nuance intelligence

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.

The yin of entrepreneurism is a steady dose of optimism.  Without it, we’d just take a 40-hour a week executive gig and slowly rot our brains.

This optimism is going to be in full force this week at the Angel Capital Summit.   As I wrote in my Colorado Biz column on angel investing this month,

Some businesses are responding [to the credit crisis] by getting small, reducing risk, laying off staff and hoarding cash. Others are anticipating a better future and ignoring today’s awful financial news in favor of the promise of tomorrow. Technophiles are promising productivity gains from new tools while “free-range” thinkers have gone completely off the reservation, and are designing new currency systems.

So it’s character-building time. A real entrepreneur has the courage and the drive to leap across the proverbial chasm and create a new fortune.  The shifts are happening to allow once-in-a-lifetime wealth creation as the old system dies and a new one is born.

Join us in Denver on Friday to learn how and where the money will flow, which businesses will thrive, and how to spot the previously unseen differentiating factors, a process we are calling evolutionary risk management.

It’s time to choose wheter you are going down with the economic Titanic or hop on a lifeboat and start rowing.

It has been an exciting few weeks, with many high-end networking events in Boulder around sustainability, investing and clean tech.  While the financial crisis remains in full swing, many investors, entrepreneurs and thought leaders are looking to the future and charting the course for the next phase in the Boulder / Colorado / U.S. economy.

Trustworthy sources are telling us about multiple 8- and 9-figure funds being raised for clean tech and sustainability investing, as well as rumors of keen interest in that space from private equity.  The rumor of Kleiner Perkins posting a one-man team at NREL to help spin out investable clean tech companies is confirmed as well — we met him this week.  Vague inquiries are coming from as far away as Tel Aviv and Sau Paolo.

Or, as my partner Kevin Johansen is saying these days, “recession my ass!”

Leading Boulder Web2.0 companies are even hosting a job fair to bring more technical talent into town, although there are also rumors of layoffs at weaker firms.  It’s going to be a mixed bag in that space, and the wheat will quickly be separated from the chaff.

If you want to escape the doom and gloom for a day, and join a more prosperous and optimistic future, look no further than the Angel Capital Summit, November 21, in Denver. Highlights include:

• Anita Burke’s presentation on how to run a business in a world of Peak Everything (including capital, it seems).
• 40 of Colorado’s strongest entrepreneurial growth-oriented businesses presenting investment opportunities.
• A TOWN HALL discussion called Disrupting the Recession, where a diverse group of thought leaders will talk directly with conference attendees about how we can all come together to build an Entrepreneurial Renaissance in Colorado.
• Surprise visit from one of Colorado’s favorite political leaders.

I’d love to know what you think about all this.  The TOWN HALL is still evolving, and your input will help make it better.

Please join us on November 21st in downtown Denver for this community gathering during a unique moment in history.

Blogged his interview with Charlie Rose over at Business Catapult blog.

Unique and interesting perspective.  Check it.

I wrote last week about transcending (and including) the current financial crisis.  The inspiration for that piece was partially grounded in a column I had written for Colorado Biz magaine, which runs today.  Assuming (as I did in the blog post) that the world continues to operate after the bailout and election, some US economic sectors will be stronger than others.  And all signs indicate — and even the New York Times, in a relative comparison of city-by-city economies (pw req’d) corroborate — that a strong entrepreneurial trend is sweeping Colorado.

The trend is based on what many entreprenurial thought leaders — from investors to serial entrepreneurs to the lawyers and PR pros who live through the cycles — recognize as sectors that will thrive, even during a predictably rough national economic period.  These sectors are technology (and in Colorado, especially IT and web 2.0), energy and other CleanTech / GreenTech / Sustainability companies.

In the CoBiz column, I propose a few potential results of the current Wall St. banking crisis:

Many investing “truths” have forever changed. The question is: which ones? We suspect — and a quick query of investors this week has quasi-confirmed — that core investing principles are intact, but the situational realities as to who will be an interesting funding candidate are likely to be quite different.

Intuition suggests that fewer wealthy people will be making investments, but with the investment banking sector suddenly and irreversibly (lets’ check that assumption in a few months) extinct, more money and talent could focus on growth sectors like green tech.

It’s also possible that money will re-localize. Investors will want their money to be a bit more tied to tangible nearby investments as a backlash to the ideological bankruptcy of radical derivatives. Further, as investors take a deep stock of their values, the evolution toward a more holistic investing approach will amplify.

But that’s all speculation.  What’s real is that on November 21st, forty of the strongest Colorado start-up businesses will present to hundreds of venture capitalists and angel investors at the annual Angel Capital Summit.  And at the end of that day, we will present a once-in-a-generation opportunity to “not only learn about but participate in the co-creation the future of our regional business ecology.”

With Anita Burke telling us all how to measure sustainable business practices at lunch, and the as-yet-uncomfirmed special appearance by one of Colorado’s favorite political leaders open the day, it promises to be an exciting “first day of the rest of your career” type of experience.

