I was just having another look at the now infamous Does What happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook presentation and it got me thinking about online privacy and what a paradox it is. Anything online is easily reproduced and propagated by virtue of the internet being digital and omnipresent in nature. It is therefore a medium which is fundamentally at odds with the idea of privacy because the preservation of privacy requires the existence of informational silos which limit said information from spreading too far.

The idea that the real world concept of these “contextual silos” which prevent information from spreading very far beyond it’s original context could be transferable to the web is flawed because digital information is ubiquitous. Anything on the web can potentially be seen by anyone, anywhere at anytime, whereas in real life a night of say, alcohol fueled revelry, would only be witnessed by people present at the event and would be known to only so many people outside those that were present. Furthermore, the internet is a repository of digital memories as opposed to human memories and so not only is nothing ever Read more »

The business plan is sorely in need of reinvention. Much like fortune telling, it continues to be an elaborate, ritualistic and time-honored exercise in pre-cognition. The whole thing is about as reliable as a stock tip overheard at a racetrack.

It’s such a meaningless exercise in terms of the depth bankers and investors want from these plans. There’s no crystal ball to assure the future, but they want you to make it look that way. Not to say that there is no value to a business plan, because that would be overstating the case. A business plan is a good exercise in strategic planning that is useful in bringing considerations to the forefront, which might otherwise become nasty future surprises.

However, it’s definitely high time that we had second-generation business plans, business plan 2.0 if you will. Above all, the most important thing is Read more »