Archive for the ‘innovation’ Category

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Shai’s Divide and Conquer!

Monday, April 13th, 2009

Shai Agassi is a real genius—one of my rock stars that I’m just dying to meet. I’ve already got to meet the other big name in electric cars, Elon Musk from Tesla.

He has said before that he’s good at break big problems into smaller problems, solving the pieces, then aggregating the results. I’m not familiar with his work at SAP, but clearly he’s proved this with his divide-and-conquer approach to problem solving here. Computer scientists make some of the best problem solvers out there.

In this TED talk, Shai talks about a shift in thinking: viewing the electric car’s battery a discrete unit that’s interchangeable, vs. today’s mentality where the car is one with the fuel tank (who would buy a car without a fuel tank, or vice versa?)

I’ve previously blogged about unbundling production from delivery before with examples of Amazon.com and it’s IT infrastructure, mobile phones as a poverty buster, and this is kind of like that, but with other concepts tied in – e.g. subsidized pricing (e.g. like how cell phones are subsidized by carriers).

The analogy Elon Musk uses (I can’t find where he said this, but I swear I remember him saying this), is like air travel today. I can fly to Europe from California for $500. But that’s because I’m not the first person to ever fly on that plane, nor will I be the last; the same air plane gets reused over and over for many flights. The point here is that the owner of the plane doesn’t have to recoup the cost of the plane with a single flight, it is done over a period of time. The higher the utilization rate, the faster they recoup the investment.

That’s why Elon’s SpaceX goal of building a reusable rocket is so revolutionary (most people don’t realize this) and is an important step for man-kind. Imagine being able to fly to the moon or other planets in our solar system for the price of a flight ticket?

Back to Better Place. In Shai’s talk, he shows how battery for electric cars follow a Moore’s law-like curve; battery prices will drop as its technology increases. By unbundling the ownership of the car and the battery, you can increase the utilization rate per battery which result in people owning these cars having access to the latest and most efficient battery at that time (vs. someone stuck with the same battery for the lifespan of the car). Small but important point.

Shai’s a very cool guy who is literally, changing the world. I’m a big fan.

Check out his TED talk if you haven’t already!

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Posted in changing the world, cleantech, entrepreneurship, ideas, innovation, passion, people i like, startup, technology | No Comments »

Health care technology, the stimulus and opportunity

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

Padmasree Warrior (@padmasree), Cisco’s CTO and until recently, one of the top candidates for America’s CTO position was recently interviewed on Technology Review. I recently watched her interview on Web 2.0 expo and could certainly tell that this is someone who is a real visionary, certainly someone to pay attention to. Some clips from her interview from MIT’s interview below.

TR: But how does more broadband installation boost the economy, beyond creating one-off construction jobs?

PW: There are many areas we can look at, such as modernizing health care with health-presence solutions–like a doctor from a remote area interacting with a patient who might not otherwise have access–and making the energy grid more efficient with smart-grid technologies. Collaboration, virtual networking, and visual communications will be the e-businesses of the next decade, and this will drive productivity. To do all of that, we need to have broadband connectivity nationwide.

Given my interest in using technology to help people (health care an obvious application), I thought this point was interesting. On a related note, there’s a new stimulus bill that mandates MDs to now electronic-ize all patient data, and most doctors don’t know how to navigate these techie waters.

To a techie, it’s quite amazing to see how health care is so .. for lack of a better word, backwards. Systems that don’t talk to each other creating separate data silos (in Web 2.0, data overlayed with other data creates even more richer data), programs written in MS-DOS (seriously?), and they still use the fax to transmit data (have you heard of this thing called the Internet?)

One of the ways entrepreneurs look for opportunities is to ask themselves, “What industry has not seen any innovation breakthroughs in a long time?” Paypal came about because the financial industry have remained stagnant for a long time prior to that. Health care is another area. And now with the stimulus/mandate in America .. it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing some creative software startups tackling this problem.

Tom Siebel (of Siebel Systems) has identified health care as one of the worlds largest looming problems, and will present an opportunity for not just good but GREAT companies to capitalize on.

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Tom Siebel on problems to focus on – if you’d like to change the world

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Tom Siebel (from fame of Siebel Systems) identifies the next opportunities for entrepreneurs looking to change the world. Using surfing as an anology, these are the waves in the horizon—you have to paddle hard and fast now before it reaches you. The IT wave has already floated us far. And although IT will still play a large role in solving these problems, these are the broader world problems that need to be solved (technology is just the conduit for the solution).

The big problems are .. *drumroll*:

  • food
  • water
  • healthcare
  • energy

Counterintuitively for most technologists, these are all “lower in the stack” type problems. Why? Because more people are living longer/child mortality rates improving (thanks to advances in health care), hence an aging population – with inadequate health care infrastructure, especially in China.

