Tag Archive for 'Driving Forces'

With $50M raised, Nicira disrupts Cisco and Juniper Networks with network virtualization

Published on February 6, 2012 in High Tech & Media. 0 Comments Tags: .

Network virtualization start-up Nicira is coming out of stealth mode today and it has an impressive set of customers who evidently believe that it can disrupt the likes of Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks. The idea is to become a company that can offload data networking demand as needed in the age of cloud computing. If it lives up to its billing, as some of its customers say it does, it can save tens of million of dollars in spending on data centers and network infrastructure.

It’s a new version of virtualization, but one for the whole network. With virtualizaiton software like VMware, a single computer can use translation software to behave as if it were dozens of different computers at once. Each “virtual machine” is a compartment within the computer that serves a particular user. But that user isn’t using the computer, the computer can be rededicated to serve other users. It’s a more efficient way to use computers and serve users. The virtual machines can be created as needed to serve the demands of users within minutes.

Nicira’s network virtualization works in the same way, but serving the owners of huge networks instead. Service providers like AT&T often have to add new network capacity when they are overloaded. Nicira steps in as a kind of middleman, providing the network capacity as needed in an on-demand fashion. This gives networks a lot more flexibility [Source].

The emerging economies have had a great decade. That was the easy part

Published on October 12, 2011 in Emerging Markets. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

The IMF’s latest forecast is that emerging economies will grow by more than 6% in 2011 and 2012. But growth in the rich world is likely to be below 2%.

Twenty of the 42 economies covered in the back pages of The Economist grew by 3% or more in the year to the latest quarter. Only two of these, Austria and Sweden, are from the traditional group of rich countries. The rest are developing economies, such as Brazil and Turkey, or newly rich ones, such as Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Yet the growth of emerging economies is unlikely to continue at the same rapid pace or without occasional downturns. As economies become richer, they can rely less and less on the brute force of capital spending, coupled with a steady flow of cheap rural migrants, to fuel their expansion. They have a greater need of a skilled workforce and a modern financial system that is attuned to where the best returns might be found.

The shift will not be easy. The coming decade is therefore likely to prove harder for the emerging markets. China and others are entering the tricky middle-income stage of development in which the big advances from absorbing rich-world technology start to run out [Read more].

Samsung: The next big bet

Published on October 9, 2011 in Emerging Markets and Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

The world’s biggest information-technology firm is diving into green technology and the health business. It should take care; its rivals should take notice.

In 2000 Samsung started making batteries for digital gadgets. Ten years later it sold more of them than any other company in the world. In 2001 it threw resources into flat-panel televisions. Within four years it was the market leader. In 2002 the firm bet heavily on “flash” memory. The technology it delivered made the iPhone and iPad a reality, and made Samsung Apple’s biggest supplier—and now its biggest hardware competitor.

The handsome payoffs from these ballsy bets made the South Korean company a colossus; last year its sales passed $135 billion. Now it is embarking on a similarly audacious plan to move away from electronics into technologies where it barely has a presence today. It intends to spend $20 billion over ten years on solar panels, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) used for lighting, electric-vehicle batteries, medical devices and biotech drugs.

These businesses shift Samsung away from easily substitutable gadgets towards more essential industrial goods (see table)—or from “infotainment” to “lifecare”, as the company puts it. Just as electronics defined swathes of the 20th century, the company believes green technology and health care will be central to the 21st [Read more].

Is journalism as we know it becoming obsolete?

Published on September 4, 2011 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: .

There have been plenty of obituaries written for the newspaper business, most of which have a kernel of truth to them — but is journalism as we know it at risk as well? Dave Winer, a programming guru and visiting scholar at the New York University school of journalism, says it is.

In a blog post on Friday, Winer argued that “journalism itself is becoming obsolete” because now anyone can do it. Is he right? In some ways, yes. One thing is for sure: Journalism is being transformed by the web and by real-time publishing networks and what Om calls the “democracy of distribution.” Whether that’s good or bad depends on your point of view [Read more].

It cost a lot of money to push bits around the net before there was a net. They had to have huge capital-intensive printing plants, fleets of trucks and delivery boys with paper routes. Now we can hear directly from the sources and build our own news networks. It’s still early days for this… but in a generation or two we won’t be employing people to gather news for us. It’ll work differently [Source].

Facebook reportedly partnering with Spotify for music service

Published on May 25, 2011 in Real-Time Web and Social Media. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Facebook plans to launch a new music-streaming service powered by Spotify in as little as two weeks, according a report by Forbes. The partnership will only be in countries that already have a Spotify presence, which excludes the U.S.

When launched, Facebook users in Spotify-enabled countries–such as Sweden, France, and the U.K.–will see a Spotify icon appear on the left side of their newsfeeds. Users that click on the Spotify icon will first install the service on the desktop and then allow users to stream millions of songs for free through Facebook.

