Oddly Relevant Jan-7-2013

The crowd-funding need and the current impediment: Easy for tech start-ups to raise money, but quite difficult for food, agriculture, retail and other consumer-oriented businesses—A big opportunity for crowd-funding sites and accredited investors alike and quite disruptive to the current financing paradigm. The race to reinvent how capital flows from investors to entrepreneurs is on, but S.E.C. had been struggling to balance protection for investors with increased access to capital for small businesses. Fraud and failure rate are the 2 biggest concerns.

Note: caveat emptor so it be; but I see great potential in this disintermediation from the traditional investment banking model. Through clever checks and balances alongside crowd-sourced due diligence and credit-worthy backing, this is one golden opportunity that will not only brew billion dollar companies (both the fundee and the platform itself), but also revolutionize this ancient industry for the better.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/business/crowdfunding-for-small-business-is-still-an-unclear-path.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0

The comfortable US telecom cartel: Verizon promised not to spread FiOS any further, and Comcast, and Time Warner promise to stay out of the wireless business. The result? 40% profit margins and 80% market share for Verizon and AT&T, devices are increasingly tied to specific networks by design, and both companies are bathing in cash. [Note: pretty natural oligopoly given the tremendous start-up cost; but Google, I’m looking at your]…Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-26/how-at-t-and-verizon-manipulate-your-smartphone.html

Apps aside, what’s exciting for tech in 2013? Hamish McKenzie is talking about the kinds that pushes the human frontier forward; and it includes (1) transport: car sharing program with electric cars by Hiriko in German; Google’s self-driving cars as a reality within 5 years, and the Tesla’s supercharger station. (2) Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Page, Schmidt, and James Cameron’s Planetory Resource project to mine resources from asteroids. (3) Other quirky ideas such as humans as batteries, martin jetpacks, Leap motion’s 3D computer control, and of course, the Google Glasses. [Note: It’s indeed time to go beyond softwares on phones]…Source: http://pandodaily.com/2013/01/03/apps-aside-has-the-tech-industry-ever-been-more-exciting/

The Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist: 6 million pounds of maple syrup (about 6% of 2012 Quebec production) worthy of $18 million + was stolen from Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve (we are talking about 100 tractor trailer’s load here). The industry is strictly centralized and regulated—thus the reserve to stabilize prices—and this theft was potentially an act of free-market renegades inside and outside the province who opposed what was, in their view, a Communist program. [Note: Canada will always face a black market and continuous disobedience of the “law”, if there is enough profit for the outlaws.]…source: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-01-02/the-great-canadian-maple-syrup-heist

On deliberate practice and how talent is overrated: By nature, we humans shrink from anything that seems possibly painful or overtly difficult. We bring this natural tendency to our practice of any skill. Once we grow adept at some aspect of this skill, generally one that comes more easily to us, we prefer to practice this element over and over. Our skill becomes lopsided as we avoid our weaknesses. Knowing that in our practice we can let down our guard, since we are not being watched or under pressure to perform, we bring to this a kind of dispersed attention. We tend to also be quite conventional in our practice routines. We generally follow what others have done, performing the accepted exercises for these skills. This is the path of amateurs. To attain mastery, you must adopt what we shall call Resistance Practice. The principle is simple—you go in the opposite direction of all of your natural tendencies when it comes to practice. [Note: truer words cannot be spoken.]…Source: http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2012/07/what-is-deliberate-practice/

Additional source for book: http://www.amazon.com/Talent-Overrated-World-Class-Performers-EverybodyElse/dp/1591842948/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1357537193&sr=8-1&keywords=talent+is+overrated