In last week’s blog, we discussed how we are entering the Web 3.0 world. That world consists of mobile. We talked about creating real value for customers and real commerce for merchants. I recently came across some really great examples of this in an article called Web 3.0: The Mobile Era written by Jay Jamison, who has a venture company that invests in early stage mobile companies.

Mobile acts as a much tighter link connecting advertisers and users, which makes it easier to close a transaction. Jay says “Now technology services have the ability to leverage not just the social graph data from Facebook, but even more real-time / real-world information. Your current location, weather, traffic, local merchants other friends nearby, how often you’ve been to this specific store or location are available (or will be soon). And this in turn provides a whole new level of commerce opportunities for potential advertisers.”

Let’s look at a few companies that are already doing this, like Waze, ShopKick, and Foodspotting. Waze is a service for social mapping and GPS. It provides the fastest routes around congestion with real time traffic information. You can also get offers for the cheapest gas along your route from Waze. Do you think this will drive some people to do business through those offers?

Another mobile app called Shopkick is pretty neat in that it turns the shopping experience into a game. It rewards shoppers for tasks and quests that they complete, and Shopkick is showing that shoppers spend more money in stores while using their app.

How would you like to know the best dishes to buy at local restaurants? With the Foodspotting app, you can. It knows where you are and shows you the pictures of what others rate as the best food at nearby establishments. This is very cool for the merchants because they can offer promotions to those that are looking at the dishes they want to order, which will drive people to go there to eat. What’s to think about? You are looking at a yummy dish that you already are dying to try, and a promotion comes along with it. I am seeing the dollar signs, are you?

As I assume you are staring to guess, the world of mobile is going to be exciting for both the users and businesses out there. This is not a world of ads that will pop up on your screen. This is more about the creative interaction that can occur when you position all the technology that we have in our hands in a way that engages our customers to want to spend money with us. This will be a disruptive world and one in which the innovators will be the winners.

What are you doing to engage your customers with the mobile experience and make them more eager to spend with you?

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As I have discussed in many past blogs, we are seeing a major shift in how people access technology as more people move toward Smartphones. I see a world where business will be driven by the connectivity we all have with one another based on that little device that acts as an extended appendage for most of us.

We all have an internal desire to be connected. As I spend time with my family in Rochester, NY, I listen to the conversations of my nieces and hear their infatuation with the latest phone technology and getting a new or upgraded phone. At this point in their lives, they consider that to be a major accomplishment. Why is that? I would say it has to do with the knowing that they can share and connect more with their friends and the world around them.

If you think of this from a business perspective, you’ll see the opportunity to connect with your customers as well as their friends, which will create more business prospects. You can connect with your sales people on the road to update them on all your products, services, and even competitor products, so they can be more effective. People working on projects in the field can update software, coordinate with others, and access so much more information to get the job done.

Web 3.0 is mobile! Web 1.0 was about connectivity with the likes of Netscape, AOL, Google, and Yahoo, and Web 2.0 was all about social media with Facebook, Linked In, and Twitter. The main elements of Web 3.0 will be:

Real Time

Location-Aware

Ubiquitous (everywhere at the same time)

Sensors

Smaller Screens

The key for the 3.0 mobile world is real value for customers and real commerce for merchants.

At Efficience, we are building an infrastructure to help companies get a mobile platform up for themselves along with a strategy to make money using their mobile app.

I’ll have more on real examples of how consumers and merchants can be mobile in order to get real value in the next blog.

How are you using mobile to reach new customers and realize more business?

I wrote a blog in July 2011 called “What Disruptive Technology is Sneaking Up on You?” I also wrote another one more recently called “Crowdfunding, the Savior for the Entrepreneur.” Interestingly, they have both been pulled together by the disruptive technology guru Clayton Christensen. Clayton spoke with CNNMoney for an article they featured on his involvement in crowdfunding.

As I explained in my previous blog, crowdfunding will allow companies to raise money with their social contacts for partial ownership in a company. You can raise a lot of money by asking for small investments from a large number of people. Think of this like a mutual fund that has lots of money to invest, but one individual investor may only put in $500 while another puts in $10,000. Crowdfunding gives the investor the opportunity to invest in people they know even if they don’t have large sums of money. The previous laws placed tight limitations on this.

Clayton pulls disruptive technology and crowdfunding together when he points out that crowdfunding has the potential to disrupt traditional financiers. He has invested in a platform that is being created to help bring together both the investor and the company trying to raise more capital.

