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The Next Big Thing |
HenryTo
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 Posted: Sat May 09, 2009 7:50 pm Post subject: The Next Big Thing |
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Courtesy of Stanford's Entrepreneurship Corner:
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2112
| Quote: | | Three Silicon Valley dealmakers - Tony Perkins, CEO of AlwaysOn; Tim Draper, Founder and Managing Director of Draper, Fisher Jurvetson; and Michael Moe, Founding Partner of ThinkEquity - discuss the evolutions in online media, the power of partnerships, and other next-generation opportunities for the global marketplace. |
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rffrydr
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Sun Jun 21, 2009 1:20 pm Post subject: |
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Why "free" is the future of business. A Wired.com article by Chris Anderson, author of the "Long Tail":
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?currentPage=all
| Quote: | FREE CHANGES EVERYTHING
Between digital economics and the wholesale embrace of King's Gillette's experiment in price shifting, we are entering an era when free will be seen as the norm, not an anomaly. How big a deal is that? Well, consider this analogy: In 1954, at the dawn of nuclear power, Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, promised that we were entering an age when electricity would be "too cheap to meter." Needless to say, that didn't happen, mostly because the risks of nuclear energy hugely increased its costs. But what if he'd been right? What if electricity had in fact become virtually free?The answer is that everything electricity touched — which is to say just about everything — would have been transformed. Rather than balance electricity against other energy sources, we'd use electricity for as many things as we could — we'd waste it, in fact, because it would be too cheap to worry about.
All buildings would be electrically heated, never mind the thermal conversion rate. We'd all be driving electric cars (free electricity would be incentive enough to develop the efficient battery technology to store it). Massive desalination plants would turn seawater into all the freshwater anyone could want, irrigating vast inland swaths and turning deserts into fertile acres, many of them making biofuels as a cheaper store of energy than batteries. Relative to free electrons, fossil fuels would be seen as ludicrously expensive and dirty, and so carbon emissions would plummet. The phrase "global warming" would have never entered the language.
Today it's digital technologies, not electricity, that have become too cheap to meter. It took decades to shake off the assumption that computing was supposed to be rationed for the few, and we're only now starting to liberate bandwidth and storage from the same poverty of imagination. But a generation raised on the free Web is coming of age, and they will find entirely new ways to embrace waste, transforming the world in the process. Because free is what you want — and free, increasingly, is what you're going to get. |
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rffrydr
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Fri May 29, 2009 7:26 pm Post subject: |
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Signs of a pinkberry/yogurt bubble:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203658504574189993176077028.html
| Quote: | Six months later, the Pinkberry was so crowded neighbors were complaining about the lines and the city sent extra traffic cops to the scene. Today there are 73 stores in New York and California, and last year, despite the recession, the company got $27.5 million from a venture-capital firm founded by Starbucks Corp. Chairman Howard Schultz.
For most of that time, Mr. Lee’s abode was a futon in his design office. But in 2007, with Pinkberry booming, he began hunting for a contemporary. Last summer, while being shown a home by his agent, Mr. Lee looked up the hill and spied his dream.
It wasn’t for sale. Undeterred, Mr. Lee asked his agent to contact the owner anyway and arranged a tour that day. Inside, he immediately fell in love with the design, particularly the way the baseboards met seamlessly flush to the walls. He offered $3.5 million on the spot. The owner, Steve Kent, an architect who had been building the house for his own family, accepted. “In this economy I couldn’t turn that down,” he says. |
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HenryTo
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| Posted: Sun May 24, 2009 11:52 am Post subject: |
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Many subscribers have asked me where the "next big trend" or "next bubble" would be. The most popular candidates have been alternative energy, biotechnology, nanotechnology, China, India, etc. The following article suggests that when it does come, we may not be able to identify it in the traditional sense:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/business/24unboxed.html?_r=1&ref=technology
| Quote: | There was a rich vein of business-school research supporting the notion that innovation comes most naturally from small-scale outsiders. That was the headline point that a generation of business people, venture investors and policy makers took away from Clayton M. Christensen’s 1997 classic, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” which examined the process of disruptive change.
But a shift in thinking is under way, driven by altered circumstances. In the United States and abroad, the biggest economic and social challenges — and potential business opportunities — are problems in multifaceted fields like the environment, energy and health care that rely on complex systems.
Solutions won’t come from the next new gadget or clever software, though such innovations will help. Instead, they must plug into a larger network of change shaped by economics, regulation and policy. Progress, experts say, will depend on people in a wide range of disciplines, and collaboration across the public and private sectors.
“These days, more than ever, size matters in the innovation game,” said John Kao, a former professor at the Harvard business school and an innovation consultant to governments and corporations.In its economic recovery package, the Obama administration is financing programs to generate innovation with technology in health care and energy. The government will spend billions to accelerate the adoption of electronic patient records to help improve care and curb costs, and billions more to spur the installation of so-called smart grids that use sensors and computerized meters to reduce electricity consumption. |
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