How Technology is Taking us Back to Old Market Values. Many thousand years ago, man mastered the art of agriculture. And through that knowledge, humans started producing more food than their immediate families needed. They realized that they could afford to give some of their goods away, and gain a benefit from it. Thus bartering was born. Barter is the root cause for much of our human culture. Somewhere along the way money evolved as a medium of exchange, trading activities began to specialize and institutions like banks, insurance agencies and transport organisations came to be. That’s a very, very short history of the evolution of commerce, but it elucidates that fact that we’ve moved far away from knowing the person at the other end of the transaction. “We’re seeing this shift away from top-down monopolies to human marketplaces. “In the world of collaborative consumption, people are investing in meaning.”- Rachel Botsman Why are we going through this reversed market-evolution, back to sharing resources in a community?
“Yes. The $8 Trillion Internet: McKinsey's Bold Attempt to Measure the E-conomy - Derek Thompson - Business. The Internet -- that 200 million-person, $8 trillion global economy -- accounted for 21 percent of GDP growth in the world's largest economies over the last 5 years, McKinsey found in a report released this week.* As an entity, it accounts for more GDP than the Spanish or Canadian economies, and it's growing faster than Brazil. As a sector, it is now larger than these countries' agriculture or energy industries.
Sweeping statements about the size and growth of the Internet are tough to swallow. So here are three highlights from the new McKinsey report: 1. What Is the Internet Economy? There is a lot of Internet to measure, with two hundred million global consumers and $8 trillion in total revenue. 2. As an industry, the Internet contributes more to the typical developed economy than mining, utilities, agriculture, or education. Much of the Internet's contribution to our lives is nearly impossible to measure. 3. *This post originally referred to a 200-billion-person global economy. Zuckerberg & Sandberg on how Facebook's culture differs from Google's. With Google+ on the rise and Facebook making rapid changes to the platform, it’s only natural that media’s curiosity has peaked a bit in terms of what exactly separates the two competitors from one another.
Charlie Rose in particular seemed very interested in the subject during his interview with Facebook’s CEO and COO just yesterday. Rose asked, how does [Facebook's] culture differ from Google? And what exactly is Facebook culture? Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg (once the Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google), notes that although Facebook and Google might be similar in a lot of ways — they are both founder-led, based in Silicon Valley and driven by engineers — they are still fundamentally different. According to Sandberg, Google is all about “algorithms and machine learning”, a process that she notes is very important and that Google just so happens to be very good at. The 147 Companies That Control Everything. The Fundamental 2x2 of Capitalism.