team that I qualify today as "the Dream Team".



This "Thank You" is obviously primarily dedicated to our CTO, delivering every product in time, from Right People for the President, through Right People for CEOs, Right People for Conferences and Tradeshows, and now Right Pople for Individuals.

Thank you to our Chief Architect for having found the sophisticated algorythms of the powerful Right People search engine.



This "Thank You" is also dedicated to our ergonomist, designers, developers.

And at the end of the process, "Thank You" to our User Satisfaction Manager and our COO who conducted every test of the platform.

Right People for iPhones has been delivered

Right People for iPhones has been delivered.

Right People for iPhones will first be connected to Right People for Conferences and Tradeshows and will be extended to all other product ranges.

Right People for iPhones works worldwide.
We are proud to be part of the booming of iPhone's new behaviors.

Right People for Mobile Phones has been delivered

Right People for Mobile Phones has been delivered, two days in advance.

Right People for Mobile Phones will first be connected to Right People for Conferences and Tradeshows and will be extended to all the other product ranges.

Right People for Mobile Phones works on any mobile phone.
No specific software or download necessary.
Even an old vintage phone can use it.

Investing into Right People Technologies and taking advantage of ISF tax reductions for French residents

Now is a good time for French residents to benefit from ISF tax reductions while investing into innovation companies. With this in mind, we have published a special brochure outlining the advantages of investing into Right People right now.


Investing right now into Right People Technologies means investing into:


1. A company at the very center of the battle of the coming years fought on the Internet and mobile phones: the battle around the search for people.
2. A patented technology that allows the monetization of the booming social networks.
3. A company that, in time of crisis, is turning the enormous social networks market into a mutual aid tool of tremendous efficiency.
4. A company with the potential for becoming a leader in the Internet and mobile phones markets.
5. A company whose major risks are now at bay. The technology is mastered and patented. The product has been delivered. The teams are settled. The company has fulfilled all the financial and legal requirements for public offering. Revenues are coming in.
6. An innovative technology already confirmed by 10 innovation awards including a price from Oseo.
7. A company backed by renowned Senior Advisors and investors.
8. A company in which investment is eligible for FCPI, TEPA, ISF, PEA tax rebates.
9. A company that has already been through a successful IPO, proof of the attention and interest from stock shareholders.

Investment for institutional and qualified private investors only.

Right People brochure for investors

The complete brochure for investors can be downloaded here.

Investment for institutional and qualified private investors.

Social network ad spending is taking a hit from the worldwide economic crisis

Social network ad spending is taking a hit from the worldwide economic crisis and the ongoing challenge of developing effective ad models. Marketers will spend an estimated $2.35 billion to advertise on social networks worldwide in 2009, a 17% increase from 2008 levels.Though a double-digit increase during a recession is a good sign, the reality is that it is half of the growth rate eMarketer had previously projected.

Marketers spent an estimated $2 billion to advertise on social network Websites worldwide in 2008, eMarketer estimates. In 2009, spending is expected to increase 17%, to $2.35 billion. A double-digit rise in spending is certainly good news at a time when forecasters are shrinking their worldwide online ad spending projections to the low single digits. But the expected growth in social network spending in 2009 is half of what eMarketer had projected it would be in their previous forecast in December 2007.



Emarketers Research 2009.

Advertising budgets towards social networks

"In order to be successful, brands have to have dedicated strategy and programs to make these [venues] work like their other marketing vehicles," Forrester analyst Jeremiah Owyang said.

The good news: Even with the economy in recession, a majority of marketers -- 53 percent -- said they expected to increase spending on social media. Just 5 percent said they would decrease spending and 42 percent said their outlays would remain the same. (Forrester did not ask marketers to specify if they were including ad programs on social sites.)

"Social media is new so marketers are trying to pull budgets out of other areas," said Owyang. "It's very early days for most marketers."

Owyang pointed to less quantitative signs that social media is moving up the chain at major companies. Speaking from the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, he noted the presence of major marketers like H&R Block, Coke and Microsoft. Pepsi has more than 10 employees at the conference and is sponsoring several events.

"That's very different from two years ago," he said. "It's clear they want to be educated on social media marketing."

Forrester's research is based on interviews with 145 interactive marketers, nearly three quarters of which work at companies with over 1,000 employees. The survey was conducted between November 2008 and February 2009.

Among the areas the majority of respondents tabbed for increases, social networking led the way with 70 percent stating they planned to boost budgets. Over half said they planned to spend more on blogs and user-generated content.

From Forrester Research - 2009.

New features for Right People for Conferences and Tradeshows

Attendees and visitors are now able to search for the Right People, according to new filters about:
- company search
- role search
- position search
- country search
- products/services search

These new features give conferences and tradeshows organizers a full range of networking capabilities for their customers.

Social networks are now for people aged 35-45

Source: Nielsen Online, Global Index, December 2007 – December 2008.

Not just for teenagers anymore. Now for adults.

The social network audience is becoming more encompassing As an entity moves from being niche to a major player the composition, or make-up, of its audience changes. Social networks online started out amongst the younger audience. However, as the networks have become more mainstream with the passage of time, it isn’t surprising to see the audience becoming broader and older. This shift has primarily been driven by Facebook, whose successful formula (page 9) opened up the possibilities of social networking to a much wider audience. In terms of sheer audience numbers, for example, the greatest growth for Facebook has come from people aged 35-49 years of age (+24.1 million). Furthermore, Facebook has added almost twice as many 50-64 year olds visitors (+13.6 million) than it has added under 18 year old visitors (+7.3 million). Consequently, people under 18 years old are making up less of the social network and blogging audience, whereas the 50+ age group are accounting for more of the audience.

Social network and blogging sites are now the fourth most popular activity on the Internet

‘Member Communities’ now reach over 5 percentage points more of the Internet population than it did a year ago – a growth rate more than twice that of any of the other four largest sectors. The strongest growth has come in Germany where the sector now reaches 51% of Germans online compared to 39% a year ago – an actual increase of over 12 percentage points. Large growth has also occurred in the UK, Spain, Italy and Switzerland – the sector reaching 10% percentage points more of the online population in each of these countries than it did a year ago.

Source: Nielsen Online, Global Index, December 2007 – December 2008.

How social networks are creating a potentially transformational change in consumer behaviour

A powerful survey from Nielsen explains how social networks are deeply changing our day-to-day habits.

Social Networking has been the global consumer phenomenon of 2008.
Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population1 visit a social network or blogging site and the sector now accounts for almost 10% of all internet time. ‘Member Communities’ has overtaken personal Email to become the world’s fourth most popular online sector after search, portals and PC software applications.
The story is consistent across the world,‘Member Communities’ has taken a foothold in every major market from 50% of the online population in Switzerland and Germany to 80% in Brazil. Facebook has become the largest player on the global stage, dominant in many countries, yet localised offerings have won the day in many others. However, the growth in popularity of social networks – and the resultant broadening audience – is only half the story. The staggering increase in the amount of time people are spending on these sites is changing the way people spend their time online and has ramifications for how people behave, share and interact within their normal daily lives. Consequently, the global media and advertising industries are faced with new challenges around the opportunities and risks this new consumer medium creates. Social networks provide competition to traditional publishers for consumer attention and at the same time, facilitate new ways for publishers and advertisers to connect with their audiences. So how do they need to change their strategies accordingly? Consumer engagement within social networks has the potential to change the way consumers are targeted, not just through the digital medium, but through all forms of traditional media. Whilst a few billion dollars of ad revenue can’t be wrong, the prevailing wisdom is that the current level of advertising activity on social networks isn’t consummate with the size – and highly engaged levels – of the audience.

... to be continued...

Data confidentiality is a key issue for the future of social networks

Right People has developped and patented a technology that protects social network users against privacy abuses and that gives them a total control over their personal data while using socia networks; this article show how important this issue might become very soon.


Facebook backs off changes to terms of service
The founder of Facebook says the social networking website will return to its previous terms of service regarding user data, after critics complained recent changes had eroded user privacy.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder and CEO, wrote early Wednesday morning that move back to the previous terms is temporary, and comes in response to questions and comments the website has received about changes made two weeks ago.

"Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised," he wrote in the company's official blog.


Facebook had changed its terms of service on Feb. 4, deleting a paragraph that allowed its 175 million users to remove content from the site at any time.

Zuckerberg said in a Monday blog post the changes were made to reflect how account holders use the site.

When a user shares a message on Facebook with a friend, a copy of the content remains in the friend's inbox, he said. This content remains, regardless of whether the sender has deactivated his or her account or not.

The change touched off a storm of criticism from blogs, users and consumer advocates accusing Facebook of undermining user privacy. Facebook users have also created groups voicing opposition to the changes.

"Make sure you never upload anything you don't feel comfortable giving away forever, because it's Facebook's now," consumer advocacy website the Consumerist said in a post on Sunday.

Zuckerberg said in his Wednesday blog post the website is committed to making changes to the terms of service to reflect how people share and control their information, and said "it will be written in a language everyone can understand."

Zuckerberg said users will have input into how these changes take shape, and said users can post comments and questions on a group created within the website called Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

Complete article here.

Social networks facts and figures

The US analysts company, eMarketer has just released its updated analysis about social networks.

These figures give a clear view of the market trends.







The social networking audience is growing rapidly.

eMarketer estimates that in 2008 nearly 80 million people, 41% of the US Internet user population, visited social network sites at least once a month, an 11% increase from 2007.

By 2013, an estimated 52% of Internet users will be regular social network visitors.



“The steady stream of social network updates and news is now a weekly—or even daily—habit for many online users,” says Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, Social Networks: Five Consumer Trends for 2009. “That stickiness is good news for social networks.”

Good news because social networks have yet to develop viable revenue models. But there is still time.

“Social network usage is not tapering off—it is growing,” Ms. Williamson says. “Not only are more consumers joining social networks, but their level of involvement is deepening.”

The majority of social network users have profiles.

eMarketer projects that 79.7 million people, 40% of US Internet users, will create content on social networks at least once a month in 2009, either by updating a profile or communicating publicly.




That represents 90.5% of social network users—and a lot of stickiness.

It is no secret that the social networking audience has grown rapidly.

In 2008, 79.5 million people—41% of the US Internet user population—visited social network sites at least once a month, an 11% increase over the previous year.

“More users are more involved with social networking now than ever before,” says Ms. Williamson.

Right People launches Right People for Conferences and Tradeshows

Conferences and Tradeshows are primarily selling networking opportunities. Just imagine the accelerating impact of allowing participants to start networking as soon as they have paid their registration fees. Months or weeks in advance, they have a reason to pay for their attendance, far prior to the date of the event.

This is what Right People has just revealed today: the most powerful networking tool for conferences and tradehows.

If you are a conference or tradeshow organizer, you may contact our sales team to customize Right People networking tool for your event.

Right People is now eligible for FCPI funds investments

Right People Technologies is now eligible for FCPI investments.



We have just received our OSEO FCPI agreement.

With ad budgets declining, marketers focus on targeting

This interesting article from the Wall Street Journal describes the accelerating trend of advertising investment into targeted advertising.

As marketers scale back their ad budgets, some new technologies that make it easier for marketers to track the impact of their online advertising are gaining ground.
Products based on these technologies -- such as customized ads that show different products to different users, Web ads hidden inside links in text, and online coupons -- are part of what is called "performance-driven advertising." That's because the products aim to improve and more precisely measure how a particular ad performs.
While no one format is likely to emerge as a silver bullet for marketers seeking to use their ad dollars more efficiently, the advertising industry is betting on these technologies to increase online advertising spending. Altogether, the U.S. online-ad market is expected to increase 9% to $25.7 billion in 2009, slowing from its year-earlier growth rate 11%.
Internet retailer Overstock.com is becoming a big user of performance-driven ad products. The Salt Lake City company is planning to spend about $15 million, or 20% of its overall marketing budget for this year, on personalized ads from Choicestream, which makes product-recommendation software, says Overstock Chief Executive Patrick Byrne.

An in-text ad by Vibrant for Chrysler's Dodge Ram pickup. Such ads appear when a computer user's mouse hovers over a link embedded in a Web page.

To devise the personalized ads, which Overstock started testing a few months ago, Choicestream relies on data the retailer provides about what customers browse and purchase on its site. Choicestream uses the data to select what personalized products and offers to insert into Overstock ads as they appear to potential customers browsing the Web.
Mr. Byrne says that while Overstock hasn't had much luck with online display advertising in the past, the new, personalized ads drove a sevenfold increase in clicks on the ads and a threefold increase in sales relative to other display ads. "We are ramping it up as quickly as we can," he says.
Internet giant Yahoo and Teracent, which develops online display-ad technology for clients like Hewlett-Packard, offer customized ad products similar to Choicestream's. Yahoo's version, called Smart Ads, debuted in 2007. Michael Walrath, a senior vice president at Yahoo, says demand for Smart Ads has grown during the economic downturn, even though fourth-quarter revenue was relatively flat from the previous year. A new Yahoo service that allows advertisers to target their display ads to users who have searched for particular terms has also gotten a good reception, he says.
Advertisers' "budgets may be reduced, but the expectations of driving business aren't being reduced," adds Mr. Walrath.
Companies like Choicestream, Yahoo and Teracent hope to steal some thunder from search advertising, which remains one of the biggest and fastest-growing ad formats. Since search ads are related to what a person is searching for on the Web, consumers often find them more relevant than other ads, and advertisers typically find them more cost effective.
But as budgets tighten, other formats that can prove they are worth their price are gaining momentum too. Coupons Inc., which makes software to help companies create and distribute online coupons, is among the companies that are benefiting. It has seen a recent surge in interest from advertisers looking for more cost-effective online marketing options, says CEO Steven Boal. Mr. Boal says the company expects to issue $1 billion in coupons this year, up from $300 million last year, and is drawing new customers who appreciate that they pay for the service only when a consumer prints out a coupon.
Committed revenue for the year at Vibrant, which creates in-text ads, has doubled from a year ago, says the company's CEO and co-founder Doug Stevenson. In-text ads appear when a computer user hover a mouse over links that appear in the text on a Web page. Vibrant charges advertisers only when someone clicks on their ads.
The new ad formats are winning over some big marketers. Over the past year, auto maker Chrysler, whose brands include Dodge and Jeep, has shifted its online-ad spending away from lifestyle sites to sites, such as Edmunds.com, that are geared toward consumers who are in the market for a car, as well as toward performance-driven products like Vibrant's in-text ads. Chrysler is also continuing to spend on search ads, says Chuck Sullivan, director of interactive at Chrysler.
"The good news about the performance-based media is that it's very easy to track, and we are able to see what works and what doesn't work," Mr. Sullivan says.
Chrysler says the shift has paid off: The percentage of total retail sales attributed to online leads rose two percentage points in 2008 from the prior year.

