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/

 The whole Kresge Auditorium was full:

Here are the speakers:

Tim Draper – a big Venture Capitalist (Founder and a Managing Director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson ) in the Silicon Valley and a blogger. His partner Steve spoke yesterday at the ChurchillClub Event. On Tim’s blog entrepreneurs could get some insights about the life of a VC and what’s important and what’s bullshit. I prefered to read Guy Kawasakis blog on VC but I will give him a chance one page one (of 25 with 500 other blogs on my Netvibes). He also stated to have Tweet Experiences but I couldn’t find him.

Michael Moe – Blogger and author of “How to find the next Starbucks”

+  Founding Partner, ThinkPanmure, and Author (Finding the Next Starbucks: How to Identify and Invest in the Hot Stocks of Tomorrow)

and Tony Perkins – CEO of AlwaysOn. Also a blog which I read nearly daily.

From the homepage:
As part of the Entrepreneurship Week closing finale, find out what the hot entrepreneurial opportunities are today and tomorrow, as three of the most forward-looking and insightful thought leaders in Silicon Valley weigh in. They’ll debate, argue and discuss their way through an analysis of where technology is going and where to start placing your bets
 

Short summary, long version will follow tomorrow!!!

The next big things among other things is:

Definitely the overall No 1. with a current validation of $250 million – Twitter.com

In my opinion, spoken in Gartner HypeCycle words:

We are on the Peak of Inflated Expectations now. Let’s remember: 2 years ago, we all had a ”Second life”. I also wrote my thesis on virtual currency taxation - This was nearly the same Hype as it is with Twitter today. Also every VC or analyst  talked about virtual worlds at this time. Today, only view people are interestd in virtual worlds. But like always:Second Life was the first attempt of Virtual Reality online and many more will follow soon and will arise from the through of Disillusionmnt.

So this could be the way Twitter goes to. But it is not such a highly technical tool and very addictive. So the “Through of Disillusionment” could be short. Technical problems we already had last year and seems to be solved.

It is more for fun and to be a wannabe micro celebrity and there for it is great and good for wasting time while wating for the bus and do some viral marketing.

More information:

Facebook will make “Deals” to get money in. Hm, this could be perhaps an ad deal in the end!

Youtube and Hotmail are marketing tools for Google and Microsoft. They were not bought to make money but to save marketing costs.

The new generation is called “The instant messaging generation” (aka digital natives) – compared to some years ago 5 of 10 US Top webpages got replaced by Youtube and MySpace etc. (6 out of 10 in Germany)

They were several more things like Green Technologies

Social Learning will be great

Mobile and Video stuff

Off Topic:

Free Trade was preached – There was a fear of protection in the room. I share this. Also in Europe there is a new movement for higher market protection. This could also be in a way of supporting domestic companies via money gifts. So they could offer there products cheaper. This makes the downwards spiral also faster.

Tim Draper mentioned: We need more nuclear plants. For me, as a greenenergy, guy: No, you are wrong. We need more innovation pressure to make Green energy more competitive. We do not want more nuclear material for our children. Tim didn’t get the acid fallout rain from Tschernobyl on his house when he was a child. This could be discussed on a higher level and more differentiated, for sure.

http://www.beingpeterkim.com/2008/09/ive-been-thinki.html

That are only the example for companies which start with an A

and a nice list:

Data came from Nielson Online

               Site         Sept-07 UA (000) Sept-08 UA (000) YOY Growth

• Twitter.com      533*                  2,359                 343%
• Tagged.com 898 3,857 330%
• Ning 842* 2,955 251%
• LinkedIn 4,075 11,924 193%
• Last.fm 850 1,879 121%
• Facebook 18,090 39,003 116%
• MyYearbook 1,422 3,056 115%
• Bebo 1,299 2,418 86%
• Multiply 592 941 59%
• Reunion.com 4,845 7,601 57%

Source: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/31/facebooks-growing-problem/

They are burning so much cash per month that they are running out of money soon. Ok, with such a growth rate the will get another round founding but this does not solve the problem.

The current ad based business model generates not enough money to pay at least the server costs per year.

Sooner or later the have to take money for premium services or the should offer some kind of business services.

But good for Facebook they are not alone in this area. Every social network has the same problem and I would state that only MySpace has an idea how to make money e.g. with brand and lifestyle channels.

Funny is also that the German www.studivz.de has the same problem as Facebook and just fired its boss Marcus Riecke who was not able to generate any meaningful income stream

Bernd Zeller a former gagwriter of Harald Schmidt was the author of this famous magazine. His new blog is online: http://www.darvins-illustrierte.de/

The first SPAM persons wanted to be connected with me. After a lot of bands want to be your friend on MySpace, now, also Facebook has a problem. Ok, sometimes the MySpace bands are like a manual recommendation system of last.fm and sometimes they are really good, but most of the time it is SPAM in your eMail inbox.

Now, this week it there were 2 persons which requested my friendship. The first one was a faked profil…that is really uninteresting but really funny was the second one. I asked who he is and he answered with a personal mail, that he found me in a group xyz and he wants to recommend to invest in oil really cool and also he recommended (sure) a page where I could send my money to…

I think this problem will increase massively in the next years…Sorry, no good analysis on a public holiday. I only wanted to share that with you.

http://kara.allthingsd.com/

after i read this on Twitter…

http://de.geocities.com/michaelaltendorf80/Diplomarbeit_MA.pdf