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.
If there were any doubt, a recent piece in the Financial Times leaked a report (free reg req’d) from the International Energy Agency which says that global oil production is already decreasing.
I wrote about this over at the Business Catapult blog.
Dylan said it best,
the first one now will later be last
the present now will late be past
the order is rapidly changing…
Well, it took me a while. I came off my game for almost two weeks.
But on a drive home from an inspiring meeting with Kevin (Johansen, my Business Catapult business partner and long time co-consipirator), I fully and completely transcended (and included, as the integral school teaches) the financial crisis. That is to say, the crisis is a moment in time, and will be over sometime soon. The future will have to include the history and (future) present of the impact of the crisis, but we will move beyond it. So I am THERE.
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!
What am I talking about?
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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?
Can you concentrate? I’ve been having a rough time this week.
I have promised myself to leave politics out of this blog, but it’s not out of my mind.
And the economic debacle … I’m hardly consoled with the “I told you so” feeling that has been driving me nuts. Since there were only one or two people who could stand to listen to me ramble on about you just can’t separate risk from reward for the past several years, it’s even less comforting to have been right. As a good friend told me (in relation to a lawsuit he was losing), “being right is the booby prize.” So where’s my booby?
In more trenchant commentary, see the following:
What happens over the weekend is anyone’s guess. Enjoy the debates.
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:
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.
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.
It’s a never-ending sport. With some drastic implications.
There’s ample evidence that the social networks are nothing more that the dot.com bubble revisited. At the same time, big time players are putting heavy bets down that there’s a pot of gold out there somewhere. So what are social networks really worth?
MIT’s Technology Review, in my opinion, the ‘Economist’ of tech media, i.e, the ones who have the best writers, do the best research and present it most professionally, has a series of articles this month as part of their Web 2.0 bubble cover feature. The more relevant article investigates the valuations and advertising assumption, reviewing major financial disappointments at MySpace and Facebook, highlighting ad CPMs in the pennies, and raising the question of whether advertising has any chance of producing meaningful revenue for social networks. (as I’ve written before, the answer is NO.)
TechCrunch, one of the influential blogs in the web 2.0 / mashup / social media space did a decent job of analyzing social network valuations based on a detailed assessment of advertising revenue, and the value of recent investments (LinkedIn, Facebook) and purchases of large social networks (Bebo, by AOL).
Silicon Alley Insider analyzes the Tech Crunch analysis, adding their own enhancements to the model. Separately, they’ve also got running values of the top 25 private companies — including many social networks — in their SAI 25.
What’s the nuance?