Mar

29

Technology and Changing the World: Trends roundup - March 29, 2008

Filed Under business, changing the world, entrepreneurship, microfinance, mobile, passion, poverty, regular reads, startup, technology, things to ponder about | Leave a Comment

This post consists of my “value-added” thoughts on David Kirkpatrick’s article on Fortune here.

Since I love all things technology and passionately believe that it wields the power to change the world, these numbers are just plain interesting to me. I’ve overlayed on the data some general technology trends on Web 2.0 startups, venture capital, microfinance and poverty, all cleverly slapped into one big fat blog post. Why? Because they’re all inter-connected, and I haven’t written anything all this week (been so darn busy lately!) Off we go.

Indonesia:
- 1 in 100 owns a PC
- 1 in 1,000 has broadband Internet
- 63 million cell phone subscribers, representing 27% of the population (of 234 million)
- Annual cell phone subscription growth rate: 36%

India:
- 166 million cell phone users
- Last year’s cell phone subscription growth rate was 84.5%

Switzerland:
- The Swiss have 85.1 PCs per 100 persons, beating the United States at 80.3 PCs per 100 persons

Global PC penetration is 12.9 for every 100 people. Room for growth? You bet. Many of PC owners are obviously in well developed countries, and not poor countries with lots of people. OLPC’s efforts to reach the billions at the BoP will move the needle here, if they succeed. Not forgetting the “middle” market, more of those who are neither rich nor poor will also buy computers and get on the internet. (Better start loading up on some PC stocks!) But wait, am I sure that the middle-class is not going to get poorer and not buy computers? Well the stats from Hans Rosling’s TED talk show that the overall trend here is that the world is slowly digging itself out of poverty, and I take comfort in that. Actually, read on below as I describe another trend that supports that.

Now, for some cell phone stats:

United States:
- 77.4 subscribers per 100 people
- Everywhere in Europe (except Turkey) exceeds penetration in US. Italy is at a whopping 135.1 cellphone subscribers per 100 persons.
- Hong Kong beats the US in penetration too, at 135.3

The global average is 41.6 per 100 people.

Cellphone usage growth in fast growing markets last year*:
- Peru: 57%
- Vietnam: 114%
- Pakistan: 170%
- Ukraine: 185%

*numbers might be fuzzy, but they show a general trend

What’s also important to note about this upward trend in adoption is that mobile phones were the crucial piece that first enabled the poor in Bangladesh to get out of poverty (see section on Village Phone). Women built business models around it and turned it into a source of income. These days, mobile phones are also playing another role in microfinance: enabling the transfer of money and information over, well, mobile phones! In poor countries, a brick-and-mortar bank branches with ATMs are hard to come by (ditto for computers and broadband), so mobile phones are serving this unmet need, facilitating microfinance and thus helping reduce poverty.

Other interesting stats:
- 1.3 billion of global population connected to the Internet, compound annual growth of 20.3% for past 8 years.
- Internet ad spending of $40 billion is only 6.6% of global total of $605 billion and is growing at 33%. (Ha, I should double down on this little company while I can!)

Data from 2008 Global Internet Snapshot compiled by Imran Khan, senior analyst at JP Morgan. (hmm, can anyone get me access to that full report?)

That’s why medium and big tech companies can weather the unfavorable US economy trend by going abroad. Fruit trees in your backyard not yielding? Then go after the greener pastures outside of your backyard too. It’s called diversifying. That’s the other thing I love about software is that it’s not a physical object–a computer scientist can create value with merely a laptop (and some coffee!) The cost of making that first software copy is the most expensive, then every other subsequent copy ad infinitum is basically free. This is just the nature of information economics, and has obviously served Microsoft very well. Actually, tiny tech startups can do this too — by leveraging the distribution power of this thing they call the internets.
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Mar

22

The missing middle: SME

Filed Under changing the world, microfinance, poverty, wokai | Leave a Comment

Food for thought: In rich countries, SME’s (small and medium enterprises) represent more than 50% of the country’s GDP and 2/3 of the jobs in private sector. This engine for growth that sits between microenterprises and large corporations is clearly missing, a hamper on a poor country’s effort to bail itself out of poverty.

Google’s success is also because they had access to finance and well developed capital markets. SME’s in poor countries lack access to both. Google strives to bring these opportunities available to silicon valley entrepreneurs and take them global. A global silicon valley, imagine that! Silicon valleys that span nations, uniting the world :)

Opportunities are difficult to come by when you just simply don’t have them. It’s like looking for a job when you have no experience, having all your prospective employers say, “show me some experience.” Likewise, this is a catch-22. I have to say, I know this first hand … and I absolutely value opportunity, never taking it for granted. The one thing worse than wasting money is wasting human potential.

