The Next Organization

Google’s YouTube headache, or there is still no model for social media sites

Last year, I wrote a block entry indicating that there was no good business model behind the social network sites. yet. Recent events, including Viacom and CBS’s pulling videos from YouTube and recent news that Viacom filed a $1B lawsuit against Google. Apparently, only deep-pocket, fast-growing companies like Google would pay such a price for a tiny revenue and no investor even cared. However, the share of attention that Google executives paying to YouTube may be too much. If it had been acquired by a media company, YouTube might have had less legal cases, but the business model is still not clear how copyrighted materials to be tracked and revenue to be shared with the owner.

Social networking will soon go mainstream

New wave of social network is changing the way employees communicate and collaborate. Small and distributed IT companies are pioneers in this area, in both usage and technology development. Big companies have been recently awaken. Among the examples are: IBM’s global meetings on SecondLife, Oracle’s inclusion of Web 2.0 into portal product, SAP’s alumni network, etc. Recently Cisco acquired Utah Street Networks just for its software knowhow in social networking and aimed at blending it into its Media Solution Group. Clearly, all signs point toward social networking’s going main stream not far in future, I believe.

Anything-on-the-go and the iPod economy

I was amazed to know that my colleagues at SAP could bring the whole contents of a demo scenario on a Linux server blade to a big drive, then dump it on any standard PC and start immediately. Recently, RingCube has commercialized its software to allow mirroring software into a small storage device and start it again in a Windows-based machine. It seems that mobile computing may not only bring computing devices around, but also as simple as a small storage device... and one of the popular device that people bring along anyway is iPod.

Talking about iPod, on my trip to Vienna, I stayed in le Meridien and guess what, I saw iPod rental on the wall. Strolling last week in Saturn, a electronics chain similar to Circuit City or CompUSA in Germany, I encountered dictionaries for iPod, which are similar to Merriam-Webster's here.

What I can see from these two different sets of events is the iPod-economy no longer stops at music- or video-on-the-go. It has been and will be more as new technologies enable anything go mobile, from telephone, PC, dictionary to map, calendar, and God knows what next... Welcome to the new world, where anything is on-the-go, and how many devices do you still have? I see some day, human will carry only a single tiny, easy-to-use, lightweight device with smart (but no need to be powerful) computing capability and a lot of storage. Maybe, I will go and buy Apple's share now.

Uploaded in Heidelberg.