Posts Tagged ‘web 2.0’

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A laundry list of business problems (opportunity)

Sunday, July 20th, 2008

“Every problem is an opportunity, and the bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. No one will pay you to solve a non-problem.”
– Vinod Khosla, on big problems and big opportunities.

The one thing I’ve come to admire about Paul Graham (using “Paul Graham” as a synonym for Y Combinator itself), is that he’s turned into quite a force to be reckoned with – aligning, match-making problems with teams and solutions, cranking up accomplishment cycles. Seems to me that these days, he has access to all sorts of real-world business problems, and conveniently enough he also practically has an army of technology entrepreneurs ready to take a bite out of any gauntlet that he throws down.

I love that quote from Vinod Khosla above, and I’m always on the look for problems, because I see them as unmet needs, and I love disruption – David vs. Goliath style take-on-the-incumbent fights. PG has recently written up on ideas for startups that he’d like to fund, so reading this list was definitely a must for opportunity-seekers, and you know what .. even if it’s not a problem that you can see yourself solving, it’s good to be aware of the problems out there in your adjacent industry.

I find #6 interesting:

More variants of CRM. This is a form of enterprise software, but I’m mentioning it explicitly because it seems like this area has such potential. CRM (“Customer Relationship Management”) means all sorts of different things, but a lot of the current embodiments don’t seem much more than mailing list managers. It should be possible to make interactions with customers much higher-res.

When I think CRM, I think of Salesforce.com, simply because well, who doesn’t associate CRM with Salesforce? ;) What I really like about Salesforce.com is how they have opened up their platform for 3rd party developers via AppExchange. Why is this such an important strategic move?

They realize that now that they are a huge company serving a huge customer base, there’s bound to be a subset of their customers whose needs are either over-served or under-served, and thus these customers will be ripe to be poached by smaller and more agile startups. Thus, the bigger Salesforce gets, it’s only a matter of time before their core market gets nibbled from say, the low end, .. which would force Salesforce.com to then shift focus on the higher end of the spectrum (and keep going higher) until the nibblers now become this real threat of displacing the incumbent.

Thus, by opening up their platform to innovation, they can capture the “long-tail” of features needed by their customer base and actually meet them. Imagine you are running some obscure business in a very niche vertical. You need CRM, but you also need this 1 extra feature very specific to your business. You now have the option to installing the “addon” to meet your needs. Other (most) companies who don’t care about this addon don’t need to install it.

What Salesforce.com has also effectively done here is allowed their SaaS bread-and-butter be customized specifically to each customer! This is powerful, because most people think that SaaS is just a web app, and because it’s served from the same web server to all customers, customization is difficult.

Software customization/personalization is also way to segment your market and extract more value from the different segments. And all of this, for free to Salesforce.com because they don’t even need to hire developers to build stuff — the platform is open to any 3rd developer. In short, AppExchange is one of Salesforce.com’s competitive advantage that builds network effects over time (like eBay), further solidifying their dominance on the market.

The iPhone too, has a developer app market place. And this too, will be a powerful force to be reckoned with by iPhone competitors over time.

Back to what PG was saying, “It should be possible to make interactions with customers much higher-res.” I wonder what he means by that exactly, but then again he did say that this list was intentionally vague. I can at the very minimum at least conclude that he sees an opportunity for innovation in CRM, which I do too :)

Paul Graham’s list of problems: http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

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Posted in entrepreneurship, problem-opportunity, product management, silicon valley, startup, things to ponder about, web 2.0 | Comments

Web 2.0 weekend roundup: Mashup (projected) money, Slide, plus mobile

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

Forrester reports that mashups are taking off. A trend/wave to take note of. This reminds me of what Greg McAdoo (VC with Sequoia) said, that the tiny companies have no power to change waves (technology trends), only the option of riding the wave. So here’s the wave, for those who want to ride it!

Mashups — custom applications that combine multiple, disparate data sources into something new and unique — are coming to the enterprise. Forrester projects that the enterprise mashup market will reach nearly $700 million by 2013; while this means that there is plenty of money to be made selling mashup platforms, it will affect nearly every software vendor. Mashup platforms are in the pole position and ready to grab the lion’s share of the market — and an entire ecosystem of mashup technology and data providers is emerging to complement those platforms. Those vendor strategists that move quickly, plan a mashup strategy, and build a partner ecosystem will come out on top.

