I recently got to speak with Rob Passarella who was working on the postponed 2009 Money:Tech Conference.

Rob has some big ideas that I will be sharing over two posts. We both agreed that this year more than any in recent memory is truly the time for the financial and technology communities to come together to let innovation lead us forward.

Our discussion started with Rob pointing out an often overlooked fact: In pre-dotcom days finance was the field that often employed the biggest innovators, computer geeks and hackers. Top talent from MIT, CalTech and IBM would often get swooped up by firms like Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Bear. In fact Google’s CIO, Ben Fried and founder of Del.icio.us Joshua Schrater are great examples of technology talent who emerged from the ranks of investment banks. A connection between finance and technology has always existed, even if it has not produced a tremendous amount of public startup activity in recent years.

According to Rob, a monumental ruling forever impacting the role of information advantage within finance was Elliot Spitzer’s ‘Global Settlement’ in 2003. The issue was that investment firms were asserting inappropriate influence over their research analysts as tied into investment bankers lucrative fees. As a result, firms literally had to insulate their banking and analysis departments from each other both physically and with Chinese walls (Wikipedia). It was about this same time that new publishing tools: blogs, rss and early social media began to emerge. These publishing tools, coupled with new distribution outlets led to the start of a massive shift in power (and influence) among outcast financial researchers and analysts. Technology now empowered analysts to break away from traditional institutions and strike out on their own – all while maintaining the same levels of credibility among their peers that they enjoyed while under the corporate umbrella.

However, not only did the ruling and technology shift empower already established individuals, but it also gave rise to a new wave of individuals who could build credibility and a public brand on their own. Examples include publicly blogging their trades on Covestor, interacting with a network of finance geeks using applications like StockTwits and the emergence of blogs as media outlets. An amazing example is Barry Ritholtz’s, The Big Picture, a blog covering macro perspectives on the capital markets and which is frequently quoted in leading publications such as the New York Times and FT. Likewise for David Malpass of Gildertech.com. That an individual’s voice could compete with traditional corporate media on such lofty topics was unthinkable only a few years ago. Finally, the new channels also allowed Wall Street analysis to finally step pass the ‘herd mentality’ so prevalent in the glory days. Individuals could freely promote their owncontrarian or simply far-out perspectives opening up massive new opportunities for insight and strategy.

Technology has a rich history within the halls of finance, but we are only just at the brink for the next wave of innovation…

In part two of this interview I’ll explore which areas Rob views as having the most opportunity for innovation in 2009.

Also, if you were a presenter at Money:Tech and would still like your voice/ideas/materials to be shared, please ping me and I’d be more than happy to open my blog up to continue this discussion

Finally, please subscribe to my RSS feed so you can receive new posts as I write them.

When used properly Delicious is the #1 way I have found to quickly capture key information for future reference and effectively disseminate non-critical information among teams.

After reading this post you will understand the following:

1) Why social bookmarking matters more than ever
2) Why EVERY business should be using Delicious
3) How to actually setup Delicious so that you will use it (24/7!)

Why Social Bookmarking Matters More Than Ever.

If you don’t know what social bookmarking is, watch this video primer.

Information is growing exponentially. There are well over 15 billion web pages on the Internet. It is estimated that 40 exabytes of unique information will be created this year alone — that’s more information than was created in the last 5,000 years combined! Individuals can no longer keep up with such exponential information growth despite information being more valuable than ever. That’s where social media comes in to save the day. By leveraging technology like Delicious, savvy Internet users can leverage social and technology filters to rapidly identify the MOST CRUCIAL information. Delicious is an awesome example of this in practice. While saving and sharing personal bookmarks is great (how is explained below) there are two additional critical steps to optimal efficiency. First is to leverage the power of a network. How? Simply browse the bookmarks of your network and save the most relevant ones. Let them do the grunt work of discovery! The second critical step is to utilize ‘subscriptions,’ that is, you can subscribe to keywords or tags. Thus whenever anyone on Delicious tags a new web service, or blog post with a tag you care about, you will automatically be notified. With virtually no additional effort you can have a team of free researchers working for you, delivering the key information you need in real-time and allowing you to decide what is worth reading and/or keeping for future reference.

Using this technique, not only will you discover more relevant content than you ever could on your own, but you will save tons of time and benefit from the descriptions and context accompanying each bookmark.

Why EVERY business should be using Delicious.

