Flavio about Business 2.0

robwebb2k did a manual calculation of facebook penetration in different countries using the facebook flyer pro tool, which nicely indicates how many people you are reaching with certain demographic selection, like male/female - single/in a relationship or even favorite band or movie.

Here are the results:

As you can see, the penetration in Canada has reached an absolutely unbelievable 22%. More than every 5th Canadian is on Facebook - more than any political party for example has voters.

Extremely high penetration is also reached in Norway, where about 19% of the population is already on facebook.

If you look at other European numbers, Switzerland has a quite high penetration of 1.32 %, much higher than it’s neighbors France, Germany or Italy. Probably due to the internationality of our country.

How much longer until we reach 20% in Switzerland?

When are votes going to be cast over facebook or official government decisions broadcast? I bet you can reach more people than through traditional media.

This afternoon (morning in New York) Google’s stock hit the symbolic value of 600$ a share. It opened for $85 in 2004 and has thus created a 7x return on investment for its earliest public investors. The market capitalization of Google - 186.53 bn $ - is slowly but steadily approaching Microsoft’s 279.70 bn $ valuation.

Contrary to the currently much hyped social networks and as much hyped facebook applications, Google generates real money: 1,104.62 bn $ of operating income in the last quarter alone. On top of that they have 10′000 of engineers researching and building new products. And what Google does right: they hire the smartest people they can find and go great lengths to find and keep them (ever heard of free massage, free hair dresser, 24/7 access to the office or free gourmet dining at your workplace?) . Take a look for example at the following Google recruitement video.

In an intriguing blog post, seobook’s Aaron Wall describes how Google could leverage the huge amount of information it’s gathering every day to make predictions on stock markets .

It’s very true that Google has access to almost everything that’s happening on the web. How about a (paying?) service that tracks specific patterns in Google searches and Blog Posting and an analysis of Google Finance usage to create an instant trend recognizer?