Complete article here.

Where data confidentiality is more and more an issue

As Right People has patented and is developing a solution to avoid data confidentiality issues within social networks, this episode shows the growing need for taking data privacy in consideration.

Stormy reactions arose when the Guardian and the Telegraph disclosed that Facebook would go through new steps of monetization of its users database. Facebook had to react and send a response.

Here's the articles extract:
Facebook is planning to exploit the vast amount of personal information it holds on its 150m members by creating one of the world’s largest market research databases.

That’s how this Telegraph article kicks off in a report that was widely quoted by a ton of tech news sites and blogs. Sure enough, the article was based on an interview with Randi Zuckerberg, Facebook’s Global Markets Director and Mark Zuckerberg’s sister.

Here’s Facebook’s response:

“The polls run at the World Economic Forum were not part of a commercially available product for advertisers and should not be confused with Facebook’s Engagement Ads. At WEF, Facebook ran a series of polls to provide the Davos audience with real-time insight into the opinions of people outside of the conference. These polls were conducted on Facebook using internal tools.

Engagement Ads have been available since September and take five different forms. Most recently, Facebook began testing an Engagement Ad where advertisers can pose a question within the ad itself.

Facebook has, for many years, allowed the targeting of advertising in a non-personally identifiable way, based on profile attributes. Nothing has changed in our approach, and Facebook is committed, as always, to connecting users in a trusted environment.”

Facebook aims to market its user data bank to businesses

Facebook intends to capitalise on the wealth of information it has about its users by offering its 150 million-strong customer base to corporations as a market research tool. The appearance, later this year, of corporate polls targeted at certain parts of the Facebook audience because of the information they have posted on their pages, is likely to infuriate privacy campaigners.
Last week Mark Zuckerberg, the company's 24-year-old founder and chief executive, showed the audience at the World Economic Forum in Davos how the social networking site could be used to poll specific groups of users.
He asked users in Palestine and then Israel about peace issues before relaying the results back to the audience within minutes. He also polled more than 100,000 American users of the website, asking them whether they thought President Obama's fiscal stimulus package would be enough to resurrect the economy. Two out of five said it was not enough.
Giving consumer brands the chance to use such a wide audience to get a quick response to targeted questions would do away with, or at least reduce their reliance on, expensive and time-consuming focus groups.
Speaking to well known tech blogger Robert Scoble at the event, Zuckerberg said 2009 will be Facebook's "intense" year as it tries to justify some of the mammoth valuations that have been placed upon it by making some serious revenues through advertising. He was even seen sporting a tie, a sartorial extra which the Harvard drop-out has so far eschewed.
He added the company has been experimenting with analysis of user sentiment, tracking the mood of its audience through what they are doing online. Such information is potentially very interesting to large brands, which are always seeking to measure what their customers think about their own or competitors' products.
Facebook's advertising technology already allows advertisers to choose which sort of customer will see their ­display adverts when they log on to the site. Advertisers can choose from such ­categories as where the user is located and their age and gender, based upon what the user has uploaded on to Facebook – which is adding about 450,000 new users a day.
Last year, Facebook launched its Engagement Ads tool, which allows advertisers to publish a poll on people's home pages. They are then able to see how their friends and other Facebook users have voted. The polls, which can include actions such as watching and rating a movie trailer, are being tested by companies including AT&T and CareerBuilder.com.
The American recruitment website tonight used its trial Facebook polls to ask people what they thought of the advert that was played during the coverage of the 43rd Super Bowl. The first widespread use of polls is expected in the spring.
Facebook also has a tool called Facebook Lexicon, which is a bit like Google Trends, in that it allows users to track what topics are being discussed by people on Facebook. While Google Trends uses the search terms that are entered into its site, Facebook Lexicon looks at one of the most visible parts of a user's profile page – their wall, where people and their friends exchange public messages. It provides a searchable database of trends over time, showing how the incidence of particular words or phrases has increased or decreased in wall posts.
Facebook Lexicon shows that the company already has a significant database of user information which it could exploit and the tools are in place to allow companies to use its information for market research purposes.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/feb/01/facebook-seeks-to-exploit-user-information

Advertising revenues trends within social networks

Facebook's Plan to Amp Up Ad Revenue

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Think Facebook's 15 minutes are just about up? Well, one in five web users in the world is saying otherwise. Facebook lured 222 million unique visitors in December, according to ComScore, twice as many as MySpace, and it has been growing at a more than 10% rate each month since September.
Until now, Facebook has focused on growth at the expense of advertising, much like YouTube circa 2007. MySpace, on the other hand, wasn't born in a Harvard dorm room and is run like a profit center for Rupert Murdoch, one reason it's expected to book around $1 billion in ad revenue in 2008, compared with Facebook's estimated $300 million.

complete article here

Social networks now considered to be essential: Davos World Economic Form

The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this year, broadened its discussions by inviting major social networks as part of the strategical discussions about the crisis recovery and the key challenges of the planet.

Social networks are now considered to be as powerful as traditional media.
Not any more gadgets, or dedicated to teenagers, they demonstrated that they already are powerful key media, in particular while serving the Obama successful campaign as Facebook and Right People for the President did.

More about Right People new corporate website

New preview.
Coming soon.

When crisis boosts social networks' revenues

In thoses times of crisis, sales of targeted advertising through social networks are growing at the expense of traditional advertising media. Myspace has just revealed revenues superior to $1Billion.

Here is an interesting article from the Financal Times:



Chris DeWolfe is dashing around his Beverly Hills office. The co-founder of MySpace is preparing to go to Davos, where he will rub shoulders with leaders of the world economy, including his boss, Rupert Murdoch.

Davos this year is packed with gloomy-sounding sessions on the collapse of global capitalism but Mr DeWolfe is in an upbeat mood. MySpace has fine-tuned its advertising model and as it celebrates its fifth birthday he believes the site can prove its critics wrong about the durability and profit-making potential of social networking.

With their millions of users, social media has long been seen as a panacea of online advertising. But sites such as Facebook and MySpace, which is part of News Corp, have been unable to turn those users into significant profits. MySpace narrowly missed a $1bn revenue target last year, while Facebook has preferred to concentrate on building a large base of users.

By Mr DeWolfe says a relentless focus on profits at MySpace is starting to pay off. "From day one we have always been focused on building a really big, scaleable business that is based on advertising," he says. "If you are a big brand and you want to reach any demographic you can get real scale on MySpace."

The group has devised a hybrid business model that combines big branding campaigns on the popular pages with its ability to "hyper-target" millions of users according to their interests.

The big, more general advert campaigns are a recent factor: MySpace has introduced branding on its home page, which is seen by more than 50m users daily. "That's more people than watch American Idol ," says Mr DeWolfe. Such campaigns used to be found only on portal sites, such as Yahoo, AOL and MSN but Mr DeWolfe says MySpace has those companies in its sights.

This is partly because MySpace has built a sufficient user base to compete for what is a much larger pot of money. "In the early days, either the brands or their media buyers would reserve a small part of their buy for social media sites - the rest would go to the portal sites," he explains. "But what has happened is that we are now competing against offline media and the big portals, such as Yahoo and AOL."

Analysts say this move to a hybrid model that combines the penetration of social media with the broad reach of a portal site could be decisive. "MySpace is going to be more attractive to advertisers because they have created these 'safe havens' where advertisers can put their brands," says Richard Greenfield, an analyst with Pali Research.

The home page branding comes a year after the site launched its "hyper targeting model". Mr DeWolfe says the move does not represent a strategic U-turn and instead gives the site the best of both worlds.

He points to the more than 1,000 "enthusiast groups" on MySpace as being appealing for advertisers keen to target their products at niche demographics. "We have also built a product that reaches small and medium-sized businesses that represent billions of dollars in potential ad revenue."

One user - a roofer in Chicago - turned a MySpace advert offer costing a few hundred dollars into a $30,000 roofing deal. "There has been no easy way for people like that to advertise online other than buying big display ads or by buying text ads on Google. But more than 15,000 have used our product to create graphical advertising."

With the economy crashing and advertisers reining in their spending, maintaining momentum is going to be difficult, although he says first-half sales rose 16 per cent on last year. "Where the next six months are going is hard to say because the economy is changing so quickly. But I think we are in a much better position than most of the other [online] companies formed in the past five years."

Complete article here

Right People and the President of the USA

As Right People took part in helping the new President Barack Obama, we hereafter publish the result of this amazing campaign, this amazing event: the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States. And for those who did not have the opportunity to watch the inaugural speech, .. it is worth a look!

Right People new corporate website

For your eyes only...

A preview of the brand new Right People corporate website.
To be released very soon...

Social Networks Among Trends in CRM for 2009

Customer relationship management (CRM) projects in 2009 will be all about business value, and that includes adding social networks to the mix, according to a report from analyst firm Forrester Research.

An increased emphasis on business value will see enterprises focusing on customer retention and creating dynamic solutions to support customer facing processes.

"During this economic downturn, customers tell us they need bulletproof financial arguments to get funding for their projects," William Band, Forrester vice president and principal analyst, said in the report.

Another way to improve customer experience will be to incorporate social networking capabilities in CRM applications, and Forrester predicts that enterprises will begin doing this in 2009.



Complete article here

Social networks are solutions to the current crisis

Social networks such as Linked-In and Facebook have long been used for developing personal and professional connections online. However, in the wake of rampant job losses, the recruitment potential of the sites has skyrocketed, bolstered by increasing functionality and reach.

“I think we've only just scratched the surface of using social networking for job hunting,” said Matt Hicks, a spokesperson for Facebook. “People are now going beyond their direct network and reaching that next layer of people that may have an interest in getting a job with your company, but may be hard to reach through traditional media.”

The fact that many more people are out of work today than this time last year also means that more people are searching. The stock market's nosedive prompted a tornado of job losses that left 533,000 people without jobs in the month of November alone.

Jerry Bernhart, principal at Bernhart Associates, which along with the Direct Marketing Association publishes the Quarterly Direct Marketing Employment Survey, said the survey saw the biggest one-quarter drop in its eight-year history in October, and 17% of direct marketing firms surveyed were planning layoffs.

To put the link between professional social networking and the economy in perspective, US traffic to employment sites has increased 20% across the board over the past 13 weeks, compared with the same time period in 2007, according to Hitwise. Traffic to LinkedIn has increased 174%.

Job seekers aren't the only ones benefiting from the social networks. Using these sites can give employers an upper hand when getting to know their candidates, according to Jeremiah Owyang, a senior analyst at Forrester Research. He notes that companies using Facebook have the ability to create interactive pages that can focus on recruiting, such as one created by Ernst & Young.

“The marketers can then gain access to see what these [prospective employees] are doing, what photos they're uploading on Saturday morning and how they communicate with others. [They are] checking the behavior, not just the resume,” Owyang said, “These are telling tools that help you understand how these people will behave once you hire them.”

Additionally, Bernhart notes that on sites like LinkedIn, which touts its Jobs Insider tool that allows users to see their connections at companies that have job postings on major listing sites across the Web, users must create profiles that all their connections can see.


On a survey done by DMNews:
How did you fing your last job?
5% said by a recruiter
55% by an online ad
30% referred by a friend
10% using a social network online
meaning that 40% is done by offline or online social networks.


Complete article here

2009 will be the year of the Right People

Happy new year to all Right People fans and friends.

Merry xmas to all Right People fans and friends

will be back in 2009!

:)

Right People Technologies launches today the first technology that unleashes the “wisdom of the crowds” for CEOs.

RightPeople Technologies following in the footsteps of Right People for the President launches today RightPeople for CEOs.

Right People for CEOs allows CEOs to find Billion dollar ideas in the haystack. The technology used by Right People for CEOs will give CEOs direct feedback from employees and customers on major corporate goals.

Right People for CEOs can be implemented in a simple cut and paste operation, with no need for IT development. This tool will be accessible by any employees and customers worldwide through the company’s existing communication channels. Right People for the CEOs is extremely easy to use and customize.

Employees and customers will trust and use a solution that allows them to openly and easily communicate with the CEO. CEOs will be able to immediately create an atmosphere where any employee and customer feels involved, thus strengthening the reputation of the CEO and of the company.

Right People for CEOs allows CEOs to instantly and efficiently view the best ideas generated by employees and customers. These ideas will be pre-filtered, evaluated and ranked by the Right People filtering and evaluation tool.

Right People for CEOs helps CEOs get an expanded view and keep their fingers on the pulse of the enterprise.

Right People for CEOs is the only solution that solves ALL of the shortcomings of existing products.

Dan Ake, Right People CEO explains: “We created Right People for CEOs because, as we all know, the best ideas in corporations come from the ground and we wanted to give CEOs a tool that helps them easily capture the knowledge of employees and customers. Right People for the CEOs gives companies an immediate and simple way to answer, in a positive way, employees’ need to be listened to. ”.

This brand new application from Right People’s search platform is now available online here through a dedicated website as well as numerous business sites and blogs.

Right People for CEOs is now available for big corporations

As we all know, the best ideas in corporations come from the ground i.e. from employees and customers. Adwords, the engine of Google’s spectacular growth is an idea that did not originate in the mind of Larry, Sergei or Eric Schmidt. Adwords was an employee idea: Salar Kamangar’s idea.

Right People for CEOs is a powerful knowledge management tool designed to capture billion dollar ideas from the ground. Any company can install it in a single copy and paste. CEOs are no able to instantly and efficiently view the best ideas generated by employees and customers. These ideas are pre-filtered, evaluated and ranked by the Right People filtering and evaluation engine.



Our VP of Sales mentions that every single one of the CEOs he meets tells him of multi-million dollar or even billion dollar quarters that were the direct result of the adoption of an employee or customer idea.

"Until today, companies have not been able to systematically capture feedback from employees and customers. Existing tools: suggestions boxes (physical or virtual), town hall meetings, customer/employee councils, employee surveys have done a mediocre job of allowing employees and customers to openly and easily communicate with the CEO. Right People for CEOs is the ONLY solution that solves ALL of the shortcomings of existing products", he said.

For a demo of how Right People for CEOs can help your enterprise, or to customize Right People for CEOs for your company, contact our Sales Department here

Mobile advertising initiation

As Right People technology works on any mobile device and is at the center of the advertising game, we are very interested by the movement forward that Google is initiating in mobile advertising.

Is the mobile Web converging with the sedentary one? Google apparently thinks so.

