Business Insight

Saturday, November 24, 2012

GRANTHAM: We're Headed For A Disaster Of Biblical Proportions

Grantham believes the world has undergone a permanent "paradigm shift" in which the number of people on Earth has finally and permanently outstripped the planet's ability to support us.
The phenomenon of ever-more humans using a finite supply of natural resources cannot continue forever, Grantham says--and the prices of metals, hydrocarbons (oil), and food are now beginning to reflect that.
Grantham believes that the planet can only sustainably support about 1.5 billion humans, versus the 7 billion on Earth right now (heading to 10-12 billion). For all of history except the last 200 years, the human population has been controlled via the limits of the food supply. Grantham thinks that, eventually, the same force will come into play again.

If These Two Brilliant Investors Are Right About Future Growth, The World Is Screwed

But will long-term growth rates be slow? Both writers focus on the demographics: Mr Brightman cites figures showing that the US population was growing at 1.8% per annum in the 1950s, 1% in the 1970s and just 0.9% in recent years. and he says that the recession may make things worse, not better, since hard times make people more reluctant to have children; population growth slowed from 1.5% in the first two decades of the 20th century to 0.7% in the 1930s. The US fertility rate in 2011 was the lowest ever recorded. Meanwhile, immigration has also slowed; between 2005 and 2010, net migration from Mexico was zero.

Mr Grantham reckons that future population growth will be just 0.5% a year and, when adjusted for fewer hours worked per person, total work hours may only rise by 0.2% a year. The rise in female participation -a big factor in growing hours worked in the 1980s and 1990s - seems to have stopped in around 2000

The proportion of the American population aged over 55 has risen from 18% in the 1970s to 25% today and will hit 31% by 2030. As we age, more people drop out of the workforce. Over the 1990-2010 period, only 29% of the over-55 cohort was in employment, as against 82% of 25-54 year olds. Clearly, fewer people will be able to afford to retire early in future and this gap will narrow. But it will still be hard for overall employment to rise. By itself, this factor will weigh on growth.

GMO

Hours worked are falling...

Mr Grantham reckons that future population growth will be just 0.5% a year and, when adjusted for fewer hours worked per person, total work hours may only rise by 0.2% a year. The rise in female participation -a big factor in growing hours worked in the 1980s and 1990s - seems to have stopped in around 2000. The proportion of the American population aged over 55 has risen from 18% in the 1970s to 25% today and will hit 31% by 2030. As we age, more people drop out of the workforce. Over the 1990-2010 period, only 29% of the over-55 cohort was in employment, as against 82% of 25-54 year olds. Clearly, fewer people will be able to afford to retire early in future and this gap will narrow. But it will still be hard for overall employment to rise. By itself, this factor will weigh on growth.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/slow-growth-will-clobber-government-budget-deficits-2012-11#ixzz2DA9Syhoz

GMO

Hours worked are falling...

http://www.businessinsider.com/slow-growth-will-clobber-government-budget-deficits-2012-11

Sunday, September 30, 2012

The Lowest Fare? Ask the Crowd

TRAVEL search sites have made it easy to find the lowest available fares ever since the Web’s early Jurassic period, when pioneers like Expedia and Travelocity opened shop. Many others, like Kayak and Hipmunk, have since joined in.

Travelers with complex travel plans may have noticed, however, that the search results aren’t necessarily consistent. This has created a business opportunity for Flightfox, a start-up company based in Mountain View, Calif., which uses a contest format to come up with the best fare that the crowd — all Flightfox-approved users — can find.

A traveler goes to Flightfox.com and sets up a competition, supplying information about the desired itinerary and clarifying a few preferences, like a willingness to “fly on any airline to save money” or a tolerance of “long layovers to save money.” Once Flightfox posts the contest, the crowd is invited to go to work and submit fares.

The contest runs three days, and the winner, the person who finds the lowest fare, gets 75 percent of the finder’s fee that the traveler pays Flightfox when setting up the competition. Flightfox says fees depend on the complexity of the itinerary; many current contests have fees in the $34-to-$59 range.

Travelers’ savings can be considerable. In a contest for a long, complex trip that began in Sydney, passed through Barcelona and then many South American destinations before returning to Sydney, the difference between the lowest fare, $6,538 a person, and the third-lowest was about $1,400. Why couldn’t every human searcher find the same fare that the winner did? The fact that the travelers specified 15 destinations for their four-month-long trip meant that no single search engine had all the needed information.

