Coolfarming

Coolfarming: Turn Your Great Idea Into the Next Big Thing by Peter Gloor

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book of Peter Gloors discusses the “magic of cool” – how to take your new idea – product or service – and spread the meme.

In 1857, Eduard-Leon Scott de Martinville invented and patented the phonautograph in France – a way to record and play back the human voice and other sounds. But it never caught on – you’ve never heard of him before just now.

Roughly 30 years later, Thomas Alva Edison invented the phonograph, to record and play back sound. But Edison was a “coolfarmer.” He assembled a team @ Menlo Park (William Hammer, working on the lightbulb; Charles Batchelor, working on telegraph systems; John Kruesi, the builder of Edison’s designs). He socialized his concepts. He promoted his ideas and inventions. He enlisted others and got them involved. He collaborated with partners and customers on features and innovations and implementation and improvements.

How do you become a “coolfarmer”? (as opposed to a “cool farmer” – I used to know a lot of those)

Part of the process is a lot of C words and C phrases that I’m not going to tell you the meaning of – you need to read the book.

1) Creator – cool idea
2) COIN (collaborative innovation network)
3) CLN (collaborative learning network)
4) CIN (collaborative interest network)

One part of the book I loved analyzes the bee hive and discusses smarm creativity and swarm intelligence (the latter being a term Gloor says was invented by computer scientist Eric Bonabeau… that term is one that I believe Randy Williams and other members of the Keiretsu Forum, an angel investing network, invented independently, and certainly used, starting more than 10 years ago, to reflect the different K4 bees ‘swarming’ around a company and communicating and building up a joint understanding of an opportunity and business based on the combined intelligence and experience of the K4 ‘hive’).

[though now that I’ve researched it I see that swarm intelligence,  the collective behavior of decentralized, self-organized systems, natural or artificial… is a concept first employed in research on artificial intelligence, and was introduced by Gerardo Beni and Jing Wang in 1989, in the context of cellular robotic systems.]

Gloor is an academic (and, I suspect, a former geek), so he invests a lot of time in the examples of Linux and the Web, which I was already familiar with. I would have liked more examples of consumer products that were and are non-technical, and where it’s harder for things to be adopted as quickly and to go viral.

And some of his personal observations seem a little out of place.

But overall, this book has great concepts, that any inventor, marketer, investor, product manager, salesperson, academic, and/or executive should understand and implement.

I’m giving it two thumbs up, five stars, and now I am going to buy Gloors’ two previous books: Swarm Creativity (Oxford, 2006) and Coolhunting (AMACOM, 2007), and read those.

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The Warren Buffetts Next Door: The World’s Greatest Investors You’ve Never Heard of and What You Can Learn from Them

The Warren Buffetts Next Door: The World’s Greatest Investors You’ve Never Heard of and What You Can Learn from Them by M. Schifrin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Schifrin profiles 10 great investors – some of the leading equities investors on Marketocracy (www.Marketocracy.com) – who do not manage money professionally for others. Though a few of them are now professional investors, most of them are in occupations like a civil engineer, a truck driver, a computer lab manager, and all of them started out in other sectors (one of them was a vagabond for 30 years).

For each such investor, Schifrin tells their story, and gives their methodology, describes the tools they use and how they analyze investment opportunities, and provides a case study of a particular investment they made, and some of their writings and advice.

For example, Schifrin discusses Justin Uyehara, profiled here in Forbes:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkam/20……

…Kai Petinen (www.kaipetinien.com), a Finnish computer lab manager in Ann Arbor: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkam/20…

… and Mike Koza, a civil engineer in Sacramento who only started managing his own investments when the professionals screwed up his account, and his wife Maria urged him to manage his portfolio himself: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkam/20…

The amazing thing is that Maria tells Mike that he’s smart and should be able to make an IRR of 40% (which is off the charts and better than Warren Buffett), and he’s actually made 34% IRR net of fees and commissions over a decade plus – absolutely amazing.

They all are great with math, and they all are looking for a bargain, among other shared characteristics: http://business.time.com/2010/12/09/q…

In any case, the book is very interesting and highly recommended.

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Timeshares, Vacation clubs, and Fractional ownership

The timeshare industry has some challenges.  Timeshare is now a sleazy word, mostly due to sky-rocketing maintenance fees and deteriorating properties among the plurality of the market.

