Flavio about Business 2.0

Watch out when building facebook apps: They changed the from being able to invite 10 users at a time to 10 users a day per user, severally limiting the viral distribution of facebook apps:

Inside Facebook’s take

Facebook is hype:

Now Facebook certainly has the biggest market share with students in the anglo-saxon world, while in the germanophone parts of the world, Studivz is still much stronger.

This is how they are growing internationally:

While it was always clear that studivz would never be able to beat facebook worldwide, the question arises on how long the studivz can sustain itsself when facebook grows in users and in features.

It is not that simple to compare user numbers in specific countries. The facebook network Switzerland has 16′000 users now, while Studivz claim they have 52′000 users in Switzerland. But a lot of people on facebook don’t necessarily join their regional Network. In fact, of my 136 total friends on facebook, only 71 of them are in the Switzerland network. I guess I have about 100 people that actually live in Switzerland as friends, which makes my guess at the penetration 70%. According to this, There would be 16k / 0.7 ~= 23k users from Switzerland. That’s already close to half of the Studivz users. How long until we surpass Studivz?

Let’s take a look at University penetration. ETH Zurich Network on Facebook has 8 people called Philipp. Studivz shows us 90 results for ETH. That would be a penetration of less than 10 percent, if we generalize over all students.

St. Gallen University has a better penetration in facebook: 23 Philipps while Studivz shows
72 results, this is roughly a third.

While it is hard to really compare how much penetration those networks have, two things are clear:

1. Studivz still has much more users in Switzerland and Germany
2. Facebook is growing fast internationally, also in those two regions.

The question we haven’t answered yet is, who grows faster?

Nevertheless, I would suggest that facebook will win sooner or later just because of their wider international reach ( you need facebook for your exchange student friends in the US/England. ) and their massive expansion strategy with facebook apps. They understand what’s important and what’s viral, execute fast and deliver results.

While researching on the facebook platform, I stumbled upon this blog: http://www.insidefacebook.com/

With the rising hype around the facebook platform and Mark Zuckerberg showing no modesty by saying they want to build a platform to the internet as was the Microsoft Windows OS to computing, Applications on Facebook gain an increasing momentum.

The most used application Top friends has - at time of this writing - 6,908,623 users growing a few hundred users every minute.

The increasing traction that facebook applications receive, has already let to two acquisitions.

If Facebook becomes the next Microsoft, then inside facebook has a pole position for being the next Techcrunch

While reading Seth Godin’s book Small is the new Big, I just realized how effectively and smart Facebook is applying Seth’s Theory of Flipping the Funnel is (in fact right now I am being Seth’s salesperson as his customer. Well done, Seth!)

When you upload pictures to facebook, you can tag people on the photo, providing additional information to facebook. Facebook will intelligently propose the friends that are most likely on the photo, according to people you tagged in previous photo of the same album.

If a friend is not on facebook, facebook proposes you to add their email address so your friend can sign in to facebook and check out the picture.

You nearly can’t give a bigger incentive to someone than receiving a message:

“Melissa tagged a photo of you on facebook. Click here to view it.”

The person will most likely click on the link. Everyone is obsessed with photos (and everything else) about themselves.  To see the picture, there is no registration necessary, but in most cases people want to see the rest of the album, with pictures of them and their friends, so they will likely sign up for facebook.

Literally everyone who tries to build a network or platform uses viral marketing. But Facebook does it in a very smart and effective way.

I’d like to tell you about the fact that START St. Gallen together with my good friend Andreas Brenner, is hosting the event ” Web 2.0 = Money 2.0? Gründerperspektiven im Mitmachweb” starting at 18.00 to 20.00.

As speakers we would like to announce the following personalities:

* Ehssan Dariani, Founder StudiVZ
* Patrick Frei, Founder Venture Valuation
* Felix Haas, Founder Amiando
* Barnaby Skinner, Journalist at SonntagsZeitung

The participants are first going to present their perspective for 15 minutes. A discussion with the audience will follow the speeches.

