I am more connected to my friends and family today than ever before.  There’s Facebook for photos and life events.  There’s Twitter for the random musing.  There’s people’s blogs for the deeper thoughts.  There’s Foursquare for location awareness.  But when it comes to my coworkers and company, there is a void.

What’s Missing
Many medium and large businesses today have solutions for file storage, internal blogging, address books, and instant messaging.  The problem is that they exist in silos.  The components aren’t connected and can’t talk to each other.  That’s the web circa 2003.

The company intranet today should be so much more powerful.  It needs to have the best parts of LinkedIn and Facebook: the profile.  A simple address book listing doesn’t do justice anymore.  People expect rich details like interests, expertise, and past projects.  Finding people within my company that have knowledge in SOX or speak Japanese should be as easy as looking up someone’s office number.

Sharing and collaborating on files has become a daily necessity.  Documents have multiple owners and change hands frequently.  File storage and collaboration tools are essential.  Sharepoint and Google Docs have streamlined the task.

Finding resources and answering questions need to be easy.  Searching through documents and people needs to be fast and accurate like Google and Bing.  If answers can’t be found, there needs to be spaces for people to ask questions and receive answers.  Those answers need to be saved, so a question only has to be asked once.

Companies have a hierarchy and a reporting structure.  That’s not how people work.  They work in teams that are structured and unstructured.  They have interests that reach outside of where they sit in the corporate structure.  Facilitating groups and networks is key.

All these pieces above may exist in some shape or form.  The secret is how you connect them.  Actions and activities across networks and groups that are relevant to you, should be aggregated like a Facebook Newsfeed.  If a file has been updated or someone in your network has asked question, you should be notified.  An internal social network has to be integrated with your business.  If your company is driven by sales, deals should be broadcasted to the Newsfeed.  If a company does business in consulting, new projects should be automatically broadcasted out to people who’s interest it aligns.

Opportunity
The demand for a corporate social network is natural.  Historically the workplace has had more technology than homes, but times have changed.  With devices like the iPhone, consumers are getting advanced technologies faster.  The ability to share document or look up a profile for someone has existed in the consumer space for 7 years.  Once people get a taste of a good technology in their day-to-day life, they expect it in their work life.

Startups and established companies are trying to create the perfect solution.  Companies like Salesforce.com, 37signals, Yammer, and even Microsoft are going after the challenge.  Adoption will be tough, but if any of the players create the perfect solution, they have struck gold.  The value of  a network that makes company employees more connected and more productive is priceless.  Also, once a company selects a technology and adopts it, the switch cost will be very high.

Adoption is going to be difficult.  For cloud-based solutions, the biggest roadblock is data privacy.  For a large company with a lot of sensitive data, trusting a 3rd party to store and manage your data is a shift in traditional practices.  For internally deployed solutions, the biggest roadblock will be cost.  Small businesses do not have infrastructure or budget to buy a set of servers and manage it themselves.

In my opinion, many businesses today will see value in cloud-based solutions.  Research on the topic can be done forever, but the best way to realize the benefit is to try it internally.  A small business that signs up for Basecamp or Salesforce Chatter is farther along the technology curve than most large corporations.  Have a small portion of your company try a particular technology out.  Make sure the group that is testing it works together closely.  If things work, expand the technology to more employees.  If things don’t work, try a new technology.

It’s time for the void to be filled and the silos to be connected.  The corporate social network is coming and I have a feeling this year will be when it all happens.

Messages fly at us from all directions.  There are good messages like emails from bosses, wall posts by friends, @replys by followers, and text messages from family.  Then there are the bad ones like the newsletters we subscribed to 3 years ago, spam from groups on Facebook, and the plethora of tweets from Ashton Kutcher.

This past decade has brought us innovations that keep us more connected and as a result we can be closer with people that are farther away. With one click we can send a photo via email.  Or even better share that photo on Facebook and our entire network gets a glimpse into our lives.

The unfortunate byproduct of all the connectedness is the noise that occurs as well.  By definition, noise is any activity that can disturb communication.

We have intentionally and unintentionally oversubscribed ourselves to things.  We intentionally subscribed to the daily newsletter from UrbanDaddy. We were unintentionally added to status update emails at work.  Noise are activities that we cannot directly take action on.

Out of the 300 emails and 200 status updates a day, there are only a handful that are actionable.  Filtering out the noise is a necessity.  Setting up email filters for newsletters and distribution lists is the easiest way to divert excess messages from your inbox.  The next is to filter out notifications from services like Facebook, Sharepoint, and Twitter into separate folders as well.