As I’ve said before, I think this opportunity is going to be big! It will change the game for many people, most importantly the entrepreneur. Ideas and opportunities that would have never gotten off the ground before will now have a better chance at a good start and could become job creating machines.

Now, the important ingredient for anyone with aspirations to grow and get funding is a strong social network. The theme we had back in my investment days was connectivity. We invested in companies that were creating the infrastructure which would bring us together. We have all heard “it’s who you know, not what you know.” This rings even truer today with a major focus on people.

What are you doing to grow your social network?

My software team and I at Efficience had a business meeting with an investment firm this week, and it was exciting to be back in that world again and see the latest happenings! They had an interest in a mobile app, which is what we are talking about to many companies these days.

The businesses on the forefront are seeing with their own eyes how the Smartphone is enhancing the opportunity to connect and create real interaction and relationships. This is an exciting space to be in, and I am thrilled to have placed myself on this path.

During our conversation, I listened to one of the principals discuss how well they were doing despite the lack of returns in the marketplace over the past twelve years. This brought me back to why I got out of the investment business back in the early 2000s, which was the thinking that the markets wouldn’t be any higher over the next ten years or so. Along with declining assets and increasing regulatory burdens, the decision was made to get out of that business. Before I did, I had already seen the future, and to me it was going to be in connectivity through software.

Watching the investment business decline and the opportunities fade, I could have felt sorry for myself and lamented that life wasn’t fair, and that since I’d worked so hard somebody had to owe me something. I found it difficult to think that the world I had educated and prepared myself for was slipping away. That is what happens, and will always happen, because things change. And today, it is occurring at an even faster pace.

As an entrepreneur, I wasn’t going to wait on someone or something to come along. I set out to find a new opportunity, and then I went out and made it happen. I went to India to open an office, and now here we are with a wonderful team that builds the latest and greatest applications to connect businesses to their venders, employees, or customers.

More change is coming, and many areas of the economy are not doing so well. For those that are not prepared, it could be painful. What are you doing to stay ahead and ensure that technology and change doesn’t sweep you up into a world in which you don’t want to be?

Mary Meeker recently released her annual overview of internet trends, and I found it to be very insightful. You may remember that I have discussed Mary’s research and opinions on this topic in some of my previous blogs. She pushed forward as a leader in this space with different investment banking firms and is now a partner at one of the most prestigious venture capital firms, Kleiner Perkins.

Meeker’s overview includes more than one-hundred slides, so I have summarized some of what jumped out at me. The general theme is that internet growth is still significant and mobile adoption is still in the early stages. Many of the slides show examples of how this connected world is creating the Re-Imagination of everything.

The Smartphone has penetrated only 953 million users when compared to the 6.1 billion mobile phone subscriptions as shown on slide 11. This is a huge upside. Think about all the new businesses and people considering apps moving forward. Is your business prepared to benefit from this growth?

Next, on slide 10, compare the global penetration between the Android and iPhone shipments. Android has over 250 million compared to over 60 million with the iPhone. This is a four times difference, and it makes you think about for which one you would build an app. Looking at your demographic, area, and global reach will help to determine if you choose to create an app for one or both.

Slide 18 shows India’s usage of the internet on a desktop has decreased over time, and their usage of internet on mobile devices has increased over the period 12/08 to 5/12. Mobile usage has currently surpassed that of desktops, which should be considered for the monetization of sites. Most sites make more money from ads on the desktop than on mobile. This will changes things.

Mary also makes several points about how things are changing in the world with the internet. In 2010, after 305 years, newspaper ad revenue was surpassed by internet (slide 32). The trend lines for the newspaper ad revenue were declining much faster than the internet was sloping up.

From a technology investment perspective, be careful. Look at slide 108. Out of the 1,720 IPOs over the periods 1980 and 2002, only 2% of these companies accounted for 100% of net wealth creation.

Mary states that the “Magnitude of upcoming change will be stunning. We are still in spring training.” She gives a long list of reasons in slide 85. A few key elements include nearly ubiquitous high speed wireless access in developed countries, fearless and connected entrepreneurs, and inexpensive devices and services, including apps.

How are you benefiting from these major trends taking place right before our eyes?

Have you thought about how fast things change and how really different things have become with how you work and live? Think about the companies that you use every day that didn’t even exist ten years ago. Think about how you use your smartphone today and access Facebook. How different, both good and bad, was your life back then?

Consider all this from a business perspective. What new companies have appeared or disappeared because of a new innovative idea? Things move so rapidly! A company can go from zero to hero in a flash, but one can also go from kingpin to trash bin in the blink of an eye. What happened to MySpace, and what is occupying that building near you that was once Blockbuster?

