Internet: Wave Three

Posted on May 31, 2015 by Adela Rogers

Steve Case writes: Most people didn’t see the need to be connected; only 3 percent of U.S. households were online when I started, averaging less than one hour of usage per week. It was not clear why people would want to communicate, buy things or gather information through a computer. Online services were pricey, slow, confusing and of limited usefulness.

It was a slow and steady ascension with many near-death experiences. We went through several layoffs and pivots, trying to identify a viable path forward. When we went public in 1992 — after seven years of hard work — we still had less than 200,000 subscribers.
But we stayed with it, and eventually people decided they did want to get connected. By 2000, when we celebrated our 15th birthday, we had 25 million subscribers and nearly 10,000 employees, and about half of the consumer Internet traffic,

But looking back 30 years later, with nostalgia and pride, I am struck by how our journey is about to be repeated by the next generation of entrepreneurs who are tackling some of the world’s most pressing challenges. Indeed, the Internet’s future may very well look a little like its past.

The first wave was the period of building the infrastructure, connections and awareness that ushered in a connected world. During this time, companies such as Cisco, WorldCom, IBM, Microsoft, Netscape and AOL were constructing the on-ramps to the information superhighway.

Iin the second wave, as the market shifted from narrow-band, dial-up phone connections to broadband and the disruption of media and commerce took hold.
That second wave involved a shift from building the Internet to building on top of the Internet. The focus moved from connecting people to creating new ways for them to access information and one another. The sheer volume of information enabled Google to create a dominant search engine. Apple roared back to life with a vision of seamless integration of hardware, software and services. And the explosion in smartphones enabled the Internet to go mobile, unleashing the app economy.

The third wave of the Internet is about to break. The opportunity is now shifting to integrating it into everyday life, in increasingly seamless and ubiquitous ways. These third-wave companies will take on some of the economy’s largest sectors: health care, education, transportation, energy, financial services, food and government services. These third-wave sectors — all now ripe for disruption — represent more than half of the U.S. economy.

To be successful during the third wave they will need to remember the three P’s:
Perseverance: Overcoming long-term structural changes within regulated sectors won’t happen overnight; entrepreneurs (and investors) will need to be more patient.
Partnerships: Just as partnerships were key in the first Internet wave, they will be key again in the third. Entrepreneurs won’t be able to go it alone in the third wave; they must go together.
Policy: Entrepreneurs will need to understand public policy in a more nuanced way. Last year, 75 percent of venture capital went to just three states: California, Massachusetts and New York. But 75 percent of our Fortune 500 companies are located in the 47 other states, and many of them will play a pivotal role in the third wave, as a new generation of partner-friendly entrepreneurs seeks strategic alliances to gain credibility and accelerate growth.

Entrepreneur Alert: E-Commerce in India

Posted on May 31, 2015 by Adela Rogers

Interesting Facts and Figures about the growth of e-business in India

Clean Energy Initiatives

Posted on May 30, 2015 by Andi Howe

Clean Energy on the Rocky Road to Globalization

U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz launched several new initiatives with other global energy leaders at the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas (ECPA) and the sixth Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM6) this week in Merida, Mexico. These initiatives will further strengthen momentum in the Western Hemisphere and around the globe to combat climate change and accelerate clean energy technology and policies ahead of the December 2015 climate talks in Paris. At both ECPA and CEM6, energy ministers discussed technology solutions to grow low-carbon economies while helping to implement national commitments to reduce climate pollution.

At ECPA, Secretary Moniz met with energy ministers from across the Western Hemisphere to discuss areas of cooperation in the region. The ministerial established two new initiatives – the North American Energy Ministers Working Group on Climate and Energy with Canada and Mexico, and the ECPA Western Hemisphere Clean Energy Initiative with governments from around the region.

The new trilateral Working Group enhances a North American Energy Ministers’ Areas of cooperation include reliable, resilient, and low-carbon electricity grids; modeling and deployment of clean energy technologies; energy efficiency for equipment, appliances, industries, and buildings; carbon capture, use, and storage; climate change adaptation and resilience; and emissions reduction from the oil and gas sector.

At CEM6, Secretary Moniz and fellow ministers announced new efforts to increase the ambition and productivity of CEM – or “CEM 2.0.” They created a year-round steering committee made up of China, Denmark, the European Commission, France, India, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States to guide the strategy for CEM.

