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Wednesday
09Dec2009

Tata Announces World's Cheapest Water Filter - BoP Strategy

DateWednesday, December 9, 2009 at 7:28PM AuthorPhilip Cortes

The new buzz word (acronym) I’ve been hearing over and over again is BoP – Base of Pyramid.  According to a World Bank report, there are 1 billion people living on a dollar a day or less. More importantly to the concept, however, there are 3 billion people that live on $5 or less a day.  BoP experts believe that this massive group of people have urgent needs that need to be fulfilled, and they also have some form of income to provide in exchange for the fulfillment of these needs.   I recently had the opportunity to speak with Josh Tetrick, the founder of 33needs.com - and his main argument is that it can be profitable for companies and startups to focus on this segment (the BoP), and is passionately working to convince companies to do so.  You can learn more on his venture at 33needs.com
Seems like the idea is taking hold – Tata launched the world’s cheapest car a few years back, and has now announced the world’s cheapest filter.  894 million people lack access to clean water  - a clear need – and this filter aims to provide families with clean water for 200 days.  The filter is estimated to cost 21 dollars, or approx 10 cents a day for clean water.

Another startup targeting the BoP is D.Light, which sells solar powered lanterns, which also double up as phone chargers.  “One in four people don’t have electricity in the dark” is the lead quote on their website – and if they can create a dependable source of light for cheap enough, this provides a massive market opportunity.

Ultimately I wonder if startups alone will be able to fulfill these needs – there are few if any good distribution systems in third world countries, creating a massive barrier to the selling of these BoP solutions and products.  Nestle  has one of the world’s most expansive and robust product distribution networks in the world – if it were to volunteer its distribution platform to such startups, I think we’d have a winning strategy.  Without the ability to leverage these existing and costly distribution networks, I’m not sure how a startup for profit company could quickly make it to breakeven….

Here's what the filter looks like :

 

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Tuesday
08Dec2009

FlexVite - Your New Party Planning Tool

DateTuesday, December 8, 2009 at 1:46PM AuthorPhilip Cortes

Check out flexvite.com - a neat platform designed to maximize attendance to your party.  You select the type of event you're looking to host (party, happy hour get together, going to the movies, coffee, whatever), and then suggest a date/time range that you're thinking of.  You then send the invite to a group of people, and they all vote on the dates and times that work best for them.....once the vote is in, Flexvite automatically notifies everyone on the list what date and time won.    I dig it, I think it's a smart way of getting people together. 



Ideally this platform would sync with a service like Tungle (which I'm also a huge fan of), and automatically tell you what dates worked without having to bug people.  There's a clear need for social calendar syncing, but the problem is that most people don't track their social plans on any one calendar...I wonder if that information will ever make it online.  Maybe Flexvite is the first step towards that, we'll see.





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Monday
30Nov2009

Spudaroo - Where your tedious tasks are completed by others, on the cheap.

DateMonday, November 30, 2009 at 4:45PM AuthorPhilip Cortes


I’ve been looking for a site that can effectively leverage collaboration, and finally I think I found something of note -  Check out Spudaroo.com

Not sure what the title means exactly, but the site itself is quite well designed, and hits a very specific need – People have specific, time consuming, tasks that they would love to delegate to someone else.  The problem is, for tasks as important as having someone write your business plan, or crafting your resume, you don’t want to entrust it to any single individual.  You’d rather have several people work on the task, and pick the best one. 

 

Historically, you’d have to hire 5 different people at once, and pay each of them for their work.   Spudaroo enables people to price out the service they need done, and evaluate the individuals looking to do the work.  I absolutely love this idea, and plan on submitting quite a bit of work/tasks/projects to Spudaroo in the near future.  

 


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Monday
30Nov2009

What Black Friday Really Looks Like....According to Ebay

DateMonday, November 30, 2009 at 11:29AM AuthorPhilip Cortes

Ebay just posted a new site that the data junky in me is in love with - they overlayed ebay purchases on black friday with a map of the united states, helping us visualize which regions of the United States are purchasing the most.   

Here's what it looks like :



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Saturday
28Nov2009

Imagine your Social Security card came with your very own government issued email address....

DateSaturday, November 28, 2009 at 4:23PM AuthorPhilip Cortes

That's right - the Turkish government is issuing an email address along with an every new identity card.  From birth, Turkish citizens will have their very own, government hosted email address, with up to 10GB of storage space. 

Couple quick thoughts...

1)  Do you remember how hard it was to come up with your own screen name for AOL?  This definitely gets rid of that stress, furthermore, as all imagineable names get taken up in yahoo, hotmail and gmail, this ensures that everyone who is born gets a standard identity that belongs to them.

2)  The libertarian in me can't help but worry - if the government is issuing the email address, and hosting, then it also will have access to everything you do.  This announcement comes hot on the tail of Turkey declaring that it was launching its own search engine due to "security concerns".  Let's put it this way, do we feel better about a place like Google having ALL of our information, or the government?  (Some argue it's picking between the same evil....)

3)  The power that companies like Google are capitalizing on is increasingly drawing the attention of foreign governments.  Either these governments are worried that too much information is being concentrated into the hands of few firms (most of them being American), or they are seeking to have access to this information and firms like Google aren't giving it up.  Either way, it's a lot of power to be concentrated, and the more power is aggregated in firms like Google, the greater the headway they're going to encounter from Governments.

4)  Is the Turkish government going to build its own facebook?  That might be a bit weird....

Fore more info, check out :
http://thenextweb.com/europe/2009/11/28/turkey-give-70-million-citizens-email-address-search-engine/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheNextWeb+(The+Next+Web)&utm_content=Google+Reader

 

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