Flightfox asks travelers who have already found a good fare on their own to make clear at the outset that they will award the finder’s fee only if a better price is found. The site also encourages travelers to consider awarding a finder’s fee for flights that may not be less expensive but have fewer stops or shorter layovers.

Human searchers can find flights that handle special requests, like traveling with a pet or a surfboard, to which a travel search engine remains oblivious. Todd Sullivan, a software developer and co-founder of Flightfox, says, “There are too many variables for it to be economically feasible to build an algorithm that covers every aspect of travel.”

Mr. Sullivan says the company has about 900 researchers, which it calls “experts,” who search fares on behalf of the sponsoring travelers. Anyone can apply to be an “expert”; Mr. Sullivan says applicants need only show evidence of the ability to find good fares.

About 20 percent of the Flightfox researchers are travel agents. Another large group are what Mr. Sullivan calls “flight hackers,” people who enjoy the sport of fare-hunting and frequent sites like FlyerTalk. “They do this at sites like this for free anyhow,” Mr. Sullivan says. “We’ve commercialized it.”

The other large group of researchers comprises frequent travelers seeking ways to make money to finance their travel. Mr. Sullivan says he and his co-founder, Lauren McLeod, were in this category when they started the company early this year.

The two say they have raised $800,000 in seed funding from Silicon Valley and Australian investors.

One of Flightfox’s experts is Michael Roizman, a medical student at the University of Queensland in Australia, who has not done a lot of traveling himself. Nonetheless, he won a contest that Flightfox set up for fun, challenging searchers to find the lowest possible fare for an itinerary that would begin and end in a North American city and would touch all other continents except Antarctica. Mr. Roizman’s winning fare was $1,730 for a trip that included stops in Guyana, Morocco, Istanbul, Kuala Lumpur and Perth, Australia.

“A flight search engine is blind to the opportunity to break up a complex itinerary into separate segments that originate in low-fare markets,” Mr. Roizman says.

He gives an example of a flight from Sydney to Germany. It’s much cheaper, he says, to start with an inexpensive flight from Sydney to Southeast Asia, then fly on to Germany on any of several low-fare carriers.

The contest for the 15-destination trip from Sydney was won by Monique Krestyn, a Flightfox expert in Massachusetts whose days are mostly filled with looking after five young children. “I have a cousin who is a computer geek,” she says, “and he once said that the only thing I could do better on a computer than him is find good flights.” He ran across an ad for Flightfox and brought it to her attention.

Ms. Krestyn recalls, “At first, I thought, ‘Where in the world are these experts finding these fares?’” It took about a week, she says, to become familiar with smaller airlines that don’t show up in travel search engines. She also discovered that fares “are priced differently depending on where you look — and where you are looking from.”

In that contest, she made $100, but more typically the winnings are $20 or $30. “It doesn’t sound like much, but it really does add up,” she says. “In three months, I’ve made $4,000 and that’s just utilizing my downtime when home and family aren’t demanding me.”

It’s most heartening to see that in the domain of travel planning, humans still manage to hold their own. Every contest concluded at Flightfox is a small win for the species.

Randall Stross, a professor of business at San Jose State University, is the author of “The Launch Pad,” published this month.

Could ePatient Networks Become the Superdoctors of the Future?

As technology allows patients to pool their knowledge, can the collective experience of the sick create better care?

There’s something seriously wrong with a health care system that makes patients wait a month or more just to get a doctor’s appointment. Fed up with this information bottleneck all too common in the U.S., a new breed of “ePatients” is crowdsourcing treatment databases online and using mobile technology to access and share health information.
“People are recognizing that they can and need to take an active role in managing their health instead of just sitting by and going to doctor’s appointments,” says Sean Ahrens, a leader of the ePatient movement who was diagnosed with the inflammatory condition known as Crohn’s disease at age 12. His startup, Healthy Labs, launched a site called Crohnology last year that lets people with Crohn’s and ulcerative colitis record and share treatments--including medications, dietary changes, even alternative medicine--in a structured database.
“We are building what we think is a new way to practice medicine. We think software is going to supplant the traditional health care systems,” says Ahrens, who has received $167,000 in funding from Y Combinator and Start Fund. Unlike Web 1.0 patient forums and message boards, in which useful data is often buried in lengthy, free-form posts, Crohnology presents treatment reviews in a structured format that makes it easy to see how others are managing their condition and how well it’s working. The site’s 2,000 members can also rate via text message how they’re feeling every day on a scale of 1 to 100, in order to create their own personal health graph. In the question and answer area of the site, people pose questions like, “Are you the first person in your family to have Crohn’s or colitis?” and “What has been the greatest gift of having Crohn’s and colitis?”
Other ePatient networks are well under way. MyHealthTeams and DiabetesMine provide similar information-sharing services for people with autism and diabetes, respectively. The personal genomics firm 23andMe, which just got FDA approval for its $299 gene screens, lets people learn about health risks they may have inherited. Meanwhile, Healthy Labs plans to launch communities in the future for people with multiple sclerosis and fibromyalgia.