The point is that technology and connectivity are changing the world so fast that items and companies we consider staples, such as Google and Facebook, may not even be around in 5 or so years. I recently read a Forbes article that shared a perspective on this topic.

According to the article, companies in the early years of the web 1.0 like Yahoo, Amazon, or Google didn’t see the social aspects of web 2.0. Now in web 3.0, the social companies have not adapted to the current world of the Smartphone.

Will Google face a challenge as better ways to search on smartphones appear? Will Amazon and Facebook keep up as more people use their phones to shop and connect instead of the desktop? Which one of these companies will be hit by a new idea brewing up in the garage right now?

Is there an opportunity for you in this space? If mobile can disrupt Google and Facebook what can it do to your business?

Let’s continue our discussion from last week’s blog. How does Abundance solve the future problems that seem to loom before us like population growth, water needs, hunger, and power?

Abundance Thinking holds the understanding that we have the capability to solve our pains with the technologies we have already created. Those technologies are at such a level that the continued connectivity of each of them creates exponential opportunities for solving all the issues of the day and the problems out ahead of us.

Click Image below for TED Talk.

When I talk about technologies, I am referring to ubiquitous broadband networks, nanomaterials, digital manufacturing, synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, robotics, and infinite computing. These areas of exploration are a game changer for the world in which we live. For those skeptics out there, let’s look at a few examples.

Consider the issue of water needs, which is a major one. Dean Kamen was working to get sterilized water to dialysis patients, when he realized he could solve a problem of clean water for billions of people by creating the Slingshot. This device is the size of a dorm room refrigerator and has an intake hose and an outflow hose, so you could stick it into anything wet, and out would come pure pharmaceutical grade injectable water for dialysis. Great for drinking also! Anything wet includes salt water, arsenic-laden water, and even the latrine. Can you imagine that?

This ultimately translates into helping to solve the population explosion. How? Most people that have large families are rural farmers that need more people to work their farms. They have more children because they tend to have a higher mortality rate in rural areas without clean drinking water. Solve the water problem, and you take huge steps toward the over-population problem.

Next, let’s tackle food. Vertical farms will change the game here. This would consist of utilizing buildings that would be immune to weather changes, so crops could be grown year round. It would take ten to twenty soil-based acres to produce the same amount of crops as one acre of skyscraper or vertical farm. This also means no pesticides or herbicides to runoff and effect the environment.

Now, we will take a look at the power issue. An updated version of the stirling engine can burn almost anything, and it is being used to power things like cell phones and lights. This engine can also power the Slingshot. Guess what powered it during a six month trial in a Bangladesh village? Cow dung!

All these examples prove that we really can solve huge problems and realize how abundance will raise the living standards, save resources, and provide ecological benefit to all on the planet.

If you are wanting to explore this more or still not convinced check out the TED Talk by Peter Diamandis or read the book.

The pervasive worldview today suggests limitations and scarcity, and this restricted perspective seems to be spreading with all the negative feedback we are continually inundated with at every turn. When human civilization and technology repeatedly prove the limited and scarcity thinking wrong, why do we let it consume our consciousness?

If this scarcity mindset was accurate, we would have mostly starved to death by now after all the cries in the ‘70s that insisted the exploding population would consume all the food. Have you been to a grocery store lately? What about how we were scheduled to run out of oil a decade ago? We should all be walking now and burning our furniture to heat our homes.

This is scarcity thinking, and it gets the best of us because our minds were built to think this way in order to save us when we lived in a day of surviving off the land and running from predators. However, we really live in a world of abundance! A little more awareness and understanding of this could take a lot of stress off our shoulders.

In previous blogs, I have discussed how an abundant mindset opens people up to achieving the success and goals they desire. It also prevents us from getting so depressed by the world’s problems and issues, which Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler explain in their new book “Abundance: The Future is Better Thank You Think.” In this book, they discuss that resources are open to the benefits of technology. Few are truly scarce; they are mainly inaccessible. They show this by the analogy of an orange tree. If I pluck all the ones I can reach from the lower branches, then I am out of usable fruit until technology kicks in, and someone builds a ladder.

Diamandis and Kotler say “humanity is now entering a period of radical transformation in which technology has the potential to significantly raise the basic standards of living for every man, woman and child on the planet. Within a generation, we will be able to provide goods and services once reserved for the wealthy few to any and all who need them.”

Are you letting the negative messages get to you, or are you looking at the world with all the abundant opportunities?