Together with a series of hemispheric partners, Secretary Moniz also announced the ECPA Western Hemisphere Clean Energy Initiative, under which countries announced that they intend to work toward a collective doubling of renewable sources such as solar, wind, small-scale hydropower, sustainable biomass, and geothermal, by 2030.

billion high-efficiency, high-quality and affordable advanced lighting products as quickly as possible. With lighting accounting for 15 percent of global electricity usage, replacing the world’s existing

The United States also announced efforts to dramatically scale-up the Clean Energy Solutions Center, a CEM initiative that has already provided real-time, no-cost clean energy expert policy assistance to more than 80 countries around the world.

Entpreneurs Alert: Cheap Computing

Posted on May 29, 2015 by Adela Rogers

The idea behind a tiny and affordable computer for kids came in 2006, when Eben Upton, Rob Mullins, Jack Lang and Alan Mycroft, based at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, became concerned about the year-on-year decline in the numbers and skills levels of the A Level students applying to read Computer Science. From a situation in the 1990s where most of the kids applying were coming to interview as experienced hobbyist programmers, the landscape in the 2000s was very different; a typical applicant might only have done a little web design.

Something had changed the way kids were interacting with computers. A number of problems were identified: the colonisation of the ICT curriculum with lessons on using Word and Excel, or writing webpages; the end of the dot-com boom; and the rise of the home PC and games console to replace the Amigas, BBC Micros, Spectrum ZX and Commodore 64 machines that people of an earlier generation learned to program on.

There isn’t much any small group of people can do to address problems like an inadequate school curriculum or the end of a financial bubble. But we felt that we could try to do something about the situation where computers had become so expensive and arcane that programming experimentation on them had to be forbidden by parents; and to find a platform that, like those old home computers, could boot into a programming environment.

By 2008, processors designed for mobile devices were becoming more affordable, and powerful enough to provide excellent multimedia, a feature we felt would make the board desirable to kids who wouldn’t initially be interested in a purely programming-oriented device. The project started to look very realisable. Eben (now a chip architect at Broadcom), Rob, Jack and Alan, teamed up with Pete Lomas, MD of hardware design and manufacture company Norcott Technologies, and David Braben, co-author of the seminal BBC Micro game Elite, to form the Raspberry Pi Foundation to make it a reality. Three years later, the Raspberry Pi Model B entered mass production through licensed manufacture deals with element 14/Premier Farnell and RS Electronics, and within two years it had sold over two million units.

We don’t claim to have all the answers. We don’t think that the Raspberry Pi is a fix to all of the world’s computing issues; we do believe that we can be a catalyst. We want to see affordable, programmable computers everywhere. We want to break the paradigm where without spending hundreds of pounds on a PC, families can’t use the internet. We want owning a truly personal computer to be normal for children, and we’re looking forward to what the future has in store.

Entrepreneur Alert: Smart Watches and Wearables

Posted on May 29, 2015 by Adela Rogers

Following the release of the Apple Watch, 2015 looks more than ever to be the year that smartwatches reach a mainstream audience. Watches traditionally have been worn for fashion as well as practicality and the latest generation from tech manufacturers are looking to try to bridge that gap for the first time.

Apple have even made inroads into the high end luxury market with the release of Apple Watch “Edition” which sports a gold case and starts at $10,000. The concept of a smartwatch is not new as manufacturers have seen the potential for decades but haven’t had access to the technology required to make their pieces either desirable or functional. IHere is a look at the development of the smartwatch since the turn of the millennium.

Entrepreneur Alerts: Snapchat, a Good Name?

Posted on May 28, 2015 by Adela Rogers

Brad Stone and Sarah Frier write: Evan Spiegel begins a conversation in the offices of his startup, Snapchat, by propping a sneakered foot onto an Eames chair, leaning back, and acknowledging how infrequently he speaks to the press. “I literally have not done this in so long,” he says, before taking a sip from something called a Happy Juice—pineapple, pear, ginger, mint. When asked why, he chooses his words carefully. “I’ve been working,” he says. “This s— is hard!”