All businesses (especially startups) need to be on their game to succeed in our current marketplace. Information is truly a competitive advantage, especially when resources are limited. This is especially true for webstartups because the field of technology is so dynamic (new techniques and strategies are constantly popping up) making it imperative thatstartups understand their operating environment. If you are at an information disadvantage, you cannot execute properly or make informed decisions.

This means that someone must pay attention to almost everything, including:

-Overall industry trends
-Competitors
-References to your brand and product(s)
-Technology hacks, advances and pitfalls
-Experienced persons sharing their failures, successes and insights

While it may seem way too much to pay attention to, it’s 100% necessary. So what can you do about it?

How to actually setup Delicious so that you will use it.

Delicious.com as a standalone website sucks. It’s worthless. Thank God for Firefox and the notion of plugins. Plugins are incredibly valuable because 100% of the time you spend online, you spend accessing the web from a browser. Plugins reside in the actual browser allowing fast access and valuable functionality. For example, rather than having to remember to log-into specific websites, plugins allow you to semi-passively use their services. Delicious plugins are no different — but the trick is you need to download two of them:

First, download and install Delicious Bookmarks, the official Firefox add-on for Delicious.

Second, download and install Delicious Buttons which will put ‘tagging’ and del.icio.us search access into the toolbar.

Now you’re ready to rock! As long as you surf the web with Firefox, you will be able to save a website, chunk or text, or image in less than a few seconds. One small trick I use is to make sure to highlight sections of text and then click, “Save New Bookmark” from the Delicious Toolbar Menu. This insures that each bookmark will be saved with some accompanying text helping to remember key points and the reason why you saved it.

Example of highlighting a chunk of text and then selecting “save a new bookmark” from the toolbar…

Once you select “save a new bookmark” the text goes into the Notes section and you can add Tags…

My next post will describe how to maximize Delicious, including: adding subscriptions, building a network and tagging strategies

I love any sort of hack or opportunity allowing me a ‘sneak peak’ inside the minds of persons’ whose intellect or innovative thinking I admire. One of my favorite things to do is to peruse someone’s personal library, either in their home or office, to gain a better understanding of what they value and/or think of as important reference points. This same logic is also behind my infatuation with Del.icio.us — it’s an opportunity to passively follow what others deem as worthy of attention and future thought. Social bookmarking sites are the modern bookshelves of our times.

So it turns out that Twitter also has a feature allowing me the same type of insights: “favourites.” It hadn’t occurred to me before, but Twitter actually makes publicly available those Tweets that any Twitter user has marked as a favorite (to mark a tweet as a favorite simply scroll over the tweet and click the star).  So here is the hack — in order to see what any Twitter User has been marking as favourites, simply use this logic: http://twitter.com/username/favourites. As an example, here are my recent favorites. Also by simply clicking on “Favvorites” when viewing your “all your friends feed” you can quickly see what Tweets your network has recently deemed important.  Not only is this a great discovery mechanism for content and ideas but it’s also a great way to find new people to follow.

For some this concept of public favorites on Twitter may be obvious, but since it just came across my radar screen I figured I’d share

Update: I may be wrong, but I believe that Favrd is a site that creates a daily leader board of most favorite-ed Tweets

Yes, prediction posts are laregly a waste of time.

I did a prediction post last year but in the spirit of admitting “What the F&%k do I really know?” I figured I would forgo predictions and instead compile a small list of observations and personal wishes for trends going into 2009. The reason for this is that I embrace any time the blogging collective ‘stops following the herd’ and ACTUALLY focuses on free thinking and thought leadership. I enjoy this tremendously more than the Techmeme game and hope such spirit can find it’s way into more mainstream posting.

Now onto my observations and hopes for 2009…

Minimalism en Vogue. Between our troubling economic times and the well documented cognitive benefits of reducing clutter, I fully expect the role of minimalism as a lifestyle choice to be front and center. As people question the economic and cognitive value of material possessions as well as those services consuming our attention (the most valuable asset), I expect our web applications, consumer mentality, and personal environmental choices to be reflective of fewer, but more valuable/multi-purpose things. Small is the new big.

