aphexddb.com

Many people (including my family) are always asking whats the point of Twitter, Friend Feed, BrightKite, social media and all the other cool new stuff  out there. As I have said before I have a grasp on these issues, but communicating to nonbelievers sometimes proves difficult. The good news today is that there is serious money behind web 2.0, blogging 2.0, mashups, etc. Some choice quotes via Twitter today:

Social media and web 2.0 is possibly recession proof (article 1)

Furthermore, James Cooper in his Business Week column points that the Services sector continues to add new jobs while the overall employment rate continue to recede.

All of this is a 4.6 billion market. That’s billion with a capital B. (article 2)

A new study by Forrester forecasts that Enterprise 2.0 solutions to capture an astonishing market share of 4.6 billion by 2013 and Social Networks related technologies are expected to take the lion share of these investments, accounting for approximately $2 billion.

In short, it’s a NEW field here. Enterprise 2.0 they are calling it but its really just another cross-discipline segment of the workforce. Looking around at all the big players in the consulting areas I see nobody, not IBM, Accenture, etc. doing anything specifically in this space. I postulate that the reason for this is a lack of talent in this space. It’s like the computer revolution, almost nobody knows how it works and has experience in this. This will eventually change of course, but in the meantime its time for us to make some loot. Your blogging hobby which you are starting to monetize, your deep interest in social media, your experience building and designing messaging tools are all worth a lot of money right now. This value will decrease over time so lets do something cool today!

@boblozano have another BBQ

Good thing we have this brilliant insight out there from the geniuses at Gartner:

If AT&T announces that it will be marketing the phone to enterprise customers, “we’d be against it,” said Ken Dulaney, an analyst with Gartner, who said he hasn’t heard of such a plan from the operator. “We’d immediately tell our customers that’d be a very serious mistake.”

No matter what kind of reputation a vendor has, if it’s making its first phone, Dulaney would be unlikely to recommend it. “Building a phone is one of the most difficult things to do,” he said.

Brilliant and well thought out analysis. Almost as amazing as this little gem:

Companies like to extend corporate apps to the mobile space and in order to do that you need an open OS

Wow, what a show stopper. Oh wait, the iPhone has a browser. Ever heard of the web? Sheesh, who is going to write java apps for mobile devices when you have web applications!

Nifty site 15 Second Pitch has a pitch wizard tool to distill that 15 second elevator ride with the CEO into a pitch for you. Their tagline is “A personal introduction that is concise, compelling and conversational. No elevator required!”

Here is my lame attempt:

My name is Gardiner Allen and I am an expert technologist specializing in helping people better communicate. Knowing how to apply big ideas to real business scenarios I have a deep and fundamental understanding of how the modern world exchanges information. Over a cup of coffee I’ll show you how web technologies are essential to the future of innovation and business.

Hot damn, I sound like I know what I’m doing while oozing a wee bit-o-confidence.