Next week we will explore how abundance will make this happen!

Think about that!  If you had access to 4 billion customers, how would that impact your marketing, your strategy, your vision, your opportunities, and your profit potential?  Well it’s coming, and I see it happening right before my eyes.

Let me back up for a moment and give you some perspective.  As I write this, I am at my office in Pondicherry, India.  I started Efficience with my partners April and Rich back in 2004 and came to India shortly after to set up the office.  We started with one full time team member and one intern and then quickly added five more.  We have now grown to 40 bright, enthusiastic, hardworking men and women.   

When I started coming to India, none of the team members had cell phones.  Cell service existed here, but the phones were expensive, and most didn’t see the value in having one. This continued for a few years.  Now all our team members, from the lowest to the highest paid, have cell phones.  At this point, eight of them have smartphones, and I see the rest upgrading in a year or so.  I can see this new global customer base growing right before my eyes.

You may remember reading the Software Monster blog I wrote about how new software applications, Software as a Service (SaaS) tools, and apps are eating up the legacy business of a huge number of mainstream industries.  This was based on an article that Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, wrote in the Wall Street Journal.  Now, he has another article out that deals with the expansive opportunity that putting a handheld computer or communication tool connected to the entire world is offering by bringing customers to your doorstep.

In a CNet article called Marc Andreessen Predications for 2012, Marc discusses how smartphones are now in the hands of about 2 billion people in the developed world, and in three to five years they will be in the hands of 6 billion.  Can you imagine what to do with 4 BILLION New Customers?  I have been advocating the power of connectivity since the early ‘90s, and this adds an exponential growth factor to that, which compounds the potential.  If you read any futurist thinkers like Ray Kurzweil, it looks like we are much closer to that Singularity moment.  You can check out his book here.

Marc ends the article with how opportunities and growth wrap around smartphones saying, “Local merchants, like local restaurant owners, are going to have a smartphone app they can use to dial up customers on demand. Whether that’s from Groupon or Foursquare — any of these companies can do that. A lot of small business owners are going to start running their businesses from their smartphones.”

Your marketplace is not your backyard anymore; it’s not even your country.  We recently launched a requirements gathering tool called Sluice, and it gets 60% of its sign-ups from outside the US.  I can already envision all kinds of great opportunities with this mobile expansion, and we are moving our company in that direction for the potential it offers.  What are you doing to go after the soon-to-be total of 6 billion new customers?

As a follow up to last week’s blog on disruptive technology, I wanted to talk about ways of getting around the mentality that causes successful firms to be blindsided.  (On a side note, I just watched the movie The Blind Side again and it’s a great analogy to what can happen in business).  Blockbuster’s blind side tackle was being a step off and letting Netflix sack them.

So what is it we need to be looking out for so this doesn’t happen to us?  There are companies going under every day who appear to have done all the right things.

To begin with, you need to understand that there is a difference between sustaining technological change and disruptive change.  In sustaining change, the existing companies continue to invest and improve their products and it’s hard for new companies to break through to these leaders. Disruptive changes come from new entrants that use disruptive technology to find new markets that can sustain growth.  The existing companies may have thought this disruptive technology was “cool” but their customers didn’t want it at that moment, so someone else came along and ran with it.

This is the type of technological change you want to protect your blindside againt: the “cool” stuff that you can see being viable, but disregarding for the time being because the bulk of your clientele isn’t interested.

According to Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, there are 4 things managers can do to deal with disruptive technology:

First, proper resource allocation is essential.  Determining which projects get money and which don’t can be grueling.  The projects that do receive resources have a solid chance of succeeding, while the ones that don’t will likely fail, and this is where disruptive technology sneaks in.  If you don’t allocate resources to some kind of R&D, the cool stuff might come back to bite you.

Second, it is best to have organizations prepared to handle disruptive technology.  You can set them up on a smaller scale and match them up to the markets and customers that need them.  By keeping it small, flexible and exploratory, they can appreciate the small wins and not get hung up on huge profits right away.

Third, failures are a given in new markets since they lack any significant history to research, so be prepared.  Seasoned managers will generally avoid this scenario, so seek out the entrepreneurial types to lead these organizations.  They will have the drive to explore and fail, just be sure to give them the freedom to do so.

Fourth, and last…locate new markets that will appreciate the disruptive technology that your primary customer base doesn’t welcome.  Start out small, then grow those markets and see where they take you. Over time they could mature to a point that your primary customer base might begin to find them useful.

Are you prepared to protect your blind side so you don’t get sacked?