alan wells

I had dinner with a great friend of mine today, and we had an absolutely fantastic conversation about business, technology, and ideas. One of the best conclusions to come of the conversation:

Adapting people’s behavior to work with technology: works when my generation’s demographic is your target audience

Adapting technology to work with people’s behavior: works when my parents are your target demographic.

Meaning that the key to accessing the more mature markets for the technologies that already dominate the lives of teenagers and twentysomethings is to turn the problem on it’s head. Ask not what your customers need to do to use the technology, ask what your technology needs to do to be used by your customers. Finding a market beyond the early adopters requires a refining of your product so that it fits in naturally with the lives of your customers, because unlike the younger generation, the older generations will not remold their lives to make your technology/product/gadget/service fit into it better.

Louis Pasteur, the scientist famous for confirming the germ theory of disease said once said:
"Chance favors the prepared mind."

I’ve been thinking about this idea a lot lately, mostly because I’ve recently acknowledged that the only thing I’m lacking in my aspirations to run my own business is that great idea to base it around. I feel confident with the idea of running my own company, and would start doing so tomorrow, if I had an idea that I felt was worthy of that commitment. Knowing this, the next question is naturally: how do I find this great idea? Perhaps it is just chance, and great ideas are things that wake you at night with a start and force you to write them down before they slip down into the subconscious again. But I’m inclined to agree with Pasteur, and I think that there might be a method.

A few months back, I watched Ray Kurzweil’s TEDTalk. A few days ago, I read an article by Kurzweil in Inc Magazine, and I was reminded of his lecture. Kurzweils’ point that interested me was that certain things in the technology world are very predictable. You may not be able to predict what Google’s stock price will be in two years, but you can very accurately predict how expensive computer processing power is, or how cheap bandwith will be, or how much a gigabyte of storage will be. Furthermore, these trends increase not in a linear way, but in an exponential way.

The implication of this is that things that today seem impossible, prohibitively expensive, or too far ahead of the technology will be possible in the future – and the future is coming sooner than you think. In his words, "With the doubling of price performance each year in every kind of
information technology, you just need to wait a short while to find
that you can have your cake and eat it too."

OK, so what does this have to do with the next big thing? The way I figure it is that the secret to finding the next big thing is being able to recognize what is theoretically possible in today’s world but unfeasible due to financial or technological constraints. Take that idea, look down the road after 2-3 years of exponential growth, and try to see where the idea stands. Since data about bandwidth, processing power, and storage are so accurately predictable, the secret to the next big thing is being able to figure out what we can’t do today but can do three years from now – and then be the first one to do it, and do it well. I think this applies particularly to disruptive technologies – things that really change the rules of the game. In these cases, a certain market application is made possible when the growth of those predictable trends reaches a level that suddenly makes something possible that wasn’t before, in a critical point/threshold kind of model

Examples of this:

- Declining prices, increasing availability of broadband internet, digital camcorders, and consumer-level video editing lead to the YouTube explosion of user generated video content.

- Declining price of computer hard drives and digital video hardware allows the creation of a reasonably priced digital video recorder – say hello to TiVo!

- Decrease in bandwidth costs and increase in processing power make Vonage and other internet telephone services possible.

I’m not saying that coming up  with a great idea is easy – the conceptual connection between recognizing the predictable trends and realizing what (successful) products those trends will make feasible in the future is no small feat. But it’s one step closer to a methodology for identifying these ideas. And I’m convinced that the time I invest in keeping current with tech trends and learning about the bleeding edge of technology is worth the effort for the insight it may give me into the future.

My newest project – still in testing phase but coming along nicely.
project:regenerate

On the way back from San Diego a few weeks ago, I had a conversation with my friend Tom that made the last few hours of the drive fly by. As always, our conversation covered a lot of ground, but one thing we talked about was what makes a person interesting, what draws the line that we know to exist between those people that seem to have something of substance to talk and think about, and those that seem to be walking the world on autopilot. I think I can summarize our conversation graphically better than verbally, in the style of indexed.

This is a question that’s been floating around in my head for a while: Why California?

As in, why is California home to the tech industry, Hollywood, many top-tier universities, lots of influential thinkers and writers, the country’s most environmentally progressive laws, and an explosive start-up and entrepreneurial industry, among other things. I have to say that as a native Californian, it’s a comfort to be roaming the international blogosphere and see my home state mentioned so frequently.

