The pain is a function of the fact that I always find myself focusing on the price first and thinking that the more I spend the better off I will be. All this despite the fact that what I need could be handled by a less expensive configuration.

Perhaps consumers and companies are better served by a new shopping experience. One that starts with the evaluation of how well needs and capabilities match. There could be many benefits.

Consumers would be shielded from the illusion that higher prices mean better fit. It would allow consumers to focus on “value” relative to what they need as an individual. Only then would price come into play, to help refine the final buy decision. The consumer would end up with greater clarity as to what they paid for and why.

Companies would be encouraged to better describe the benefit of a capability in plain English. Their customers would be more likely to buy (and pay for) exactly what they need. They would in turn be more satisfied, willing to buy again and willing to recommend the experience to others.

I think it’s a win-win for everyone and for the right products.

I recently read about an instance where the courts decided that a company could not patent a person’s DNA on the basis that it is a naturally occurring substance upon which no patentable ingenuity had been applied.

A ruling of this nature has been long awaited, fought for and fretted over. Michael Crichton fans are familiar with the issue as raised in his recent not so fictional work Next.

This got me thinking. What if ownership rights extended to other types of information associated with a person. Although this time not genetic. But personal, private, transactional, financial, etc?

The implications are quite interesting. Below is my take on what such a future might resemble.

Your information creates income.  You now earn an income based on to whom you sell or license your personal information.   You sell your data for a fee to those entities (people, organizations) best positioned to manage it per the terms of your contractual agreement with them. You adjust your fee to account for any risk based on criteria, e.g. the quality of your data, the type of data, it’s intended use, etc.

Privacy improves.  Entities want your data. Since your privacy remains a key concern of yours, entities work extra hard to protect it. You favor entities best equipped at meeting your needs. You reward them by offering better “terms”. And you have legal/contractual recourse should your rights be violated, deliberately or otherwise.

You improve.  Entities want the best data. The better the data the better terms you can negotiate. This means you have an immediate financial incentive to make sure your affairs are in order, as reflected by your information. Another benefit is that having better data puts you in a better position to negotiate a purchase on which that data is based, such as buying a home.

When will people start charging entities for use of their personal information? When will entities start paying for it? What might a market disrupted and transformed in this manner look like?

Only time will tell.

…A practical, inspiring handbook for anyone striving to improve a business model.  Co-authored by 470 Business Model Canvas practitioners from 45 countries, the book was financed and produced independently of the traditional publishing industry.   – Amazon.com

Authors Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur use the creative visuals to explain how to break down business models into nine building blocks–elements such as partnerships, revenue streams and key resources–and how to re-imagine them to reflect the changing times. – Enterpreneur Magazine

There are many apsects to BPM that I find intriguing.   At the moment I’m focussed on conceptualizing each process step as a self contained object consisting of attributes that describes it.   For instance, how it  behaves generally or in relation to other steps or other environmental factors such as where used.  

This book is very popular.  I believe it’s in it’s third printing with many backorders. 

Reserve your copy now.

“America still has the best innovation culture in the world. But we need better policies to nurture it, better infrastructure to enable it and more open doors to bring others here to try it. Our politics has gotten so impossible lately, too many Americans have stopped dreaming. Not these two. They just never got the word. As Sridhar says: ‘We came to America for the American dream — to do good and to make good.’ “

I hope you find the piece as inspirational and insightful as I did.

March 7, 2010
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Dreaming the Possible Dream

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

The thing I love most about America is that there’s always somebody who doesn’t get the word — somebody who doesn’t understand that in a Great Recession you’re supposed to hunker down, downsize and just hold on for dear life. I have a couple of friends who fit that bill, who think a recession is a dandy time to try to discover better and cheaper ways to do things. They both happen to be Indian-Americans — one a son of the Himalayas, who came to America on a scholarship and went to work for NASA to try to find a way to Mars; the other a son of New Delhi, who came here and found the Sun, Sun Microsystems. Both are serial innovators. Both are now shepherding clean-tech start-ups that have the potential to be disruptive game changers. They don’t know from hunkering down. They just didn’t get the word.
As a result, one has produced a fuel cell that can turn natural gas or natural grass into electricity; the other has a technology that might make coal the cleanest, cheapest energy source by turning its carbon-dioxide emissions into bricks to build your next house. Though our country may be flagging, it’s because of innovators like these that you should never — ever — write us off.

