We are all early adopters now. Everyone is looking for the new new thing. When someone finds the latest new new thing, technology helps everyone else find out about it and we get to decide if we want to follow along. When done right this process moves lightning fast and blockbuster products surface almost instantaneously. New products cross the chasm faster than they’ve ever crossed before. For remarkable products, the chasm has shrunk.
Despite all this progress, there remains a lack of both art and science in the field of new …

The Web is changing. The current Web is designed to allow computers to retrieve and deliver documents from other computers for the end user to view, read, and interpret. As anyone who has used Google’s (GOOG), Yahoo’s (YHOO) and Microsoft’s (MSFT) search engines can attest, sometimes the retrieval of desired documents and information is accurate and sometimes it is way off base. The Semantic Web, others prefer to call it Web 3.0, has the potential to change the game completely. In the Semantic Web, computers have …

A few months ago I came across a piece by Jeff Nolan, titled Incrementalism and “The New New Thing,” which struck poignantly at a raw nerve. He called attention to the incrementalism gripping Silicon Valley despite the flush amount of capital available for startups. Much of the attention and hype has surrounded social networking and Web 2.0 startups but each new entry is a slight improvement over the previous. But only discontinuous, quantum leap innovations create disproportionate value. So what’s next?
Umair Haque’s An Open Challenge to Silicon Valley put it …

In highly entrepreneurial hot spots like Silicon Valley, San Francisco where I grew up, Route 128, Washington DC, Seattle, Los Angeles where an impressive raft of social networking and new media startups has sprouted, and biotechnology-focused San Diego, critical mass of entrepreneurial activity organically attracts venture capital. In other words, a rich “ecosystem” – where entrepreneurs can assemble readily available capital, talent, and relationships – can only come about when entrepreneurs first satisfy the initial criterion of creating innovation and value to a significant degree. In emerging hot spots such …

Life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Thomas Hobbes might say the same about life in the stock market for hedge fund managers. The mortality rate found in the hedge fund world is extremely high; it is an ecosystem that is filled with predators and would-be predators. By mid-2007, an estimated 9,700 hedge funds controlled approximately $1.7 trillion in assets. According to Hedge Fund Research, 1,518 launched in 2006 and nearly as many called it quits. The battle for investment survival mirrors Hobbes’ State of Nature found in his …

Macro

More pain in the housing market anticipated as some homeowners find themselves “underwater” or owing more on their homes than what their homes are worth on the market. According to Mark Zandi at Economy.com (MCO), 10% of all homeowners currently face this negative equity situation. Zandi also sees home prices falling 20% as the economy worsens into a recession. Zandi could be underestimating the damage; homeowners abandon their homes and mortgages at a high rate when they enter negative territory on their equity. Foreclosures and abandoned mortgages exacerbate the problem …