Facebook is probably the most powerful phenomenon to hit the marketing industry since Google (and Headlight :).

It’s now possible to target your audience like never before. Fortunately I’m surrounded by very talented people who understand this platform better than I do: I’ve had 3 meetings today with curious and creative designers and developers at TraceWorks who have some really interesting ideas on how to really help marketers who want to utilize Facebook to generate some serious growth. Stay tuned for more updates.

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If you have to convince your boss that Facebook is a big deal here’s some statistics for you:

• 25m users, growing 3% per week, which is 100,000 new users per day (up from 7.5m users in July 2007), projected to reach 50m by end of 2007
• The fastest growing demographic is the 25 and over age group
• 1% of all time spent on the internet is facebook
• 50% of registered users come back to the site every day.
• 60 billion page views per month, 50 pages per user every day
• 6th most trafficked site in the U.S
• 1 bn photos hosted on the site, 6m uploaded each deay, 70k photos served per second, making facebook the biggest photo sharing site on the web
• 1-2 m people are on facebook simultaneously at any one time
• $100m per year advertising deal with Microsoft
• Internal valuation of $8bn, based on projected revenues of $1bn p.a. by 2015

via trendcatching.com

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Pimalai Resort & Spa - 5-star luxury beach resort on Koh Lanta, Krabi with a direct access to 900-meter of private sandy beach.

Bye now.

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Just learned about this cool place called InnoCentive - an online community designed to help corporate and nonprofit clients solve research-and-development problems by posting descriptions of these problems, called challenges, on a website visited by thousands of researchers, scientists, engineers, and mathematicians from around the world; those who solve a problem can qualify for financial awards.

Anyone tried it? Is it good? Suitable for big or small companies?

Well, one of the reasons why InnoCentive is particular interesting to me is that I’ve been struggling some time now trying to figure out how a decent innovation ecosystem could look like (e.g. for TraceWorks). I’ve been asking questions like:

• What is the distinction between e.g. “mundane changes”, “innovative changes”, and “inventions”?
• What would be an effective incentive to motivate active involvement?
• How open should innovation be e.g. only internal or also include the outside world? And to what degree?
• How to control innovation in certain directions? And is control necessary at all (or even counter productive)?

I think it would be a lot of fun to knit together a simple yet powerful web app to help small and medium sized companies streamline innovation - or probably in many cases introduce “innovation” as concrete individual process for the first time.

I don’t want it to be a big market place like InnoCentive. I want it to be a small web based tool where employees, customers, selected experts and ambassadors can openly suggest, request, and collaborate in pushing a given company forward … and I think “SHIFT” could be a pretty cool name for such a web app.

Stay tuned. SHIFT might happen…

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I’ve a big fan of 37signals and I just wanted to check out Highrise to help me keep track of my personal professional network … It’s probably pretty cool - haven’t tried it yet … have you? If not, you probably should.

Anyway for me 37signals is all about simplicity and a getting things done attitude, a lot about beautifully executed communication, and some about producing solid web apps. But as I came to their website (I haven’t been there for a while) I was a little surprised seeing this:

Not much simplicity here. I think this piece of communication is too cluttered: Too many colors, font sizes/types, and areas of attention etc. I think it lacks a little priority and some clear decisions.

Well, I’m definitely not a web designer. I don’t know shit … I was just a little surprised. Guess I expected something a little more “awesomely simple” from 37signals - who I by the way respect more than most others, so don’t take this the wrong way anyone … e.g. buy their book!

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A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting with Jake Nickell of Threadless “on location” in Chicago. It was awesome to get a glance of the company backstage and to check-out some of the new stuff they’re working on.

To the few people who don’t know what “Threadless” is all about here’s a quick introduction:

Threadless is a business which to an extreme degree is based on user-driven innovation or “crowdsourcing” - as many call it today. They use these techniques to make and sell T-shirts. Anyone can submit a design, then users get to vote on their favorites. The T-shirts that get the most votes are produced and sold online. Four to six designs are chosen every week from 600+ submissions to be printed and sold from the site with the winning designers receiving $2,000 in cash and prizes.

They’re doing a great job: Came up with a great - yet fairly simple - idea (which many people do!) but more importantly they executed this idea with so much energy and so much skill (which very few people do!) that “idea” quickly grew from a very small to be a million $ business. Well done.

I hope to convince Jake to do some projects together … that would be fun.
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This guy Frank Piller dissected a New York Times article on Threadless and found out that:

2000: Year of founding Threadless.

125: Number of submissions received by Threadless each day.

“Millions”: Dollars earned by selling T-shirts” not by hiring star designers but by asking anybody to design them.

Hundreds of thousands: Number of user voting each day.

6: Number of new T-shirt offerings per week.

1,500: Typical size of a batch of each new design.

2,000: Dollars paid to winning designers.

“Almost everything”: Number of items that sell out.

1: Number of Threadless stores, the first opened in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago in July 2007.

2.6 or higher: Score of most winning designs (on the rating scale from 0 to 5).

2.0: Lowest rank of a winning design.

x*n/z: “The final decision about which T’s actually get made and sold has always involved a bit of nonpublic number crunching. For example, Threadless looks at how many 0s and 5s a design gets; designs that inspire passionate disagreement often get printed because they tend to sell”.

1: There is a surprising degree of consistency — maybe even similarity — in the designs. “It’s a barometer of what’s going on in art and design right now,” Threadless director Kalmikoff suggests.

17: Number of winning designs submitted by Glenn Jones, a New Zealand designer.

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Is Google looking more and more like a classic greedy follower rather than a leader? I mean what is Google’s “OpenSocial” all about (what is it?)? Creating a Facebook2? New York Times report “the strategy is aimed at one-upping Facebook” - which means WHAT, exactly?Help me out here. Thanks.

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