Italy and innovation
In the last times I am wondering what is the situation of Italian companies and which is the future of their economy, taking in consideration the steps that are being taken in innovation, research and development from both the government and the companies themselves.
From my point of view they are really awful, I mean, there’s no doubt that we are in an difficult phase for our economy and this bad economic conjuncture effects are lasting for more than expected, but, when I say awful I’m saying that we are navigating in bad waters more than we notice or think.
Of course there are big multinationals that are investing a lot in R&D or online customer relationship or whatever strategy that uses the power of IT [there’s one in particular near where I live (Brembo), that has even created a park for scientific development and it’s going to be huge], but most of the small and mid firms don’t even know the potential of some simple yet cheap instruments that internet offers to them. For example, few of them has a simple facebook page and updates it regularly, or use a twitter account for interating with their customers, very few industrial companies use a voip client to keep in contact with their supply chain, and even fewer take advantage the virtualization to empower the production line and their control system.
Problem is that those small companies are the real engine of the Italian economy, and if they don’t wake up , they will be literally eaten by the asian competitors.
Besides this, let’s assume that a company has the ideas to implement an “online” strategy, which are the investments of the government for creating a solid infrastructure to sustain those business? None.
The possibilities to have a really high speed connection, like in fiber, are remote or the costs are prohibitive. Italians copper lines are too old and the pairs are always overloaded. There are no economic district where to do some joint venture. We are now (now!) investing in the high speed trains, and there’s still someone that does not understand the importance of them. We are years back.
We keep sustaining old big companies just to not lose our face internationally (it’s too late Italians!), and keep giving subsidies to the banks. Gosh.. If they cannot stand up with their own legs or they don’t fall within the european requirement, it means that there’s something that doesn’t work!! We have people to the power that only look to their interests, and I’m not biasing saying this.
Even a lot of young students are blind in front of this disastrous country, and most of them are even contributing to it by wasting their relatives’ money enrolling to university just because they don’t want to go to work.
Maybe, fortunately, not everything is lost, we have some young talented people that are creating some great startups, don’t make them escape abroad.
Focus on: Twitter
So.. everybody during these days seem to have finally realized the power of this social platform.. Especially medias..
Let’s start with some numbers.. The usage of twitter is becoming always more high. in less than one year the number of tweets per day doubled.. It’s considerable assuming that this site in July already handled 25 Million updates per day. People are always more interested in it and always more accounts are being subscribed. Everyday there are 300.000 new accounts and twitter has already 105 Million Users.
Take a moment to think on how much hidden power has Twitter.. And think about how much it could grow in the future..
Their administration seems to have done it and they have come out with some new very interesting ideas.
First I want to talk about “promoted tweets”. Even twitter such as other companies in this sector has decided to monetize by using ads in their site.. They are entering in Google, Facebook and Apple business: Advertising.
How they are going to do that? Simply.. They are going to make arrangements with some other companies such as Starbucks in order to publish some promoted tweets in each of our public time lime.. It’s a very clever idea because the ads will be integrated in the system appearing like a tweet from someone we are following and we could even retweet that if we think the ad is interesting.. Giving it the possibility to become even more visible. A great opportunity for companies and a bigger one for twitter to improve their incomes and to grow.
There is also another way to take advantage of twitter that some firms are already doing, that is by creating a company account and posting their promotions or giving updates on their new products. And believe me.. it’s a great way to follow your favorite brands.
The other quite interesting fact happened just yesterday is the opening of the developer page by twitter.. A great piece of news for devs in fact twitter could offer a so wide range of opportunities that we couldn’t even imagine. Twitter is giving the documentation to develop any kind of application online and offline using the features offered by this site. For example try to think of an application that gives you in real time (because this is the real power of Twitter) the exact position of the tweets by using the geolocalization.
It’s very interesting because once twitter was used only to post what were you doing, now it has become a huge source of news from all over the world.. If anything it’s happening anywhere and someone writes about it on twitter, in few seconds the world will know that! Think about how important news could spread so simply.
Another point for twitter is the 140 characters limitation that often could give someone a hard time, but it really helps to improve your mind and your ability to summarize your thoughts and it also contributes to the immediacy of the message.
My only concern is that twitter will become a trend like Facebook which is full of idiots, because today from my point of view twitter is used mostly by smart people who like to be updated and give their points of view.
BTW, I would really invest on this company because they are surely going to grow a lot in the next future.
There would be a lot of other things to say but I like to leave them to you.. My only intention is to make you think 😉
R.I.P. Geocities (1994-2009)
26th October 2009… This will be the last day of the epic Free Hosting Space… Millions of people all over the world (not only Nerds…) used this service, with an unbelivable peak from the end of the 90s to 2001.
In 1999 Yahoo bought the company for $3.57 billion… And now, after 15 years of service, Yahoo will cut off power from the leggendary web 1.0 hosting space…
Anyway, this is a Web’s piece of history… If now, we are here with our Blog 2.0, with Facebook, Twitter and so on, We must say thanks to David Bohnett and John Rezner, the minds of Geocities… Thank you guys…
Facebook Lite
Finally facebook lite is now available in over 70 countries.. Italy comes always later.. 🙂
On fb lite you can view your news feed and publish a photo or a video.. it’s not possible to show only some category of feed suche as on the normal version.
It’s useful if you have a slow connection or just if you want a simple interface to cope with.
keyboardr
an interesting search engine based on google with a very minimal interface and an instant search feature while you type..
The hard life of a nerd.. 