Passive Data Collection. One of the primary benefits to interacting through technology mediums is the ability for our activity to be logged, filtered and made intelligent. Imagine your own personal “cookies.” I think one of the biggest trends for the 2009+ will be applications that a) make sense of and b) help predict/provide future recommendations based on things we are already doing; i.e. requiring no additional work on our part. Great examples are RescueTime and Google Web History. RescueTime is a desktop app running in the background to let you know how much time you spend using various applications or on various websites. Google Trends allows you to see your search histories in Google, including frequency of queries and other sites that may be of interest to you.

Personal Health Monitoring. At Workstreamer, one of our new favorite applications is Daily Mile. Daily Mile is a great example of a new breed of web apps and smart toys (see below) that are focused on making a healthy lifestyle both an interactive and social experience. Personal health is such an important issue in the face of lifestyle diseases and the ever increasing costs of healthcare. Example of smart toys with a fitness focus are Nike+ and Fitbit (one of the real crowd pleasers at Techcrunch50)

“Customers as Assets”. I wrote about this yesterday, citing a great quote:

It is amazing how fast the world changes. 50 years ago the biggest asset for most companies was their equipment. 15 years ago the biggest assets for most companies were their employees. Today, in 21st century – the time of social networks, the biggest assets for new companies are their customers. All this suggests that an entirely new revenue models need to be created – models, where customers give and receive back something of higher value than their own contribution. The new companies’ role is to bring together people, who are able and willing to help each other. But how are they going to profit out of this? – by sharing profits with their customers.

Value Add Angels. I will post more on this later, but I see trends toward larger syndicates of angel investors where some subset of investors are not only investing cash, but also time, resources and social capital in much more front-and-center way. I believe that angels able to provide social capital and online presence will prove just as valuable, if not more so, than traditional dumb money. Ashton Kutcher, Tim Ferriss and Todd Stottlemyre are examples.

Personal Data Assets. I have long been an advocate of Del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site that logs all the websites, quotes and information I encounter throughout my day. Del.icio.us is truly my personal library. Yelp is another personal library I constantly use and share with friends. One thing that has hindered my use of these personal libraries in the past has been their reliance on the web/browser based. However, between the iPhone’s GPS functionality and Applications, I see personal data assets going mainstream and ultimately providing new monetization opportunities. Thses could well be blogs 2.0

Smart Toys. Toys that enable us to use our experiences and interactions with them in an intelligent manner. Nike+ is one the best examples I know of. That said, smart toys dont even need to exist in the physical sense; check out the virtual pets, FooPets and contrast with Pleo. 23andMe is another example of a company that I feel combines the excitement and fun of a toy with the real-world value of data for personal empowerment and health.

Technology Leadership. I really hope that technology and innovation are able to assert a leadership role in helping us transition into a new world of value creation and autonomous work. Read Michael Lewis’ great piece. As Mike Lazerow points out, the ‘secuirity society’ is dead. And as Malcolm Gladwell stated on Charlie Rose,

“Meaningful work is one of the most important things we can impart to children. If you think there’s always got to be a connection between what you put in and what you get out, then of course you’ll run off with a great excitement after an idea that catches your idea”

Technology can be the catalyst.

Web Enabled Education. Education has gotten far too expensive in an age when knowledge and expertise should be more accessible than ever. As people look to transition into new fields and/or develop new skill sets to embrace new conventions or stages in life (what’s retirement?) we need to find the platforms and outlets to disseminate that knowledge. I am particularly looking forward to following School of Everything, Path101 and EduFire.

Do you have more to add? Add a comment or subscribe to this blog

Last week Google Reader added a feature allowing “sharedâ€� blog posts to be made available to contacts (actually you were forced into sharing, but that’s another post). Initially I thought this was an amazing addition. Since I already share articles I deem particularly worthwhile with several friends via private feed, I was excited to share and receive lots of new great feeds and posts.

This concept of ‘public knowledge sharing’ is something I have done in Del.icio.us for a while. I invest a lot of time noting, organizing, and tagging my bookmarks because I see them as a real assets (wake up Yahoo!). For example, at a moment’s notice I could pull up 20 articles on the best strategies for naming a new company. I think this is so powerful.

My problem is as follows: Why am I being so nice to people? Admittedly, I never tell anyone who I am on Del.icio.us because I want to be somewhat protective over my bookmarks and notes. While I certainly take advantage of other people’s work, I’m not sure I want the same done to me. My 4000 bookmarks have taken me two years to build and yet I readily offer it up to anyone for free. In Google Reader I subscribe to over 250 blogs. As I pick and choose the best stories, should I so carelessly share insights and posts I recognize as valuable?

