Minutes after posting about Smart meters, I got my first piece of smart metering Spam from confused.con
First smart meter spam appears less thant 12 hours after government announcement!
I guess someone somewhere will always find an angle to make money. Confused help you to save ‘up to 15%’ on energy bills and make themselves money by making money for First Utility who supply a ‘smart meter’ of some sort.
Widely reported today that Smart Meters will be available in every home. (Grauniad cunningly uses the word, ‘may’, not, ‘will. Does it suspect another government announcement with sound bite about a consultation from people that know they are unlikely to still be in power in 11 years time?)
There is lots of investor (venture capital, private equity and institutional), analyst and company interest in who will be the winners in this field and we have been pulling some names together over the past six months to participate in a small discussion group, mid-June, for some of the leaders in this area with investors and possibly a journalist or two.
UPDATE: Got my first Smart metering spam offer about 30 seconds after I first posted this! Now we know who will make the money, https://thebln.com/2009/05/smart-meter-beneficiary-1/
Is that a Smart Meter in your hand Sandy McKinnon or...
Would be curious if anyone wanted to recommend participants?
We are finding that LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media tools are delivering some very random, but often very worthwhile connections so thought we would try a direct call this time and see what comes out.
We will produce a list of all the names that we discover and present them back here.
Many thanks for arranging an excellent dinner and a lively discussion last night. It was right up there in terms of quality of comments, people and a great balance of investors, advisors and companies.
I’ve been to many networking events, but the calibre of people that attend BLN and the atmosphere for genuine debate and discussion, is unparalleled.
Key words returned in survey of 30 CFOs from companies that are either public or have raised funding in the past 6 months. If companies have money, they are very bullish about opportunities to grow business and secure market share at expense of competition.
“What would you consider as ‘success’ for your organisation over the next 18 months?”
75 Wordle. www.wordle.net
“What is the biggest opportunity for your organisation over the next 18 months?”
50 Wordle. www.wordle.net
Just found out about this from @BindiK and the deadline for applications is this weekend but if you are developing for Windows Mobile, it has to be worth looking into.
Deadline for Applications May 10th!
Calling all Start Ups! Announcing Mobile Incubation Week EMEA
Have a great idea for a mobile communication? Want to be one of the first applications featured on Windows Marketplace for Mobile?
Microsoft is sponsoring the first-ever ‘EMEA Mobile Incubation Week’ to help start-ups incubate outstanding ideas. Following the success of recent event in Microsoft Silicon Valley, we have decided to replicate the event in EMEA, out of London.
Sample coverage of the US week below:
- http://www.youtube.com/user/WindowsMobileDev
- http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/18/networks-in-motion-wins-mobile-incubation-week-microsofts-american-idol-for-mobile-applications/
- http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=2509
- http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/04/17/microsoft%e2%80%99s-american-idol-for-mobile-apps/
The first EMEA event will be held at Microsoft’s Cardinal Place Office, Victoria, 1st – 5th June, 2009.
The event will feature technical gurus from the Microsoft business, technology veterans who have built their own Windows Mobile applications and influential venture capitalists and industry experts. Our developers will lead interactive discussions, provide helpful advice, and facilitate actual application development on the windows mobile platform. At the end of the week we will have a prize giving where we will select a winner who will be eligible for prizes and special PR opportunities.
The event is completely FREE, although you will have to pay your own travelling expenses and each team can bring up to three participants (1 business and 1-2 technical).
All start-ups are eligible, whether or not you have a mobile application built today.
The only requirement is that you are planning to develop a new application on Windows Mobile 6.1 or 6.5.
Spots are limited.
To nominate your team, please submit the following details to mobincub@microsoft.com
- Contact information
- Location of Company
- Size of company and year founded (if applicable)
- Overview of your idea
- Why you would like to participate
- How your applications is unique to Windows Mobile
*Note: please do not send confidential materials at this time as no NDA has been signed.
Applications will be judged according to the strength of the founding team, originality and creativity of the idea and its uniqueness to Windows Mobile. The deadline for applications is May 10th so get your applications in today so you don’t miss out.
If you have any questions please feel free to email mobincub@microsoft.com
Retailing on the high street has evolved over at least 2,000 years but has changed as much, if not more, since 2000. We are in the middle of a retail revolution. How will the revolution change your shopping experience 20 years from now?
Retail has always been about managing fixed costs – goods, premises, marketing, people, place, prices – all have played a major role in the economics of any business that sells stuff. Online, many of these constraints can almost disappear.
At our BLN discussion dinner this evening, we were privilidged to have the leaders of businesses including Net a Porter, Tesco.com, Figleaves, GlassesDirect, My-Wardrobe, eBay, Reevoo, Spreadshirt, Viagogo, Isabella Oliver and other key revolutionaries, to discuss what the revolution means for consumers.
The discussion was surprising. This could be the future of the high street retail experience:
The only reason high steet shops will exist?
I found this photo on my camera the other day. There was a queue of people lining up to be photographed with the purple chappy who was advertising Mac Cosmetics. They didn’t buy any then, but her friend did later that week on eBay. This illustrates two theme of this discussion perfectly – the way people buy stuff has changed; brands are powerful.
The way people buy stuff has changed. Shops are still a big social experience for most people but increasingly online stores are benefiting from the trend towards meeting on the high street, finding stuff you want with your friends, deciding what you want – then buying online or mobile at best price. Naturally, pure play ecommerce businesses are happy with this scenario at the moment as they are typically the biggest beneficiaries – they sell great brands at low prices so do very well. High street stores with their high fixed costs and expenisve rents are effectively subsidising pure play ecommerce businesses for the most savvy consumers.
