VentureBeat notes a raft of mobile payment plans now available in the US market. With this much competition, I imagine that many of the plans will attempt to differentiate themselves by offering easy sign up and access and by competing over an growing list of participating vendors, most of whom will be retailing items, from gasoline to coffee, which are not inordinately expensive:
So where is the opportunity? I suspect that it is on the phone bill side. Let's say I get three providers and make sixteen purchases, some of which should be billed as expenses while others are personal. What will this look like on my phone bill, which is already difficult to read? Are there third parties which are even now working to make these bills more transparent? I;ve written to my Dad about this (he is an expert in large information systems and had spent years working on phone billing systems) to see whether he has a take on this.
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It is worth some time to pay attention to Make Magazine. While few readers will go ahead and build their own radio transmitter circuits, publication in the magazine or the website lends garage designer status to the circuitry in question. This is important as micro supply chains develop. Let's say I invent a new household item using the MAKE transmitter. Within a few years, I'll be able to ship the design out to 1-3 small manufacturers who will send back 100 or 200 boards, enclosures etc. At that point I can file a provisional and bring a first batch of products to WalMart or some other entity and suddenly Linksys finds a new, totally unexpected competitor.
So MAKE and other magazines (Mother Earth News, I guess) devoted to the DIY movement will become steadily more relevant as standardized contracts and improved communications enable your average garage inventor to bring prototypes and first production runs to the table.
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AfriGadget Notes a Knife Sharpening Bicycle Operation:
The design efficiency is noteworthy. If I were to design this blind, I might force the cyclist to dismount from the bike each time he wanted to sharpen something. That would amount to lots of extra effort for $10 per day. Here, all transactions and services take place from the seat of the bicycle. Excellent.
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core77 points to the carpet alarm clock, which forces the user to stand up in order to shut off the alarm.
Microsoft and other "house of the future" companies have had some trouble coming up with a compelling package of services that would justify the learning curve and IT maintenance expense of a fully networked house. In part, this seems to be because the systems involved are far reaching (everything from music to lighting to heating to milk in the fridge and digital photos on your desk. In part these systems also seem to flood the user with data. The alarm carpet above makes me think tha we can re-work some of these concepts by thinking of the house as less of a provisioning entity (a vending machine for shelter, food, security, etc) and more of an interactive daily planner (ie, a storage unit and interface that let's us work with the outside world.) In this slightly different view, I would walk through the day wiht the same task list, but the house would sit as an entity in the background, allowing me to do simple things like mark off shopping tasks by brushing my hand against the fridge to more complex tasks like helping to arrange a Friday night meal or an evening party. Many of these activities can be done on a laptop today of course, but there is some physical dissonance in sitting down in a fixed spot to get most of our work done during the day. I'd be interested to see whether volume and quality of finished work increases when we move around during work, turning the house itself into a distributed computer and much more of an interface for the outside world.
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Engadget notes that Apple has passed amazon to become the world's third largest retailer (after Wal Mart and Best Buy) for music.
Since we are in the business of building disruptive businesses, we should always be a little bit curious about benchmarking growth rates for these businesses. I'm happy to put Apple at the ceiling. In general, if I a modeling growth for a potential business and my numbers suggest "faster than Apple" growth in a new market, I will re-test the assumptions underlying such growth.
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These shoes, highlighted at core77 remind me that the spartan interface/ simplicity movement, which getting old in electronics, still has miles to go elsewhere. Muji is pretty much based on the same aesthetic. (I'd like to see a Muji-redesigned ipod).
This reminds me that the clean form aesthetic was not created by Apple. We have seen this of course, in Shaker communities and I am sure that there are plenty of Western examples that predate this. Examples are even more plentiful in Asia where entire schools of art (such as the certain Chinese landscape painting schools (Ni Tsan, others)) were constructed around the use of empty, uncluttered space.