Part of me believes I should absolutely embrace open knowledge sharing. However, my capitalist half emphatically disagrees. My other 50% wants to keep my knowledge secret. In many ways, it’s my access to these personal knowledge bases that makes me valuable as a consultant and advisor.

Bottom line is Google Reader sharing has started to make me think long and hard about what I’m willing to do for others. I’m having difficulty drawing a distinction between what I consider ‘personal IP’ and what I consider information for the “social commons.â€�

—For posts on related topics please read: Why I Can’t Read Novels Anymore, Top Down Selection: Sifting for Information and How to Use Del.icio.us Bookmarking for Competitive Advantage

Update: Wired Magazine has a good article covering issues of information sharing:

“But beneath all the kumbayas, there’s an awkward dance going on, an unregulated give-and-take of information for which the rules are still being worked out. And in many cases, some of the big guys that have been the source of that data are finding they can’t — or simply don’t want to — allow everyone to access their information, Web2.0 dogma be damned.”

Apologies for my blogging absence. I have been cranking away on a few projects that have involved a bunch of travel and unfortunately its left me with little time.

I wanted to highlight a few of my favorite bookmarkers on Del.icio.us. These folks are really my lifeblood for inspiration. They are my private research army. Just as many people check their Google Reader daily, I constantly check my Del.icio.us network for updates. Often times these links and comments become the starting point for conversations and/or blog posts. Without my network, I would be decidedly less knowledgeable. I could go into detail here about each person, but instead, I encourage you to simply add them and then explore their collections for yourself:

5. Nivi
4. Bokardo
3. Jessesaves
2. Finnstones
1. Mediaeater

What do I mean?

Well it occurred to me just now that Yahoo already has its own version of human powered search. Yahoo owns Del.icio.us. I have been using Del.icio.us as my very own ’people powered’ search engine for months now without ever thinking about how similar it is to Mahalo. Del.icio.us is a social book marking site that allows tagging. Essentially as people surf the web they find websites and resources they like and then ’tag’ them with various intuitive keywords.

Because the people using Del.icio.us tend to be the higher IQ portion of society (you gotta be a geek to be using it; seriously!) it really is an exceptional content filter. By doing my keyword searches in Del.icio.us, I tend to get much more targeted and relevant search results. What’s more is that as more people save a bookmark, I deem those resources to be better. Thus a quick search for ’valuation’ and ’vc’ will result in much better results than if I did the same keyword search in Google (plus no ads). One feature I wish is that you could do keyword searches within your network, rather than only on the entire universe of users. That way, for example, if I knew five people in my network had niche expertise on say co-location hosting, I would do my searches for ’co-location hosting’ just among these experts.

If Yahoo was smart, they would figure out a way to integrate their more ’collectively intelligent’ search engine, Del.icio.us, into their main search site.

Oh, and Yahoo – if you choose to borrow my suggestion, I want credit for it. Thanks.

I have decided to share a big secret of mine. I have been stealing people’s knowledge for the last six months. In that time I have increased my expertise on subjects such as enterprise 2.0, social media, design, and hacks by 10x. How have I done it?

Del.icio.us

Many people use Del.icio.us, but forget that it’s also a social network. If someone knows your username, the default is that your bookmarks are shared with anyone else who finds your username and adds you to their network. I actually follow one VC who marks things as ‘target acquisition’ ‘“ you can’t tell me he’s purposely doing that. He has forgotten that Del.icio.us lets other people see what he is looking at. An insider’s snapshot into what someone sees as a valuable web resource. Even better, some people leave personal notes in the descriptor. That’s the best because they will tell me, for example, this designer is so and so’s cousin. Sweet ‘“ I just plug that info into my contacts, or just make an introduction on LinkedIn. I think of it as ‘networking 2.0.’

So how do I find what people’s user names are? Well, many people tell me on their blogs. Just follow their del.icio.us links and you’ll see who is publishing them. First letter of first name, last name, is also a common format. Some people have an email name they love, like DforDoug. If someone uses Del.icio.us I can figure out their name in very little time.

I love Del.icio.us and I thank all of you who have been making my life easier by finding me all these great resources and companies! Cheers!

—Want to learn exactly how I use Del.icio.us? Click here for an step-by-step explanation