Sunday, November 30, 2008

What will be the next Wave?

For the last two decades start ups funded by Venture Capital from pension assets have ushered in technology revolutions bringing web technologies and web based applications and businesses remaking the way people conduct their lives, allowing people to connect, and making products never available before available, changing and improving our lives.

Now however, the pension money available to start ups is diminished, the web could replace the whole genre, the need for new technology is less interesting and new needs now exist.

Will the Web 2.0 corporation be some amorphous group from the web without "employees". OpenSource is developing software why not the next utility company or automobile? Or perhaps it could be from the banking, lending space, obvious is that fact that the segment is facing turbulent times, excessive salaries (indicating there is room for competition), and it is an electronic industry. Could corporate finance and governance (and transparency) be created by the web?

We have the tools to do some wonderful things available to us now. There are certain human activities that are hard to fathom being done over the web... for example, the assembly of a car, or farming corn in Iowa but in a world where global warming, shortages of oil and water, and the existence of natural disasters (hurricanes, earth quakes, and fires) there must be industries ripe the disruptive implementation of technology to change the dynamics.

Insurance (where 50% of the cost is administrative and 50% is actual insurance)
Finance and banking (where the spread in lending and savings rate is 40%
Retail (where Wal-Mart has a sophisticated CRM/ERP/MRP system) small retailers do not benefit from being able to break down economic order sizes. (but Amazon could).
Traffic patterns - why aren't automobiles connected to the a network and hybrid vehicles start and shut off engines to minimize fuel use.
Public investment in energy, infrastructure, NG fuel systems.

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