“In 10 years, the idea of going down to your doctor’s office for a visit is going to feel as foreign as going to the video store to get a VHS tape,” says Ahrens, who adds, “A doctor’s skill level is pretty highly correlated with the number of cases they have seen. What if you could have a system that has seen a million cases? We are building a superdoctor.”
Ahrens and other ePatients will share their stories at the MedicineX conference on September 29 at the Stanford School of Medicine. Sharing their health data, on the other hand, is an ongoing endeavor.

E-Commerce Success List

E-commerce is one of the fastest-growing sectors in technology and is poised to get even hotter, with sales expected to double between 2010 and 2015, according to eMarketer. So how can discerning investors find the most promising opportunities? They have to first take off the rose-colored glasses.
While innovative, fast-growing e-commerce companies abound, many of them will not succeed in the long run. For all the opportunity, it remains extremely difficult to build a great e-commerce company that truly and repeatedly delights the consumer.
At Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), we’ve been shopping in the e-ommerce market for years. The companies that rise to the top of our list have one thing in common: an obsessive focus on the consumer lifecycle, which can be measured and managed in many ways. For me, it boils down to four key elements that I refer to as the 4 A’s: Awareness, Activation, Addiction, and Amplification.
Amazon.com exemplifies the 4 A’s cycle. In 1994 Amazon began offering readers a much larger selection of books than would ever fit on the shelves of local bookstores. The startup gradually improved and extended customer experiences and engagement as it expanded far beyond the book realm. Massive brand loyalty turned Amazon into the world’s largest online retailer, a household brand, which benefits from loyal customers praising it in online and offline social conversations.

The Cycle Begins: Awareness

The cycle starts by using a variety of channels to expose prospective customers to your brand, attract them to your e-commerce site, and get them to revisit and start to engage. These channels may include direct marketing (e-mail, direct mail, catalogs, etc); search-based advertising and marketing; social networks; and mobile technologies. The precise mix is dictated by the habits of the target audience and can generate powerful cross-channel synergies.
Tracking visitors, Monthly Active Users (MAU) and monitoring social chatter can measure awareness. If you can, give pre-purchase users enough reason — such as a delightful digital experience — to Facebook Connect, comment, register or log in on subsequent visits. You can collect more detailed statistics implicitly and/or explicitly and propel users to the activation stage.

Activation and Engagement

The Activation stage starts with a transaction. Consumers will purchase something, and perhaps register for future interactions. First-time impressions are critical, so obtaining feedback on the product and the entire experience at this stage is critical. Tools such as the Net Promoter Score can measure satisfaction levels and start separating out your evangelists from your detractors.
Tactics that can distinguish your site at this stage include unique merchandising, a superior user interface, more granular personalization, seamless accommodation of mobile devices, and streamlined logistics.
Revel Touch is a company that fosters activation by extending a retailer’s footprint to the fast-growing iPad channel. It also helps lead into the addiction phase by turning a retailer’s website into an app that can be as sticky and engaging as a game.

Addiction and Loyalty

You reach the Addiction stage when you have captured some significant mind share. You get a high level of repeat purchases from your customers, and your site becomes the first thing they think of when they want to buy something in the category or occasion your brand represents.
Apple can boast a very addicted customer base, the foundations of which pre-date the web. When Apple releases a new iPhone, legions of passionate evangelists are ready to tout it. An addicted customer base is ready and willing to be engaged, with e-mail campaigns, contests, games, and links from social sites. At this stage it is important to measure everything in the sales funnel, quantify delight factors, and keep a close eye on customer service metrics.
As customers get more addicted, you will see increases in purchases-per-buyer ratios and average order values. There are also mind-share metrics that help you measure brand loyalty.
Creating a personalized connection with each customer is critical to the Addiction phase. Companies like Certona, SailThru, and MyBuys that create personal recommendations and promotions can help boost loyalty and build devotion.

