nuance intelligence

My latest column just ran at Colorado Biz magazine.  It investigates alt.energy investments at any level, from the WalMart shopper to President Obama.   Here’s an excerpt:

Angel-level investing
If you are a bona-fide angel investor, looking to cash in on clean-tech, there are two places where an investment of a couple hundred thousand dollars will actually create a reasonable return in a reasonable amount of time. Service companies are focused in two areas, distributed generation and energy efficiency or conservation.
Average cost: Investments in smaller companies are generally made in no less than $25,000 increments.
Expected return: In a recent study by the Kauffman Foundation, angel capital investments returned 2.6 times the initial investment over 3.5 years, for a 27 percent internal rate of return. Of course, performance here varies heavily, and 52 percent of investors in the survey received less than 100 percent of their money back.

VC-level investing
If you are a venture capitalist with a $100 million fund, you can start to look into the actual technology of the energy revolution. Thin-film solar, new battery technology, improved wind turbines and many other technologies are not quite ready for prime-time, but offer a huge upside if they hit.
Average cost: Expensive, with investment rounds averaging 10 times greater than parallel IT investments. An investment round may be $25 million to $100 million
Expected return: Very few clean-tech investment exits have happened thus far, and the investment horizon could be 10 years or longer. But the long-term potential is incredible.

More opportunities identified over at Colorado Biz.

Who reads TIME and Newsweek anymore?  Not many people I know — except my mom, who brought about three issues of the latter with her for Thanksgiving.  During the perceived junk-out — err, semi-annual research into mainstream media coverage trends — I was pretty surprised to find an article about complementary currencies titled “Small Town Currencies,” in the Crisis Watch section.

Dozens of such systems arose during the Great Depression. In the 1990s, they resurfaced as a way to fight globalization and keep wealth in local hands. Now the idea of homespun cash is back because it keeps people liquid even if they are short on traditional dollars.

The rest of the two-paragraph front-of-the-book micro-mention missed many of the core values and benefits that drive the currency movement, which is to be expected.  Imagine m surprise when I read The Transitioner’s tweet that TIME magazine had covered much the same story.

“Alternative Currencies Grow In Popularity” is a better piece of journalism, covering the history and background of the movement, and highlighting the activities of some of the more well-known systems.

Alternative means of trade often surface during tough economic times. “When money gets dried up and there are still needs to be met in society, people come up with creative ways to meet those needs,” says Peter North, a senior lecturer in geography at the University of Liverpool, author of two books on the subject. He refers to the “scrips” issued in the U.S. and Europe during the Great Depression that kept money flowing, and the massive barter exchanges involving millions of people that emerged amidst runaway inflation in Argentina in 2000.

The article does a good job of explaining the 101 of currencies, tax implications and highlights many leaders in the space, including our friends and co-conspirators Jean-Francois Noubel and Bernard Lietaer, two European thought leaders on the issue.

In recent years, the impetus for alternative currencies in established economies has stemmed in part from localization movements. Periodically ditching the dollar (or the pound, or the yen) in favor of homegrown currency doesn’t merely fortify the local economy, it also builds community: people have a stake in their neighbor’s well-being because that neighbor represents both market and supply chain. Some argue that such transactions are more secure than others because knowing the person you’re dealing with (and his family and friends) serves as a kind of social collateral.

It seems that the author has actually begun to understand the deeper impact of currency, which is where we think the general appreciation has lagged.

What’s the nuance?

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Over at the Business Catapult Blog, we just published a piece highlighting the research-backed definition and 2009 predictions of the Cleantech sector by Lightspeed Ventures, one of the leading blue-chip-Silicon-Valley-VCs-with-a-new-cleantech-focus.  Check it.

We’ve been talking about location intelligence and geo-analytics for a while now, both here and at the AWhere blog.  As the economy shifts into epochal distress, every point of leverage much be engaged to create or maintain a competitive advantage.  The other choice is the drama felt by every company gracing the front page of the business section of their local newspaper (if that company is still in business).

New tools — like AWhere’s suite of location intelligence software and services — are evolving just in time to keep pace with the increasing complexity of business.  As we face a new turbulence (it turns out the volatility of volatility is increasing) in the markets, it’s going to take the ability to ask — and quickly answer — new questions from your data in order to keep pace.

As I wrote at the AWhere Blog:

AWhere President Jim Pollock has had most of his attention on our CPG Visions, a custom tool produced for category managers and business strategists in consumer packaged goods and retail.  He points out that it would take the average analyst roughly 200 hours of focused analysis to produce a report including the level of complexity of our CPG Visions output, which maps incoming data from WalMart’s Retail Link service, and correlates it to Neilsen demographic data along with National Weather Service weather forecasts (more detail here).  Given the workload of a small (and shrinking) analysis team, it’s the kind of work that cannot necessarily be justified on a weekly basis.

But once it’s only a matter of looking at this information on an interactive map, the ability to ask “what if” scenarios and plan for multiple futures becomes a very real business practice.

Business intelligence dashboards provides a mere fraction of this ability, but the principle is the same.  When you can see your data — over time, and correlated with external info — and then ask it questions and pose scenarios, you gain a new level of understanding about your business, and that competitive advantage to lift your business during this crazy time.

I think we can expect many discussions in the next year about IT as a transformative force for business in these challenging economic times.