This short video clip says it all. The stories are typical. An entrepreneur goes to the local bank, wanting a loan to open a school and educate children. Banks say, “show me 2-3 years of your cash-flow.”

Cash flow?!?!!!
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Mar

18

The best thing I read today

Filed Under career, failure, fear, passion, perseverance, product management, quotes, self improvement, things to ponder about, things to remind myself, values | Leave a Comment

Question: Describe your job in one sentence.
Answer: The art of prospering between a rock and a hard place.

That reminds me of a quote:

There are really only two ways to approach life - as victim or as gallant fighter - and you must decide if you want to act or react, deal your own cards or play with a stacked deck. And if you don’t decide which way to play with life, it always plays with you.
– Merle Shain

Which reminds of awesome book I read titled “The Pathfinder” by Nicholas Lore–which I highly recommend. (Thanks for the recommendation, Becks!)

You can at any moment, take flight on new wings into an unprecedented life making a choice for vitality, for living fully, for LIFE spelled in capital letters. It is, however, an expensive journey. You pay by giving up the familiar, comfortable, everyday ways of living and thinking that are the wages and rewards of going with the flow of your programming.

The willingness to feel fear and keep going forward distinguishes the living from the merely breathing. In fact, it is not just the so-called negative emotions that are uncomfortable. When you choose to live fully, your palate of experiences, thoughts, emotions, and possibilities expands. This leads you onto new ground in other areas of your life as well. And, folks, all that newness swirling around just ain’t comfortable.

The question is not whether to take risks, but which ones to take. The peril of being reasonable is that you will miss all the fun. It’s not enough to cautiously edge your way towards the cliff. Learn to revel in taking risks for the sake of your soul. Every choice you make gives birth instantly to certain risks as surely as your shadow follows you.

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Mar

16

Failure quotes roundup!

Filed Under failure, fear, perseverance, quotes, things to remind myself | Leave a Comment

Time for another quotes roundup! These are things I wish to remind myself and hope to never forget:

Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.
–Winston Churchill

Not doing more than the average is what keeps the average down.
–William M. Winans

Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
–Ralph Ellison

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err.
–Mohandas K. Gandhi

I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: which is: Try to please everybody.
–Herbert B. Swope

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and “mangled mind” leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
–Elizabeth Drew

My will shall shape the future. Whether I fail or succeed shall be no man’s doing but my own. I am the force; I can clear any obstacle before me or I can be lost in the maze. My choice; my responsibility; win or lose, only I hold the key to my destiny.
–Elaine Maxwell

The deepest human defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become.
–Ashley Montagu

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
–Anais Nin

Mar

14

Pricing information itself as a product

Filed Under business, did you know, marketing, product management | Leave a Comment

Have you ever tried looking up stock prices online? Let’s say we look up the ticker symbol GOOG on Yahoo! Finance:

yhooticker

Hmm. It says, “Quotes delayed for <ticker symbol>. Get streaming real-time quotes - FREE TRIAL”. And this is the same ticker symbol on MSN Money:

msnticker

Quotes on MSN Money are delayed 15 minutes. Now how about we just look up Google’s stock price on well, Google themselves! This is Google Finance:

googticker

15 minute stock quote delay. Ever wonder why that is?

It’s a pricing strategy. The product here is information–the price of the stock quote. They segmented their customers into those who are casual surfers (who may or may not care about investing) from those who are serious stock traders (stock prices accurate up to the nearest millisecond is critical!). The perceived value of the same piece of information is different to each consumer.

If you suffered from some life-threatening disease and have a week left to live, how much you would pay for information of a possible cure? (note: I said “possible” cure) I’m sure you would sell off everything you have for that information, maybe even taking on a loan. Now if I told you that I have information for a verified cure, but you don’t have the disease, how much would you pay for the information now? None.

This is pretty much the same thing. Companies that are in the business of selling information, are always looking for ways to generate a bigger return from their “product”, and this is one of them — by extracting more money from people who are willing to pay the price.
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Mar

10

Inveneo: The battle against information poverty

Filed Under changing the world, entrepreneurship, innovation, passion, startup, technology | Leave a Comment


While most of us in the well developed parts of the world battle attention poverty (I’ve come to peace with the fact that I will *never* be able to keep up with all of my RSS feeds!), we forget that this is actually a luxurious problem to have. Many in the underdeveloped world face the opposite problem: information poverty–the lack of access to information, which in turn means lack of access to knowledge and education, which really feeds back into the cycle of financial poverty.