The search giant has begun distributing AdWords campaigns to handheld devices with full HTML browsers -- beginning with Apple's iPhone and its own touch screen handheld, the G1 from T-Mobile.

Google says these phones can handle standard AdWords ads and landing pages without requiring modification or other special action by marketers, and it believes extending advertisers' reach in this way only makes sense. "Last year, we released a metric that the iPhone delivered 50 times the number of searches any other mobile platform [did]," said a Google spokesperson. "A lot of people are searching on these things."

But he added Google did not have ready statistics on how its users interact with search ads on these devices. To allow marketers to better measure the impact of the change on their campaigns, Google is offering performance reporting broken out by device.

Additionally, AdWords advertisers can create campaigns targeted exclusively to iPhone and G1 owners. Separate calls to action can be created for all mobile users, or even for the users of individual devices. That approach might be desirable for marketers of iPhone or other mobile apps, or for the makers of device accessories.

According to M:Metrics, 68 percent of iPhone owners use the device to conduct searches. Meanwhile, 40 percent of owners of devices with HTML browsers use them for searching, and 10 percent of people with any device type do so. ComScore-owned M:Metrics said it does not have enough data to measure the search patterns of G1 device owners.

Campaigns will be distributed to iPhone and G1 browsers by default. To turn the capability on or off, AdWords users must visit the Networks and bidding section of the campaign interface and check or uncheck the box next to "iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers." Marketers using Google's pre-existing mobile ad formats will not be affected by the change.

Complete article here.

Right People investors presentation at AlwaysOn Summit Silicon Valley

Our Marketing VP and Sales VP on the last round before lauching our second product

Last tuning before the official launching of "Right People for CEOS".

What a professional event!

Yesterday as I was preparing our presentation, I discovered that we would have 6 minutes to present, "including set-up". You can imagine how hard it was to present Right People from A to Z in already just 10 minutes.So there it was to be 6 minutes.

So I was a little nervous yesterday night. I rehearsed twice.

I must admit I was impressed this morning, by the AlwaysOn Summit Silicon Valley. While only the speakers have had the chance to see the backstage organization.

Just imagine that speakers had to wait in the "Speakers ready room" 45 min before the panel. There a staff member gave us the last details for presenting, while a video technician connected your computer, tested it in a testing environment backstage.



Then you were assigned a wireless microphone, each of us having our own. Then we all rehearsed in the exact same order as we would have to speak.


As I noted, the "Speakers ready room" had "the" view that would give anyone the power to change the world.



Then you were called backstage in the last five minutes, and called to jump on stage like a rock star!


And it worked!
Above is the video of this 6 minute presentation of Right People.

Right People has been selected as one the "the hottest companies" in the sector "Consumer and Media" at AlwaysOn summit Silicon Valley

And it starts tomorrow!

Venture Summit Silicon Valley 2008 Current Program & Invited Speakers:

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

11:15am
CEO Presentations -- Consumer & Media
Presentations by CEOs of the hottest companies in this sector,
emceed by Ezra Roizen, Contributing Editor, AlwaysOn.
Jason E. Barkeloo, CEO, Somatic Digital
Avtar Khalsa, CEO, Stiki
John Ham, CEO, Ustream.TV
Dan Ake, CEO, RightPeople
Scott Morrow, CEO, ThisNext
Jan Eglen, CEO, Digonex Technologies
Anu Shukla, CEO, Offerpal Media
Charles Delamain , CEO, Social Go

Welcome on 2225 East Bayshore Palo Alto

Jena-Michel Billaut, Bertrand Gerard-Boucheny and I were proud to welcome the second wave of new employees at 2225 East Bayshore, Palo Alto, in our new offices in Silicon Valley.

24H/7 or 24H/6 for Right People?

We welcomed last week our first two team members from Poland and France working with the marketing and sales teams to tune launching schedules.

That was their first time in Silicon Valley and they just had only seen the airport, the hotel, and the offices for the past ten days. So yesterday we decided to have them experience a Sunday in the Bay Area.
They discovered the Golden Gate Bridge and other typical should-know San Francisco places.

Right People innovatice concept on LCI TV and DowJones Eurotech feedback

The DowJones Eurotech showcase was very effective for us.
We were presented to the major decision-makers in the Silicon Valley. We had one-to-one appointments with ten of them who asked for a 10mn interview with us.
Things were at a top-level of professionalism.

After 1Omns, they decided whether they wanted to go further or not.
We are now arranging the second meetings with them.
To be followed...

Growth of profit, or growth and profit, for social networks

Here is an intersting article comparing the (official?) strategies of Facebook and Myspace. One is focused on growth, the other one is focused on profits.
Right People is definitely focused on both!

Facebook's Land Grab in the Face of a Downturn
The social-networking site is moving aggressively to sign up more users around the world while much of Silicon Valley hunkers down

As gloom descends on Silicon Valley, most startups and giants are growing cautious and cutting back. But not Facebook. The social-networking Web site sees a bleak economy as all the more reason to press ahead with aggressive plans for growth. "This is not the time for tech companies to be cutting back; this is the time to be hitting the accelerator," says Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member and investor.



Facebook executives think they can use the economic downturn to gain ground on the competition. So they're going to great lengths to keep user growth on track in these rough times. The company is gearing up for more acquisitions, hiring rapidly, and rolling out new advertising programs. Rather than trim the site's development costs, Facebook has engineers cooking up versions in languages such as Xhosa, Tagalog, and French Canadian to go after niche audiences around the world. "We're in this game not just for five or 10 years," says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's chief operating officer. "We're in it for 20 to 30 years."

To fuel growth, the company asked the Securities & Exchange Commission earlier this year for an unusual exemption. Typically, private companies that exceed 500 shareholders must start disclosing their financial results publicly. (This is the law that helped push Google to go public in 2004.) Facebook is approaching that threshold, so the company asked the SEC for a waiver that will allow it to keep hiring and handing out restricted stock without public disclosure. The SEC granted the request on Oct. 14. That will help the company reach 800 employees by the end of the year, up from 400 at the close of 2007.

The company is even reducing its revenue goals to pull in more users. In January, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook was shooting for revenues of $300 million to $350 million this year. But this spring, Zuckerberg and his board lowered the revenue target to $250 million to $300 million, say sources familiar with company finances. Thiel says engineers were shifted away from ad programs to concentrate on fresh features, languages, and other projects that will boost user growth. Even as the economy has weakened in recent months, Facebook has decided to stick with its spend-now, profit-later approach. "We still think it's a land grab where we have to try to get to scale first," says Thiel.

It's a gutsy strategy, increasingly rare in Silicon Valley. Last month, prominent venture firm Sequoia Capital gave a presentation to its startups titled "R.I.P. Good Times," which argued that companies must cut costs fast to survive. One Power Point slide included a skull-and-crossbones and the words "death spiral" to show the likely fate of startups that fail to come to grips with the new reality. The Sequoia view has become accepted wisdom among Valley venture capitalists, leading to layoffs at scores of companies.

Facebook isn't yet profitable. But Thiel says the company can afford to be aggressive. It has raised about $500 million and is "slightly cash-flow negative," Thiel says. At its current burn rate, he says, the company has enough cash for three or four years. "If we stopped growing, we could make money, but it makes no sense for us to stop growing," he says.

Facebook's strategy stands in contrast to that of rival MySpace (NWS). Part of Rupert Murdoch's publicly traded News Corp. (NWS), MySpace has dialed back on growth to focus on profits. Over the past year the site has expanded modestly, to 118 million users, while Facebook has more than doubled in size, to 161 million users, according to research firm comScore (SCOR).

MySpace argues that the horse race isn't that important. Travis Katz, head of international operations, says about 85% of the world's online ad spending is concentrated in five markets—the U.S., Britain, Japan, Germany, and France—and in those markets, MySpace is 30% larger than any competitor. That's one reason MySpace, though smaller in number of users, will generate an estimated $606 million in revenues this year, according to Goldman Sachs, (GS) more than twice Facebook's revenues. "We're not worried about rolling out in every single country," says Katz.

Facebook may not reach every country, but top executives like Zuckerberg give the impression they would like to. A social-networking site that can connect people with friends in Saudi Arabia or the Philippines or Tonga, they say, is simply more valuable than one that can't. Chief Financial Officer Gideon Yu says he is actively looking for deals to expand the company's reach. Top options could include sites in Brazil, Germany, India, or Japan, where Facebook does not have a strong presence. "If there's a way for us to acquire a geography or a demographic, it may be prudent to go off and buy it," says Yu.

At the same time, Facebook needs to figure out a sustainable business model. All the focus on expansion means Zuckerberg and Sandberg will have to do so in the face of a nasty downturn. Companies typically cut ad spending during recessions, especially for newer forms of ads, such as those on social-networking Web sites. "The first things to go are experimental ads," says Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at research firm eMarketer.
VIRTUAL GIFTS

Facebook hopes to make money in three ways. Online advertising is far and away the most important, accounting for an estimated $200 million to $225 million in revenues this year. The company is also selling digital goods—electronic versions of guitars, flowers, and the like that Facebook friends give each other. Charging $1 apiece for these goods will generate $30 million to $40 million this year, estimates venture capitalist Jeremy Liew.

The third leg of Facebook's business may be the most controversial. The company is seriously considering a plan to take a cut of money from the software developers who create applications for the site. These startups make software people use on Facebook to discover new music, play games, or share slide shows. Vice-President Chamath Palihapitiya, disclosing the initiative for the first time, says the company may be able to help these startups generate more cash from advertising or e-commerce and then take a slice of that revenue. "Over the next few years, I bet we will create a very meaningful revenue model," he says. Developers already have a delicate relationship with Facebook, though, so any grab for a piece of their revenues could prove contentious.

Facebook is counting on Sandberg to make all this work. The former Google (GOOG) sales executive played a key role in turning the search giant into one of the most profitable companies in the world. Adam Freed, who used to work at Google for Sandberg, says she's both demanding and supportive. He recalls working on a presentation to set up a Google office in Dublin and having Sandberg tell him it wasn't good enough. After making suggestions, she ultimately took over Freed's computer keyboard to help him find the right words. "She was tough on me to allow me to grow," he says.
INTERACTIVE ADS

Facebook and Sandberg are working on ways to move beyond traditional online ads—the text and pictorial banners that show up on most Web sites. They believe that only by offering something truly different, as Google did, can Facebook stand out among the many sites on the Web. One example came in August when Facebook began rolling out what it calls "engagement ads." Whereas most online ads are like billboards trumpeting a slogan, engagement ads are more like digital bulletin boards, encouraging users to respond to the pitches by commenting, sharing virtual gifts, or becoming fans of the ads themselves. Some of the trial efforts have taken off. An engagement ad for Paramount Pictures' Tropic Thunder, including a trailer for the movie, generated 30,000 comments from Facebook users. "I laughed so hard I couldn't breathe," wrote one fan.

A service set to launch this winter, called Facebook Connect, will bring social-networking capabilities to CNN, CBS, and other Web sites and could make advertising more relevant to Web surfers. The service tracks what people search for on the Net and what kinds of sites they visit. If Facebook learns that you frequent food sites, for instance, it could serve up an ad for a subscription to Gourmet magazine. To support these efforts, Facebook is more than doubling its salesforce, to 130. The team will complement the 400 salespeople at Microsoft (MSFT) responsible for selling Facebook's traditional display ads.

The company is making progress in attracting deep-pocketed advertisers—one reason revenues will as much as double from last year's $150 million. Clients include Blockbuster, Mazda, and Ben & Jerry's. Katie O'Brien, digital marketing manager for the Vermont ice cream maker, says her ad campaign this spring went better than expected. When the company let Facebook users give each other virtual ice cream cones, it anticipated hitting 250,000 cones. Instead, it gave away twice that number of icons. "It created good brand awareness and buzz," she says.

Still, O'Brien says social networks have yet to become a core part of Ben & Jerry's marketing. The company spends most of its digital ad budget on search-engine marketing and its own Web site. Social-network ads don't have the same track record, she says, and are time-consuming to create. For Facebook to become more successful on Madison Avenue, O'Brien and other marketers say, the company needs to make it easier to develop, automate, and manage ad campaigns. "Social networking has been fun," she says. But it will "probably take another successful year" for it to become essential.

Such skepticism doesn't faze Sandberg. Facebook, she says, is in this for the long haul. That's why it's so determined to forge ahead, even as others succumb to the slowing economy. "We are in a new industry," she says. "We are figuring it out."

Complete article here.

68% of advertisers say they plan to increase their ad spending online

This article is very interesting. Here are the results of a survey done do anticipate the reactions of advertisers regarding the current financial crisis.

The conclusion is that Marketers will Cut Back on traditional media (Broadcast TV, Magazines and National Newspapers) and they will increase their spending in Online and Mobile in the Next 6 Months.

By Michael Bush

Published: November 19, 2008
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Over the next six months, not only will ad spending be down, but the feeling among advertisers and their agencies toward media such as broadcast TV, national newspapers and magazines is growing more pessimistic. The dreary outlook is courtesy of the new Advertiser Optimism Report by Advertiser Perceptions.

The latest Advertiser Optimism Report by Advertiser Perceptions. Click to enlarge.
But while the outlook is somewhat bleak for the aforementioned ad media, others like online, cable TV and mobile are likely to attract more of marketers' money.

The report shows a large percentage of the advertisers polled (68%) said they plan to increase their ad spending online. Still, that number is down four points from 72% six months ago. The numbers were also slightly down for cable TV (27% vs. 28%) and mobile (51% vs. 53%) over that same period but remained on the "optimistic" side of the scale.

Advertisers were more pessimistic on broadcast TV, with only 16% saying they would increase their ad spending on broadcast. That is down from the 22% who said they planned to increase their broadcast TV budget a year ago, and only slightly better than the 14% who were planning to increase their broadcast spending six months ago. National newspapers, which were already low six months ago at 10%, dropped into the single digits at 9%, while magazines saw a more drastic drop from 22% to 18% over the same time period.

Accountability
"We're seeing less slowing in media that's more accountable and targetable," said Randy Cohen, principal at Advertiser Perceptions. "We still see less optimism for online and for cable TV, but it's more severe in the media that tends to be less accountable."

From the agency perspective, optimism for the online space is down seven points from six months ago but is still quite high, with 67% saying they plan to increase their online spending. The report showed that fewer agencies planned on increasing ad spending on cable TV (27% vs. 30%) and mobile (50% vs. 54%) than six months ago, but that they were still optimistic about those media. The same couldn't be said for broadcast TV (13% vs. 17%), magazines (18% vs. 21%) and national newspapers (8% vs. 7%).

