Posts tagged sime08

I firmly believe that in the year 2050 when people look back at this year of 2008, we had yet not seen even 10% of the change that the Internet was about to bring to our world.

It’s a very well known fact that in the .COM-bubble days in 1999, business plan predictions of what e-Commerce would become in 2006 were way off from the outcome. The thing that most people don’t know is that the wild .COM business plan budgets widely underestimated the global e-commerce turn-over by a factor of 5. It’s only those business plans where targeting consumer e-commerce, but the real revolution that happened in the years after the .COM bubble burst, were in the the Business-2-Business segment (how many larger corporations can you name that do not do electronic procurement and e-commerce for their supplies, computers etc).

Why did not the consumer e-commerce happen?
Infrastructure was not ready, payments processing did not work well enough, global logistics were underestimated and number of factors that have come into place for the past couple of years.

So the big shift in online e-commerce for consumers is going on now. In spite of financial crisis; not much of what I am working with (and most people on the globe) is directly related to the financial sector. But almost everything is indirectly, which is way it affects all of us more or less and making the financial sector problems are very contagious; as we (the non-financial people) need the financial companies to help us manage funding, cash-flow, credit etc.

But still; I have mentioned it on this blog before, the opportunities are plentiful and a recession, means that we need to keep our focus on finding the opportunities and there are riches to be made. Historical facts shows, that in a financial crisis like we are seeing now, and lot of new wealth is created. Europeans seem more pessimistic than the Americans though.

But what about all the others that are not in the middle of this whirlwind?
I am an Entrepreneur, and I regularly meet some of the top 500 Swedish entrepreneurs, and this are the things we talk about. But more than 60% of these Swedish entrepreneurs do business do not have Internet businesses, but almost everyone is doing something on the Internet no matter their core business today.

And I think I am preaching to the choir; but they need to be on-board, because there is a shift that is going on, and it’s happening with or with-out a financial crisis and credit melt-down.

Now is the time to focus on performance based sales and effective and measurable marketing (such as online marketing and sales), now is the time to change, and tap into the additional reach and distribution power of the Internet, if not alone for the reason that there are many not taking advantage of the benefits of the situation.

SIME 08
This year’s SIME was guided very well by Ola Ahlvarsson, with an impressive visual presentation on stage (in-spite some technical problems).

And the theme of SIME this year was the “DNA of change”, which I at first though was a bit late in the game, but given it some more thought I realise as mentioned above, that there are so many that have not changed yet, and many that are afraid to change during these pessimistic times.

But for those of you not in in the middle of the Internet business innovation whirl-wind, the time to change is now, because…

Either you are part of the shift or you will be shifted out!

Links, and videos from SIME

• Are you a changemaker?
• Ace of base interview before the SIME concert – Talks about the Web.
• SIME Blog, maintained by Andie Nordgren.
• David Sifry interview, and also here.