Data:
Location: Universität St. Gallen, Room A120
Time: Monday, 25th Juny 2007, 18.00-20.00

Start Global St. Gallen and I would love to welcome you in St. Gallen to discuss about Web 2.0 and it’s future.

Join our event on facebook!

After a successful first event, Andreas and team are already preparing round two of Synetgies Events.

This time it’s about Formula Student, where “Students build a single seat formula racecar” to race against each other. ETH Zurich is also part of it. One student that participated in the project will tell us about his experience.

Join the Synetgies Facebook Group to learn more about the event!

I just saw the movie Oil Crash at ASPO Switzerland, which I would highly recommend.

The movie contains interviews with some leading oil and energy experts and what they say is pretty clear: We are about to reach to Peak Oil, where we will never be able to produce more oil than right now.

The implications of decreasing oil production will obviously be huge. The demand is rising even more with people in China and India starting to drive more and more cars and their economies growing rapidly.

They talk about Air Travel being available only for a Super Elite. Driving is going to become very expensive, and most of the world’s companies are either directly or indirectly dependent on inexpensive oil.

Why is oil so important? As the movie suggests, it costs only a handful of dollars to get a barrel of oil out of the ground.
But the barrel of oil contains the same amount of energy as do 25′000 (!) hours of human manual labor. Oil is a very, very cheap source of energy and was highly responsible for the world’s creation of wealth during the last one and a half centuries.

Many very intelligent and driving people are looking for ways to encounter this potential energy crisis. I find Jeremy Rifkin’s approach very interesting, suggesting a peer to peer sharing of energy with hydrogen.

As reported today in Cash Daily, people who know nothing about Stock Markets and the companies they’re investing in, on average make better money than those who have at least access to some amount of information.

The explanation is simple: People who have certain, but not all and not the newest information, make poor decisions on outdated informations, which market players with the most extensive information have acted upon long ago.

Only if you have access to a huge amount of information and the necessary tools to work with them, you can make a really informed buying decision.

Otherwise, the study suggests, you’d rather roll a dice to pick the stocks you’re investing in, than trying to do research.

Hard facts, and everybody will think “Yeah, that might be true to others, but I certainly know what I’m doing”. Who would want to admit that he made money on the stock market by rolling dices?

While intensively following Google Stock Price today, I noticed how we where approaching the all time high of GOOG.

At the end of the day, the stock has effectively clearly surpassed it’s previous all time high of $513 to to close at $518.84 and to rise even more in after hours trading, up to $520.15, making the total gain 2.57% today.

The rise certainly is connected with the announced Salesforce.com deal, which will enable salesforce.com customers to link their marketing campaigns directly with google adwords and thus help Google acquire new clients in a very inexpensive way.

What’s next with the Google stock?

The Google stock has been underperforming compared to other tech stocks like apple and might just now become increasingly interesting to investors. Time has yet to tell if the high volume acquisition of DoubleClick will yield the expected synergies and new sales for Google and/or Doubleclick products.

A short look at an Alexa Rank at Statsaholic, comparing studivz.net and facebook.com shows a clear result:

Facebook’s growth in visitors can’t be stopped nor topped, but Studivz.net seems to be standing still in unique visitors accessing the site.

Generally, this is not that much of a surprise, because facebook has a far better developed product including the much beloved newsfeed and the much extended group functionality.

Additionally, it has an open facebook platform with API , which allows companies and developers to create applications right in the heart of facebook, allowing a huge leverage from the already existing userbase of facebook. No need to hunt your users anymore and ask them to fill in all their details. It’s already there. They just have to sign up.

I have been observing the growth of the Switzerland network within facebook for six months now and it has grown from 3000 users to close to over 13000 by the time of this writing, a 300% increase in just 6 months.

In the long run, I see more and more people using facebook and making the switch from studivz in the germanophone countries, for the reasons noted above. Anyway an interesting battle to watch.