Here are some notes from the Mark Logic CEO’s blog (that I mostly cut-and-pasted here, thanks to Dave Kellogg for actually transcribing):

  • He (Tom Siebel) did a long riff contrasting the period from 1980 to 2000 with what he anticipates in the period from 2010 to 2030.
  • The 1980 to 2000 period was a paradise of government policies, efficient capital markets, and a free flow of capital to information technology that ultimately created a $1T information technology industry.
  • IT growth was 17% CAGR from 1980 to 2000. From 2000 it grows, he says, with GDP at a rate more like 3%. “The party here is over.”
  • “It’s done. Tell me the next step that’s a replacement technology. Right now it’s all bells and whistles.”
  • The big picture from 2010 to 2030, he says, is (1) increased government regulation, (2) exponential population growth, (3) aging population, (4) increased demand for healthcare (of which 85% of an individual’s lifetime consumption is spent in the last year of life), and (5) energy scarcity.
  • It took from 8000 BC to 1750 AD to grow the world population to 1B. In 2008, it’s 6.5B. In 2028 it will be 9B. (Says the guy next to me: “and they’re all going to need to buy things — how is this bad?”)
  • These trends make for the following opportunities: (1) food, (2) water, (3) energy, and (4) healthcare.
  • Per-capita energy population is increasing exponential. So if you combine exponential population growth with exponential per-capita energy consumption, you end up with energy demand that is — pardon the expression — exponential squared.
  • He then discussed the concept of peak oil, an idea that I’d heard of but that I hadn’t known was postulated in the 1950s by an engineer at Shell. By 2020/2030, says Siebel, this gets to be a real problem.
  • He then said we have two choices: drill / drill / drill or invent / invent / invent.
  • He then discussed two initiatives he’s working on: (1) an Energy-Free Home Challenge that is soon to be formally announced, and (2) a new company called C3 that he was involved in founding.
  • The Energy-Free Home Challenge is a contest with $20M in prizes paid for by the Siebel Foundation (2007 annual report here). The goal is to find a way to build houses that consume net zero energy at the end of a year, built with no more expense than traditional construction methods.
  • C3 (which I think is related to the acronym carbon-conscious consumer) is a new company, run by Siebel veteran Pat House, that will make enterprise software to help companies manage their carbon footprint. The company started by calling together a panel of 29 experts during the summer of 2008. “Deliberations were concluded 12/08.” C3 was founded last month, in 1/09. Operations will begin in 2/09. The product spec will be completed by summer 09. And — if I heard correctly — they will have demonstrable product one quarter later in fall 09. (And one heck of a development team if they can actually build a product in a quarter.)
  • C3′s goal is to help companies “monitor, mitigate, and monetize” their carbon footprint. I tried for about 15 minutes to find a website for the firm and failed. If you find one, let me know via a comment and I’ll link it here.
  • Almost to the point of comedy Siebel strained to not position C3 as an information technology company, despite the fact that it will sell enterprise software. “C3 is an energy tech company.” “IT is incidental to C3.” “C3 will not have an IT rate of growth.” (How quickly they turn.)

Check the entire podcast for the entire story with stats.

Tom Siebel – Emerging Opportunities in a Post IT Marketplace

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Posted in changing the world, entrepreneurship, innovation, problem-opportunity, stanford, things to ponder about, trends | 1 Comment »

Test of Innovation

Monday, February 2nd, 2009

The test of innovation lies not in its novelty, its scientific content, or its cleverness. It lies in its success in the marketplace
—Peter Drucker

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The importance of also being technical (not just strictly business)

Sunday, September 21st, 2008

It’s not enough to be just business-savvy, especially in a technology venture — one must also be tech-savvy. Despite what people say about why today is a bad day to begin majoring in computer science because all the jobs in the US are being offshored to China and India, I still humbly largely disagree, because tech companies are still hungry for talent.

Obviously, with globalization and the flattening of the world, if all you do at work is push a button, then your job is most probably by and large a candidate for offshoring. If someone in China or India can push the same button for a fraction of what you’re being paid ..why should the company not use them? The point I’m trying to make is that it’s still great to be in tech – as long as you’re not complacent. You have to differentiate yourself and actually be useful/valuable (imagine that!)

Why are science and technology so important today?  We are living in times of intense change, a point I tried to cover in my post on Innovation last week.  In any kind of system or organization, the more components the system has, the faster those individual components are changing, and the more integrated the components are, the harder it is to predict how that system or organization will evolve into the future.  The system becomes “emergent,” a term used to describe highly interactive, complex systems whose behavior — indeed, whose very nature — is essentially unpredictable.

It is not hard to see how our world, its institutions, perhaps even our personal lives are becoming increasingly “emergent”, that is, hard to predict.  Technology is changing at a prodigious rate, new products and services are born almost every day, and to top it all off, ever since the Internet hit in the mid ’90s, we are living in an increasingly interconnected, global world.  If your business and/or your life feel more chaotic . . . . it is because they are. (Or, at least, they look chaotic through the lens of our familiar paradigms.)

And .. the reason why I wake up in the morning, the reason why I’m proud to be a computer scientist,

To a good scientist or engineer, all this complexity and seeming unpredictability is fun. It’s in times like these that the most important innovations happen. Scientists love to explain what is going on in a complex world in the simplest, most elegant way possible, so you can analyze the options, make sense of what is going on, and take the proper actions.  Engineers love to solve problems and build things, and the more sophisticated the problem or thing you want to design and build, the more good engineering you need.

Emphasis is mine. Cutting through complexity is not just an important technical skill to have, it’s an important business skill for CEOs as well. “Cutting through clutter” is something Ram Charan talks about. I’ve blogged about him here and here before.

(more…)

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