Spiegel is the co-founder, chief executive officer, and profane enfant terrible behind one of the largest and fastest-growing social networks on the Internet. At 24, he runs a startup with 330 employees and a valuation north of $15 billion, which claims more than 100 million mostly young users. He’s also incredibly secretive about his business plans and an unknown (and arguably underestimated) figure in the intersecting gossip circles of Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

Now he’s ready to talk about a major turning point for his company. More than three years after Spiegel founded Snapchat at Stanford with his fraternity brother, Bobby Murphy, 26, he’s trying to turn it into a real business. After starting to run select video ads earlier this year, Snapchat is about to begin soliciting other big advertisers with some new numbers that assert its audience is bigger, younger, and more obsessive than anything on television. In a 23-page sales pitch it’s sending to ad agencies this month, the company says more than 60 percent of 13- to 34-year-old smartphone users in the U.S. are active on the service and together view more than 2 billion videos a day. That’s already about half the number of videos people watch on Facebook, which is seven years older and has 10 times as many members. Spiegel’s Snapchat

Entrepreneur Alert: Wooden Skyscrapers?

Posted on May 27, 2015 by Adela Rogers

Peter WIlson writes: Until recently, the potential for using timber in towers was very limited. Platform timber frame – the system used, for example, to construct more than 70% of Scotland’s housing, by my calculations – is effective up to seven storeys in height. In Scotland, we build four or five storeys in timber as a matter of course. But any higher than seven storeys and structural challenges and simple economics always made it less effective.

The game-changer reached the skyline in 2009, not in North America but in London. The Stadthaus in Hackney’s Murray Grove, designed by Waugh Thistleton Architects and Techniker engineers, is a nine-storey building comprising 29 apartments, constructed almost entirely from cross-laminated solid wood panels. These provide strength, stability and, importantly, a convenient way of locking in considerable volumes of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

This became possible following the commercial development of cross-laminated timber in Austria in the 1990s, its increasing application in the UK, and the decision by Hackney Council that the carbon agenda was more important than the strict application of fire regulations that related to old forms of timber technology.

Vancouver-based architect Michael Green is unequivocal:

“We grow trees in British Columbia that are 35 storeys tall, so why do our building codes restrict timber buildings to only five storeys?”

Until recently, the potential for using timber in towers was very limited. Platform timber frame – the system used, for example, to construct more than 70% of Scotland’s housing, by my calculations – is effective up to seven storeys in height. In Scotland, we build four or five storeys in timber as a matter of course. But any higher than seven storeys and structural challenges and simple economics always made it less effective.

This ability to use a renewable material to provide a positive response to a key environmental issue facing the construction industry, namely global warming, is nothing short of transformational. The use of concrete is already responsible for 5% of global greenhouse-gas emissions.

Entrepreneur Alert: Obama Opens Opportunities Worldwide

Posted on May 25, 2015 by Adela Rogers

Kaj Leers writes: Obama has been judicious on most key crises of the day. His caution and care have been notable—and underrated. He has sometimes taken the notion of strategic restraint too far, as with a premature U.S. military departure from Iraq, excessive nervousness about any entanglement in Syria’s civil war, and ongoing plans for a complete military withdrawal from Afghanistan next year. But Obama’s discipline has often been quite wise and quite beneficial to the nation, especially in regard to Russia, China, and Iran. As his presidency begins to wind down, the country’s fundamentals of national power as measured by economic growth, high-technology, industrial entrepreneurship and productivity, fiscal and trade deficits, and military power are generally no worse and in some cases modestly better than when he entered the White House.

Notable contrasts between his first secretary of state and his second reveal John Kerry as a master of diplomacy. On behalf of the President, Kerry has furthered an Asia-Pacific rebalance, The tricky Russia relationship is being re-considered. The Iran deal is momumental in terms of nuclear safety and the turmoil in the Middle East. Obama Opens Opportunities for Women Entrepreneurs

Beyond the AIIB and Development

Posted on May 23, 2015 by Adela Rogers

On the Rocky Road to Globalization

Anne-Marie Slaughter writes: China’s success in establishing the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank has been widely regarded as a diplomatic fiasco for the United States. After discouraging all US allies from joining the AIIB, President Barack Obama’s administration watched as Great Britain led a raft of Western European countries, followed by Australia and South Korea, into doing just that.

Worse, the Obama administration found itself in the position of trying to block Chinese efforts to create a regional financial institution after the US itself was unable to deliver on promises to give China and other major emerging economies a greater say in the governance of the International Monetary Fund.