Download the pdf survey results here

However, the number of media brands being considered over the next six months by all who took part in the report is up. The number of online media brands being considered jumped from 14 to 18, TV brands from 21 to 22 and even print brands increased from 11 to 13. In fact, the number of media brands considered by ad category increased for all except the categories home and appliance, technology and telecommunications. And the number of media brands that advertisers and their agencies have committed to over the next six months in the online (seven vs. four) and print (five vs. four) spaces are both up as well, which indicates that less money is being spread across more media brands. The number of TV brands remained constant at eight over the last six months.

The report also reinforces that it is the results that are most significant to marketers and agencies, even more so than cost. Whether it's an online, TV or print media buy, the ad results are what matters most to marketers and their agencies. The report shows that 83% of online media decision makers believe the ad results are more important than the cost/price (50%). Nearly three quarters of TV media buyers (71%) also believe that ad results are more relevant than cost/price (62%). And a larger percentage (73%) of print decision makers are more interested in the ad results than the cost/price (53%).

Looking ahead at the next six months, the Advertiser Optimism Report projects advertiser optimism will continue to slow, taking ad spending along with it and thus creating a much more competitive media marketplace.

This also means that managing the perception of potential results and delivery for ad dollars will be vital.

Complete article on advertising age

Twitter passes on Facebook offer

Facebook offered a rumored $500 million in stock (based on its $15 billion valuation) to acquire Twitter, reports Kara Swisher of All Things Digital. No one went on the record to discuss the deal, but sources indicate Twitter felt it was undervalued in the deal -- especially considering the high valuation the deal put on Facebook. From the standpoint of Facebook, the acquisition of SMS-based Twitter meant taking on potentially high messaging fees from mobile providers.


The complete article here

Mobile Internet usage rises 25%

A new study by Nielsen Online has found that mobile Internet usage in the UK grew by 25 percent between the second and third quarter this year. The study - the first produced by the company's Mobile Media View service - revealed that the number of UK consumers accessing the mobile Internet rose from 5.8 million to 7.3 million in the period, while those accessing PC-based Internet usage rose by just 3 percent, from 34.3 million to 35.3 million. Mobile Internet audience also has a higher concentration of younger users than PC-based Internet, the study found, noting that 25 percent of mobile Internet consumers are aged 15-24 compared to 16 percent for PC-based consumers.

"The fact that almost seven and a half million Britons now access the Web through their phone shows that mobile Internet is fast becoming a viable way for advertisers and publishers to reach important demographic groups," said Kent Ferguson, Nielsen senior analyst. The study also found that while Google Search is the most popular PC-based Internet site, on mobile Internet BBC News is the most popular, being visited by 24 percent of UK mobile Internet consumers (1.7 million people). Other websites that were found to have a greater reach on mobile than PCs were BBC Weather (21 percent mobile, 17 percent PC-based), Sky Sports (11 percent mobile, 8 percent PC-based) and Google's Gmail (9 percent mobile, 7 percent PC-based).

Sorry for a few days of silence

Sorry for not having had time to update the blog these last few days. These days have been crazy:
- finalizing the launch of our second product that will be available very soon, supervising the IT team in Poland and the testing team in France and UK
- working with our Marketing VP and CFO on the preparation of the big DowJones Eurotech event for which we have been selected to present Right People as one of the most promising European start-up to key decision-makers and investors here in Silicon Valley.

Right People Investors Presentation transcription

Here is the transcription of the Right People Investors Presentation available online for our investors

Redwood City, CA – 11.18.08

Right People presenting to Investors “how to unlock and capture money from the social networks phenomena”.

This presentation is about unlocking and capturing money from online advertising through social media.



Social networks are a goldmine. Social networks are big phenomena. They have huge valuations (Facebook valued at $1.5Billion, LinkedIn valued at more than $1Billion). And that is because social networks hold the answers to what marketers and advertisers need the most: to acquire numerous new customers - and the virality of social networks is a powerful answer to this need; and to maximize their return of investments in terms of online advertising - and social networks can provide a unbeatable precision to targeted advertising. But revenues are still not as significant as expected.

There are two major issues to be solved before accessing this gold mine. The first one is the privacy issue that represents huge roadblocks to revenue generation. The second one is the doubts about social networks usefulness and longetivity.


The Privacy issue: The Facebook story is a perfect illustration at this point. Each time Facebook increases its revenues by selling more targeted profiles, new law suits arrive based of privacy breaches. Monetizing the users’ profile is a goldmine. But the problem comes from the fact that golden profile data are linked to personal confidential data. We have developed and patented a system that splits confidential data and profile data, allowing us to unlock the user’s profile monetization. We’ve solved the privacy issue.


The Usefulness issue: Right People specificity is that product development comes not only from IT technologists, but also from top sociologists. Our sociologists pinpointed the causes of the usefulness issue as follows: Social networks are about friends and friends of your friends. They are fun. But in times of crisis, social networks should be about usefulness. The principle our sociologists have transformed into a product is that if you have a problem, a question or a need, it is very likely that someone, somewhere, has already solved it. Therefore, usefulness is not about friends and friends of my friends. Usefulness is about finding the right people. And that is what Right People does. We’ve solved the usefulness issue.

We are not “yet another social network”, neither a Facebook application nor a plug-in. We do not depend on existing social networks. We are a system that helps PC and mobile phone users find the right people who can help them within their social networks.




We do more about usefulness. Not only do we help PC and mobile phone users find the right people who can help them within their social networks, but also we help them find the right people around them, in real life, meaning in an event, a conference, a hotel or resort, at a fitness center, a night club, a bar or a restaurant, while commuting, around where they live, where they work… in one world, everywhere

And we can do that because we solved the privacy issue and we do that in total control of anonymity. We can do that also because our system works on the web, but also via an iPhone, a pda, or even a vintage mobile phone via SMS text messages.

We are an established UK publicly traded company listed on NYSE-Euronext. The company has been incorporated in August 2005. We went through IPO 3 years later in August 2008. We are at the product delivery version 2, as we launched our first two products in the past weeks.



Our targeted customers are the Fortune 1000 companies.
Our first source of revenues is Right People Pro, customizing our viral technology for brands, helping them expand and strengthen their customers’ base by bringing to their customers the value of others around them.
Our second source of revenues is Right People Targeted Self-Service Advertising propelling targeted sponsored links, on the same business model than Google.



Our road to profitability brings our first $1Million of revenues in Q1 2009, and our first $10Million of revenues and profitability for Q2 2010.

Investing early in Right People is still available for a short period of time at the IPO introduction price while the current stock price has doubled in a few weeks.

Institutional and qualified private investors may now invest for a short period of time at a privileged stock price.



All information on "How to invest early in Right People" here
or contact bertrandgerard@rightpeople.mobi who is in charge of investors' relations.



Full pdf version download here

Welcoming our Sales VP in Palo Alto

CEO and COO welcoming our Sales VP for his first day at Right People in Palo Alto

Right People for the new elected President

The Right People Team also spent their night waiting for the results of the elections.

Two versions of "Right People for the President" were ready to be switched on:
- one in case of a victory from Obama
- one for McCain.

All our teams were asked to remain neutral during the campaign and as long as the results were not officialy disclosed.
So we did. So did I.

Now that the winner has been declared, I can say that I am happy that Barack Obama has won for 3 reasons:
- first, because he has won thanks to the tremendous use of Internet and social networks. My next post tells you the story of Obama and social networks. His victory is a powerful illustration of how social networks will shape our day-to-day life in the future. And I am proud to run Right People Technologies which has developped and patented the greatest technology in terms of social interactions.
- second, because I share most of his vision of the world and I wish him the best for his 4-year mandate.
- and third, because of mother nature: lately, and since the beginning of the campaign, there hasn't been one day when people didn't stop me on the street and tell me 'you know what? you really do look a lot like Obama!'

:)

Obama election results speech

As Right People took part in helping the new president, this speech is worth a look.

The world is watching...

Today is D-Day.
Every American citizen knows what he/she has to do... and we stand watching....

How Obama Really Did It using Social Networks

The social-networking strategy that took an obscure senator to the doors of the White House.
Web Jockey: Jascha Franklin-Hodge, the 29-year-old cofounder and chief technology officer of Blue State Digital, the company behind Obama’s social technologies, says that “on every metric, this campaign has operated on a scale that has exceeded what was done before.” Beyond fund-raising, the Web tools enabled event planning, phone banks, and targeted e-mailing. Credit: Porter Gifford
Multimedia

Jascha Franklin-Hodge talks about his company’s work with Barack Obama’s online social network.

View photos of parties organized through Obama’s social-networking site.
Joe Trippi, Howard Dean's 2004 presidential campaign manager and Internet impresario, describes Super Tuesday II--the March 4 primaries in Texas, Ohio, Vermont, and Rhode Island--as the moment Barack Obama used social tech­nology to decisive effect. The day's largest hoard of dele­gates would be contested in Texas, where a strong showing would require exceptional discipline and voter-education efforts. In Texas, Democrats vote first at the polls and then, if they choose, again at caucuses after the polls close. The caucuses award one-third of the Democratic delegates.
Hillary Clinton's camp had about 20,000 volunteers at work in Texas. But in an e-mail, Trippi learned that 104,000 Texans had joined Obama's social-­networking site, www.my.barackobama.com, known as MyBO. MyBO and the main Obama site had already logged their share of achievements, particularly in helping rake in cash. The month before, the freshman senator from Illinois had set a record in American politics by garnering $55 million in donations in a single month. In Texas, MyBO also gave the Obama team the instant capacity to wage fully networked campaign warfare. After seeing the volunteer numbers, Trippi says, "I remember saying, 'Game, match--it's over.'"
The Obama campaign could get marching orders to the Texans registered with MyBO with minimal effort. The MyBO databases could slice and dice lists of volunteers by geographic micro­region and pair people with appropriate tasks, including prepping nearby voters on caucus procedure. "You could go online and download the names, addresses, and phone numbers of 100 people in your neighborhood to get out and vote--or the 40 people on your block who were undecided," Trippi says. "'Here is the leaflet: print it out and get it to them.' It was you, at your computer, in your house, printing and downloading. They did it all very well." Clinton won the Texas primary vote 51 to 47 percent. But Obama's ­people, following their MyBO playbook, so overwhelmed the chaotic, crowded caucuses that he scored an overall victory in the Texas delegate count, 99 to 94. His showing nearly canceled out ­Clinton's win that day in Ohio. Clinton lost her last major opportunity to stop the Obama juggernaut. "In 1992, Carville said, 'It's the economy, stupid,'" Trippi says, recalling the exhortation of Bill Clinton's campaign manager, James Carville. "This year, it was the network, stupid!"
Throughout the political season, the Obama campaign has domi­nated new media, capitalizing on a confluence of trends. Americans are more able to access media-rich content online; 55 percent have broadband Internet connections at home, double the figure for spring 2004. Social-networking technologies have matured, and more Americans are comfortable with them. Although the 2004 Dean campaign broke ground with its online meeting technologies and blogging, "people didn't quite have the facility," says ­Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor who has given the Obama campaign Internet policy advice (Lessig wrote The People Own Ideas! in our May/June 2005 issue). "The world has now caught up with the technology." The Obama campaign, he adds, recognized this early: "The key networking advance in the Obama field operation was really deploying community­-building tools in a smart way from the very beginning."
Of course, many of the 2008 candidates had websites, click-to-donate tools, and social-networking features--even John McCain, who does not personally use e-mail. But the Obama team put such technologies at the center of its campaign--among other things, recruiting 24-year-old Chris Hughes, cofounder of Facebook, to help develop them. And it managed those tools well. Supporters had considerable discretion to use MyBO to organize on their own; the campaign did not micromanage but struck a balance between top-down control and anarchy. In short, Obama, the former Chicago community organizer, created the ultimate online political machine.
The Obama campaign did not provide access or interviews for this story; it only confirmed some details of our reporting and offered written comments. This story is based on interviews with third parties involved in developing Obama's social-networking strategy or who were familiar with it, and on public records.

An Online Nervous SystemA row of elegant, renovated 19th-century industrial buildings lines Boston's Congress Street east of Fort Point Channel. On any given day, behind a plain wooden door on the third floor of 374 Congress, 15 to 20 casually clad programmers tap away at computers. On the day I visited, the strains of Creedence Clearwater Revival filled the room; a Ping-Pong table dominated the small kitchen. This is the technology center for Blue State Digital, which means that it is also the nervous system for its two largest clients, the Barack Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee. Founded by alumni of the Dean campaign, Blue State Digital added interactive elements to Obama's website--including MyBO--and now tends to its daily care and feeding. The site's servers hum away in a Boston suburb and are backed up in the Chicago area.
Jascha Franklin-Hodge, 29, greeted me with a friendly handshake and a gap-toothed grin. He has a deep voice and a hearty laugh; his face is ringed by a narrow beard. Franklin-Hodge dropped out of MIT after his freshman year and spent a few years in online music startups before running the Internet infrastructure for the Dean campaign, which received a then-­unprecedented $27 million in online donations. "When the campaign ended, we thought, 'Howard Dean was not destined to be president, but what we are doing online--this is too big to let go away,'" he says. He and three others cofounded Blue State Digital, where he is chief technology officer. (Another cofounder, Joe Rospars, is now on leave with the Obama campaign as its new-media director.)
The MyBO tools are, in essence, rebuilt and consolidated versions of those created for the Dean campaign. Dean's website allowed supporters to donate money, organize meetings, and distribute media, says Zephyr Teachout, who was Dean's Internet director and is now a visiting law professor at Duke University. "We developed all the tools the Obama campaign is using: SMS [text messaging], phone tools, Web capacity," Teachout recalls. "They [Blue State Digital] did a lot of nice work in taking this crude set of unrelated applications and making a complete suite."
Blue State Digital had nine days to add its tools to Obama's site before the senator announced his candidacy on February 10, 2007, in Springfield, IL. Among other preparations, the team braced for heavy traffic. "We made some projections of traffic levels, contribution amounts, and e-mail levels based on estimates from folks who worked with [John] Kerry and Dean in 2004," recalls Franklin­-Hodge. As Obama's Springfield speech progressed, "we were watching the traffic go up and up, surpassing all our previous records." (He would not provide specific numbers.) It was clear that early assumptions were low. "We blew through all of those [estimates] in February," he says. "So we had to do a lot of work to make sure we kept up with the demand his online success had placed on the system." By July 2008, the campaign had raised more than $200 million from more than a million online donors (Obama had raised $340 million from all sources by the end of June), and MyBO had logged more than a million user accounts and facilitated 75,000 local events, according to Blue State Digital.
MyBO and the main campaign site made it easy to give money--the fuel for any campaign, because it pays for advertising and staff. Visitors could use credit cards to make one-time donations or to sign up for recurring monthly contributions. MyBO also made giving money a social event: supporters could set personal targets, run their own fund-raising efforts, and watch personal fund-­raising thermometers rise. To bring people to the site in the first place, the campaign sought to make Obama a ubiquitous presence on as many new-media platforms as possible.