But when timeshares started, they were an innovation – a way for owner/operator/developer/investors to get sales and cash flow for properties that might otherwise have been challenging to sell or rent at anywhere near the pricing they received via timeshares.  And for early adopters of timeshares, they were often a great deal on a vacation spot at a much lower cost than hotels.

Timeshares started with 52 fixed weeks, and when you bought a timeshare, you received a certain week every year – say, week 35.

The next innovation in timeshares was the float… you could move your timeshare to different weeks.

Then, the location of your timeshare also became movable, through RCI.  You could exchange your week in Florida for a week in Costa Rica.

Then, some of the big hotel chains entered the market, both because they were threatened by this burgeoning industry, but also since they saw opportunity.

Marriot came in and provided great availability, among other features.

Starwood entered the market, and using points, offered great flexibility.

Four Seasons jumped in and offered amazing quality and service.

For the exchange market, Interval also entered to give timeshare owners an opportunity to exchange with more partners, with more product types, worldwide. Most people in the market assert that Interval’s properties are generally higher-quality than RCI’s.

Now, we are seeing vacation clubs, which often provide some of the best aspects of all of the above.

For me, if I was going to make an investment in a vacation club or timeshare, I would want flexibility, value, and a cap on the fees (or management participation via a HOA).

But, I personally prefer, intellectually and philosophically, the notion of fractional, Deeded ownership, rather than timeshares or vacation clubs.  Making a significant investment, but not having the upside of the real estate over time, makes no sense to me.

Next Conference On Innovation and the Future (in Seoul, Korea)

I’ve gone to many conferences over the past 20+ years.  The last ones where I was interested in all the subject matter were the RSA Conferences in 1994 and 1995 (and, almost as much, 1996… but those first two were heavy on cryptography & algorithms & mathematics – the foundations of digital security – which I was learning at the time).  Thank you Kurt Stammberger for founding the RSA conferences!

Tony Perkins (and his cast of co-conspirators – hi ValerieWag!) put on very good conferences, too… some of the Red Herring ones in the 90s were fantastic.  The Always-On ones (2004 onwards) also had quite a bit of good content.  But I went to those conferences, like many others in the 1990s and 2000s, to network & schmooze (and since I had to go to many of them anyways for GoingOn – our company which created the software that ran the conferences’ social media, streaming, video, and interactivity).   Thank you Tony!

On the real estate side, International Living conferences were fantastic in achieving some of my goals, and also had some great speakers (Lee Harrison) and information, and the one Live and Invest Overseas conference I spoke at had good content and lots of great people.

The Next Conference On Innovation and the Future, which I attended today, June 14th, 2013, here in Seoul, had the best content of any conference I’ve ever been to… So much so that I’m going to write about some of the topics, chats, people, and statements.

The financial, regulatory, environmental and political issues and challenges across the globe – especially in the US, Japan, and Europe – had been affecting my outlook recently, but after today I am inspired once again and excited and optimistic about the future.

Inventors’ Creative Juices

Juice: The Creative Fuel That Drives World-Class Inventors by Evan I. Schwartz

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Interesting book. Schwartz talks about some of the top inventors of the world, and how they came to invent new products and services. My favorite parts were the tales about the inventors – their backstories, if you will.

Schwartz attempts to divide the inventors in to various classes based on how he believes they came up with their inventions: Pinpointing Problems, Recognizing Patterns, Transcending Boundaries, Detecting Barriers, Applying Analogies, Visualizing Results, and so on.

I had a hard time with this as I think all the inventors did most of the things he discusses, but I do applaud Schwartz for attempting to analyze this and for coming up with his theories and trying to justify them.

For me, the book would have been better had it told all the inventors’ stories first, and then gotten in to Schwartz’s theories and conclusions.

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An Economist Gets Lunch – and this one is a Brown Bag like one on the cover of the book

An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies by Tyler Cowen

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I had high expectations for this book. I love the airchair economist books that have been coming out for the last 7 or 8 years, like the Freakonomics series.

As an avid foodie (and fan of food books, too), I figured the combination would be fantastic.

However, this particular book did not live up to my expectations.

It does have some interesting histories of food, and food distribution systems.

A big part of the book, though, is the personal experience of the author with certain foods, in cooking certian foods, in buying certain foods, and in eating at restaurants in certain areas, which is not so helpful, especially for those of us who don’t live where the author does (near Washington DC).

If you like the pop-culture economics books that I do, and/or you are a foodie, you should still read it… but be prepared to skip or skim about half the chapters in the book.

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Congratulations to Bay Area Entrepreneurs of 2012

The 2013 Book of lists from the San Francisco Business Times is out.

