I found this stunning YouTube video on John Chow's blog here.

The Bugatti has to race a mile, turn around, and race back. The EF-2000 has to take off, race a mile into the air vertically and then turn around and fly towards the ground another mile and then cross the same finish line as the car.

VERY well done and hilarious that somebody bothered to do it at all!

• You need to be careful about who to listen to - like analysts who don't understand basic business.
  
• www.bobparsons.com - he talked about why they filed for and then withdrew their S1 application to become a public company. It cost him $3M to realize that once he went public he would have to listen to the advice of a lot of people who had no clue about his business.
  
• "I met a lot of analysts who didn't know the basics and who focused on short-term financials rather than on good solid business basics."
  
• Here's the lesson: "people love the convenience and speed of transacting business over the internet but when it comes to resolving problems and learning features, people much prefer to deal with other people." 920 of our people are in customer support. But analysts would ask: when are you going to move your customers to self-service? Ummm. Never.
• Cashflow is WAY more important than paper profits.
• [I agree wholeheartedly with Parsons here and this is one of the top lessons I drill into the startups I work with. For a small company, cashflow is life & breath!!]
  
• We will have $340M revenue and cash of $50M (?) of cash flow ($1M free cashflow PER WEEK) so I think we're doing okay.
  
• When it comes to promoting your company, everybody wants you to fall in line and offend nobody. That's just the wrong idea. To be different you have to be polarizing.  Market analysts asked "when you go public, will you stop being so offensive?" Hah!!!!! So I found an offensive ad agency and forced them to make me an ad with a buxom brunette with Godaddy.com written across her chest. Their ads can be found here. We have been promoting our business with "GoDaddyesque ads" - which is now defined as: "somewhat tasteless and slightly inappropriate." The biggest mistake you can make is to please everyone - particularly investment analysts. It's much better to alienate 10% of your audience and have the other 90% pay attention.
• [There  have been multiple studies in the automotive industry that seem to show the same thing. Cars that polarized their audience into love/hate like the Beetle, the Mini, and other memorable cars, performed better than the average cars that people couldn't tell apart from each other. The summary lesson was: build interesting vehicles that people will either love or hate, don't try to please everybody.]
  
  
  
  
  (graphic courtesy of this article from the Creating Passionate Users blog)
  
  
• we let podcasters create their own ads for us - they're weird and crazy and even a bit "off" but they're specific to their audiences so in that way, they were perfect each and every time.
  
• FINAL MESSAGE: Don't forget the fundamentals and be VERY careful who you listen to.
• [Dan Pena uses the phrase - "Don't listen to the morons" where "moron" is defined as anybody who hasn't done what you're trying to do - which is most people. I tend to agree with Pena on that point so I appreciated Parson's talk and thought it was the most grounded back-to-basics talk of the day. Thanks Bob!]
  

• Just now publishing "wikinomics" - a new book about how mass collaboration changes everything
  
• Available for pre-order now:
• First chapter is available here
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Carlotta Perez, historian, talks about all revolutions: excitement, bubble, bubble burst, actual deployment cycle. We're now heading into the real period of the web finally.
  
• This is the biggest change to company structures, competition, and the way companies create value that has happened in the past hundred years!
• My company has done large $500M syndicated research projects to understand this stuff.
• I have been studying web 2.0 for six years now.
• Web 1.0: HTML; standard for presentation
• Web 2.0: web services; multimedia, geospatial, mobility, integration, "the thing"; it is becoming a platform for application building in its own right but is not a presentation layer.
• The act of putting stuff on the web is "programming" the machine.
• Enterprise 2.0 is about the economics of collaboration:
• Why do firms exist? Transaction costs; the cost of coordination to bring it all together to solve a problem. Otherwise, everything would be built by individuals. It's cheaper to do things in the corporation than as a single person.
• We moved from industrial age corporations to the extended enterprise, to the business webs (think of the IT global supply chain web) and moving to "mass collaboration" - this is MUCH more than crowd-sourcing or social networking. Social networking is becoming a new form of production. Self-organization  What used to take millenia or centuries can now happen in years, months, or overnight.
• BMW's X3 is built by Magna, a globally distributed group of manufacturers, not by BMW. This is about changing how BMW makes cars.
• Goldcorp: published his proprietary geo-data on the web and held a competition for $500K to see who could find gold on the property they owned. For $500K investment, he found $3.4B worth of gold. His market cap went up to $10B. He had all sorts of crazy responses from geologists, mathematicians, etc. and got crazy solutions.
  
• HOLY COW
• He acted globally; he shared his private data; he changed the game.
• Mass collaboration:
• Question: Could you create something other than an operating system with open source? Answer from Linus Torvalds: I don't think there's anything you couldn't create.
• Red Hat: Linux; Spike source; open source applications are all good examples.
  
• Zopa.com: peer lending is mass collaboration where people help other people build their businesses.
  
• The California school board wants to open source and wikify all of their textbooks
  
• Cambrian House lets a group of people come up with innovative ideas, grade those ideas, narrow the list to the best ideas, build those ideas, and then Cambrian House sells that widget for you and you as the contributor or team, profit from it. Click here to see how it works. [WOW. Bizarre concept. I wonder...how good will it be at manufacturing. Or selling/distribution?]
• The Chinese motorcycle industry is an open source ecosystem
• Ideagoras: cooperative markets innovating in business (see chart below)
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Second Life: the REAL story is not that their currency is pegged to the USD but the product is entirely created by its customers (pro-sumer)
• So you could pro-sume clothing, mindstorm robots,
  
• Biotechs and pharmas could have owned gene patents but they collaborated instead.
  
• Mashups ecosystems will be collaboratively built on a massive scale
  
• IntelliOne: calculate the location of any cell phone over time (like watching traffic)
• Boeing - the Dreamliner has no spec. Companies collaborate together, build chunks of the plane and those chunks are snapped together like LEGO. [I don't buy that statement. You can't build a wing or a fuselage or a nav system or anything else without a specification / blueprint, particularly not if the parts are going to fit together like LEGO. It will be interesting to see how Tapscott covers this in his book.]
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Enterprise 2.0 is causing a crisis of leadership!  It is the single largest change in corporate structure and operation in the past century.