The full report costs $775 ( ouch! psst .. can someone share? :) )

I got that link from Dion Hincliffe’s report on the mashup industry. An interesting read, do check it out — I do no justice in summarizing it here. It’ll get you a quick overview of the state of the mash-o-sphere (did I just invent yet-another-useless new Web 2.0 buzzword?) Plus, it features cool San Diego tech startup by two cool people I know; shoutouts to my friends Steve and Aaron from MindTouch!

On another note, Slide reports that they are doubling down their efforts on their current top widget properties to make them even better, .. implying that they are going to slow down on churning out new and potential “disruptive” widgets. I’m all about focusing on your core business for sure, but I hope they still carve out some time (as a percentage) throw stuff against the wall to see what sticks, since there’s no time better to encourage innovation than during hard times. Maybe this is all just an investor-relations fluff .. in which case, fine.

Max Levchin is no stranger to innovation, and I am sure he knows what he is doing. He is definitely someone I admire, and I’ve covered him previously on my blog here before.

Someone I spoke to this weekend was blindingly oblivious to the revenue opportunities in value-added services for mobile, so I thought including this pretty picture from this very worthy blog post from Alec Saunders here was in order.

Silly wabbit, of course you can make money writing apps for mobile :) — just google for {iPhone, Android, Blackberry} fund.

mobile value added services: long tail

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Posted in mobile, regular reads, web 2.0 | Comments

iPhone apps for healthcare technology — plus some robots

Sunday, May 11th, 2008

Cell phones, mobile phones, hand phones, whatever they are called, wherever they are in the world–can change the world! We already see it help drive economic development in microfinance, and now, we’re making strides with healthcare technology, another field I’m interested in because I love seeing technology change lives. The convergence of sophisticated UX-centric mobile devices, Internet/Web 2.0, Software as a Service, cloud computing — not to be missed!

From the article:

Despite all the advances in medical diagnostics, two-thirds of the world’s population has no access to imaging technologies. Worse, about half of the imaging equipment sent to developing countries goes unused because local technicians aren’t trained to operate it or lack spare parts, according to the World Health Organization. But thanks to the proliferation of cellular and other wireless networks, researchers are stepping up efforts to deliver crucial medical services from afar. “You go through India, anywhere, in the middle of the road, there’s someone with a cell phone. A friend calls me from the jungles of Costa Rica,” says Rubinsky. “I can see so many applications in which the cell phone becomes an integral part of a medical device. A cell phone can cut the cost of almost every [diagnostic] device.”

We have the $10Mil fbFund for Facebook apps, $100Mil iFund for iPhone apps, $10Mil for Google Android apps, and the to be announced $150Mil Blackberry apps fund — will we see a fund to drive healthcare technology apps?

With the iPhone spurring more handset makers to introduce similarly robust devices, the U.S. market for medical cell-phone software is expanding rapidly. Sales of phone applications for medical professionals are expected to rise from $111.8 million last year to $276 million in 2011, according to consultancy Ambient Insight.

On the “heavier” tech side, we’re definitely making huge strides in having robots that can now operate on people.

Consider this: Suppose there are only 10 surgeons in the world that specialize in this really complicated brain disease, affected by not that many people, but the number of victims dying from it is significant enough (say, 5,000 deaths a year worldwide). There’s only so many surgeons to go around, and with that many victims around the world, even if these surgeons worked themselves to death to save the world, they can’t possibly help everybody with just two hands and only 24 hours in a day. Seriously, it takes almost a day to just travel halfway across the world, and that’s just a one-way.

The solution: remote surgery. In terms of supply and demand, the supply is scarce (the Ph.Ds in this very narrow field) and the demand far exceeds the supply, and the number of victims is probably going to grow at a rate faster than the rate Ph.Ds in this field can be minted. Technology here serves to increase supply, that is, not by letting universities churn out more doctors (although that would work too), but rather by increasing the “utilization rate” of the existing doctors by allowing them to perform their work anywhere at anytime, by saving on travel time and expense. Even if we had an infinite amount of money to spend on the fastest jets, nobody can buy more than 24 hours in a day. 10 hours on a jet spent traveling is 10 hours that could be spent operating on a patient.

“If you are looking at the future, it’s hard to envision a hospital not offering robotics,” said Robert Glenning, chief financial officer at the Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey

Technology, changing lives and making the world a better place–I love it!

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Posted in changing the world, healthcare technology, innovation, mobile, regular reads, technology | Comments

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

Saturday, March 29th, 2008

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.
(more…)

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Posted in business, changing the world, entrepreneurship, microfinance, mobile, passion, poverty, regular reads, startup, technology, things to ponder about | Comments

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