However, fast forward 20 years and what happens when everyone buys online/mobile and the only purpose retail outlets serve is to showcase stuff that people buy remotely for the cheapest price? Stores that showcase goods but don’t sell anything will go bust. Will high street brands move online? (In fact they already have and the vast majority of the highest traffic ecommerce sites are high street brands). Will online brands have to move offlline and lose some of the key benefits of their low cost models? (Some of them are experimenting but the general feeling was that most of them have too much of an advantage by staying online at the moment).
Brands are powerful. An alternative scenario considers the value of brands to consumers and retailers and paints a picture where brands take high street locations, and develop almost theatrical experiences that create a desire amongst consumers to buy – think Apple Store, think Ted Baker’s in house Olde Worlde Barber Shoppe. Ultimately, brands care much less about whether they sell in-store or online as long as they are creating demand for their goods.
These are exciting times for retailing. A revolution is happening but whilst we are in the middle of the revolution, it is not always clear who will come out on top and what the world will look like afterwards. Clay Shirky recently wrote a widely reported piece about the future of the newspaper industry.
In it he looked at sources describing what life was like in the early 1400s before the invention of the printing press and in the late 1500s when printing was well established in Europe. It was much harder, but interesting, to find out what was happening during the revolution.
“Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?
“During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points. Aldus Manutius, the Venetian printer and publisher, invented the smaller octavo volume along with italic type. What seemed like a minor change — take a book and shrink it — was in retrospect a key innovation in the democratization of the printed word. As books became cheaper, more portable, and therefore more desirable, they expanded the market for all publishers, heightening the value of literacy still further.
“That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.”
It is a strange thought that high street shops as we know them today may be little more than interactive, 3-d advertisements for consumers when the revolution has passed. The retail revolution will be swift but potentially bloody.
A comment on JP’s blog post about innovation and business models. Think this may have been pushed into the spam filter as a comment as it mentions things like cures for baldness, malaria, pills, etc.
Ho hum.
Interesting and topical post. I read a recent article (Umair Haque?) along the lines of the world’s best business model is one that produces products that work – the innovation should come from the greatness of the product, not the greatness of the business model.
The Independent had the best coverage of the polypill meme this time round I think – http://cli.gs/yL3ZEE This is a common idea and it is a sad fact that medicine and health are driven, less by doctors than by the pharmaceutical industry.
Malaria affects approximately 250-500 million people per year (note large range) and kills approximately 1-3 million people (mainly <5 years old) per year in the world’s poorest countries. It has been estimated that malaria COSTS Africa about $12billion per year. It has also been calculated that $3 billion of aid, appropriately directed, could bring malaria under control. Most of the technology is already developed. If these numbers are correct, there is an economically rational argument for fixing the problem. The problem is that the people who pay are not necessarily the people that benefit and the value to the big pharma companies in fixing something at cost is zero.
Male Pattern Baldness treatments are worth approximately $3 billion. Male pattern baldness does not kill many people but is a ‘Western disease’. There is more innovation in male pattern baldness treatments than in malaria treatments as there is more money in it.
I think my point is that sadly people obsess with the business model from the outset. If the objective is to make money, only certain outcomes are possible. Other outcomes are possible with well-articulated non-financial goals.
Only rarely, do we get clear and succinct goals that do not reference money these days – putting a man on the moon and returning him safely by the end of the decade was one of the most notable of the last 50 years. Look how much it cost but there were spin off benefits.
Perhaps an enlightened combination of someone like Dr Reddy, viewed as a Pariah by the pharmaceutical companies as he does not, in their view, respect copyright, (he generally works around or uses out of patent compounds) and a western philanthropist could do something about this one?
My 5 year old daughter offered me the option of ordering on my computer when we played shops at the weekend. Apparently she has acquired ecommerce capability. She really does need to get with the times.
A new report from Pricegrabber, released 1st May suggests mobiles may becoming a viable channel for ecommerce. Over 58% of phones in the US are web-enabled & c. 10% of these have been used to purchase products or services (58% digital content, 37% computers/laptops). For iPhone users, over 56% of users reported using their device to compare prices, twice that of other Smartphone users (e.g. Blackberry). In the UK, digital content is less important, (46% made purchase in last year) but 50% of consumers purchased, computers, laptops and related equipment on their mobile.
For me this is interesting because if you have ever tried to purchase stuff outside the App Store using an iPhone, it can be very frustrating as so few sites support it effectively. To make a purchase you will have gone through some effort to get there. I would love it if I could organise our weekly grocery shop from the train, bus or even bike (a true test of simplicity!).
View while grocery shopping - mobile shopping Nirvana?
I assume it would need a useful iPhone App rather than a browser based experience to enable this effectively. Whether Tesco, Ocado, ASDA or anyone else can deliver a simple mobile experience for regular shopping, they will get my business, at least till all the others follow suit and they have to come up with the next innovation.
This fits with my recent informal survey asking for questions of our upcoming ecommerce panel where of the 30 or so responses, over 20 related to the availability of ecommerce solutions, particularly grocery shopping, on mobile devices.
38% of users in the survey report that purchasing processes taking too much time, and 28% report that purchases are ‘too difficult to complete’. It does seem though that iPhone users are in the vanguard of consumer behaviour.
It will take a while to become ubiquitous but is is coming faster than people might think. I am looking forward to hearing the views of the people that deliver that capability to hear their views tomorrow at our BLN ecommerce discussion dinner.
Very excited about our BLN ecommerce discussion dinner next week.
Here is the Wordle plot of the biographies of the participants.
Here is the Wordle plot of the company descriptions.
They don’t convey the impression of the incredible quality of the people fully but it does seem that Amazon and eBay have provided an extraordinarily effective training ground for some of the most significant business leaders in the ecommerce scene.
