About Stuart G. Hall

Making a positive difference one day at a time. #London #Leicester

Web 2.0 delivers new finance model for business?

I was at a talk at the RSA last night for a sneak preview of a new film Us Now about the potential power of ordinary people using web 2.0 tools to change everything from the way government works to the ownership of football clubs. To quote internet guru Clay Shirky change happens not when we adopt new tools, but when we adopt new behaviours. And web technology can make this happen easier than ever before.

After the film I realised the film’s real power was in describing an alternative model for financing projects, based on web 2.0 technology, from BHO to banking. Fortunately as I work at the ICAEW this realisation came a little quicker, and I blogged it on the ICAEW’s IT Counts.

As you’d expect the US is way ahead of the game on this, it’s already got a catchy title ‘Finance 2.0’, with discussion at a recent Silicon Valley event including the US-version of Zopa called prosper.com.

My Jotspot’s (now) moved to Google

I blogged in November 2006 that Google had bought the Jotspot wiki. Well, today I’ve completed the migration of my wiki to Google Sites, read more from Google here. There were no hitches, and it’s great I have a personal wiki on the same platform as Gmail. Thanks Google, as there are some great benefits:

  • Unprecedented scalability and availability
  • Significant improvements in performance
  • Unlimited pages for no cost
  • When used with Google Apps
  • Unlimited wiki creation
  • Significant increases in free storage
  • Improvements in wysiwyg editing
  • Improvements in ease of use
  • Tight integration with a product suite which includes enterprise class calendars, spreadsheets, video hosting, presentations, and documents
  • Internationalization support (38 languages)
  • Improved configuration over the site and page layout.