As more people hop on the internet bandwagon in the developed world at rates that dwarf technology adoption in the poor countries, this will obviously further increase the gap between the rich and the poor–which we all know is a not a good thing. If you are unable to find food to eat or medicine for your baby, would you consider violence and theft? Decision making under those circumstances are difficult. The poor becomes an easy target for people with bad intentions; can you imagine someone walking up to you with a gun and saying, “Fight for me, and I’ll give you food.”

This digital divide is not a newly discovered problem, and is actually one of the initiatives of the World Economic Forum. I’m passionate about technology because I believe it’s an enabler for a better quality of life. I’m excited that I’m not the only one who thinks so, and there is a real startup with real products with that same vision (imagine that!).

Inveneo says it well in their mission page:

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can:

  • help save lives (rural healthcare and relief)
  • provide better economic opportunities (agriculture, market access)
  • help enforce human rights (monitoring/reporting)
  • offer a better future for children (education)

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Mar

7

Towards a greener computer–but what does that really do?

Filed Under cleantech, did you know, geeky, hardware, ideas, innovation, technology, things to ponder about | Leave a Comment

MSI announced that the company has recently invented the world’s first powerless air cooler for computer motherboards. For those new to computer hardware, as we ignore Moore’s Law and advance computer technologies by making them faster and store more data, cramming more and more transistors into a piece of silicon, the heat generated by all these components start becoming a non-negligible problem–as anyone managing a data center with hundreds of computers will identify with.

There are many ways to cool the insides of a computer, but the most common is through the use of heatsinks and fan’s. Computer hardware junkies prefer a more advanced hack: liquid cooling, a more quiet and efficient (and l33t) way of dissipating heat from their overclocked CPU’s. This invention by MSI makes the fan inside your computer power-free, thus less power drawn from the computer power supply.

The basic idea employed here is one derived from the Stirling Engine. MSI’s invention captures the heat from the component, whose energy is then converted to push the fan blades around, which in turn cools the heatsink.

From their press release:

The “Air Power Cooler” transfers the chipset heat into air momentum, when the air becomes hot, the air will expand then push the fan to rotate and In doing so cooling the heatsink immediately. After the air moves from the bottom to top of the piston, the air will become heavy to push the up piston down. The better air piston design can transfer over 70% heat power and transfer to air power, that’s great efficiency transfer from Stirling engine theory. In a comparison with solar power the transfer rate is only around 20~30% requiring more surface and as a result cost.

I think the claim of besting solar power is interesting, but would like to see some independent tester verify that statement (just for my assurance that this isn’t the typical corporate PR mudslinging nonsense).

This actually reminds me of Tesla Motors’ regenerative braking system. Energy from deceleration is captured and stored for later use in acceleration. Genius!

In a battery-powered electric vehicle, regenerative braking (also called regen) is the conversion of the vehicle’s kinetic energy into chemical energy stored in the battery, where it can be used later to drive the vehicle. It is braking because it also serves to slow the vehicle. It is regenerative because the energy is recaptured in the battery where it can be used again.

Tesla Motors is an interesting electric car startup in Silicon Valley headed up by Elon Musk (of PayPal fame), who also started SpaceX and SolarCity (I’m an admirer!).

But I digress.
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Mar

3

$3Bil USD poured into cleantech in 2007, 10Bil projected by 2009

Filed Under cleantech | Leave a Comment

Can the solar system drop it like it’s hot?

Venture capitalists keep putting more green into green technology.

In 2007, venture investors globally backed 221 companies developing so-called clean technologies with $3 billion, according to data released from Dow Jones VentureSource, up from $2.1 billion invested in 173 deals in 2006. VentureSource is owned by Dow Jones & Co., the publisher of this newsletter.

The U.S. led all geographic regions in venture investing in the category, according to the data, accounting for 83% of global investment in 2007.

Venture investors remain bullish on the sector, despite some rumblings in the industry that there may be a cleantech bubble that formed in the last year.

“[Cleantech] is going into very diverse markets that are enormous and can sustain a tremendous amount of capital and new technology,” said Michael Bevan, managing director of Radnor, Pa.-based cleantech venture firm Element Partners.
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