The future of online investing

ING Campaign To Support Relaunch Of ShareBuilder Site This looks very much like the way young people will be investing in the years to come. To compete with ING will require innovation and a web based approach to reach clients for financial services.

 

 

How to “get ink”

is the title of a great post on the Ask 37signals blog. It’s great advice that I can fully subscribe to and recommend. Doesn’t really have anything to do with technology but is valid in a general sense.

By the way, I did watch Steve Martin on Charlie Rose, one of my favorite TV shows for which I have a TiVo season pass. One of the best and most knowledgeable interviewer of all times.

 

From zero to 100 million……

After 10 Years of Blogs, the Future’s Brighter Than Ever
Wired reports and I’m sure few knew who first coined the phrase “weblog”.
Well here he is. Jorn Barger

And according to the comments section another fellow claims to have started blogging from Japan in ‘96.

We sure have come a long way since then and the landscape of communications has changed significantly and will continue to change as social media will become even more mainstream and the percentage of contributors rather than readers increases.

Tags: blogs,

 

Banking Sold Online, Serviced Offline

eMarketer reports some very useful insight on the financial services market on the web.
The industry the second largest online advertiser with a 15% share of the total market in the first half of 2007.

As for using online financial products or receive investment advise over the internet, the picture is mixed, with the younger male audience  of 18 to 34 year olds the most receptive, far outnumbering women in the same age group. 

For the 35+ group the figures drop significantly but with smaller differences between men and women.

The positive: Higher income leads to more receptiveness with the highest figures for men with income higher than $ 75,000

Another important statistic is the influence of word-of-mouth from family and friends as the main source of information, followed by the internet. This seems to indicate that the combination of both - as in user reviews will be of key importance on the buying process.

Tags: financialservices, banking, online banking

 

Social Graph & Beyond: Tim Berners-Lee’s Graph is The Next Level

The evolution of the web continues and here’s a great take on what’s coming. It will affect how we access and consume information in the future and no doubt how business is conducted on the web in any industry, including financial services.

 

 

 

via Read/WriteWeb by Richard MacManus on 11/22/07

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, today published a blog post about what he terms the Graph, which is similar (if not identical) to his Semantic Web vision. Referencing both Brad Fitzpatrick’s influential post earlier this year on Social Graph, and our own Alex Iskold’s analysis of Social Graph concepts, Berners-Lee went on to position the Graph as the third main “level” of computer networks. First there was the Internet, then the Web, and now the Graph - which Sir Tim labeled (somewhat tongue in cheek) the Giant Global Graph!

Note that Berners-Lee wasn’t specifically talking about the Social Graph, which is the term Facebook has been heavily promoting, but something more general. In a nutshell, this is how Berners-Lee envisions the 3 levels (a.k.a. layers of abstraction):

1. The Internet: links computers
2. Web: links documents
3. Graph: links relationships between people and/or documents — “the things documents are about” as Berners-Lee put it.

The Graph is all about connections and re-use of data. Berners-Lee wrote that Semantic Web technologies will enable this:

“So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That’s just what the graph does for us. We have the technology — it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL. Not magic bullets, but the tools which allow us to break free of the document layer.”

Sir Tim also notes that as we go up each level, we lose more control but gain more benefits: “…at each layer — Net, Web, or Graph — we have ceded some control for greater benefits.” The benefits are what happens when documents and data are connected - for example being able to re-use our personal and friends data across multiple social networks, which is what Google’s OpenSocial aims to achieve.

What’s more, says Berners-Lee, the Graph has major implications for the Mobile Web. He said that longer term “thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildy differing devices which will give us access to the system.” The following scenario sums it up very nicely:

“Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That’s what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary.”

Conclusion

I’m very pleased Tim Berners-Lee has appropriated the concept of the Social Graph and married it to his own vision of the Semantic Web. What Berners-Lee wrote today goes way beyond Facebook, OpenSocial, or social networking in general. It is about how we interact with data on the Web (whether it be mobile or PC or a device like the Amazon Kindle) and the connections that we can take advantage of using the network. This is also why Semantic Apps are so interesting right now, as they take data connection to the next level on the Web.

Overall, unlike Nick Carr, I’m not concerned whether mainstream people accept the term ‘Graph’ or ‘Social Graph’. It really doesn’t matter, so long as the web apps that people use enable them to participate in this ‘next level’ of the Web. That’s what Google, Facebook, and a lot of other companies are trying to achieve.

Incidentally, it’s great to see Tim Berners-Lee ‘re-using’ concepts like the Social Graph, or simply taking inspiration from them. He never really took to the Web 2.0 concept, perhaps because it became too hyped and commercialized, but the fact is that the Consumer Web has given us many innovations over the past few years. Everything from Google to YouTube to MySpace to Facebook. So even though Sir Tim has always been about graphs (as he noted in his post, the Graph is essentially the same as the Semantic Web), it’s fantastic he is reaching out to the ‘web 2.0′ community and citing people like Brad Fitzpatrick and Alex Iskold.

Related: check out Alex Iskold’s Social Graph: Concepts and Issues for an overview of the theory behind Social Graph. This is the post Tim Berners-Lee referenced. Also check out Alex’s latest post today: R/WW Thanksgiving: Thank You Google for Open Social (Or, Why Open Social Really Matters).

 

 

 

The Machine is U

this video is a great description and visualization of the web today and how it will develop beyond 2.0 by adding intelligence

Hat tip to Stephen Joyce for bringing it to my attention.

Tags: web2.0, web3.0, intelligence, web

 

Check this out, pretty useful stuff….

found this about The website marketing mind map on Hotelmarketing.com It sums up web based marketing in a visual and effective way and applies across all industries.

 

Talk about relevant messaging!

and who can express it more succinctly than the Brits: SatLav scheme takes the piss out of Westminster as reported here by Absolute Gadget.
And fear not Americans, as synchronicity would have it, a similar service is being announced in several North American cities today — including Atlanta, Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Manhattan, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Oakland, Portland, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Toronto, and Washington D.C. The new service is called MizPee (www.mizpee .com) from Yojo Mobile (www.yojomobile.com).

Who will ever doubt again the utility of the web for all of us in one of life’s most dire situations…..!

 

It pays to provide excellent service!

as this study by The Kelsey Group Online Consumer-Generated Reviews Have Big Impact on Offline Purchases reported in Marketing VOX shows.

The numbers are significant both in terms of influence on product and services selection but also the price people are willing to pay based on reviews. This is especially evident for restaurants and hotels but also other industries.

It is absolutely no longer an option to not be totally aware of what is said about you in the conversation that takes place in social media today.

 

Here’s a survey marketers should like!

Online Reviewers Driven Mostly by Altruism, CMOs Need Not Fear WOM writes MarketingVOX in their article about a recent Bazaarvoice survey. It shows some interesting facts:

• Fully 90 percent of respondents say they write reviews to help others make better buying decisions, and more than 70 percent want to help companies improve the products they build and carry.

• The study also found that 79 percent write reviews in order to reward a company, and 87 percent of the reviews are generally positive in tone.

Now, if this is not good news for any supplier then I don’t know what is. Companies used to spend vast amounts of money on research to find out less than what customers today provide us with for free.

There is no more effective way to get real-time feedback about the service you provide than from people who just experienced it and are willing to write about it. What’s there to fear?