Cyberposium @HBS Keynote

Cyberposium is the premier MBA technology conference in the world. Held annually at Harvard Business School, Cyberposium facilitates an interactive network of current and future business leaders to engage in a provocative dialog about technology and its impact on business and society.

Here is a wrapup of the 2 keynotes for the day:

The day started with Jim Balsillie, Co-CEO of Research In Motion speaking about BlackBerry market share and future strategy. However, throughout the keynote he alluded at taking names of any of the rivals. The following stats were talked about:

BlackBerry has 32M subscribers, 200K developers, 500 carriers.

Blackberry moves about 4 petabytes of data per day, compared to 8 petabytes moved on the internet.

6 out of 10 cellphones best seller phones in North America are BlackBerry.

He continued with the message that RIM is fundamentally a services middleware company in an enabling role. The 2 things he repeatedly talked about were constructive alignment with the ecosystem and deep rich application integration. He reinforced that RIM is not just an app company but it's core competency is the enabling role. The focus is on a transformative and contextualized user experience. Balsillie framed wireless and mobility as an multivariant scarcity optimization model. The strategy is that the seamless intersection between applications and core should be delivered as a managed service. This essentially helps provide a transformative and contextualized user experience.

His best quote I liked: "I make radios for 100 bucks and sell them for 200 bucks"


Chad Hurley followed it after lunch. Here are some stats which came up during his talk:

YouTube serves 1 billion videos a day.

It went from 67 to 600 people after the Google acquisition which helped them grow to where they are today

A YouTube video that gets shared gets 7 times more views

Only 3 countries are blocking YouTube today - Iran, Turkey, and China

The conversation with HBS Prof. continued discussing YouTube's mantra of Find,Follow,Feed Chad mentioned how the integration of WiFi with TV will change the industry whereas set-top boxes are short term fix. He gave the example of how in future buying a TV without WiFi will be the equivalent of someone buying a laptop today without wireless capabilities. Also, YouTube will be providing transaction capabilities to any partner - big or small. Implementing this transaction model for will help earn revenue for partners. He mentioned that in future, everything will be on-demand/IPTV and Hulu won't see real traction until it's connected to the TV.

Focus on audience, build better tools, create ad solutions: 3 things we do ~ Chad

Advice to entrepreneurs: Don't start with PowerPoint or an organizational chart but start with a whiteboard and go to the product.

And finally the best quote from Chad that I liked: "Start building something before you start pitching."