Amplification and Social Spread

Once you have established a cadre of addicted evangelists, they will start promoting and amplifying your brand to others. If you track and further engage with your best customers and empower them via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Extole, Kenshoo and other social tools, they can amplify your message endlessly.
You can increase evangelist impact in the Amplification stage by making effective use of social media measurement and marketing tools. Other Amplification tactics include personalized offerings, incentives that encourage social sharing, and tell-a-friend campaigns. Good customer testimonials are worth their weight in gold at this stage.
Key metrics for the Amplification stage include buyer/sharer ratios; a traffic mix that is increasingly organic; lower customer acquisition costs; higher repeat purchases; Net Promoter customer loyalty scores; and viral coefficients. Ultimately, a delightful service with a high measure of evangelists and low level of detractors should translate into higher Awareness, beginning the cycle again at the first A for a new wave of customers.

Fab.com has nailed Amplification with a product feed that ties directly to a consumer’s social graph. Built to be extremely social, the amplitude is that company’s most valuable asset.

The Wow Factor

The 4 A’s cycle hinges on delighting customers, and just what constitutes customer delight varies from one e-commerce brand experience to another. What makes your product — or how you sell it — stand out?
Zappos sells products that are quite ordinary and uses massive availability and no-hassle returns to delight customers. Zappos offers the same brands at roughly the same prices, but carries most sizes and widths. You will find what you want. Zappos also removes some of the risk of online shopping, by offering a very friendly returns policy and great service.
Another great example is Gemvara in the jewelry category. Gemvara delights you with customized products that don’t exist until you create them, and engages you with enjoyable virtual renderings of inspiring jewelry that exists nowhere else.
ModCloth sifts through the fashion universe and carefully curates vintage and retro-inspired clothing. You don’t know what you will find, but you know it will be on-trend and beautiful.
E-commerce has undergone massive changes since Amazon first opened its virtual doors in 1994, and there is no sign that the transformation is abating. This continuing disruption favors agile startups that deeply understand and obsessively measure their unique 4 A’s of the consumer lifecycle: Awareness, Activation, Addiction, and Amplification.
With each turn of the cycle, the customer base increases rapidly while customer acquisition costs drop and the lifetime value of each customer goes up. The result is a high-worth and durable e-commerce brand that scales and delivers high profits.

Sunday, September 2, 2012

10 tech startups this week in Asia

1. Mogujie | China

Mogujie, China’s Pinterest + ecommerce referral startup, is reportedly raising series C funding at a projected $200 million valuation.

2. WeiboAgent | China

Currently in incubation at Chinaccelerator, American entrepreneur Michael Michelini has co-founded WeiboAgent that aims to help brands do much better social media marketing on Sina Weibo, the nation’s hottest Twitter clone.

3. Burpple | Singapore

This week, the food journal app Burpple is getting new features in its v1.1.6 update, with the two biggest being support for cross-posting from Instagram, as well as a full Japanese language localization.

4. TaoZhiBao | China

Chinese startup YaoZhiBao is shaking up the county’s jobs listings market with a simple app that scrapes jobs postings from many major job search services as well as from over 10,000 corporate sites – including the HR sections of the likes of Apple, Baidu, and Sina.

5. Sribu | Indonesia

Sribu.com, a startup from Indonesia which offers crowdsourced designs says that it is ready to expand its service to reach the rest of the world.

6. OpenLanguage | China

OpenLanguage, founded by Jenny Zhu and Hank Horkoff is a platform for learning numerous languages with mobile apps for iPad and Android tablets.

7. Sedapur | Indonesia

Foodie startup, Sedapur.com, aims to help Indonesia boost its culinary market with e-commerce, selling made-to-order pies, cakes, sushi, Indonesian dishes, and more.

8. Vibease | Singapore

It’s no secret that we’ve been interested in Vibease around here since the team pitched its unusual product at our first Startup Asia conference. We’ve been waiting patiently for the vibrator/app hybrid, which began pre-orders back in February, and this week there’s finally some good news: the Android app has officially launched.