I started asking this question because as I started to do more reading about business, sustainability, design and other things that interest me, it seems like a disproportionately large number of the interesting things I read about are happening in California. Granted, I’m tech-oriented and environmentally conscious so I think that’s a big reason why many things I read about are coming from California, but that still begs the question of why California is the center for these things in the first place.

A quick scan of California’s Wikipedia article gives many possible answers:

- 3rd largest state in the US
- Most populous state in the US
- Mediterranean climate
- Diverse geography
- Coastal geography
- Home to the largest agricultural industry in the US
- 10th largest economy in the world, if it was a country.

The metrics that make California notable in the global economy are well-known in the modern world. However, in Bill Bryson’s book, Made in America, he quotes an historian that explains that the native languages in California encompassed a diversity that surpassed that of the entire European continent. Now, I’ll be the first to agree that California’s diverse geography and climate may be the original source for our wealth and prosperity, but I doubt that this diversity in climate and geography can’t be matched by the entire European continent.

The fact put forward in Bill Bryson’s book makes me think that the answer to my question can’t be in the people here. The fact about native language variation makes me think that whatever people happen to be here enjoy a rare life of diverse culture and prosperity, that there must be something about this place that is the source for this, or makes this possible, for native people and immigrants alike.

I think the key to answering my question lies in the fact that California not only has diverse geography and climate, but something about this combination encourages specialization, niches, and therefore promotes biodiversity. From an ecological perspective, biodiversity is one of the world’s most valuable resources. Wikipedia defines it as “the variation of taxonomic life forms within a given ecosystem, biome or for the entire Earth.” Tropical places are often fountains of biodiversity because their climates allow for the construction of complex ecosystems with many trophic levels and niches. But California isn’t tropical. So how do we explain the fecundity of our state? Certainly, the relatively mild weather in California helps, but I think it is this combined with the huge variation in geography that accounts for the diversity here. If you drive the length of the state, you can drive through almost every climate zone from alpine to near tropical, mountain to coastal. This complexity allows an almost infinite number of ecological niches – which in turn leads to a high level of biodiversity.

And now the conceptual jump – I think that high biodiversity in natural ecosystems can be mirrored and reflected by an equivalent level of diversity in human enterprises, and I think that California is proof of that. The success that we Californians enjoy is just a continuation of success that other species in this area have been enjoying for millions of years. The biggest implication of this: we need to protect those other species to maintain our own success, as our wellbeing depends upon their survival. I think that’s a big issue for business in California to tackle, but I think it will be essential to our future as a state.

Seth Godin recently wrote about why people blog:

“What do most people get out of blogging? After all, most blogs are virtually unread by outsiders…

The act of writing a blog changes people, especially business people. The first thing it does is change posture. Once you realize that no HAS to read your blog, that you can’t MAKE them read your blog, you approach writing with humility and view readers with gratitude. The second thing it does is force you to be clear. If you write something that’s confusing or in shorthand, you fail.

Respectful and clear. That’s a lot to get out of something that doesn’t take much time.”

Since my blog definitely falls into the “virtually unread by outsiders” category, why do I bother? For me, its more of a replacement of a journal. Of course its public and I suppose that limits what I can write about, but I’m a pretty open person so I don’t find that to be a huge limitation. For me its about having a written record of my thoughts and musings, as well as the books I’ve been reading, the music I’ve been listening to, and some of the other things that are a big part of my life. Being a child of the internet, I like that writing a blog (instead of a journal) makes this written record searchable, linkable, and easily shared. Also, it allows me to include digital things that are hard to get into a hardcopy journal – and although the converse is also true – there are things that exist in the physical world that are hard to get into a blog, I find that the balance sways in the direction of the digital. But I do keep a paper sketchbook/journal/notepad/collection of interesting things to fill in the gaps. In fact, if I had a scanner, I’d probably scan some of those pages and post them here, because I think they’re interesting in a raw, unpolished sort of way. I did this in my digital portfolio and I like the depth that adds to an otherwise all-digital website.

More accurately, this would be a job decision update, as I was fortunate enough to have some really awesome opportunites dropped on my doorstep. Last week, I decided to move forward with a job at SNP. I’ll be doing a lot of things there, including some web design and web 2.0 kinds of things, but so far the people have proved to be great co-workers and I’m enjoying the work.