There is often much said on strategic immigration and the competitive battle for the world’s most gifted workers. A recent interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in the Detroit Free Press drives home the negative externalities from limiting the brightest from our shores. Ballmer discusses why in 2007 Microsoft built an R&D facility in Vancouver – just over the border from their Redmond, Washington headquarters in Canada in 2007. Ballmer stated Microsoft
Recently I’ve been asked repeatedly about the current state of Europe. I’ve said since January that 2012 was going to be marked by periods of volatility – stressing that European issues would be a key catalyst to those periods of volatility (energy prices have also contributed to uneasiness – something I’ll say more on at another time). I was recently quoted in a Bloomberg article and a point I made deserves repeating – a lack of confidence can be very contagious.
One of the books I’m currently reading is Jason Turbow and Michael Duca’s The Baseball Codes: Beanballs, Sign Stealing, and Bench-Clearing Brawls: The Unwritten Rules of America’s Pastime. It’s a great read that goes through the myriad of unwritten rules in baseball – from running up the score, when stealing should be done, retaliation and general baseball etiquette.
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An interview from a few months ago where Mark Addicks – chief marketing officer of General Mills – discusses the future of the cereal box. The line that caught my attention, “the wonderful world of packaging, a cereal box, which a lot of people love some of the most well read print material in the world will start to be platforms for all kinds of content.” As we move more fully to a world of digital data – what I refer to as the second digital decade – it is likely that we’ll see traditional distribution mechanisms – like a standard cereal box – become important platforms for the dissemination of digital data.
Daily deals were all the rage in 2011. Groupon – the leader in the daily deal space – went public last year to much fanfare. The November IPO raised $700 million and valued the company at $12.8 billion at the time. It was the largest IPO by a Web company since Google went public. A few weeks later LivingSocial – the other big player in the space – raised $400 million to give it a valuation of $6 billion. But are daily deals the next big bubble (behind food trucks)? Groupon’s valuation is down roughly 60 percent since the IPO just 5 months ago.
Good Technology is a privately-held company which offers a mobile solution for corporate and government clients. The core offerings include email, calendar, and secure mobile access to applications and company data. While the customer base is likely small relative to the entire universe of tablets and smartphones and many end-users are likely bringing personal, mobile tech devices like smartphones and especially tablets into the enterprise directly (ie the consumerization of IT, or CoIT), the companies activations are up 50 percent in the last year. More, the technology has been deployed with more than half of the Fortune 100 companies. Each quarter, Good Technology releases a summary of the past quarter’s activation activities so exploring the trends there within can be insightful for understanding some of the trends currently influencing the tablet ecosystem.
Good Technology recently released their Q1 2012 Activation Report. Here are a few of the highlights:
- iOS devices accounted for 80 percent of the activations in 1Q12
- the top 6 devices are iOS devices.
- iPad (both the new and the old) represent 97 percent of tablet activations in 1Q12
- iPads were activated the most in three industries: Financial Services, Business/Professional Services and Life Sciences, with Life Sciences showing disproportionately higher rates of iPad activations when compared to overall device activations
- Good released support for Windows Phone 7.5 in April 2012, so activations of Windows Phone devices like the Nokia Lumia might be underrepresented in the Q1 results. Related data will be included in the Q2 2012 activations report
One thing heavily overlooked is how technology shrinks the supply chain. By supply chain I mean in the broadest and most general sense how a product or service is ultimately delivered through to the end user.
This morning Fred Wilson wrote about Demand It! From Eventful. With Demand It! the basic concept is simple – users demand a certain service (movie, concert, or other event) and if users can accumulate enough “demands”, the event will come to their location. Historically, concert organizers played an important intermediary role. Through the use of technology, bands can no identify the most attractive markets and sidestep any analysis previously done by intermediaries.
Technology also helps to capture a more precise quantitative metric and I believe this is an important reason why technology is able to shorten and consolidate the supply chain generally. Intermediaries in markets like summer concerts would frequently rely heavily on their understanding of how successful a certain genre of music would be within a given market. Historically bands would be beholden to these intermediaries, but they can now rely on a more quantitative measure of interest within a given geographic market.
There are a plethora of other examples of how technology has shrunk the supply chain. The move to digital files has allowed content creators to deliver directly to the end market because the move to digital significantly curtained shelf space scarcity. With shelf space no longer a constraint, content creators and end users are no longer beholden to intermediaries like record labels and music stores who have historically provided a vetting process to determined what content passed down the supply chain. Because of constraints like limited shelf space downstream in the supply chain, these intermediaries culled or funneled the content that actually made it to the end consumer, but with digital files producers can now go directly to consumers.
eCommerce solutions allow producers of a product or service to deliver their product or service directly to the end user – in many instances bypassing several layers of retailing. Airline ticketing provides one of the best examples of how the move to eCommerce shrunk the supply chain between producer and the end-market buyer.
Kickstarter is another example of how technology is shrinking and consolidating the supply chain. The list goes one. With unlimited choice, the importance of search and curation are certainly key. And creating a relationship with a fickle consumer is clearly easier said than done – but we’ll save these for another day.
With technology shrinking the supply chain and consolidating players within the supply chain, end users can work quickly and easily back up the supply chain. This is exactly what is happening in the case of Demand It!. End users have the able to push their wants and desires back up through the supply chain. Quirky, which uses a wisdom-of-the-crowds approach to product development is another example of how consumers can push their desires up the supply chain.
The shrinking and consolation of the supply chain will also open up new services and opportunities for end-users to push their preferences up the supply chain. Over a decade ago John Hagel and Marc Singer wrote about infomediaries, which are services that act as a personal agent on behalf of consumers to control their personal information. Personal.com is an example of these infomediaries. Project VRM is another example of how users might leverage infomediaries to work up the supply chain.
Last week the Social Security Trustee Report reported the Social Security trust fund will be exhausted by 2033. Comparing this date with previously released estimated Veronique de Rugy at the Mercatus Center highlights the estimated exhaust date has continued to decline and is now estimated to happen 20 years sooner than estimated in 1990. The chart below makes this point clear and should give most pause to any who think we have until 2033 to deal with this political third rail.
Sears Holdings is expanding the availability of its in-store professional apparel shop to 91 Sears and Kmart stores nationwide. Revealing of their core shopper.