Posts Tagged ‘innovation’

Google Goggles (Giggles)

Monday, December 7th, 2009

Google just publicly unveiled this Labs project today called Google Goggles. The project is still in its infancy but you can already see some preliminary results that show what a game changer this application will be (see the video).

Excerpt from the announcement:

A New Era of Computing

Mobile devices straddle the intersection of three significant industry trends: computing (or Moore’s Law), connectivity, and the cloud. Simply put:

  • Phones get more powerful and less expensive all the time
  • They’re connected to the Internet more often, from more places; and
  • They tap into computational power that’s available in datacenters around the world

These “Cs” aren’t new: we’ve discussed them in isolation for over 40 years. But today’s smartphones — for the first time — combine all three into a personal, handheld experience. We’ve only begun to appreciate the impact of these converged devices, but we’re pretty sure about one thing: we’ve moved past the PC-only era, into a world where search is forever changed.

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Ex-Google China Chief speaks on mobile internet, cloud computing, ecommerce

Monday, September 7th, 2009

It’s Labor Day, I’m still groggy from just waking up .. but this is a good piece worth sharing here if you’re looking for opportunities, and focused on mobile and cloud computing. Google’s China chief Kai-Fu Lee just left Google (some of us recall this as it was a controversial high profile hire because Lee was poached from Microsoft). Here’s what he is up to next, and his words from an interview with peHUB.

“There is a confluence of several things happening in China, and we’re at an inflection point of mobile Internet, cloud computing and ecommerce. It’s really now or never.

There is an abundance of companies here and VCs have lots of money, but there is a lack of angel funding and experienced entrepreneurs. It’s a compete imbalance. Whatever you might think of Y Combinator or Idealab in the U.S., the China market is different. China needs this type of business-building platform to hire and train people and provide angel funding, which is scarce.

There also is a worldwide economic crisis, which means that there is a bunch of strong talent out there that we want to hire, in order to start a lot of exicting businesses.“

On why it’s “now or never”, he says,

“Ecommerce in China has gone from 7% adoption to 25% adoption. Payment capabilities are just happening. Really, it’s a lot like the late 90s in the U.S. Remember how quickly Amazon and eBay and even Google search took off? You have to imagine the current Chinese Internet as news and games and blogging, but a big shift is inevitable. The average Chinese Internet user is just 25, compared to 42 in the U.S. That means they are getting older, getting more money, getting married, having kids… A rising ecommerce will lift all boats.

In terms of mobile, there are 650 million cell phones in China and mobile Internet usage is growing like crazy. It’s not just knowledge workers, but it’s also growing rapidly for groups like migrant workers and people making just a few dollars a day. They view it as the only way to access information, and with usage and volume a lot of things will grow.

There also is 3G, which is the one thing the Chinese government is going after and developing this year. In China, when the government wants to do something it happens.

For cloud computing: China has never really developed a software market, and what’s happening is like what’s happening in the U.S. – moving from packaged software to online or the cloud. In that process new businesses and models are starting to happen. If you look at the success of the Amazon platform or Google apps in the U.S., it will also be true in China because there are millions or people who want easy ways to build websites.

There is incredible opportunity right now.“

Via peHUB.

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Posted in business, cloud computing, entrepreneurship, innovation, mobile, problem-opportunity, regular reads, startup | Comments

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 | Comments

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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