The list of the 100 Fastest-Growing Private Companies is always very interesting (based on 2 years’ revenue growth, with a first year of $200,000 or greater).

Congratulations to Neil Grimmer of Nest Collective, the 5th-fastest-growing (838% revenue growth in 2 years, from $3.4 mil to $32 mil) and to Catamount Ventures for the investment in Nest.

Kudos to Marko Gargenta and Sasha Gargenta (and DJ “Deep Blue” Rooz!) of Marakana, number 10, 451% revenue growth.

Congrats to Wister Walcott and his co-founders of Marin Software – based in San Francisco – go figure – #15, 380% revenue growth, $7.5 mil to $36 mil.

Props, too, to Brad Oberwager and Sundia… #21, 280% revenue growth, $6+ mil to $23 mil.

And finally, a wave of the flag to Kristin Richmond and Kirsten Tobey of Revolution Foods, and Catamount Ventures for another great investment. #27; 195% growth; $9.5 mil to $28 mil… I noticed the win of the San Francisco schools contract, so that alone, too, presumably ensures that they will be on this list next year.

While I’m perusing the end of year Book of Lists, congratulations also to Elliott Easterling (and Ed Kim), co-founders of Red Bricks Media, who made it to the SF Business Times list of top 25 agencies in the Bay Area. I imagine happy customers and creative awards are more valued by RBM, but the external validation of growth doesn’t hurt either.

Dick Fuld

The former Chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers, he was nicknamed the Gorilla of Wall Street – since he was belligerent, and loved to grunt.

Dick’s advice in the Wharton School of Business online journal, is to pick a strategy and stick with it, “unless of course”, you’re wrong.

What I’ve seen is that pretty much every startup business pivots at least five times.

So that seems like idiotic advice to me.

I got some of this information from Entrepreneur magazine, who points out that Dick took the top spot on Conde Nast Portfolio’s “Worst American CEOs of all time” list in 2009, among other dubious awards – and concludes its article, “don’t be a Dick.”

France-onomics

First of all, I have no data to back this up, and need to do some research, but it’s not clear to me how the French government has stayed solvent. The 35 hour week maximum previously legislated are gone, but the government gives more of its money to the arts than most other governments (which I support, if the money is there), and its people retire younger and live longer than most, despite of, or because of, the French paradox. Or so says noted Brazilian economist Eduardo Miccolis. 🙂

According to this article, France invests over 10 times what the US invests per capita in the arts: ($43 to $4, though this is 15 year old data):. Incidentally, Sweden and West Germany invest more per head, among others.

In any case, I need to research the government, its current state, the pension program, and retirement statistics in France, among other things, to actually comment intelligently… but in the meantime, let’s address the two essential sets of questions of French economics.

1) The first questions are encapsulated in the men (they’re almost always men) selling La Tour Eiffel statues and other related items. First of all, why the hell are they all at the Tour Eiffel? And why do they all have the same damn products… and exact same pricing? Shouldn’t they spread out a little… and perhaps offer some products that 100 other “retailers” near them have the exact same version of? Talk about killing your margin. You can’t make much on Tour Eiffel keychains you sell for 5 for a Euro. Hell, do a deal to bring in someone else’s product, if you don’t have the capital to create your own… like this Tour Eiffel bag.

The one smart guy I saw was actually near L’Arc de Triomphe de l’Étoile. He had those same products, but no competition at L’Arc, so he was selling those same stupid products for 40% higher prices.

Here’s the real question, though, in that vein: why didn’t he have any L’arc de triomphe de l’Étoile statues, keychains, pendants or other products… There’s gotta be a market. If any of you Tour Eiffel sellers read this, contact me… or better yet, the wholesalers or manufacturers of those items.

2) Despite all of that, some French products, brands, and marketeers are just amazing.

This is also an industry I have no clue about, fashion and fashionable products… but as a layperson out of the industry who probably invests less time and money in fashion than 99.99% of people who have some money on the planet, I want to know what Louis Vuitton is doing and how they are doing it. Brilliant.

Their window designs are amazing (much better than Bulgari, Armani, Gucci, Gaulthier, and many others I saw)

Even *I* will probably go in to their store to check it out. Whatever they are doing, while the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and most of the world has economic problems, there is a line of people waiting to get in to the Vuitton store in the middle of the day and late in the day… not just when they open. There were over 100 people waiting in line to get in the other day around 2 pm. Crazy. Amazing. Brilliant.