Current Account »

• Davos reaches out to the masses

  January 9, 2012 @ 2:27 pm | by John Collins

  

  A member of the Swiss special police forces stands on the roof of a hotel in Davos as the annual meeting in the alpine resort got under way last January. Photograph: Reuters

  With everyone from Bono to Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, Peter Sutherland to George Soros, heading to the exclusive Swiss ski resort of Davos every January, it’s little surprise that the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum has been accused of being a little exclusive. Although the number of bankers in attendance has fallen off since the crisis of 2008, the annual event, which takes place from January 25th-29th this year, can still be considered Glastonbury for the world’s monied and powerful elite.

  The Forum is now using social media to try and change those perceptions and this year is pushing its Ask a Leader programme hard. Using its YouTube channel the public is being asked to submit questions it would like to see answered  by “heads of state and government, leaders from business and civil society, heads of international organizations, as well as media and academics”. The submitted questions will be voted on with the most popular getting a response from a special video booth at the event.

  It’s hard to see how the views of the hoi polloi will make much impact at the end of the month but those who feel excluded from the proceedings in Davos can’t say they weren’t asked for their opinion.

• Facebook founder still an enigma

  September 13, 2010 @ 5:34 pm | by John Collins

  If Facebook was a country it’s population of over 500 million users would make it larger than the US and third in size to only China and India. But the Silicon Valley social network is still a privately-held company and it’s 26-year-old founder Mark Zuckerberg is still largely an unknown quantity.

  All of that is likely to change in the next year. The secondary market values the US company, which has its European HQ in Dublin, at over $33 billion. Although the company doesn’t like to talk about a floatation it’s investors are likely to want to strike when the iron is still hot.

  Next month will also see the release of The Social Network a film of the founding of the website that has become a part of the daily routine for such a large proportion of the world population.

  Until then any article that gets access to the 26-year-old Zuckerberg is going to be eagerly read. Jose Antonio Vargas got unprecedented access for this lengthy piece in the New Yorker. The sub-head on the article reads “Mark Zuckerberg opens up” although in reality the reader is just left with the impression that it’s incredibly difficult to get him to open up and he decides to reveal what he pleases.

• Friends disconnected

  August 6, 2009 @ 8:46 pm | by Laura Slattery

  After spending half the Noughties wondering what exactly they should do with this website thingy, ITV has managed to offload Friends Reunited on the publisher of the Beano for a not-so-cool £25 million (€29 million). Sounds like a lot for a website, but then Facebook recently sold a mere 2 per cent of itself for the rather more flattering $200 million (€140 million), valuing its mix of chatter feeds, “which superhero are you” quizzes and incessant smugness at $10 billion.

  Strangely, there was a time when Friends Reunited, the social networking site of yesteryear, was an amazing novelty. Fancy being able to get in touch with people you went to school with! Surely, that’s like crossing into some alternative universe where fractures in the space-time continuum are creating all manner of unscripted chaos.

  Horror stories used to surface in the tabloid press of fortysomething wives leaving their stunned husbands for the boy they fancied when they were 17 – a moral outrage blamed entirely on the new technology, of course. These days, there’s no need for furtive subscriptions. Facebookers think nothing of openly flirting with friends on each other’s walls, knowing full well that both their partner and the friend’s partners can monitor every interaction – as can hundreds of other friends-of-friends should they be having a particularly boring day at work.

  Meanwhile, having been hounded down and tracked with military precision by a procession of mostly recognisable faces (albeit swollen with age), no one’s getting too excited by the prospect of “reuniting” with old friends anymore. Instead, the etiquette of “de-friending” is commonly debated in safely non-digital surroundings.

  ITV, unable to shake off its heritage as a lumbering broadcaster with a strictly analogue attitude to innovation, has been accused of dithering with Friends Reunited since it bought it in 2005. But savvier players in the social networking sphere than the company that brings us The Jeremy Kyle Show have been undone by users’ ennui: witness today’s announcement of impairment charges at Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Interactive Media, the owner of MySpace.