Figures

New-Media King: Barack Obama’s website enjoys more hits than the competition’s, but his real dominance is on social networks like Facebook and MySpace. He’s also a leading microblogger on Twitter. Credit: Facebook and Myspace data courtesy of techpresident.com; website traffic courtesy of compete.com

The viral Internet offered myriad ways to propagate unfiltered Obama messages. The campaign posted the candidate's speeches and linked to multimedia material generated by supporters. A music video set to an Obama speech--"Yes We Can," by the hip-hop artist Will.i.am--has been posted repeatedly on YouTube, but the top two postings alone have been viewed 10 million times. A single YouTube posting of Obama's March 18 speech on race has been viewed more than four million times. Similarly, the campaign regularly sent out text messages (at Obama rallies, speakers frequently asked attendees to text their contact information to his campaign) and made sure that Obama was prominent on other social-networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace (see "New-Media King" chart above). The campaign even used the micro­blogging service Twitter, garnering about 50,000 Obama "followers" who track his short posts. "The campaign, consciously or unconsciously, became much more of a media operation than simply a presidential campaign, because they recognized that by putting their message out onto these various platforms, their supporters would spread it for them," says Andrew Rasiej, founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, a website covering the intersection of politics and technology (and another Dean alumnus). "We are going from the era of the sound bite to the sound blast."
Money flowed in, augmenting the haul from big-ticket fund-raisers. By the time of the Iowa caucuses on January 3, 2008, the Obama campaign had more than $35 million on hand and was able to use MyBO to organize and instruct caucus-goers. "They have done a great job in being precise in the use of the tools," Teachout says. "In Iowa it was house parties, looking for a highly committed local network. In South Carolina, it was a massive get-out-the-vote effort." MyBO was critical both in the early caucus states, where campaign staff was in place, and in later-­voting states like Texas, Colorado, and Wisconsin, where "we provided the tools, remote training, and opportunity for supporters to build the campaign on their own," the Obama campaign told Technology Review in a written statement. "When the campaign eventually did deploy staff to these states, they supplemented an already-built infrastructure and volunteer network."
Using the Web, the Obama camp turbocharged age-old campaign tools. Take phone banks: through MyBO, the campaign chopped up the task of making calls into thousands of chunks small enough for a supporter to handle in an hour or two. "Millions of phone calls were made to early primary states by people who used the website to reach out and connect with them," Franklin-Hodge says. "On every metric, this campaign has operated on a scale that has exceeded what has been done before. We facilitate actions of every sort: sending e-mails out to millions and millions of people, organizing tens of thousands of events." The key, he says, is tightly integrating online activity with tasks people can perform in the real world. "Yes, there are blogs and Listservs," Franklin-Hodge says. "But the point of the campaign is to get someone to donate money, make calls, write letters, organize a house party. The core of the software is having those links to taking action--to doing something."

Pork Invaders

If the other major candidates had many of the same Web tools, their experiences show that having them isn't enough: you must make them central to the campaign and properly manage the networks of supporters they help organize. Observers say that ­Clinton's campaign deployed good tools but that online social networks and new media weren't as big a part of its strategy; at least in its early months, it relied more on conventional tactics like big fund-raisers. After all, Clinton was at the top of the party establishment. "They [the Obama supporters] are chanting 'Yes we can,' and she's saying 'I don't need you,'" Trippi says. "That is what the top of that campaign said by celebrating Terry McAuliffe [the veteran political operative and former Democratic National Committee chairman] and how many millions he could put together with big, big checks. She doesn't need my $25!" The two campaigns' fund-raising statistics support Trippi's argument: 48 percent of Obama's funds came from donations of less than $200, compared with 33 percent of Clinton's, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Clinton's Internet director, Peter Daou, credits the Obama campaign with doing an "amazing job" with its online social network. "If there is a difference in how the two campaigns approached [a Web strategy], a lot of those differences were based on our constituencies," Daou says. "We were reaching a different demographic of supporters and used our tools accordingly." For example, he says, the Clinton campaign established a presence on the baby-boomer social-networking site Eons.com, and Clinton herself often urged listeners to visit www.hillaryclinton.com. But Andrew Rasiej says that the conventional political wisdom questioned the value of the Internet. "As far as major political circles were concerned," he says, "Howard Dean failed, and therefore the Internet didn't work."
While it's hard to tease out how much Clinton's loss was due to her Web strategy--and how much to factors such as her Iraq War vote and the half-generation difference between her and Obama's ages--it seems clear that her campaign deëmphasized Web strategy early on, Trippi says. Even if you "have all the smartest bottom-up, tech-savvy people working for you," he says, "if the candidate and the top of the campaign want to run a top-down campaign, there is nothing you can do. It will sit there and nothing will happen. That's kind of what happened with the Clinton campaign."

Mc Main attitude
McCain's organization is playing to an older base of supporters. But it seems not to have grasped the breadth of recent shifts in communications technology, says David All, a Republican new-media consultant. "You have an entire generation of folks under age 25 no longer using e-mails, not even using Facebook; a majority are using text messaging," All says. "I get Obama's text messages, and every one is exactly what it should be. It is never pointless, it is always worth reading, and it has an action for you to take. You can have hundreds of recipients on a text message. You have hundreds of people trying to change the world in 160 characters or less. What's the SMS strategy for John McCain? None."
The generational differences between the Obama and McCain campaigns may be best symbolized by the distinctly retro "Pork Invaders," a game on the McCain site (it's also a Facebook application) styled after Space Invaders, the arcade game of the late 1970s. Pork Invaders allows you to fire bullets that say "veto" at slow-moving flying pigs and barrels.
But it's not that the campaign isn't trying to speak to the youth of today, as opposed to the youth of decades ago. Lately McCain has been having his daughter Meghan and two friends write a "bloggette" from the campaign trail. The bloggette site features a silhouette of a fetching woman in red high-heeled shoes. "It gives a hipper, younger perspective on the campaign and makes both of her parents seem hipper and younger," says Julie ­Germany, director of the nonpartisan Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet at George Washington University. The McCain campaign did not reply to several interview requests, but Germany predicts that the campaign will exploit social networking in time to make a difference in November. "What we will see is that the McCain online campaign is using the Internet just as effectively to meet its goals as the Obama campaign," she says. Over the summer, the McCain campaign refreshed its website. But Rasiej, for one, doubts that McCain has enough time to make up lost ground.

Republican Ron Paul had a different problem: Internet anarchy. Where the Obama campaign built one central network and managed it effectively, the Paul campaign decided early on that it would essentially be a hub for whatever networks the organizers were setting up. The results were mixed. On the one hand, volunteers organized successful "money bombs"--one-day online fund-raising frenzies (the one on November 5, 2007, netted Paul $4.3 million). But sometimes the volunteers' energy--and money--was wasted, says Justine Lam, the Paul campaign's Internet director, who is now the online marketing director at Politicker.com. Consider the supporter-driven effort to hire a blimp emblazoned with "Who is Ron Paul? Google Ron Paul" to cruise up and down the East Coast last winter. "We saw all this money funding a blimp, and thought, 'We really need this money for commercials,'" Lam says. Then there is McCain, who--somewhat ironically--was the big Internet story of 2000. That year, after his New Hampshire primary victory over George W. Bush, he quickly raised $1 million online. And at times last year, he made effective use of the Internet. His staff made videos--such as "Man in the Arena," celebrating his wartime service--that gained popularity on YouTube. But the McCain site is ineffectual for social networking. In late June, when I tried to sign up on McCainSpace--the analogue to MyBO--I got error messages. When I tried again, I was informed that I would soon get a new password in my in-box. It never arrived. "His social-networking site was poorly done, and people found there was nothing to do on it," says Lam. "It was very insular, a walled garden. You don't want to keep people inside your walled garden; you want them to spread the message to new people."

A Networked White House?

The obvious next step for MyBO is to serve as a get-out-the-vote engine in November. All campaigns scrutinize public records showing who is registered to vote and whether they have voted in past elections. The Obama campaign will be able to merge this data with MyBO data. All MyBO members' activity will have been chronicled: every house party they attended, each online connection, the date and amount of each donation. Rasiej sees how it might play out: the reliable voters who signed up on MyBO but did little else may be left alone. The most active ones will be deployed to get the unreliable voters--whether MyBO members or not--to the polls. And personalized pitches can be dished up, thanks to the MyBO database. "The more contextual information they can provide the field operation, the better turnout they will have," he says.If Obama is elected, his Web-oriented campaign strategy could carry over into his presidency. He could encourage his supporters to deluge members of Congress with calls and e-mails, or use the Web to organize collective research on policy questions. The campaign said in one of its prepared statements that "it's certain that the relationships that have been built between Barack Obama and his supporters, and between supporters themselves, will not end on Election Day." But whether or not a President Obama takes MyBO into the West Wing, it's clear that the phenomenon will forever transform campaigning. "We're scratching the surface," Trippi says. "We're all excited because he's got one million people signed up--but we are 300 million people in this country. We are still at the infancy stages of what social-­networking technologies are going to do, not just in our politics but in everything. There won't be any campaign in 2012 that doesn't try to build a social network around it." Lessig warns that if Obama wins but doesn't govern according to principles of openness and change, as promised, supporters may not be so interested in serving as MyBO foot soldiers in 2012. "The thing they [the Obama camp] don't quite recognize is how much of their enormous support comes from the perception that this is someone different," Lessig says. "If they behave like everyone else, how much will that stanch the passion of his support?"

But for now, it's party time. At the end of June, after ­Clinton suspended her campaign, MyBO put out a call for the faithful to organize house parties under a "Unite for Change" theme. More than 4,000 parties were organized nationwide on June 28; I logged in and picked three parties from about a dozen in the Boston area.
My first stop was a house party in the tony suburb of ­Winchester, where several couples dutifully watched an Obama-supplied campaign video. Host Mary Hart, an art professor in her 50s, said that Obama and his website made her "open my house to strangers and really get something going." She added, "I'm e-mailing people I haven't seen in 20 years. We have this tremendous ability to use this technology to network with people. Why don't we use it?"
Next stop was a lawn party in the Boston neighborhood of Roxbury, whose organizer, Sachielle Samedi, 34, wore a button that said "Hot Chicks Dig Obama." She said that support for the Obama candidacy drew neighbors together. At the party, Wayne Dudley, a retired history professor, met a kindred spirit: Brian Murdoch, a 54-year-old Episcopal priest. The two men buttonholed me for several minutes; Dudley predicted that Obama would bring about "a new world order centered on people of integrity." Murdoch nodded vigorously. It was a fine MyBO moment.
My evening ended at a packed post-collegiate party in a Somerville walk-up apartment. Host Rebecca Herst, a 23-year-old program assistant with the Jewish Organizing Initiative, said that MyBO--unlike Facebook--allowed her to quickly upload her entire Gmail address book, grafting her network onto Obama's. "It will be interesting to see what develops after this party, because now I'm connected to all these people," she shouted over the growing din. Two beery young men, heading for the exits, handed her two checks for $20. Herst tucked the checks into her back pocket.
David Talbot is Technology Review's chief correspondent.

complete article here

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/21222/page6/

Experts say that Barack Obama won the elections because he has more friends on his social networks than anyone else.

A different approach emerged in the latest presidential elections. Newly-crowned President, but then mere Democrat candidate, Barack Obama asked his party-posse: 'What are the kids down with these days, eh?' and the answer came back: 'The Internet.

So Obama decided to be EVERYWHERE on the 'net. He's on YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and so many others you won't even have heard of them. He's got a website, a blog, a TV CHANNEL and he's even made a viral video with Will.I.Am, just to make sure he ticked all the funky boxes. Let's take a look at his various profiles, and how you can add him.

Complete article here

Photos from Right People for the President preview in Silicon Valley

We have just received the photos of the Right People for the President pre-view that occured in Silicon Valley on Sept 20th., organized by Orange Labs and Plug and Play Center, with social media guru Stowe Boyd.







That was on September 30th, 2008, at an Orange Spotlight event.
Organized by PlugandPlayTechcenter and Orange Labs on the topic "Collective Action". The power of the digital crowd, including the emergence of customer collaborations today and tomorrow was explored.

In coherence with the Orange's tagline -- "Together we can do more" -- and explore using the Spotlight format, blending startup presentations with comments from a selection of experts as part of the audience.

Stowe Boyd, the social web applications master was the coordinator and moderator.

As Stowe says about himself: "I am obsessed with social tools, and their impact on business, media, and society. I coined the term "social tools" in 1999. I am on the advisory board of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, and other conferences. I wrote a column on social tools for Darwin in the early '00s that was fairly influential, and in the '90s I wrote a newsletter called Business Process Strategies that ranged from knowledge management to emerging Web culture, believe it or not."

Sequoia Capital data about how online advertising resists versus traditional advertising

This chart from Sequoia Capital, a major VC in Silicon Valley explains why online advertising is a sector where the investment value is strong versus traditional advertising.

While all other markets become negative, on line advertising maintains an average +10% progression rate.

In those times, major business social network LInkedin raises funds and is valued more than 1 Billion dollars.

LinkedIn Raises $22.7 Million from Goldman Sachs, The McGraw-Hill Companies, SAP Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--LinkedIn Corporation today announced that it has secured $22.7 million in new funding from world-leading strategic investors Goldman Sachs; The McGraw-Hill Companies; and SAP Ventures, a division of SAP AG; as well as a re-investment by Bessemer Venture Partners. This financing is a follow on of the Series D fundraising round LinkedIn announced in June of 2008, in which the company raised $53 million in funding led by Bain Capital Ventures. The valuation for the Series D was just over 1 billion dollars for the $75.7 million raised.



“We secured this investment with innovators in enterprise software, investment banking and business information who see the potential to create value and transform industries through the LinkedIn platform,” said LinkedIn CEO, Dan Nye. “These leading companies understand that LinkedIn is building a network with broad and enduring value.”

Over 30 million professionals use LinkedIn to solve business problems, manage their professional relationships and control their professional identities online. LinkedIn members represent more than 170 industries, 150 countries, and include executives from all of the Fortune 500 companies. LinkedIn is currently growing at a rate of half a million new members a week. Members experience the benefits of the purpose-driven network by finding new ways to interact and do business. While standard LinkedIn accounts are free, the company earns revenue through advertising, premium subscriptions, corporate solutions, and job listings. LinkedIn recently added a new line of revenue with LinkedIn Surveys.

