The Economist on Google, from the article: It is rare for a company to dominate its industry while claiming not to be motivated by money. Google does. But it has yet to face a crisis….
And John Battelle writes in his blog, it seems they’ve done their, er, book reading.
The list above comes from the book, The Human Equation, building profits by putting people first, by Stanford professor Jeffrey Pfeffer.
Even though the suggestions seems conventional wisdom, the general trend in the industry seems to have a different approach to management. Indeed, Professor Pfeffer explains and gives examples of how great companies adopt and benefit from those practices.
Interesting is also his latest book written with another Stanford professor, Robert Sutton: Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-based Management.
Robert Sutton is also the author of the good book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilised Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t.
This is the title of the invited talk I will give at QA&TEST 2007, the 6th International Conference on Software QA and Testing on Embedded Systems 17-19 October – Bilbao, Spain.
The talk is based on a paper I had presented at ICSEA 2006, the International Conference on Software Engineering Advances, IEEE. However, the speech will extend the content presented in the paper and will present some additional thoughts I have had to address the optmization of dynamic memory management systems in the context of embedded real-time systems and software product families.
One of the outcomes is the journal paper, Software performance tuning of software product family architectures: two case studies in the real-time embedded systems domain, which extends the ICSEA paper by considering software product family architectures.
The MobiLife Book is the result of the European project MobiLife in which Nokia and many other European Universities and companies have contributed.
The books provides the architectural framework and a discussion on mobile services. During the project we had interesting applications and demo dealing with context-aware, mobility, multi-modal interfaces and privacy and trust. The paper presented at PIMRC 2007, which I have written with my colleagues at Nokia Rearch Center presents some of the challenges and opportunities in this domain experienced during the MobiLife project.
A very interesting article on CNN money on the facebook economy.
How to turn social networking sites in money making machines is what many companies are trying to do. At the moment only a few web sites are able to monetize the phenomenon using essentially advertising banners. The article describes with a rich set of examples the way different companies, applications and services have generated revenues.
There is nothing obscure but just simple rules to take into account if you want to enter the arena of social networking.
A nice report on mobile social media, their potentials and business cases has been published by Santtu Toivonen Senior Research Scientist at VTT . This report has been created by interviewing several people (including me) .
Apparently, social networking sites are also making money. From the ZDnet blog of Larry Dignan (executive editor of ZDNet) and reported also by Marc Andreessen in his blog, some news from MySpace website:
News Corp. said its Fox Interactive unit, which largely consists of MySpace, turned a profit of $10 million on revenue of $550 million for the fiscal year ending June 30… News Corp. chief financial officer David DeVoe said the revenue figures exceeded the company’s internal benchmarks. News Corp. had projected MySpace revenue to top $500 million this fiscal year.
The results include revenue from MySpace’s deal with Google to monetize search results. DeVoe said that Fox Interactive is expected to benefit more from the Google deal in fiscal 2008. Officials said that Fox Interactive as a whole should be able to approach annual revenue of about $1 billion. This growth would come from the Google search deal, international growth on the Web and better monetization. News Corp. is also benefiting as advertisers flock to social sites at the expense of portals…
“It wasn’t so long ago–24 months–when many thought we were embarking on a fool’s errand (with MySpace),” said News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch.
He forecast that MySpace revenue alone will generate more than $800 million in revenue.
A nice video from Google EngEdu series. Peter Morville gives a talk on Ambient Findability and The Future of Search.
The slideset of the presentation is available as PDF.
With so much information around us, it becomes important to find what we look for…
An interesting evolution for the Nokia tablet pc, the N800. It will support WiMax and it will be launched in USA next year. For more information see the news on linuxdevices.com.
I just would like to recommend the latest Michael Moore movie Sicko, to really understand how important is a good and universal health care system. A system where everybody can get access. Putting profits before our health is a really dangerous choice as the movie shows.
The World Health Organization ranking of the World Health Systems is contained in the WHO 2000 report, at page 200.
You can check that table also from this website.
An editorial from the New York Times World’s Best Medical Care?.
In the same domain, I want to recommend a couple of books. The first is Peter Rost, The Whistleblower: Confessions of a Healthcare Hitman.
The second book is The Truth about the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do about It of Marcia Angell.