China will control half of the voting shares in the AIIB, initially capitalized at $1 billion. Unless the Western victors of World War II can update the rules and institutions that underpinned the post-war international order, they will find themselves in a world with multiple competing regional orders and even dueling multilateral institutions.

From the point of view of developing countries in need of capital, competing banks probably look like a good thing. But what about the impact on actual development, the likelihood that individual citizens of poor countries will live richer, healthier, more educated lives? World Bank conditionality often includes provisions on human rights and environmental protections that make it more difficult for governments bent on growth at any cost to run roughshod over their people. Competition is good, but unregulated competition typically ends up in a race to the bottom.

China’s establishment of the AIIB is the latest sign of a broader move away from the view that aid to developing countries is best provided in the form of massive government-to-government transfers. Power and wealth are not only diffusing across the international system, but also within states.

The new model of development may be one based on the recognition “that the United States is one of many actors, and that countries require investments from multiple sources to achieve sustained and inclusive economic growth.” Initiatives such as Feed the Future, the US Global Development Lab, and Power Africa combine “local ownership, private investment, innovation, multi-stakeholder partnerships, and mutual accountability.”

This new model moves beyond the mantra of “public-private partnership.” It genuinely leverages multiple sources of money and expertise in broad coalitions pursuing the same big goal.

Power Africa takes a “transaction-centered approach,” creating teams to align incentives among “host governments, the private sector, and donors.” Unlike big government-to-government transfers, which can often end up in the pockets of officials, the point is to ensure that deals actually get done and investments flow to their intended destination.

Skeptics will say that the US is simply making a virtue of necessity. The federal government no longer has billions of dollars to dole out to foreign governments, while China is far more centralized and less beholden to its taxpayers.

That criticism contains some truth. But, over the longer term, the new US model of development is actually far more resilient and sustainable than the old government-to-government model. Only societies with thriving sectors free of government control can participate in these broad coalitions of public, private, and civic actors.

Overall, the AIIB is a positive development. More money aimed at helping poor countries become middle-income countries and at middle-income countries to help them provide transport, energy, and communication for their people is a good thing. But the Asian way is not the only way.

Alibaba a Counterfeiter?

Posted on May 22, 2015 by Adela Rogers

A group of luxury fashion brands are suing Chinese online shopping giant Alibaba, claiming it knowingly made it possible for counterfeiters to sell their products throughout the world.

The lawsuit, filed on Friday in Manhattan Federal Court in the US by Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and other brands owned by Paris-based Kering SA, seeks damages and an injunction for alleged violations of trademark and racketeering laws.

It claims that Alibaba conspired to manufacture, offer for sale and traffic counterfeit products bearing their trademarks without their permission.

An Alibaba spokeswoman said the complaint had “no basis in law” and vowed the company would “fight it vigorously”.

The lawsuit came as the latest headache for Alibaba Group. On Thursday, Taiwanese media reported that Alibaba’s online marketplace Taobao had been fined NT$240,000 (HK$61,000) and ordered to withdraw from the island within six months for violating investment rules for mainland companies.

Concerns over fake products on Alibaba’s platforms, including on Taobao, have dogged the company for years, although the US Trade Representative removed Taobao from its list of “notorious markets” in 2012.

Friday’s lawsuit by the luxury goods makers marked the second time in less than a year that the Kering brands had sued Alibaba over the alleged sale of counterfeit products.

An earlier lawsuit was filed in July only to be withdrawn the same month with the ability to refile it while the Kering units worked towards a resolution with Alibaba. The lawsuit alleged that Alibaba and its related entities “provide the marketplace advertising and other essential services necessary for counterfeiters to sell their counterfeit products to customers in the United States”.

The lawsuit cited, for example, an alleged fake Gucci bag offered for US$2 to US$5 each by a Chinese merchant to buyers seeking at least 2,000 units. The authentic Gucci bag retailed for US$795, the complaint said.

Alibaba had allowed counterfeit sales to continue even when it had been expressly informed that merchants were selling fake products, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit seeks a court order that would block Alibaba from offering or facilitating the sale of counterfeit products and unspecified damages that could include US$2 per counterfeit item under a statutory regime.

A war of words erupted between Alibaba and the mainland’s State Administration for Industry and Commerce in late January after the agency accused the group of allowing counterfeit and substandard goods to be sold through its Taobao site.

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