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The name of the company has been blurred to protect the innocent, and my email too, to prevent OCR-capable spam bots – this is what landed in my inbox today. Fancy that! A Christmas greeting with a legal disclaimer. So, let’s see what the implications are:

• The fact that it is Christmas may be confidential or privileged information, belonging to the sender of the email. Santa, you are through with your monopoly! No more running around with deer and presents! Or we will sue you!
• Had I received the message in error, I would be forbidden from showing anyone the greeting card, or saying “Merry Christmas!” to friends, colleagues and family. I guess I could not buy Christmas presents for my kids, as I cannot make use of the information that it’s that time of the year, either.
•  The company doesn’t give a crap about Christmas, as the greeting is the opinion of the sender. At least they have someone nice working there.

In any case, thanks for scanning the greeting with F-Secure to make sure there were no Christmas bugs attached.

The Register reports that BitTorrent has come to deals with three consumer electronics manufacturers in order to develop devices with an embedded BitTorrent client, thus bypassing the PC and freeing it to do other tasks. This would be specially useful to laptop users, who don’t want their mobile computer immobilized by a large download.

It’s coming back, but this time, it’s a 2.0 bubble. We will not likely see hundreds of millions of dollars burning in botomless pits, as VCs are being more rational about their release of funds, but no doubt a good many companies jumping on the bandwagon will not survive.

Take social networks – there are a myriad of them appearing, each an even more boring copy of the preceeding one (whoa, preceeding has two e’s, let’s grab the 2.0 domain quick!). It looks like anything with two vowels in line can be The Next Big Thing. Andrew Wooldridge has created a very handy Web Two Point Oh! name and product generator for your shiny new company – endless fun. Want a 2.0 bullshit generator? Go here. The tools are available, the VCs are waiting with the cash, what are we all waiting for?

I read a few weeks ago an article that defined this bubble as more controlled, in the sense that investments are made after the business model is somewhat proven, so the old “lets get 100.000 users and figure out how to make money later” is definitely out. Here is a great list of 11 suggestions to survive the 2.0 bubble – sobering read.

My opinion is that bubbles are necessary evolutionary process, they sort out the weed from the golden nuggets. The 3.0 bubble will be way bigger than this one – why? Because the 2.0 bubble will be more of a pop, with dozens of $10 million investments going down the drain, thus VCs will say “hey, the last bubble wasn’t that bad, we can risk more money this time”. History has proven that history always repeats itself.

Last week I attended the WOMBAT 2 conference hosted by WOMMA (Word Of Mouth Marketing Association), at the San Francisco Hilton. The weather was great, most speakers were good, and some networking took place. We managed to take thursday to visit some areas around San Francisco, and ended…you guessed it…in Silicon Valley. More about this in another post.

The most expected keynote was that by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, on their book Naked Conversations. It was good, but way way too short. How can the organisers give their main keynotes only 45 minutes to speak, and almost zero minutes for Q&As? Specially at a conference where the topic is two-way conversations, and word-of-mouth. It was excellent to get my own copy of the book signed by both Robert & Shel – thanks guys!

Robert talked a bit about his new venture, I won’t go over it extensively here, as you can read a lot more about it in his own blog.

It was interesting to see an industry pre-worried about their future, as the last thing they want is to see word-of-mouth and viral marketing go down the dirty slope that email did. So, the first concept that was hammered into us was ethics. How to ethically get a blogger to talk about you, or how to ethically convice drivers to sell the vehicles you manufacture to their friends. Here are the main basic points on ethical WOM:

• Thou shalt not shill – i.e. pay a blogger to speak good about you.
• Thou shalt release good products – or risk having negative WOM blow you away.
• Thou shalt not deface or destroy property to promote your product (!?).
• Thou shalt not lie. Yes, you heard right. They want to convince marketers not to lie.

There are more, but these are the ones worth considering the most. It was actually very nice to see an emerging industry be so careful about setting the standard of conduct so early on.

What sucked most at the conference? No WiFi. Yes, you heard right. The Hilton wanted $24.000 to put an access point in the conference’s main hall, which the organisers refused. Eventually, people managed to get onto a rather weak AP that emanated from somewhere else in the building, and which gave you access to the internet after going through the hotel’s homepage.