Let me introduce Vinod Khosla and K.R. Sridhar. Khosla, the co-founder of Sun, set out several years ago to fund energy start-ups. His favorite baby right now is a company called Calera, which was begun with the Stanford Professor Brent Constantz, who was studying how corals use CO2 to produce their calcium carbonate bones.

If you combine CO2 with seawater, or any kind of briny water, you produce CaCO3, calcium carbonate. That is not only the stuff of corals. It is also the same white, pasty goop that appears on your shower head from hard (calcium-rich) water. At its demonstration plant near Santa Cruz, Calif., Calera has developed a process that takes CO2 emissions from a coal- or gas-fired power plant and sprays seawater into it and naturally converts most of the CO2 into calcium carbonate, which is then spray-dried into cement or shaped into little pellets that can be used as concrete aggregates for building walls or highways — instead of letting the CO2 emissions go into the atmosphere and produce climate change.

If this can scale, it would eliminate the need for expensive carbon-sequestration facilities planned to be built alongside coal-fired power plants — and it might actually make the heretofore specious notion of “clean coal” a possibility.

In announcing in December an alliance to build more Calera plants, Ian Copeland, president of Bechtel Renewables and New Technology — a tough-minded engineering company — said: “The fundamental chemistry and physics of the Calera process are based on sound scientific principles and its core technology and equipment can be integrated with base power plants very effectively.”

A source says the huge Peabody coal company will announce an investment in Calera next week. “If this works,” said Khosla, “coal-fired power would become more than 100 percent clean. Not only would it not emit any CO2, but by producing clean water and cement as a byproduct it would also be taking all of the CO2 that goes into making those products out of the atmosphere.”

John Doerr, the legendary venture capitalist who financed Sun, once said of Khosla: “The best way to get Vinod to do something is to tell him it is impossible.”

Sridhar’s company, Bloom Energy, was featured last week on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” Several months ago, though, Sridhar took me into the parking lot behind Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters and showed me the inside of one of his Bloom Boxes, the size of a small shipping container. Inside were stacks of solid oxide fuel cells, stored in cylinders, and all kinds of whiz-bang parts that I did not understand.

What I did understand, though, was that Google was already getting part of its clean-energy from these fuel cells — and Wal-Mart, eBay, FedEx and Coca-Cola just announced that they are doing the same. Sridhar, Bloom’s co-founder and C.E.O., said his fuel cells, which can run on natural gas or biogas, can generate electricity at 8 to 10 cents a kilowatt hour, with today’s subsidies. “We know we can bring the price down further,” he said, “so Bloom power will be affordable in every energy-poor country” — Sridhar’s real dream.

Attention: These technologies still have to prove that they are reliable, durable and scalable — and if you Google both, you will find studies saying they are and studies that are skeptical. All I know is this: If we put a simple price on carbon, these new technologies would have a chance to blossom and thousands more would come out of innovators’ garages. America still has the best innovation culture in the world. But we need better policies to nurture it, better infrastructure to enable it and more open doors to bring others here to try it.

Our politics has gotten so impossible lately, too many Americans have stopped dreaming. Not these two. They just never got the word. As Sridhar says: “We came to America for the American dream — to do good and to make good.”

A few months back I decided to rename this blog to better describe the nature of my interests and writings as well as to reclaim the French-Canadian half of my heritage.

L’avenir (or more precisely, dans l’avenir) is French for “In the future”. 

That’s really been the spirit of my writing.  That which speaks to what the future might look like, including the ideas and innovations which define it.

With that in mind I would like to share one of my favorite quotes which is also featured on the home page of my blog.

“Some days when you pick up the newspaper it seems to have been co-written by J. G. Ballard, Isaac Asimov, and Philip K. Dick. Human sexual reproduction without male genetic material, digital viruses, identity theft, robot firefighters and minesweepers, weather control, pharmaceutical mood engineering, rapid species extinction, US Presidents controlled by little boxes mounted between their shoulder blades, air-conditioned empires in the Arabian desert, transnational corporatocracy, reality television—some days it feels as if the imagined future of the mid-twentieth century was a kind of checklist, one from which we have been too busy ticking off items to bother with extending it.

Meanwhile, the dwindling number of items remaining on that list—interplanetary colonization, sentient computers, quasi-immortality of consciousness through brain-download or transplant, a global government (fascist or enlightened)—have been represented and re-represented so many hundreds of times in films, novels and on television that they have come to seem, paradoxically, already attained, already known, lived with, and left behind. Past, in other words.”