“SAP Ventures is extremely excited to partner with one of the leading Internet companies in the world,” said Doug Higgins, partner at SAP Ventures. “We made this investment because we believe that when Web 2.0 technologies are thoughtfully applied to the enterprise, they can produce significant efficiencies for small, medium and large companies.”

“We are delighted to enhance our strategic partnership with LinkedIn, which helps BusinessWeek readers network with others and provides LinkedIn users with broader access to content,” said Glenn S. Goldberg, president of Information & Media for The McGraw-Hill Companies. “We look forward to developing additional opportunities to connect business professionals and to serve their information needs through BusinessWeek and our other respected franchises.”

"In today's economy we spend more time tending to our professional networks, and so it's no surprise that LinkedIn continues to grow in membership and engagement,” said David Cowan, partner at Bessemer Venture Partners.

Complete article here

Weekends at Right People

As we are preparing the launch of our second product very soon, here is what weekends look like at RightPeople
:)

I enjoy watching this team work with passion.
Right People has become their lives.

Right People Technologies has been selected for the "Best of Breed CEO Showcases"

We are proud to announce that Right People Technologies will be presented as one of the "Best of Breed CEO Showcases" in Silicon Valley on Dec 2nd and 3rd, 2008.

It is very important to us to validate that the IT Silicon Valley environment welcomes us for the second time with such an award.

Venture Summit Silicon Valley is a two-day gathering that highlights the significant economic, political and technology trends impacting the global growth investor. Venture Summit features the most influential institutional investors, venture capitalists, corporate buyers, investment bankers and research analysts in keynote presentations and panel debates. The Venture Summit will also host 14 “Best of Breed CEO Showcases” handpicked from the AlwaysOn annual top 100 private company list, and 36 other qualified six-minute CEO pitches from companies seeking later-stage capital or potential acquirers.

The Venture Summit’s goal is to match growth company buyers and sellers and identify the most promising innovation-driven, growth investment opportunities. At the Venture Summit, our editors will also honor the “AO Deal Maker 100” and the annual “AO Industry Analyst All-Star Team.”

Who will be attending:
Five hundred institutional investors, venture capitalists, investment bankers, research analysts and corporate buyers will attend Venture Summit Silicon Valley. The most influential members of the financial and technology media and blogging community will also be on hand to moderate debates and cover the action. Executives attend Venture Summit Silicon Valley to identify and debate emerging investment opportunities in venture and private equity funds and private growth companies, and to build high-level relationships with technology and greentech CEOs and corporate buyers

Social networks are among the Top 10 Strategic Technologies Gartner Identifies for 2009

October 14, 2008 — Gartner, Inc. analysts today highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations. The analysts presented their findings during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, being held here through October 16.

Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

These technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives. They may be strategic because they have matured to broad market use or because they enable strategic advantage from early adoption.

“Strategic technologies affect, run, grow and transform the business initiatives of an organization,” said David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Companies should look at these 10 opportunities and evaluate where these technologies can add value to their business services and solutions, as well as develop a process for detecting and evaluating the business value of new technologies as they enter the market.”

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2009 include:

Virtualization. Much of the current buzz is focused on server virtualization, but virtualization in storage and client devices is also moving rapidly. Virtualization to eliminate duplicate copies of data on the real storage devices while maintaining the illusion to the accessing systems that the files are as originally stored (data deduplication) can significantly decrease the cost of storage devices and media to hold information. Hosted virtual images deliver a near-identical result to blade-based PCs. But, instead of the motherboard function being located in the data center as hardware, it is located there as a virtual machine bubble. However, despite ambitious deployment plans from many organizations, deployments of hosted virtual desktop capabilities will be adopted by fewer than 40 percent of target users by 2010.

Cloud Computing. Cloud computing is a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled capabilities to consumers. They key characteristics of cloud computing are 1) delivery of capabilities “as a service,” 2) delivery of services in a highly scalable and elastic fashion, 3) using Internet technologies and techniques to develop and deliver the services, and 4) designing for delivery to external customers. Although cost is a potential benefit for small companies, the biggest benefits are the built-in elasticity and scalability, which not only reduce barriers to entry, but also enable these companies to grow quickly. As certain IT functions are industrializing and becoming less customized, there are more possibilities for larger organizations to benefit from cloud computing.

Servers — Beyond Blades. Servers are evolving beyond the blade server stage that exists today. This evolution will simplify the provisioning of capacity to meet growing needs. The organization tracks the various resource types, for example, memory, separately and replenishes only the type that is in short supply. This eliminates the need to pay for all three resource types to upgrade capacity. It also simplifies the inventory of systems, eliminating the need to track and purchase various sizes and configurations. The result will be higher utilization because of lessened “waste” of resources that are in the wrong configuration or that come along with the needed processors and memory in a fixed bundle.

Web-Oriented Architectures. The Internet is arguably the best example of an agile, interoperable and scalable service-oriented environment in existence. This level of flexibility is achieved because of key design principles inherent in the Internet/Web approach, as well as the emergence of Web-centric technologies and standards that promote these principles. The use of Web-centric models to build global-class solutions cannot address the full breadth of enterprise computing needs. However, Gartner expects that continued evolution of the Web-centric approach will enable its use in an ever-broadening set of enterprise solutions during the next five years.

EnterpriseMashups. Enterprises are now investigating taking mashups from cool Web hobby to enterprise-class systems to augment their models for delivering and managing applications. Through 2010, the enterprise mashup product environment will experience significant flux and consolidation, and application architects and IT leaders should investigate this growing space for the significant and transformational potential it may offer their enterprises.

Specialized Systems. Appliances have been used to accomplish IT purposes, but only with a few classes of function have appliances prevailed. Heterogeneous systems are an emerging trend in high-performance computing to address the requirements of the most demanding workloads, and this approach will eventually reach the general-purpose computing market. Heterogeneous systems are also specialized systems with the same single-purpose imitations of appliances, but the heterogeneous system is a server system into which the owner installs software to accomplish its function.



Social Software and Social Networking. Social software includes a broad range of technologies, such as social networking, social collaboration, social media and social validation. Organizations should consider adding a social dimension to a conventional Web site or application and should adopt a social platform sooner, rather than later, because the greatest risk lies in failure to engage and thereby, being left mute in a dialogue where your voice must be heard.

Unified Communications. During the next five years, the number of different communications vendors with which a typical organization works with will be reduced by at least 50 percent. This change is driven by increases in the capability of application servers and the general shift of communications applications to common off-the-shelf server and operating systems. As this occurs, formerly distinct markets, each with distinct vendors, converge, resulting in massive consolidation in the communications industry. Organizations must build careful, detailed plans for when each category of communications function is replaced or converged, coupling this step with the prior completion of appropriate administrative team convergence.

Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence (BI), the top technology priority in Gartner’s 2008 CIO survey, can have a direct positive impact on a company’s business performance, dramatically improving its ability to accomplish its mission by making smarter decisions at every level of the business from corporate strategy to operational processes. BI is particularly strategic because it is directed toward business managers and knowledge workers who make up the pool of thinkers and decision makers that are tasked with running, growing and transforming the business. Tools that let these users make faster, better and more-informed decisions are particularly valuable in a difficult business environment.

Green IT. Shifting to more efficient products and approaches can allow for more equipment to fit within an energy footprint, or to fit into a previously filled center. Regulations are multiplying and have the potential to seriously constrain companies in building data centers, as the effect of power grids, carbon emissions from increased use and other environmental impacts are under scrutiny. Organizations should consider regulations and have alternative plans for data center and capacity growth.

“A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses,” said Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years. Companies should evaluate these technologies and adjust based on their industry need, unique business needs, technology adoption model and other factors.”



complete article here

Virality of Right People for the president

It is interesting to look at the propagation of Right People for the President.
Here is, hour after hour, the number of indexations on Google of "Right People for the President" (having the words between coma means that this is regarding our specific product for the elections).



00:00 O indexation
01:00 3 indexations
02:00 5 indexations
06:00 12 indexations
09:00 92 indexations
12:00 115 indexations
10 days later: 34300 indexations


In terms of connections
00:00 O connections per day
Day 1: 43 connections per day
Day 2: 882 connections per day
Day 3: 3071 connections per day
DAy 5: 12710 connections per day
Day 6: 48473 connections per day
10 days later: 213921 connections per day

Our ability to unlock virality in blogs

Here is what Right People for the president looks like in blogs

Third Full Presidential Debate Obama vs Mccain

As Right People is now taking part in helping the presidential candidates, this final presidential debate was of great interest.

Google just demonstrated that advertising online seems to be safe from the current crisis

Although Google stock has temporarily decreased as any stock during the last weeks because of the financial crisis, Google has just released its quarter report showing that fundamentals are better and better. For investors looking for real long-term value this is a sign of the potential profits behind advertising online, despite any global or temporary crisis.



For months, Google has promised investors that the company’s online advertising system would do relatively well in an economic downturn. On Thursday, it showed evidence that it may be able to deliver on that promise.

Google said that its growth rate continued to slow in the third quarter. But the company fared better than Wall Street expected as it reported a solid 26 percent jump in net income to $1.35 billion, or $4.24 a share, from $1.07 billion in the third quarter of 2007. The company’s results were bolstered by strong gains in online advertising and efforts by Google to slow hiring and rein in costs.

Google’s shares, which rose to $353.02, or 4 percent, in regular trading on Thursday, jumped another 10 percent after the company reported its financial results. However, they remain down sharply from their high of just over $740 last November.

Google’s chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, said the results reflected marketers’ acceptance of a system that is better and more measurable than other forms of advertising. He said that while the economic environment was unpredictable, Google was poised to continue doing relatively well.

“We are very realistic about the macroeconomic climate, but we are optimistic about Google’s future,” Mr. Schmidt said during a conference call with analysts.

While Google is the largest seller of online ads, its relatively strong results are not indicative of the overall health of the Internet advertising business. Google relies primarily on search ads, the fastest-growing segment of the market. Since marketers use such ads to lure people to their Web sites, analysts say they believe they are among the last thing advertisers would cut during a recession.

Google said revenue for the third quarter, which ended Sept. 30, grew 31 percent, to $5.54 billion, up from $4.23 billion a year earlier. The growth rate is a further indication that Google’s business is maturing. The company’s revenue grew 56 percent in 2007 and 73 percent in 2006.

Google’s net revenue, which excludes commissions paid to advertising partners, rose to $4.04 billion, roughly in line with the $4.05 billion that analysts expected. The company beat Wall Street’s profit expectations. Excluding the cost of stock options and other items, Google’s income was $4.92 a share, higher than the $4.79 a share forecast by analysts.

“This is the first quarter when the wheels are coming off the wagon on the economy and they’ve been able to have a decent quarter,” said Youssef H. Squali, an analyst with Jefferies & Company. “Google’s business model has proven to be better than that of your typical Internet company because of its focus on performance.”

complete article here


Personal comment: We share these view from market analysts about the future of advertising online, and when top analyst H.Squali says that "“Google’s business model has proven to be better than that of your typical Internet company", I am pleased that Right People's business model is strictly the same though applied to people search, rather than information search.

Checking the load balancing

On D-Day of launching of the President, CEO, CTO, Chief Analyst, Chief of Integration, watching the load balancing simulation algorythms.

Right People reveals today the first technology that unleashes the “wisdom of the crowds”, in favor of the next President of the United States!

Right People launches today the first technology that unleashes the “wisdom of the crowds”, in favor of the next President of the United States. Right People Technologies is bringing a new twist to the American presidential elections with “Right People for the President”, a website that will enable web users to help their favorite candidate win the elections. The technology used by Right People will give the candidates direct feedback from the American voters, with ideas and contributions on strategic campaign issues. A new way for the people to make their voices heard by the future President.

Dan Ake, Right People CEO explains: “We created Right People for the President because people want to be part of the presidential elections - especially the 2008 edition - , because people want more and more to speak up and be listened to. Regular blog comments do not give them the satisfaction of being useful enough. We are very excited to help the people to be heard.”

This brand new application from Right People’s search platform is now available online at http://www.rightpeopleforthepresident.com/ , through a dedicated website as well as numerous political sites and blogs. Beyond the elections, everyone should have the opportunity to help the next President of the US on his policies both at federal and local level.



A viral technology to involve potential voters

The technology used by Right People for the President gives voters an answer to their need for an arena of expression, encouraging them to get involved and not stay passive during the elections process. Right People for the President gives voters a compelling reason to engage their community of friends to support them and their candidate. The motivation to have a suggestion forwarded to the candidate, along with your picture, encourages a viral usage of the Right People player.

A viral technology to involve media and bloggers

Right People for the President can be inserted in a website or a blog in an easy copy-and-paste procedure. It gives bloggers a way to reinforce their influence, and an efficient way for their readers to be active regarding the elections. It gives them a compelling reason to engage their community of readers to support the candidate of their choice. The motivation to have a suggestion coming from their blog forwarded to the candidate encourages a viral usage of the Right People player.

« Right People for the President » is a ground breaking first in the history of the American elections; it brings forward the social media technology as a new tool for democracy.


Complete press release here

Right People for the President in every blog

Right People for Obama ...


or Right People for McCain...


If you are a blogger, just click on "ADD TO A BLOG" and the Right People for the President's player will be in your blog in 1 second.

Full Vice Pesidential Debate Palin vs Biden

Since Right People will be helping the presidential candidates very soon, this vice presidential debate is of great interest.

House approves historic bailout bill

A we are listed, we are concerned by the stock-exchange issue and we are quite satisfied that the US government has come to a nationwide agreement.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi holds a copy of the financial bailout bill as she savors the moment with fellow Democratic Reps. (from left) Barney Frank, James Clyburn and Steny Hoyer after the House passed the legislation 263-171.



In four long days, as credit markets froze, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama worked the phones with President Bush. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger leaned on the California congressional delegation. The chairmen of General Motors and Chrysler allied with the small-town car dealer and banker in a full-court press on Congress. And in the end, they helped House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat from San Francisco, engineer the biggest bailout of the banking system in U.S. history.

The overwhelming 263-171 House vote for the $700 billion rescue erased a stunning defeat Monday that shocked Pelosi and her GOP counterpart, Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio. That defeat, and fear that inaction would lead to a once-in-a-century style economic collapse, set in motion the most extraordinary political alliance witnessed in modern times.

