Companies like Zynga or Playfish will be the big hype in early 2010.
I would recommend to add http://www.insidesocialgames.com/ to your feed reader

By the way, the just announced Civilization 5! I next milestone in gaming. The PC game is not built by Sid Meier due to his work on Sid Meier’s Civilzation network
http://www.facebook.com/civnetwork?v=info

Source: http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the-Box-Presentation/

by Steve Blank, serial entrepreneur at Google TechTalk.

You can follow him here https://twitter.com/sgblank

First I thought that he is talking a bit too long about his hobby: Climibing on Mount Everest. I had not read the whole text in the program due to the thing that I went from one session to the other. But as I soon recognized this was the main topic: How to build teams with whom you are able to reach the maximum like climbing on Mount Everest or K2.

This was one of the best workshops I had since years. Totally unexpected. The whole audience was totally fascinated and magnetized in the end following his speech and his videos.

Hopefully the will upload the video soon here: http://ecorner.stanford.edu

Until this will happen, here is a short summary out of the program guide:

Nominated by Time magazine in 1995 as “one of the 100 young leaders for the new millennium,” and leader of the first successful South American expedition to Mt Everest and K2, Dr. Rodrigo Jordan will share his philosophy on applying to business and education the leadership and team-building skills needed to climb the world’s most challenging mountains. Through videos and jaw-dropping photographs, he will bring his gripping leadership stories to life. He’ll examine the dynamics of building and leading high-performance teams that produce great social and economic results.

Watch a video clip of Dr. Jordan describing a crisis during the first crossing of the Ellsworth Mountains in Antarctica. He explains how one team member’s optimism in the face of certain death completely transformed his perspective as the team leader and also saved their lives.

Here is a video from Stanford in 2007

And here one from a session at Google:

In a nutshell: Rodrigo emphasized three dimensions when building up the right team:

1. technical skills

2. personal skills

3. social skills

You should not only focus on the core team but also on the ecosystem and everybody who adds value to reach the objective to change the world.

But his workshop was really excellent and it is not enough to read only this short summary. There was much more to experience!

http://www.revolution.com/
Zip car is a very intersting car sharing company in his portfolio: http://www.zipcar.com/

You should watch the whole session, it’s worth the whole hour:

You can follow Steve on Twitter: http://twitter.com/STEVECASE

Why the hell did the invite MC Hammer for Social Technology? Ok, he as nearly 2,000,000 Followers on Twitter.

Cash4Gold Super Bowl Ad – Cash 4 Gold – Amazing videos are here

In the US he had a very famous super bowl viral video.
Robert Scoble showed that he has 1176 new facebook friend requests and how the new realtime web behaves.

Some recommendations from the panel:

• Save all marketing an PR budget and hire people who love to Twitter and do everything what you can do with creative social media to create a personal company.
• In the future all employees should have a Twitter account (I will introduce it when I’m back) and this leads to more trust and credibility, especially for the big corporations.
• There is still a niche to create a viable business around Twitter
• Word of mouth is key, also negative comments
• Answer all comments in person
• Engage and thank them
• Use a wiki and a forum and question what you should build next instead of thinking about a roadmap
• You should create a storyline and give people something to talk about – ok, nothing new since the anatomy of the buzz last year.
• some more (…)

Mc Hammer was the last speaker and was really funny and explained what he did in the past and why he is a real entrepreneur (he really is).

He did a really social thing: He asked the audience to stand up and introduce themselves to the people next to them.
This was the best what he could have done.
When I see all this bullshit talk about social media and people sitting in starbucks with a macbook. Is this social? Sitting next to each other and talk no more but looking into a technical gadget the whole day?
Social is about talking and communication and not only about writing silly things on Twitter into the endless drain of text, using very meaninglesse acronyms and bad grammar?

Instead of writing a whole summary I will update this post later with the video…

Here you can follow the panel members on Twitter
http://twitter.com/scobleizer
http://twitter.com/Mchammer
http://twitter.com/loic

Especially in Asia virtual goods and currencies are state of the art of every social network and mobile apps and games.

Here are some new presentations on social networks and a link list with interesting new articles on this topic.

Papers on virtual currencies & economies

Holistic overview Virtual Currency vendors with screenshots
http://www.virtualcurrencyplatforms.com/facts-and-figures/

Virtual currency on Habbo Hotel
http://virtual-economy.org/files/Lehdonvirta%20et%20al%202009%20Virtual%20Consumerism.pdf

Virtual Economy Research Network – Leading edge research with several papers
http://virtual-economy.org/

Inflation of different MMORPG currencies from  2005- 2008
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=ttEFy433f0C9bJSczaqGw0A&single=true&gid=0&output=html

Internet & Virtual Worlds in China (40 pages with a lot of facts and figures)
http://www.iftf.org/files/deliverables/SR-1129%20virtual%20china.pdf

40 presentations on virtual currencies, goods and internet in Asia
http://www.slideshare.net/plus8star/presentations

Social Networks in Asia
http://www.slideshare.net/plus8star/social-networkings

Mobile Social Networks
http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/15/Social%20+%20Mobile%20=%20Sociable%20_Social%20Networks%20for%20SMS,%20IM,%20_%20Mobile%20Devices_%20Presentation.pdf

Mobile virtual economies in Asia
http://www.mobilemonday.jp/presentations/plus8star.pdf

Virtual Goods summit

Find more details here:  http://pewresearch.org/millennials/

There is also a comprehensive interview on youtube: