A new technology enables new opportunities.
A few lines from the book The New New Thing.
At some point in the early 1990s the engineers had figured out that they didn’t need to build new computers to get rich. They just had to cook up new things for computers to do.
p. 39
3-D Printed Body Parts, Finally! : Discovery News: “For children born with microtia, a congenital deformity of the external ear, reconstructive surgery solutions can involve long, painful operations or prosthetics that rarely resemble the real thing.”
(Via.)
3-D Printing is not just for making toys.
Could square be used on my own device to pay bills?
Example steps
Open Square.
Enter my payment recipient company (or select from a drop down list of companies one has a prior business relationship with).
Enter account number for payment (could be a typed in number, a barcode or a QR code).
Swipe my own credit card to apply payment.
Bill paid, records kept, stamps not used.
BRILLIANT!
FN: Could also envisions something like scanning a QR code for each payment, loading a few in, then swiping ones credit card just once to pay multiple bills faster.
FN: = FootNotes
So now companies don’t just need to hire people to watch Twitter and blogs and put out fires. Now they have to fear that their abusive policies will become the subject of large-scale, instant protests.
(Via BuzzMachine)
What company or organization will be destroyed by customers who mass cancel their accounts? This will happen someday, probably in the next ten years. Some firms live on the cash flows monthly subscribers pay them.
You have a real problem If your customers loath your organization. New options are becoming available. Some customers will do without, rather that do business with you. A good example of this is people canceling home cable TV service and not replacing it with satellite TV. These people are likely choosing video programming from the Internet. It’s also possible that they are watching over the air HD broadcasts. The power to disrupt that is broadband Internet is hard to over estimate. Many new services will come about as more people have broadband at home. Faster speeds will also enable new businesses. Old ones will decline and some will be eliminated. Online data backup might disrupt the external hard drive industry in the not to distant future.
Podcasts Worth Exploring
Notes:
These are some of best podcasts I listen too. There are more, but they are not focused on business, technology or marketing quite like these.
This Week in Venture Capital is a relatively recent addition. The three or four episodes I’ve listened to were outstanding. See links below.
Interviewee
Seth’s Blog: The future of the library:
“The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.”
Great post by Seth. Not finished reading it, but even just the first few paragraphs got me to thinking about the future of libraries and the skilled Librarians that work there.
See this as a way of focusing on the WHAT, rather than the HOW. Too many people want the HOW to stay the same. The HOW can be done cheaper and more effectively as technology and ideas enable new methods to come to fruition. The WHAT stays the same, regardless of the HOW. Learning, Ideas, Value, Trade, Exchange, these are the WHAT that people want and need, Not the HOW.
Around mid day on Thursday (1/6/2011) there were rumors floating around that Skype (an Internet telephony, instant messaging and video chat client) would be acquiring Qik (a live streaming video technology service). Apparently this was more than a rumor (See Mashable). This will make an interesting marriage.
Could see Skype creating live video channels that use Qik to stream and store data (AKA: Programs). Skype may integrate it with their IM client as well.
A few thoughts:
D.L. Damore 