nuance intelligence

My “new best friend” Anita Burke has sent me two pieces recently that demonstrate how quickly climate change is affecting business in financial and legal ways.

First, a court in the UK just exonerated protesters who caused $70,000 worth of damage to a coal plant, using a British legal tenet exemplified as “it’s OK to break down a door to fight a fire inside the building.”

Summary:

The threat of global warming is so great that campaigners were justified
in causing more than £35,000 worth of damage to a coal-fired power
station, a jury decided yesterday. In a verdict that will have shocked
ministers and energy companies the jury at Maidstone Crown Court cleared
six Greenpeace activists of criminal damage.

Jurors accepted defence arguments that the six had a “lawful excuse” to
damage property at Kingsnorth power station in Kent to prevent even
greater damage caused by climate change. The defence of “lawful excuse”
under the Criminal Damage Act 1971 allows damage to be caused to
property to prevent even greater damage – such as breaking down the door
of a burning house to tackle a fire.

Full story in The Independent.

Second, as the result of a high-profile law suit, New York State reached a legal agreement with  XCel energy that they must submit a comprehensive report of the financial risk related to climate change.

As [New York State] Attorney General Andrew Cuomo stated, the “agreement sets a new industry-wide precedent that will force companies to disclose the true financial risks that climate change poses to their investors.”

Read the entire legal briefing from Nixon Peabody.

What’s the nuance?

Climate change is hitting the balance sheets.  This will, in fact, change everything.

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.

Theodore Geisel is one of the most influential post-war American writers.

He is the nuance…

Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You’re off to Great Places!
You’re off and away!

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It’s hard to miss this on the web toda — China has more Internet users than America.

AP reports:

The research firm BDA China Ltd. says China’s online population should keep growing by 18 percent annually, reaching 490 million by 2012 — a number larger than the entire U.S. population.

And continues with interesting business context:

Total revenues for China’s Internet companies soared to 40.5 billion yuan ($5.9 billion) in 2007, up 48.6 percent from the previous year, the research firm Analysys International reported this week. It said revenues should keep growing at an annual rate of at least 30 percent in coming years, reaching 137.5 billion yuan by 2010.

By contrast, U.S. online advertising revenues alone in 2007 were $21.2 billion (145.2 billion yuan), according to a report by consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers for the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

What’s the nuance?

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I’ve had a 20-year love-hate relationship with McKinsey.  When I was in my late teens, before I knew much about business, I thought I really wanted to do this kind of high-level consulting.  Then I developed a heavy aversion to strategic corporate thinking, especially corporate consultants.  But there are still really smart people there, and they sometimes (often?) produce some good stuff.

Here’s an excerpt from an email I got from them today, which exemplifies the upside:

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Set aside for a moment the vagueness of “green,” and let’s ask a different question.  In an era where travel is being replaced by virtual conferencing, shopping by eCommerce, and partying by Second Life, what is the carbon cost of all of our time online?

I wrote a piece over at eCo Times which ran last week that looks into the carbon footprint of data centers.  Here’s an excerpt:

According to The Economist, which quotes tier one researchers McKinsey And Company and the Uptime Institute, the data centers that host and serve the world’s registered web services, accounted for 1.2% of the world’s electricity in 2005. This amount of electricity was emitting more carbon dioxide than Argentina or The Netherlands, and this was before many of the biggest web services came online.

At the end of 2007, the Environmental Protection Agency released a report that details the impact of data centers on the environment. Like any complex report, varying conclusions can be drawn, so feel free to check it out and draw your own. Nonetheless, these analysts, who project data center growth and related carbon emissions, predict that data centers could become worse polluters than the airline transportation industry by 2020. That’s just 12 years from now. Wow.

The truth — or at least my perspective on what the truth may be — is that technology will evolve, and get more efficient faster than air travel will.  Here’s what’s happening on the evolutionary front:

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News junkies, commodity traders and climate change scientists are all tracking last week’s midwest flooding, noting the confluence of impacts, including global commodity prices, US food costs, regional property damage, ethanol futures.  All of this is, of course, written in the context of the upcoming US election, and all the subterfuge within.

Over at AWhere (more here, here and here), they spent the week putting together a pretty cool package that allows individuals to make maps specific to any frame of reference.  Rather than relying on the media or on other mapmakers to tell you how to think about the flooding, you can interact with the map, ask it questions, and determine for yourself the impact on your business, life, community or other perspective.

What’s the nuance?

Data visualization is one of the most important frameworks for gaining insight.  But professional mapmakers have owned a near-monopoly over the frame of reference since mapping began.  Now the power is in your hands.  Google Maps, Google Earth and Virtual Earth have set the stage for interacting with maps.  AWhere takes this evolution to the next step, and lets you plot your data (as many layers as you can generate) on to a map, creating your own view of things.

Please take a second to review our revised clients page.  We’ve reorganized it, added some exciting new projects, and updated the descriptions of some of our partnerships, which have evolved in recent months.

Let us know how we can help you connect to these interesting opportunities.

Although we’re not known to report on every SEC filing in the known universe, the recent news that Digital Global filed for an IPO (the first in many steps before they go public) is interesting on a couple levels:

1. It’s been a while since a Colorado technology company went public, so this is another indicator of a thriving entrepreneurial economy in the state, counter to the national trend toward recession, and a depressing outlook for Silicon Valley VC investing.
2. It’s a good indicator of the value of location-based services, which includes friends at local companies including Virtual Earth and AWhere.  Read more about what these local leaders are thinking about.

What do you think about their prospects?  Would you go public today?

I was recently interviewed as part of a survey of Denver’s telecom industry. On the table was the question of the future of telecom in Denver and Colorado. Our discussion brought to mind a premise that has stuck with me for almost a decade now.

In his 2001 book, As The Future Catches You (review), Juan Enriquez advances the premise that intelligence, innovation, wealth and progress will be focused in a tiny set of locations, measured more accurately by zip codes than states or cities. For instance, he points out that innovation happens in Cambridge, not all of Boston. In Enriquez’s view, these tiny hubs of intellectual activity will have an ever-widening gap with the rest of the city / state / country / world. And if you’re not in one of them, you’re nowhere.

What’s the nuance? As we watch the U.S. economy tumbles and inflation takes hold, tenuous infrastructure will start to fall apart.  Already gas prices are making suburban living prohibitive, and it’s just the beginning.

Places like Silicon Valley, Boulder, Cambridge, Ann Arbor and others will continue to deliver value through innovation; value that will be recognized globally, regardless of the power of the dollar.  Life outside of these hubs will become tougher and tougher, as is already demonstrated by the massive housing price drops in many parts of the country.  This leaves major questions about cities and communities on the bubble.

Can the globally strong Caterpillar save Peoria?  Will a telecom revival support Denver?  Civic and business leaders are going to have to turn to new strategies in order to answer those question in the affirmative, working together like never before.