Thursday, February 17, 2011

Web 2.0 Summit - 2010

Ron Conway, "The Crystal Ball"

     Ron Conway decided to introduce us to up and coming entrepreneurs that he has invested in because he is certain that they are the future. In fact, his exact words about these people were, "the companies that were invested in, that have three entrepreneurs today, are the Twitter's, Facebook's, and Google's in four years from now". He coined these businesses, that he is certain are the future, as the "Crystal Ball". His reason for this presentation was simply to introduce us to these new businesses and, in my opinion, to promote these businesses as well. After he introduced these businesses he allowed for each one to give a 30 second pitch about their new business.
     I think this sort of presentation can specifically help businesses who are trying to "one-up" their competition and get ahead of the game. This allows for current businesses to invest in these new entrepreneurs, which would be a risk, and hope that it pays off in the future. The other side of this, however, is that current business will have a new competition which apparently is well planned for the future. After seeing this presentation, it will be very interesting to see how these companies fare in the future!


 Susan Wojcicki, "The Perfect Ad"


     Susan informed us of valuable information about customer shopping. According to her studies, 42% of shoppers research products, online, before buying them. Also, only 3% of shoppers actually buy products online. This means that for most shoppers who buy their products in the stores, nearly half of them will do research online before actually making the purchase. Because of this information, Google has re-engineered their search engine so that shoppers can look up products and find out which stores nearby have them in stock. Their main goal here, as Susan mentions, is to merge together the online and offline stream. The reason I think this is a great idea is because I am definitely a customer who does online research before purchasing. And after I research, I usually go to a variety of websites, of the stores I think carry the product, and look up or call the company to see if it's in stock. However, with Google I would be able to save much time and find the closest store that is carrying the product I want. However, Google didn't stop there. They also made it so that shoppers can access this same information using their mobile devices and even in magazines with the "Google Ad". So, in conclusion, Google has once again showed why it is the number once search engine to use!

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