Another interesting aspect of the service is the ability to let a user and his or her Facebook friends listen to music at the same time. It could be pretty neat to listen to new music and talk about it in real-time with multiple friends in one online spot [Source].

Visa Is Making The E-Wallet Real

Published on May 12, 2011 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

We’ve heard a lot about the notion of a digital wallet, but the tech itself seems slow to arrive apart from one or two regional experiments, and the promise of more exciting tech in the future. Now Visa’s changing all that with a new plan to make the e-wallet, including wireless payments, a reality–and soon, too.

Visa, which calls itself a “global leader in electronic payments” has just announced what it’s calling the “next generation of payments solutions.” It means, quite specifically, the technology and financial data infrastructure that’ll supplant the little card payment machines we’re all used to swiping our card through to pay at a checkout or restaurant–a tech that’s being swiftly overtaken by digital commerce, mobile commerce, and “burgeoning social networking commerce environments.” Basically Visa’s seen the writing on the wall for the way its credit card systems currently work, and is planning to reinvent everything into a “secure cross-channel digital wallet” and a “range of customized mobile payments services” tailored to local markets around the world. This is a good thing for us consumers, and probably a shrewd business move by Visa itself.

The new digital wallet will arrive in the U.S. and Canada in the fall of 2011, and it’ll work by storing Visa and non-Visa payments data. It will support NFC payments through Visa’s payWave system and it’ll cover all sorts of payment situations, including e-commerce, mobile commerce, micropayments, social networks, and person-to-person payments. A long list of financial institutions are already on board, including U.S. Bank and the Royal Bank of Canada–indicating this really is a thing that’s happening, rather than a far-fetched patent [Source].

Women are the Next Global Emerging Market

Published on April 11, 2011 in Emerging Markets. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Here’s what works (and what doesn’t) when selling to this large, but surprisingly often ignored group of consumers.

Women’s economic power is truly revolutionary, representing the largest market opportunity in the world. Just look at the numbers: Women control 65 percent of global spending and more than 80 percent of U.S. spending. By 2014, the World Bank predicts that the global income of women will grow by more than $5 trillion.

Globally, women consumers control $20 trillion in consumer spending. They make the final decision for buying 91 percent of home purchases, 65 percent of the new cars, 80 percent of health care choices, and 66 percent of computers.

Women around the globe have more control over their life choices and path than ever before. In emerging markets, women are entering the workforce at lightning speed [Source].

Wanted: Data Scientists to Turn Information Into Gold

Published on February 28, 2011 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Data scientists will increasingly become vital employees as companies create and use more and more data and try to tap the river of data they’re generating to improve their products or build new business opportunities [Source].

But what is a data scientist? Hilary Mason, a data scientist at Bit.ly, has a good definition. It’s someone who can obtain, scrub, explore, model and interpret data, blending hacking, statistics and machine learning. It’s a set of skills that go beyond many existing job titles and it’s increasingly in demand [Data Scientist].

The ability to take data – to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it [Source].

Urbanisation: How big can cities get?

Published on February 27, 2011 in Global Strategy. 0 Comments Tags: .

The world is in the throes of a sweeping population shift from the countryside to the city. Underpinning this transformation are the economies of scale that make concentrated urban centers more productive. This productivity improvement from urbanisation has already delivered substantial economic growth and radically reduced poverty in countries such as China. The growth of cities has the potential for further growth and poverty reduction across many emerging markets [Source].

However, we are now seeing cases where the growth rates of some large cities have begun to slow. In addition, the increased complexity of large size can overwhelm the ability to manage. When this happens, cities can become disastrous mixtures of slums and gridlock, raising the question of whether there is a maximum size for a workable city.

Managing the opportunities and challenges of cities is both vital and urgent as global urbanization rushes ahead on a dramatic scale. The share of the world’s population living in cities has recently surpassed 50 percent. By 2025, we see another 1.2 billion people swelling those ranks—95 percent of whom will live in developing countries. The reasons for this rise in growth are not hard to fathom [Source].

Urbanisation has been a cornerstone in the economic development of countries. South Korea’s economic miracle—an increase in real GDP per capita of more than ten times since 1960—was enabled by a surge in the urban population from around 25 percent to 80 percent of the total population. Urban centers foster the growth of higher-productivity jobs and industries and reduce the cost of delivering basic services [Source].

Food Prices at Dangerous Level

Published on February 16, 2011 in Emerging Markets. 0 Comments Tags: .

The World Bank says food prices are at “dangerous levels” and have pushed 44 million more people into poverty since last June. According to the latest edition of its Food Price Watch, prices rose by 15% in the four months between October 2010 and January this year. Food price inflation is felt disproportionately by the poor, who spend over half their income on food [Source].

The World Bank’s president, Robert Zoellick, said in a statement: “Global food prices are rising to dangerous levels and threaten tens of millions of poor people around the world.” He also said that rising food prices were an aggravating factor of the unrest in the Middle East, although not its primary cause [Source].