-Details Magazine, May 2008, on The Long Now foundation

Welcome to the future.

One of my favorite things to do during the holidays is to read the New York Time’s annual Year In Ideas.  

It’s a great way to catch up on some of the most interesting ideas across a wide range of topics.  I find that it fuels my innovative spirit all year long. 

I hope you do too.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

I find that I need the combination of the two experiences to achieve my one desired expected must-have experience.    Which means that I am constantly in a state of dissatisfaction with either channel. 

This is problematic for many reasons, two in particular.  First,  there must be millions of others who feel just like me.  Second, these are the primary business to consumer interaction points.   That being said it’s  imperative to create the best possible channel experiences.

The benefits of doing so could be huge.   It could drive satisfaction.  It could cement critical customer relationships.  And for the early-adopter innovators it could mean new unforeseen markets, products, services, customers, revenues, etc.

I’ve had my cat for 16 years. During that time my cat food buying habits have never changed.  I buy a few cans at a time from the local deli multiple times a week paying upwards of .90 cents a can.  Needless to say this has not been the best use of my time or my money.  So on Sept 1 2009 I decided to buy in bulk for the month at the start of the month.

This actually fits in very nicely into how I otherwise manage my money.   I pay my bills in two “buckets”  “Rents” which are paid on the first of every month.  And “bills” which are paid on the 15^th of every month.  All of this is setup to happen automatically using on line banking software.  Full disclosure: I work for Bank of America and use their on line banking product.  In most cases I schedule recurring payments using on line banking.  But in a few cases I use a merchant’s auto-pay debit service.  In these cases I have configured on line banking so that I can forecast my expenses months out at a time.

So last Saturday I got on my bike destination Petco.  I rode from 114^th  and 8^th to 14^th and Fifth in Manhattan NYC , picked up four cases of catfood for .59 a can, and biked back home.  Along the way I began to think about how I would ideally like to manage this going forward, and integrate with the way I manage my other monthly bills. 

And then it hit me.

What if I could have gone into the on line banking tool and from there setup a “recurring purchase and payment” transaction for 4 cases of cat food from Petco to be paid for and delivered to my house on the first of every month.  No physical travel to Petco.  No need to access the Petco web site, login, fill shopping cart, enter credit card and shipping information, etc.  Just one (more) transaction from within on line banking .   Managed like any other bill payment transaction. With one notable exception – the addition of an order for a specific item.

Now that would be great.

As we sort through the aftermath of financial excess one thing remains front and center in my mind.  It was brought home by a recent news paper article entitled For Annie Leibovitz, a Fuzzy Financial Picture and a quote therein:

“The mind that can take these extraordinary pictures is not necessarily the same mind that is a perfect money manager,” said Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair.”

Managing money is a skill.  Doing so does not necessarily come naturally.  But it has to be done with some level of proficiency and effectiveness.  No one is immune from this basic human need to “keep what you have”.

Unfortunately “we” make managing money sound scary, daunting and complicated by using words like like “managing” and implying that success requires perfection.

In its most simplest terms, what’s required is simple, easy, friendly, consumable financial literacy training, focussed on the basics, started at a young age, embedded and continually reinforced throughout key points in the consumer saving/spending life-cycle and executed on a global basis.  

Money is often the great divider.  But it is also the great equalizer.   Anyone – indeed the entire globe can be materially, adversely and similarly affected by inattention to the basics.  

We need a find better ways to teach the basics and to ensure the appropriate application thereof.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fgBLU35cM8

This got me to thinking about the wide array of new and emerging “sensing” technologies and the way these technologies are and will be used to drive the future of many businesses including banking.

One of the ways heat sending technology could be used to advance the future of banking is as follows.

Imagine if we could identify heat profiles that correspond to a customer’s satisfaction state and use that to predict and/or influence how they might approach a banking experience to ensure maximum satisfaction from the time the experience starts to the time it ends.  In the case of a branch based experience, from the time they enter until the team they leave. In the case of an online transaction, from the time they start, to the time they finish. And so on.

Imagine if we could measure customer happiness as a function of their heat signature prior to and immediately following a banking experience.

What if we could tell that they arrived happy and left happier – or less happy?

What if we could detect an irate (dare I say heated) customer as they walk in the door and could change their mood before they hit the teller window and/or during their interaction so they leave happier than they were when it all started.

Fun stuff.