The nation's top leaders quickly rallied their combined forces behind an unprecedented and deeply unpopular government intervention in the U.S. economy, one that offended much of the public and the ideological wings of both parties just one month before a presidential election.

complete article here

Full Presidential Debate Obama vs Mccain

As Rigt People will help the presidential candidates very soon, this presidential debate if of great interest.

Attend a Right People dinner

As we announced a few days ago, Right People has been selected as one of the most promising European private technology companies by the Dowjones Eurotech Event in Silicon Valley. The event will connect us with "the leading American technology players".

You can help us prepare our presentation and session of questions and answers.
We are organizing 3 dinners, one in Palo Alto, one in London, and one in Paris where you are welcome to join us.

Additionally to this, this will give us the permanent contact that we maintain with our users and investors.

Should you be interested to invest into Right People Technologies as an institutional or qualified investor, this will be a perfect opportunity to meet the team and experience a live Q&A session.

The dinners are by invitation only, and space is limited. Everyone will take its dinner in charge (should be around 35-45€,$,£).
So please book here to attend, as reservations will be taken by order of reception.
- for Paris 8e dinner, Monday October 20th 2008, 19h30
- for London Knightsbridge dinner, Monday October 27th 2008, 19h30
- for Palo Alto dinner, Monday November 10th 2008, 07:00PM

Everything is now ready for lauching in the USA

Everything is now ready for lauching here.
We are currently checking the last details.

The transfer of our farm of servers from Europe to the US is being completed.
Load balancing tests are running to adjust the capacity here.

Our new headquarters in Silicon Valley

We will move very soon into our new offices:

Right People USA, 2225 East Bayshore Road, PAlo Alto, CA 94303 .
We are just at the exit of the 101 @ Palo Alto.

Successfull mission in the Silicon Valley

We will be back from the Silicon Valley in ten days. We have been in Palo Alto since two weeks, preparing the launching of Right People. Our check-list is ok.
All the goals we had for this trip have been reached.

We have opened our offices in the Silicon Valley.
We have hired our Marketing VP, our Sales VP, and our PR agency,...
All are 100% American. All have a top-class record of experiences and successes.
We will introduce them to you in the next days.

What Google wants to do in the mobile sector

Now’s the time to start Googling mobile user experience


Google, T-Mobile and HTC this week announced the G1, the first handset powered by Google's Android platform. The ultimate goal of Google's mobile strategy has little to do with making a success of Android or building so-called 'G-Phones'. Google's business is selling advertising space. Strip away the hype, the friendly multi-coloured logo and all those free services we've become addicted to and you'll find Google's revenue comes from a single source: connecting advertisers with potential customers.It believes Android will have two effects: firstly, devices running the Google OS will make it easy for more customers to access mobile web services; secondly, the free availability of Android will force other companies in the mobile industry to improve their own mobile internet access features. Both of these should result in Google achieving its goal: expediting the growth of mobile internet usage so it can make money from mobile advertisements.

Don't expect this to be immediately obvious. Google employs a lot of smart people who spend their time thinking about how customers interact with its services. They know that the quickest way to annoy users is to overwhelm them with advertising. As such, a lot of Google's current mobile services have no obvious advertising at all - they maintain a single-minded focus on making it as easy as possible to access emails, view maps or any of the other features Google already offers to mobile users.

Google's management has already stated it believes mobile advertising will become a bigger business for the company than its existing desktop franchise, but that this will be a long-haul. The truth is that no one really knows how effective mobile advertising will be or how to provide a customer experience users genuinely value. It's going to require a great deal of experimentation. However, we do know that mobile platforms like Android make it easier for companies like Google to learn the behavioural traits and contextual factors which will enable them to deliver more targeted, appropriate adverts and services.

When you think about mobile advertising in this way, the billions of dollars Google has poured into developing 'free' services such as email, calendar, reader, photos, videos and maps start to make sense. The more information users entrust to these services, the more accurate a picture Google is able to build of its customers and the more valuable its advertising opportunities become.

The goal for Google is a world in which mobile devices enable it to know where users are, what they are doing, what they're trying to achieve and how much time they have available.

Complete article here

Right People and the next President of the USA

Because Right People will help the next President of the USA in the very next days- in a still secret way that will be disclosed soon - we invite you to follow this exciting campaign for the presidentials.

We encourage you to look at the presidential debate video here

Here is a summary of yesterday presidential debate between Obama and McCain, from CNN.

Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama landed some punches Friday night, but neither delivered a knockout blow in the first presidential debate featuring the two party nominees.
Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain discussed foreign policy and the U.S. economy in Friday's debate.

Heading into the debate, McCain was supposed to have the edge given that the topic was originally focused solely on foreign policy and national security. However, the economic emergency that has struck the nation and the world forced an 11th-hour format tweak to allow the candidates to address the issue.

The first 40 minutes of the debate was on the economy with moderator Jim Lehrer offering both candidates a stage to elaborate on how they would address the urgent situation.

The financial crisis almost put the debate in jeopardy when McCain vowed not to attend unless the emergency was resolved. He decided earlier on Friday that enough progress had been made, so he went to Oxford.

Still, when given the opportunity, neither candidate offered specifics on the subject as both stuck to their talking points. But Obama seemed more comfortable on this topic than McCain and it showed. Video Watch Obama, McCain discuss the economy »

Polling shows that voters have more confidence in Obama than McCain when it comes to the economy. McCain, though, warmed up as the discussion turned to his turf: foreign policy.

When it comes to terrorism and Iraq, voters prefer McCain over Obama. While McCain successfully pointed out that he clearly has more experience on foreign policy issues, Obama did hold his own.

As expected, Democrats declared victory, noting that Obama did not fold when the topic turned to foreign policy. Republicans claimed a win, saying that when people head to the polls on November 4 they are voting for a commander in chief with experience.

By and large, Friday night's showdown was probably a draw, elevating expectations for their next meeting on October 7 in Nashville, Tennessee, when they take questions from an audience.

Complete article here.

Despite economy's woes, online ad spending is poised for growth

Online Ad Spending Still Robust, eMarketer Says.


NEW YORK While the ad industry reels on devastating financial news, digital marketing remains poised for growth, according to the latest data from eMarketer.Advertisers will spend about $25 billion online this year in the U.S., eMarketer projects, which is a growth rate of 17.4 percent over last year.In 2009, growth will drop somewhat, but will yield an impressive 14.5 percent for total ad spending of $28.5 billion.By 2011, an anticipated boom in online video advertising, combined with a recovered economy, will mean spending growth greater than 20 percent for the first time since 2007. Marketers are expected to devote more than $40 billion to online advertising that year.


Article here

Complete market data for investors here

Who will step up when Wall Street's titans step down?

We had a review with our investment bank before leaving for the United States on our launching mission. We reviewed the status of the current subscription. As it is not over yet, we have decided to maintain our sales force regarding institutional investors that have already discovered Right People, although they are all concerned about the issue of the financial crisis. Therefore individual qualified investors can take profit of a subscription period extension.

The Wall Street Journal just released today an excellent article that summarizes what we all think: the market is currently suffering because of the insufficiency of old banks that believed that they were invincible. The Wall Street Journal tells of "smart money" and "how to have gains in pain moments" while focusing on nuggets that will become golden nuggets in the very next future.
I believe they are talking about Right People.
:)

The abstract of the article:

From Pain to Gain: Smart Money Lurks

Who will step up when Wall Street's titans step down?

As Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley convert themselves into more conservative commercial banks, a group of well-funded private-equity firms and hedge funds stand to gain by hewing to the riskier side of the Street.

Some are already communicating that message, while acknowledging how the stunning, weeklong shake-up has damaged Wall Street's established order.


Complete article here

Documentation for qualified and institutional investors here

Right People has been elected as one the 50 most promising European Companies by The Dow Jones EuroTech Showcase

50 of the most promising European Companies have been selected to present at the Dow Jones Eurotech Showcase in Silicon Valley on Nov 18th and 19th, 2008.

The Euro Tech Showcase's association with the Dow Jones VentureWire Technology Showcase creates the best American tech venture event this fall, featuring over 100 of the most promising tech companies in the world: 80 from the US, and 50 from Europe. Both programs are fully integrated, allowing top American tech players to discover innovative tech companies from around the block or from across the Atlantic at the same time, right at their door step.

The Euro Tech Showcase is a corporate matchmaking conference focused on forging profitable links between up-and-coming European technology firms and American technology leaders. Through series of pre-arranged qualified one-on-one meetings, company presentations and demos, the Euro Tech Showcase connects fifty of the most promising private European tech companies with potential American partners, clients and investors.

More on http://www.eurotechshowcase.com/

Official Press Release here

Last marketing review before launching

A closed-door one-day seminar with the marketing and sociology team reviewing the final product.

While our Communication VP is the guarantor of the brand...

under the sweet and incorruptible eyes of Miss Simplify...

 our new marketing guy, Julien, discovered the "People Search Engine" for the first time. (screen has been blurred for confidential reasons)


Say it again?


Sociologists reporting user's behaviors.


Sociologists asking to re-design a specific screen.

Last technical review before launching

Here was the last technical review with the managers of our Development Center in Warsaw.

Reviewing the planning is always a hard discussion where every department negociates more resources and more delays.

Tomasz, our CTO, and Witold allocate the resources using a sophisticated project management plan.



It is my pleasure to announce that the launching will be sooner than expected.
:)

Our new development Center in Poland

In a quiet district of Warsaw, stimulating work and creativity?

:)

Departure for Warsaw Right People Development Center

Before our trip to Silicon Valley to prepare our launching, here is a last one to our Development Center in Warsaw to review the teams.

Buzz around Right People

Yesterday we discovered these stats about the searches that people do searching "Right People" in Google.

Buzz pays!
:)

Let's increase that buzz in the next months!
:)

Google in ten years, Right People in ten years

As everybody say that we are "the Google for people search", this article with avision of what Google could be in ten ears is very interesting.

Let us follow the tracks...

In the next day or so you'll probably find yourself hearing a lot about how Google started 10 years ago, and, well, isn't it remarkable that a company that started in a garage has survived that long and become a household name? I'm not going to do that. Hell, that's what Wikipedia and the official Google history are for.

I'm more interested in Google's next 10 years – because that could define what life is like in 2018 and beyond. I'm not exaggerating. And if I'm wrong, you can come back and beat me over the head with a printout of this piece.

An interesting generic forecast came from John Battelle, who wrote Search, a book about how Google catapulted to the top of the search – and more importantly search advertising pile – over AltaVista, Yahoo, Lycos (remember Lycos? Adverts used a dog sniffing stuff out) and Ask Jeeves (Jeeves got whacked; now it's just Ask).

His prediction? "I'd say, by then they'd have made a couple big ass mistakes and most likely one of the key founders is gone," he forecast. "But they still [will] rule the world in terms of monetization of traffic of good intent."

It's not as though Google hasn't already made some mistakes. There's been its (purposeful) concession to China's demands to filter its content; and the (accidental) release by AOL of lots of personal data gathered by Google from AOL users. Until the latter, people hadn't realised quite how easy it was to find an individual from their searches.

To get an idea of what Google will look like in 10 years' time, it helps to imagine the world then. Important trends are visible already. Energy, food, and oil and coal byproducts will all be more expensive in real terms. That means first that power efficiency will be essential in any product we use; minimising wasted energy and effort will be part of daily life. Minimising waste, in fact, will be sensible; we'll reuse and recycle because it'll often be preferable to buying to buy new.

In computing, there are important trends that are only just starting. The rise of ultraportables (or Liliputers) – really small yet fully functional computers, with solid-state drives – is a key trend. This will bring Linux to a wider market that would never have used it before.

Mobile phones are becoming even more important; their penetration is a key indicator of economic growth in developing countries. They'll become portable internet devices for the times when we don't want to use our ultraportables.

A final point before we move into the predictions: companies develop a lot less in their second decade than their first. Though it helps to be a multibillion pound company if you do want to have a stab at continuing your dramatic growth.

OK, so what should we expect from Google in the next 10 years?

First, Android, its mobile phone platform, is very important. Google wants to be in your mobile phone where you're making searches and calls. It wants to know what you're doing there so it can persuade companies to advertise with it. After all, if you're a company and all the mobile phone traffic you see comes via an Android phone, you're going to listen with more interest to Google's ad sales people than Microsoft's.

Here's my forecast: in 10 years, Android phones will be outselling phones using Microsoft Windows Mobile or Apple iPhones. Yes, I do think that.

Secondly, Chrome - its browser - is going to be preloaded, and often the default, in computers that you buy in shops, whether full-sized ones or the ultraportables. Google has the financial muscle to make that happen, which Firefox (owned by the Mozilla Foundation) doesn't.

In fact the ultraportables are important to this story. They are the real incarnation of what Bill Gates thought the Tablet would be. His 2001 forecast that in five years the Tablet would be the dominant model on sale was wrong. But I'll pick up his wonky prediction cap. I think that it will be true of the ultraportable in five years or so; in 10 years, surely.

And I think that ultraportable, like the Android phones, will be running Linux, because there's a lot of effort gone into developing low-power versions of it already. And they'll have Google as a default search engine, and run Chrome, which will be used to write documents and do spreadsheets and check email and work collaboratively – with the data stored both in the "cloud" (on Google's or other servers) and also saved locally, on the SQLite database that underlies Google Gears. (Data in two places. It's safe.)

Meanwhile, Google's other initiative is going to be in energy. It uses colossal amounts of energy for its server farms. It's going to be walloped by rising energy costs, which is a key reason why last November it began its "REC" program – with the aim of making renewable energy cheaper than coal. At the time Larry Page said: "With talented technologists, great partners and significant investments, we hope to rapidly push forward. Our goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity that is cheaper than coal. We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades." (One gigawatt can power a city the size of San Francisco. Or a few Google server farms.)

And, quite possibly, Google will sell some of that energy to the electric grid. How would you like to have your Google-laden ultraportable powered by green Google electric juice? Now there's a capture of the market for you.

Into this scenario I can see a couple of clouds that will loom. Larry Page and Sergey Brin have had their differences; I suspect that Battelle is right that one of them will leave within the next decade, and how Google reacts to that will be key to its future.

The other two things that will be a problem are that China will resist Google, because its authoritarian government cannot contemplate the openness of information the search engine represents. China, already the largest internet nation, will be stubbornly closed to Google's best endeavours.

The other is that there is going to be one hell of an antitrust case coming. Google's in so many places at so many times, and so dominant particularly in search, that it cannot avoid this: it'll move into some new market, and someone will raise a huge stink about how it is using its power in search to take over a new market. (A reminder: having a monopoly isn't illegal. Using that monopoly to force others out of other markets is.)