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Danal is the latest in a zoo of such companies, however, and it isn’t clear what makes the company unique. As the WSJ piece points out, San Jose, Calif.’s PaymentOne also allows people to bill online items to their mobile bills. Start-up Obopay, of Redwood City, Calif., lets people pay each other via mobile phone, and lets you use a debit card for this — and may also eventually allow people to bill items to phone bills. There are all sorts of other payment flavors popping up, including Payoneer, aimed at online payments (see our coverage), and Vivotech (see coverage).
So where is the opportunity? I suspect that it is on the phone bill side. Let's say I get three providers and make sixteen purchases, some of which should be billed as expenses while others are personal. What will this look like on my phone bill, which is already difficult to read? Are there third parties which are even now working to make these bills more transparent? I;ve written to my Dad about this (he is an expert in large information systems and had spent years working on phone billing systems) to see whether he has a take on this.
=========================================================================
It is worth some time to pay attention to Make Magazine. While few readers will go ahead and build their own radio transmitter circuits, publication in the magazine or the website lends garage designer status to the circuitry in question. This is important as micro supply chains develop. Let's say I invent a new household item using the MAKE transmitter. Within a few years, I'll be able to ship the design out to 1-3 small manufacturers who will send back 100 or 200 boards, enclosures etc. At that point I can file a provisional and bring a first batch of products to WalMart or some other entity and suddenly Linksys finds a new, totally unexpected competitor.
So MAKE and other magazines (Mother Earth News, I guess) devoted to the DIY movement will become steadily more relevant as standardized contracts and improved communications enable your average garage inventor to bring prototypes and first production runs to the table.
=======================================================================
AfriGadget Notes a Knife Sharpening Bicycle Operation:
The design efficiency is noteworthy. If I were to design this blind, I might force the cyclist to dismount from the bike each time he wanted to sharpen something. That would amount to lots of extra effort for $10 per day. Here, all transactions and services take place from the seat of the bicycle. Excellent.
==========================================================================
core77 points to the carpet alarm clock, which forces the user to stand up in order to shut off the alarm.
Microsoft and other "house of the future" companies have had some trouble coming up with a compelling package of services that would justify the learning curve and IT maintenance expense of a fully networked house. In part, this seems to be because the systems involved are far reaching (everything from music to lighting to heating to milk in the fridge and digital photos on your desk. In part these systems also seem to flood the user with data. The alarm carpet above makes me think tha we can re-work some of these concepts by thinking of the house as less of a provisioning entity (a vending machine for shelter, food, security, etc) and more of an interactive daily planner (ie, a storage unit and interface that let's us work with the outside world.) In this slightly different view, I would walk through the day wiht the same task list, but the house would sit as an entity in the background, allowing me to do simple things like mark off shopping tasks by brushing my hand against the fridge to more complex tasks like helping to arrange a Friday night meal or an evening party. Many of these activities can be done on a laptop today of course, but there is some physical dissonance in sitting down in a fixed spot to get most of our work done during the day. I'd be interested to see whether volume and quality of finished work increases when we move around during work, turning the house itself into a distributed computer and much more of an interface for the outside world.
==========================================================================
Engadget notes that Apple has passed amazon to become the world's third largest retailer (after Wal Mart and Best Buy) for music.
Since we are in the business of building disruptive businesses, we should always be a little bit curious about benchmarking growth rates for these businesses. I'm happy to put Apple at the ceiling. In general, if I a modeling growth for a potential business and my numbers suggest "faster than Apple" growth in a new market, I will re-test the assumptions underlying such growth.
==========================================================================
These shoes, highlighted at core77 remind me that the spartan interface/ simplicity movement, which getting old in electronics, still has miles to go elsewhere. Muji is pretty much based on the same aesthetic. (I'd like to see a Muji-redesigned ipod).
This reminds me that the clean form aesthetic was not created by Apple. We have seen this of course, in Shaker communities and I am sure that there are plenty of Western examples that predate this. Examples are even more plentiful in Asia where entire schools of art (such as the certain Chinese landscape painting schools (Ni Tsan, others)) were constructed around the use of empty, uncluttered space.
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