This book is awesome. Each word is very precise. The imagery connects deeply with the text and makes complex concepts easy to digest.

The book is divided into four main sections.

• Dynamics – an overview of major trends and their impact on brands (frreeconomics)
• Intelligence – the brand basics
• Drive – how to build your brad
• Details – 5 pages that provide a great framework for building a brand

A few highlights for me.

The Basics:

• Who are you?
• Who needs to know?
• Why should they cars?
• How will they find out?

Brand as Asset: the average brand accounts for more than one-third of sharehodler value.

“Focus groups are used as a tool, not as thought leaders”

Seth Godin: “The secret of leadership is simple: do what you believe in.”

A quick overview on the power of open source with a nice shout out to opensource.com.

If you are new to branding this a great book. If you are a brand veteran this quick read will inspire new ideas for how to drive your brand.

This is a powerful book. I am going to buy a few more copies to hand out to brand people and non-brand people (actually everyone is a brand person, some do not know it quite yet).

I just started reading The thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk.  First I read the jacket of the book, and then I started looking at the last few pages.

What a surprise.

The last 20 pages of the book are selections from the jacket design contest. What a great way to say Thank You to those who submitted a jacket design for the book. Fantastic.

I think I now understand the Thank You Economy.

Sergey Brin of google was interesting to listen to. He said the #1 factor that contributed to the success of Google is luck. He seemed very humbe and very smart. He remarked that at Google they follow their heart.

Each speaker mentioned the long tail.

Sxip, great company. They are trying to solve the problem of how can you take the book information that you have on Amazon to Barnes and Noble.

Dianna Neff, CIO for city of Philadelphia. They plan to provide wireless to everyone for $20/month. Low income at $10/month. The biggest resistance they had was from the telcos.

Meembo, this company allows you to get IM on the web. Incredible. Does not seem to work very well on linux.

Vinod Kholsa, partner Kleiner Parkins. When companies become bigger they become traditional and then die. He thinks the Yahoo and AOL model of creating their own content is wrong. Better to let the talented people in the world generate the content. Value of a company is building the community. Grow the audience, do not control the content. He would like to have all college textbooks be open source.

New product from Google: Google Reader. Easy to aggregate and read the content you want to read.

He did not directly address how sun has moved to a 2.0 company. He did say that all sun software will be open source. He also indicated that Sun is moving to a very transactional model. That they are focused on the long tail. One of the keys he discussed is distribution. One of their competitive advantages is their wide Java base. He mentioned the savings of self-service.

 Another very interesting panel was with leaders form Amazon, Yahoo, Skype, and comcast. One of the themes here is that you have to own unique data to differentiate your business. The topic of the panel was what unique data do each of the companies have that will allow them to scale. It is all in the data. Amazon’s strength is all the user comments on products over the years. Yahoo had the 400 million users.

Very interesting experience.

Today on the Red Hat intranet task force mailing list there is a post asking if anyone is familiar with a company called Social Text . I just finished talking with the CEO – small world. Social Text is powering the wiki used for the web 2.0 conference.

I am a little tired so here are some high level comments

Tim O’reilly stated that Linux has caused Sun to change their business model. Jonathan Schwartz replied – “you mean Red Hat caused us to change our business model”. O’Reilly moved on to the next issue. Schwatz mentioned Red Hat several times. It seemed like he was trying to equate Linux with Red Hat.

The other interesting comment from Schwartz is that people do not want Open Source software they want free software. Very intereresting.

Lots of talk about search. Lots of talk about paid advertising. Blogs, RSS, and AJAX.

Almost every speaker mentions the long tail. Small transactions to lots of people will make a bunch of money.

Collaboration software, social networking, and viral marketing are big themes.

Tim and Yvonne will be interested in Bright Cove. Now they can start distributing movies on the internet.

Terry Semel, CEO of Yahoo, stated the the succesful media companies will be technology companies.

The napster guys have started a new company, Snocap, that provides musicians the ability to register and sell their music.

And finally, Jason Fried, CEO of 37signals a leading web-based application company, had 5 things we need less of to be successful:

1. Less $ – need more passion

2. Less people – reduce features to the people you have

3. Less time – otherwise over analyze

4. Less abstraction – do real things

5. Less Software – present software is too complicated

ZDNet has a great blog for the conference.

-Jeff