As Microsoft discovered, fighting an antitrust case takes the creative wind out of your sails; it becomes all you can do to row to shore. The Microsoft of 10 years ago was cocky, confident; today it's vast, but uncertain, overwhelmed by its bureaucracy. That could be Google's fate – even as in 10 years we use its tools all the time, and a significant number of people use phones and computers based around its products, it will be becoming sclerotic.

And then it will be time for something completely new to burst onto the scene. Very probably the people who are going to do that have only just started their first day at secondary school (high school to our American readers).

You can't guess what it will be. But if some kids ask to use your garage for a computer project, my advice would be to let them – and ask if they'll let you fund them in exchange for a few shares. Ask for 10%. If it pays off, by 2030 you'll never need to work again.

Complete article here.

Right People seduction in Silicon Valley

Interesting feedback.
We started posting our recruitment ads in THE media for such ads in Silicon Valley.
Three days later, we alreay have more than 100 resumes of quality people, to sort and filter.
Our COO is pre-filtering them, preparing the interwiews that we will conduct wit the pre-selected candidates in Silicon Valley.

Your ad, titled "VP Sales & Media," has been posted as follows:
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/sls/828544658.html (sales jobs)

Your ad, titled "Community Manager," has been posted as follows:
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/mar/827108903.html (marketing/advertising/PR jobs)

Your ad, titled "Junior Marketing Project Manager," has been posted as follows:
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/mar/827101386.html (marketing/advertising/PR jobs)

Your ad, titled "Junior Sales Representative," has been posted as follows:
http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/sls/827020717.html (sales jobs)

Looking back on Google's 10 years

As everybody say that we are "the Google for people search", this article with avision of what Google could be in ten ears is very interesting.

Let us look back...

Google will mark its 10th anniversary today, having accomplished what few businesses have done during such a short time span. Here are some of the milestones during the Internet titan's brief history:


On September 7th 2008, the largest search engine in the world, Google celebrates its tenth anniversary. It was on this day in 1998, that Google was founded in a meager garage in Menlo Park, California. Google has the most fascinating history for a company in our age. It started off as the brainchild of two Stanford University students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, in 1996. They were making a research project about rating web pages according to their importance.

Google’s name comes from the word Googol, which represents the number, one followed by hundred zeros. After registering the company as Google, Inc. in 1997, the founders, Brin and Page, set up the company in a garage belonging to a friend on September 7, 1998. It was in Menlo Park in California bay area. Later Google moved to Amphitheater Parkway office in Mountain View and it became the headquarters.

Google Timeline

Sept 7, 1998: Founded in Menlo Park, California in a garage, belonging to the friend of Sergey Brin and Larry Page.



Google CEO, Eric Shmidt, Sergey Brin, and Larry Page (left to right)

Sept 21, 1998: Google’s first employee, Craig Silverstein is hired. He is now the director of technology at Google.

February 9, 1999: Opens an office at Paulo Alto at University Avenue. Google was answering half a million queries by that time daily.

June 7, 1999: Google gets a funding of USD 25 million.

September 21, 1999: Google goes out of Beta and their office in Menlo Park is shifted to Googleplex in Mountain View. Now Google is answering 3 million searches daily.




May 2000: Google is awarded the Webby award and People’s Voice award for the best technical achievement.

June 26, 2000: Google and Yahoo announced their partnership (Google becomes Yahoo’s search provider!). Now Google is answering about 18 million queries a day. Later that year, Google announced the Google Toolbar. By the end of 2000, Google started to answer more than 100 million search queries daily.

October 23, 2000: Google’s advertisement platform, Google Adwords comes alive.

February 2001: Google acquires Deja.com and integrates volumes of data in Usenet groups to a searchable format.

July 19, 2001: ‘Don’t be evil’ becomes the motto of Google. However, this motto is used several times against Google now.

August 2001: Dr Eric Shmidt, who was the CEO of Novell Inc., and CTO of Sun Microsystems, joins Google as CEO. He is still the chairman and CEO of Google Inc.

October 2001: With partnership with Lycos group, Google becomes default search engine for Asian Internet users. Soon enough, Google becomes Latin American search provider with partnership with Universo Online (UOL).

Summer 2001: Saw Google indexing 250 million images to a searchable index. Also launched Google catalog search for the online shopping.

December 2001: Google now indexes 3 billion Internet documents in a searchable form.

February 2002: Google Search Appliance is launched, in order to search through e-commerce sites, private networks, and intranets.

February 2002: 2001 Search Engine Watch awards is announced, and Google is Outstanding Search Service, Best Image Search Engine, Best Design, Most Webmaster Friendly Search Engine, and Best Search Feature.

February 2002: Adwords incorporates CPC campaigns (cost per click).

May 2002: AOL calls Google ‘the reigning champ of online search’ and uses it to provide search service to millions of its members.

September 2002: Google News Service starts off in Beta, offering news from nearly 5000 online sources.

December 2002: Froogle, the Google product search service is launched. Now almost a forgotten feature of all-inclusive Google.

February 2003: Google acquires Pyra Labs, the then owner of Blogger, the popular blogging platform. Though Google owns Blogger now, it is still retaining its separate domain and logos.

April 2003: Google acquired Applied Semantics, which would later revolutionize the lives of thousands of Internet entrepreneurs in the form of Google Adsense.

Fall 2003: Google Deskbar, which is used for desktop search is launched through Google Toolbar. This feature is also almost forgotten now.

2004: Google is announced as the ‘Brand of the Year’ by Brandchannel.

January 2004: Orkut, Google’s social network is born as the brainchild of Orkut Buyukkokten, an employee of Google. The social network is not popular in the US. Most of its members are confined to Brazil and India.

February 17, 2004: Google’s search index crosses 6 billion items (4.28 billion web pages, 880 million images, 845 million Usenet discussions, and a number of book-related info pages).

2004: Google Local search is announced.

April 1, 2004: The currently most popular email service, GMail is announced. It was launched with a Gigabyte of free storage space (and now growing at 7GB). And it made several email providers like Yahoo, MSN, and rediff increase their storage space to stay alive in mail service.

April 29, 2004: Google’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) is filed with the SEC (the Securities and Exchange Commission).

June 13, 2004: Acquisition of Picasa Inc., which is a digital photo management service online, which was initially a standalone software. Picasa web albums is used now in picture hosting for Blogger.

August 18, 2004: Google goes public with a market of $23 billion. In three years, a whopping growth per share from $85 to $741 was seen.

2004: Also saw Code Jam, an event targeting the best and brightest computer programmers out there.

October 14, 2004: The first version of Google desktop search is released.

October 2004: Google SMS is launched. Also, in October, Google announced record revenues of 805.9 million USD. It also announced a book search platform, Google Print.

October end 2004: Google acquires Keyhole Corp., another digital picture management group like Picasa. This helps provide 3D images of earth, which later becomes Google Earth’s backbone.

December 2004: Google Groups, the new version of Usenet groups is launched.

2005: Sees Google Mini, which takes root from Google Search Appliance. Also, Google Store, Google Maps, Google Web Accelerator, and Google Videos are launched.

March 2005: Acquires San Francisco based firm, Urchin Software, specializing in Web Analytics. This would later become Google Analytics. The first JavaScript tracker was named ‘urchin.js’ now it is renewed to ‘ga.js’ for Google Analytics.

May 2005: Adsense for Feeds is first announced, with approval only for a few top feed publishers.

June 28, 2005: The acquisition of Keyhole Corp we saw earlier led to the most innovative application from Google, Google Earth, which gives us closest satellite pictures of the Earth and its features.

August 2005: Sees the launch of Google Talk and Google Desktop.

September 2005: By the middle of September, Google announces blog search, which searches not only Blogger blogs but every blog on the planet.

October 2005: Google Reader, which is a popular feed reading application is launched.

November 2005: Google Base is launched. It helps people to upload content in a searchable structured format. It’s now almost forgotten. By the same time, Google announces Google Analytics, an innovative web analytics platform, Google Analytics, which takes birth from Urchin Software, which we saw Google acquired earlier. Now, it is the most popular web analytics platform.

Fall 2005: Also saw Google Book search, which was the new name of Google Print.

End of 2005: Saw Google innovating again with music search.

Start of 2006: Google video store comes alive. And so does Google Video Player. It is a standalone software player for web based videos.

Later we also saw Google Pack, a number of applications for improved browsing.

Jan 2006: Google launches their standalone server in China, tapping Chinese population’s Internet search volume.

Jan 2006: Also saw a successful Google court battle. The Justice Department made a demand to unveil Google’s records at the concern of people’s privacy. However, this incident seeded serious paranoia among the public.

February 2006: Google.org, the philanthropic pathway of Google conglomeration, is launched, with Dr Larry Brilliant as the director.

Google Chat is incorporated to GMail.

May 2006: Google’s tools to improve search experience, Co-op, Desktop trends, and Notebook are launched. Co-op later becomes Google Custom Search and gets incorporated to Adsense.

June 2006: Google Checkout, the new Google shopping feature was introduced. It is slowly becoming popular.

June 15, 2006: Oxford English Dictionary recognizes the term 'Google'.

August 8, 2006: Social network, Myspace and Google make agreement to provide Google search facility and advertisement on Myspace. This deal was for 900 million dollars.

August 9, 2006: Google Book Search partnered with University of California, University of Virginia, and University of Wisconsin, to digitize several thousands of books, and to provide free downloads of public domain books in PDF form.

August 2006: Saw Google launching the largest free WiFi network in the US around Mountain View, California.

October 9, 2006: Google announces acquisition of YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars. But YouTube still retains its logo, just like Blogger. In fact, most of the people don’t know that YouTube is now Google property.

2006: Also saw Google’s partnership with eBay, Adobe for toolbar distribution, and Dell to install search software on Dell computers. This move prompted Microsoft to partner with HP to install Live Search on HP computers as the default.

January 2007: Fortune Magazine calls Google ‘the Best company to work for’.

February 2007: GMail is open to everyone. Until then, it was a free service through invitation.

March 13, 2007: Viacom sues Google accusing that Google allows video piracy through YouTube. Later a compromise was done, with Google handing over the data to Viacom keeping the user information anonymous.

April 13, 2007: Google announces acquisition of DoubleClick Performics for 3 billion USD, which would later pave way to Google Affiliate Program.

February 28, 2008: New Google venture, Google Health is announced by Marissa Mayer, VP of search and user products in Google.

June 12, 2008: Yahoo agrees on Google ads on its search engine. A significant move for Google in the search engine warfront.

September 1, 2008: Google announces its browser venture, Google Chrome, a lightweight, open-source browser running on Java.

Conclusion

Google is in the path of innovation every moment of its existence. We can definitely see more from them in the coming days. Perhaps the fun within Google went well with the public. Google is a company that loves itself, and so we love it. Their yearly April Fool pranks themselves are unique for them: like Google Gulp (a free Google drink), GMail Paper (Google printing mail messages on environmentally-friendly paper and sending it free to our home address), Google Wakeup Kit (a calendar notification item), Google dialect translation, Google Manpower Search (in which Google employs people of China to search manually), Adsense for Conversations, etc.

Happy Birthday! Google



viewed here

precision of targeting, precision of targeting, and precision of targeting.

Adage and Epsilon, the research analysts firms have released an important survey regarding the future od advertising.

Three words only:
precision of targeting, precision of targeting, and precision of targeting.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Data analytics and customer-relationship management aren't the only disciplines that have benefited in the past year from the slashing and burning of general advertising budgets as marketers try to better focus their ad efforts. Interactive- and digital-marketing budgets have experienced a healthy increase as well.
Steve Cone The first quarterly Epsilon CMO Survey reveals that nearly two-thirds of chief marketing officers said their interactive/digital marketing budgets have increased in the past year, while 60% have seen their traditional advertising budgets go south. The survey, conducted last month, comprised 175 CMOs and marketing executives from some of the country's biggest marketers. More than a quarter of participants work at companies with annual revenue of $10 billion or more. All about better targeting The findings reflect marketers' growing need to better target their campaigns, according to Steve Cone, CMO of Epsilon. "The results show that because of the economy, companies are really trying to identify the consumers that are very active in communicating with each other through social computing, blogging or podcasting," Mr. Cone said. This increase in interactive/digital-marketing budgets has caused marketers to take a more experimental approach when it comes to developing a marketing scheme. The more popular interactive and digital channels that marketers said they are keen to start experimenting with are social computing (42%), which includes word-of-mouth, social-networking sites and viral advertising; blogs (35%); podcasting (31%); and mobile devices (29%), which include phones and PDAs. The study also found that some marketers have already started incorporating these tactics, with 19% of respondents already using blogs, 18% making use of podcasting and 22% using mobile devices as part of their marketing mixes.

complete article here

Recruiting Junior Sales

Location: Silicon Valley, CA
Status: Full Time, Employee
Job Category: Sales/ Media/ Business Development
Relevant Work Experience: 1 to 2+ Years
Career Level: Sales
Reports To: Sales VP

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES :

The Junior Sales will:

• Drive sales of Right People custom solutions for events and conventions to clients throughout the United States
• Develop a set of key accounts related to the congress and events industry
• Develop a strong understanding of the client’s business and demonstrate how Right People solutions can assist them to achieve their business goals
• Dedicate majority of time to direct telephone sales.
• Rework and maintain old account files and solicit new accounts.
• Maintain accurate forecast and recap information.

QUALIFICATIONS :

• A highly aggressive sales professional with a proven track record of success
• 1 to 2+ years phone or direct sales experience required in the congress and event industry
• Understanding of social networks is a plus
• A relentless work ethic and a desire to go the extra mile
• Knowledge of the convention and exhibitions industry strongly preferred
• Self-motivated individual interested in individual success while being a solid contributor to the team
• Demonstrated excellent customer relationship management skills
• Excellent oral and written communication and organizational skills

APPLY HERE for being a Right People Junior Sales

My daughter could have been recruited by Right People

Yesterday I was working on the "Values statement" for Right People, that will content the corporate values, guiding principles and rules that we, as founders, envision for our employees and for the image that we want the compay to reflect.

My daughter asked me what I was doing. So I had to explain to her what "values" mean. And we played with a set of "value cards" that I always have on my desk.

The rules of the game are to sort the values from top to bottom with the most important ones at the top. And each time she had to motivate her choice: why is this value more important than the other one,...

Here is the top of her list.
I was impressed that a seven year old child could have this precision, and (the father speaks :) ) I was very proud of her choices.
:)

If the company "Values" could be less serious, the results of her game could nearly be the document I am working on.
:)

But writing a company "Values statement" is much more complex. The first draft that I have just written will need lots of collaborative work with the other founders and VPs.