Interesting article about how Ebay is looking to go the other direction – physical storefronts to expand a company’s digital footprint. The company has always been helping businesses to connect with customers but this is a great example of expanding horizontally. Its very different from Amazon who wants to build its direct to consumer model of sales and clearly outlines that they are more about enabling commerce than selling stuff. The value of a mall and convenience of home delivery.
And we all love technology – so much so that Snapchat has spread so fast Facebook was ready to take them out for $3 Billion. Instagram hasn’t changed much since they were acquired by the FB – Evan Spiegle – he and two buddies build this thing to send disappearing apps. Then Google offered $4 Billion! Its really kind of insane – unless it meant selling his soul. Maybe that’s what he thought. As this article/interview says – he will go down in history as a brilliant soul or an idiot. The thing is – this is isolated and unusual – most of today’s dot.com success stories are the result of many years of growth and they are actually making money. Unlike the last boom that was all about hope and prayer.
Finally – 3D Printing – I remember reading about this a few years ago in Wired magazine. It was a lot of speculation then as the machines were so expensive. Then a year later I read an article about a guy who was selling custom Legos’s built on 3D printers and making money as a boutique business. Then a similar story about a set of digital blueprints that a 3-D printer can use to create more than 45 plastic objects. That’s the big impact here – its all going to change – we may just go back to the ‘olden days’ of artisans and craftsman. And manufacturing is bound to go nuts too – take this example of synthetic prosthetic eyeballs made for 5% of conventional manufacturing costs! That’s an isolated example though – the fact is we are still primarily in a prototyping to limited production state – until it can really get to mass production we won’t see a huge impact. But still – if you are going to guide your kids – this is one direction (along with “big data”) to send them.
Well business models continue to morph, we appear to be in a new technology bubble and the consumer market continues to drive the B to B world. When I started back in banking sales 25 years ago – it seems most new technology came from the business market. With the advent of the internet age technology became so ubiquitous and the democratization of the access to data, development, tools made it consumable. What consumers don’t see is the huge market Amazon has built in their web services group hosting other internet companies for example. When we tried to sell dial-up PC banking with computers there just weren’t out there enough – commercial customers were banking online in closed networks fifteen to twenty years before the internet. Then the market changed with the advent of internet everywhere- consumer product drive the market, they come from online banking to amazon.com to Facebook and google. Flip-flop – retail online banking drove growth – not commercial online banking.
So I expect that 3-D printing, Home delivery, Electronic storefronts and easy cloud storage will soon impact the commercial world. In fact it already has: Scientists are thinking about how to print organs, UPS has reconsidered logistics, there is now commercial cloud storage tied to workflow and every smart CRM company has a social media component.
This is all really amazing stuff – I’m so excited for my kids. Lets see what I can find interesting to do for the next 15 years though.
A few tidbits – #eBay simplifies Storefronts, #Snapchat turns down $3Billion, #Amazon.com and Drones – and we will… http://t.co/ZbLb6ibarh