I came across an interesting article by Chip Heath and Dan Heath in Fast Company. The article hypothesizes that people’s enjoyment of luxury goods has moved beyond the feeling of status to personal enjoyment. Think about the concept of wine connoisseurs moving beyond wines to jeans, watches, mens dress shirts, and even coffee. Traditional luxury goods consumers would prefer that every one knew that they were wearing or using a luxury product. Connoisseurs instead are happy to remain invisible to the masses but conspicuous to other connoisseurs. They are passionate about jeans or coffee or whatever it might be, and enjoy talking about their choice with other connoisseurs. The question the Heaths pose is: will the proliferation of new “connoisseurs” spread to even something as mainstay as socks?A designer named Nagrani is already selling $35 socks, but is there really potential for sock connoisseurs to be a large enough group … Continue reading →

I came across an article on BusinessWeek.com that I just have to write about because it asserts that GM has achieved a business model innovation by shunting its retiree medical obligations onto the Union (and getting away with only contributing 70% of the outstanding obligations to the fund).This is not a business model innovation, but purely a negotiation outcome and nothing that will give GM any sustainable competitive advantage. Ford and Chrysler will end up doing the same thing and the parity of competition amongst US manufacturers will be restored. A business model innovation is Southwest Airlines establishing a new airline focused on providing low fare point to point air travel instead of creating another airline based on a hub and spoke model, or Saturn selling their cars for a fixed price, not GM pushing obligations off their balance sheet.GM is not losing in the automobile industry because of health … Continue reading →

There used to be a day when you could go to your local barber and get all sorts of wonderful health treatments. That fortunately or unfortunately faded with the old west.That day is returning however, or at least in a slightly different fashion. All across the nation companies like MinuteClinic are opening locations in drug stores like CVS. What is driving this resurgence?Well, first and foremost is the escalating cost of health insurance and ranks of the uninsured. According to the US Census the % of individuals with employer-sponsored health insurance has dropped from 63.9% to 59.7% from 1999 to 2006. Amongst Blacks (49.3%) and Hispanics (40.0%) the current situation (2006) is even worse. This is while the average employee contribution for employer-sponsored health insurance has increased from $342 to $565 for an individual and from $1,275 to $1,987 from 1996 to 2002 according to the U.S. Department of Health … Continue reading →

Microsoft announced today a round of updates to its Live Search offering. Searchengineland had a good story on the developments.Microsoft, a late comer to the search engine game, has stepped up their pursuit of the number two spot, putting Google and Yahoo! on notice that they are serious about playing in this market.Microsoft already has arguably the best image and video search of any of the big three and over the coming days and weeks they will be rolling out other updates. Will it be enough to start convincing people to give Live Search a chance?I’ll be curious to see how good it is once all the updates are rolled out. Search is the type of data and hardware intensive application that Microsoft excels at. I think they’ll have much greater success than they will ever have with the Zune.Does anyone out there think that Microsoft can catch Yahoo! or … Continue reading →

An article in Fast Company recently waxed on about mahalo.com and Jason Calacanis as if they were the greatest thing since sliced bread.We live in an amazing world. Where else but on the web could you create a half baked product, launch it, and get someone else to pay you to provide the functionality necessary to provide a complete product to the market.This is what mahalo.com has done. Mahalo’s employees are hard at work building out search results by hand, cherry-picking the most common search terms on the web. That is their product, similar to the old days of the Yahoo! directory, before algorithmic search engines like AltaVista and then Google came along. Mahalo is not a search engine, but an FAQ of sorts, and the beauty is that Google pays them 35% of PPC revenue generated by visitors to Mahalo who click on Google ads for the privilege of … Continue reading →

Came across an article on a BusinessWeek blog talking about the One Laptop Per Child project announcing their plan to offer a line of accessories.The article talks about a $10 DVD Player and a $100 Projector, and how they might be a boon to entrepreneurs in developing countries when paired with the low cost XO laptop.Innovation at the bottom may lift some enterprising individuals up to a higher standard living in developing countries, but things like a $100 projector could be a boon for entrepreneurs in this country too. Many enterprising entrepreneurs trying to bootstrap their companies here in the United States might find them an attractive alternative to the $800 price for an average projector here. A $100 projector might allow a dislocated U.S. worker trying to pitch their way out of a dead-end low-wage job to now go into important pitches looking just as professional as the big … Continue reading →