Hope to see you there.

Over at the Business Catapult blog, we just wrote about the detailed and confusing report from the Small Business Administration (SBA) on angel investing.

One conclusion is that there are at least two major categories of angels — professional, accredited angels who number roughly 5,000 nationally and made just shy of 1,000 investments in 2006; and casual, unaccredited angels, who may number as many as 600,000 nationally, and could account for $20 billion injected into the US entrepreneurial economy.

In short, nobody does a good job tracking this data, because the activity is so distributed.  And while contradictions continue, we have yet to see any more comprehensive report.

Care to learn more?

I couldn’t be more excited about getting to work with AWhere on helping design a collective intelligence engine for the UN Foundation.

Here’s a recent two-part intervew I did at the AWhere Blog with UNF change agent Kevin Starace.  In his words:

As chair of the Roll Back Malaria (RBM) Performance Subcommittee we’re mandated to help the sector improve effectiveness.   Starting in 2007, we’ve been trying to find a technology that enables several things:

1. This one is the most important: we’ve got to break down silos across all boundaries, sectors and specialties, including but not limited to funding, institutional knowledge and to create a sector-wide peer review process.
2. Performance evaluation – how are we, collectively, achieving these huge global targets?  Specifically, those in alignment with the UN’s Millennium Development Goals (MDG), including an 85% distribution of bed nets and reduction of child mortality.
3. Provide platform by which all health initiatives can input information that is relevant to scientific advancement, investment evaluation, and providing a complete picture of what’s going on at the ground level.

After I first talked to [AWhere CEO] John Corbett, I realized that the common denominator for all of those problems is location.  What matters is not our organizational and bureaucratic divisions, but what’s happening to the people on the ground.  If we organize information sharing around the location of the problem, it helps us create a new collaborative holistic vantage point…

The ability to geographically correlate meaningful information from disparate sources in real time will forever alter our ability to improve the lives of people around the world.  That has never been possible before, and it’s literally going to change everything.

On a personal level, it’s incredibly humbling to even think in these terms.  That I’m helping design a small part of it is an honor.   Any advice?

At Business Catapult, we’re powering the Angel Capital Summit.

As I wrote at the Business Catapult Blog,

As supporting partners, Business Catapult provides our entire suite of tools, and provide many new features to what would otherwise be a typical investor fair.  For instance:

• Investors can review deals prior to the conference, and participate in a collective intelligence process that identifies the best companies to present.
• Entrepreneurs use our Benchmark Survey as one component of the nomination process, and are able to refine their plan, based on the results of the business logic we build into the Benchmark Report.
• Trusted Advisors can contribute to the deal screening process, and gain an insight into the strongest new companies in the region.
• Organizations, including Business Schools, Small Business Development Center (SBDCs), incubators, angel investor networks and entrepreneurial meetup groups can each organize a group on the system, nominate their entrepreneurs and, after the conference is open, see the entirety of the pool of entrepreneurs who nominated themselves.

Entrepreneurs can apply now.  Investors can learn about unusual benefits.  Coloradans can look forward to what we’re calling an Entrepreneurial Renaissance, for as usual, the independently minded (seen the polls?) folks in the Centennial State are thinking differently.

As part of our work in building a unique community that focuses on intelligent matching of entrepreneurs and investors, we have launched the Business Catapult blog.

Focused on the education of angel investors, and to a lesser extent, the provocation of venture capitalists, we break the blog down into three channels:

• 101: Investing Basics, including valuations, investment criteria and news and reports about investing trends.
• 201: Advanced Strategies, including managing an investment portfolio, advanced risk assessment and related issues.
• 301: Notes From The Cutting Edge, including investing in sustainability, clean-tech and emerging energy companies, venture philanthropy, disruptive technology and new investing memetics.

Thanks for taking a look, lots of smart stuff coming down the line over there.

It’s been a great summer over at AWhere, where breakthroughs in geo-analysis, location intelligence and busines map mashups have come one right after another.

• CPG Vision lets category managers at consumer package goods companies visualize the entirety of their Retail Link data from WalMart, and correlate it with demographic data from Neilsen as well as weather data that’s updated daily.

• InSite is AWhere’s big foray into web-based applications, which launched last month.  This product completes their primary product line roll-out, and fills the final gap between complex desktop GIS applications and Google Maps.

• The UN Foundation has announced their long-term partnership with AWhere in development of an implementation of InSite that, in the words of UNF’s Senior Malaria Advisor Kevin Starace, “will forever change the game in international aid”.

What’s the nuance?

The power of location intelligence and data visualization is coming on strong.  With projects touching the likes of WalMart and the UN Foundation, AWhere is poised to really take off in the next six months.

We expect that business mapping and next-generation of geo-web applications will become one of the big business process stories of 2009.  Thought leaders are on board.  The system conditions have changed.  Tidal wave to follow.