Farewell to 2008, Happy New Year
As we bid farewell to 2008, it is time to reflect on the
past year and look forward to the coming year.
I had started the year blogging that "2008 promises to be
an exciting year". It was exciting allright. No one could possibly have
predicted the reasons why the year turned out to be one of the most
"exciting" in this decade. I am not just referring to the the Beijing
Olympics and U.S. Election (more on these two events later). It was the
worst year for stocks since 1931. There was the credit crunch that
resulted in a meltdown on Wall Street. Main Street
suffered too in the aftermath with a jump in unemployment and steep
declines in
housing prices. We also saw vermin like Bernard Madoff run a ponzi
scheme that could involve losses of more than $50 billion.
Inspite of all the gloom and doom, there is a silver lining. Social
Networking and Social Applications are seeing a boom. Chris Hughes, a former founder of
Facebook, ran Obama's media campaign and, arguably, contributed to his
victory. Several athletes gave us first person reports from Beijing and
provided us personal insights immediately after their events. "myPicks Beijing 2008" and "myPicks
U.S. Election 2008" were social networking applications built
on zembly that ran successfully during these two global events.
We are bound to see a turnaround in 2009. Crowd sourcing and social
media are just a natural way for the web to evolve. I believe
that zembly is poised to be "the right
product at the right time" in this turnaround. There is certainly a lot
to look forward to in 2009.
Thursday Jan 01, 2009