All these manual steps are painstaking, but make our inboxes lighter and more manageable.  Ideally innovations in the future will find ways to automatically filter out noise, just like spam is moved today.  Based on my actions, my inbox will know which messages are important and which ones I can afford to see later.

Right off the bat, I’ll say what everyone is thinking, it looks like Hulu. I agree. But that’s not a bad thing. By imitating the newest and hottest video property, Vevo has set themselves up for success.

Vevo has the support of the big record labels, so content will be there. It will be in its highest quality, and if what Wired says is true, it will be the only source of those videos online. So if MTV wants to use the video on their site, they will be embedding a Vevo player.

The site iseasy to use and has a lot of room for new features and improvements. From day 1 they are showcasing full page ads, 15-second pre-rolling ads, and sponsorship links.  My hunch is Vevo will be able to monetize music videos far better than YouTube or MySpace through compelling ad opportunities.

Vevo has been given liberal branding on YouTube channel and video pages. That’s free attention. For example, the Single Ladies video by Beyonce has generated 72M views in the past 2 months. The engineering support from Google is priceless too. The partnership may look more valuable for Vevo, but Google has to be thrilled to be a big player in the room. Vevo could have easily gone the route of Hulu and created everything from scratch, on their own.

It’s only the first week, but I have high hopes for the music video destination.  I can easily see the site becoming a destination for artist bios, tour dates, ticket sales, digital downloads, and even merchandise. It’s the studios and artists collective way of making their own stamp on the web. Rather than being the participant, this time they are the creators of a new experience.

“By embracing the diversity in human beings, we will find true happiness.”

Malcom Gladwell on spaghetti sauce

The financial breakdown of 2008 was caused by a variety of factors from collateralized debt obligations to extreme speculation by financial firms. One area of interest is the pay models at financial firms and how they ended up promoting risk taking and how it’s shaping expectations today.

The de facto practice in the financial world was to reward employees for making bets and compensating them for portfolio market values that only sky-rocketed north. The formula was simple, work hard to generate money for the firm and you will reap a tremendous reward. Working banker hours has been synonymous for not leaving the office till 2AM and sacrificing your weekends. Their labor amounted to a financial sector that boomed:

From 1990 to 2006, the GDP share of the financial sector in the broad sense increased in the United States from 23% to 31%, or by 8 percentage points. The figures on profits are even more striking. For example, the financial services industry’s share of corporate profits in the United States was around 10% in the early 1980s but peaked at 40% last year.

And according to the New York Times, bonuses hit a record high of $38 billion dollars in 2006.

While that was the rosey past, things have changed: Wall Street bonuses dropped 44% in 2008; CDOs became worthless; banks constricted lending; and the business viability of once-strong American companies weakened.

Right now White House officials and the Treasury Department are debating a $100 million dollar question of paying a Citigroup executive for his energy trading team’s performance last year. If they don’t pay him, they are afraid he will leave.

The incentive system that was setup during a booming time has created the expectation of individual rewards. The odd thing is, that hardly exists in other fields. In other fields there is an understanding of company-wide accountability. My background is from tech, and if your company is doing well you receive pay-raises, bonuses, and rewards. If your company is under heat, you cut back and fight it out together during the tough times.

If you are on the team that invents a new chip or device that is going to revolutionize an industry and you work for a giant like Intel or Apple, you will be compensated well, but not exorbitantly. Why? Because your company is a vehicle for your success. Without the resources like Intel’s state-of-the-art fabrication plants or Apple’s rocking brand, your product wouldn’t have its growth potential.

The equivalence in the financial sector is the sheer amount of money that financial firms have at their disposal to make returns on.  A talented trader may make 20% returns on a $100M to generate the company $20M. But imagine if they were on their own investing $1000, they’d only walk home with $200 bucks.

So where do the large rewards come from? It’s when you create your own hot start-up or investment fund. Because you take those risks yourself, you reap the returns.

In November 2008, Proposition 8 was passed with a simple majority and added an article to the California Constitution which read “Only marriage between a man and woman is valid or recognized in California”.  A law was placed on the people that 7 million people wanted and 6.4 million fought against.

The practice that half of a population can dictate the course of a State or Country needs be strongly re-evaluated. 51% may be a majority, but it is not consensus. If we had 100 people, it means 49 are doing something for the other half. The marginally-winning team is dictating the rules.

Amendments and laws that change the livelihood of how we function and work need to be passed by a significant 2/3 majority. When you have 1/2 of a state or country disagreeing with a policy or decision, take it back to the drawing board.