International paradox: Growth without profit

Here’s an interesting article in the New York Times today about the growing demand for online content in emerging markets like Africa and India — which should potentially be a good thing.

The ‘International Paradox’ means that content-rich services such as social media (from Facebook to YouTube) are finding that enormous numbers of users in these markets are sucking up bandwidth — without any corresponding revenue growth. Read on: In Developing Countries, Web Grows Without Profit.

Still an Idealab

Nearly a decade after rising to popularity during the dotcom boom and then melting into obscurity, Idealab is surprisingly still around.

Every time I pass by the offices in downtown Pasadena, about five minutes from where I live, I wonder what’s going on at the incubator that put so many Web startups on the map. If you’re wondering too, their investments — sidestepping much of today’s popular stuff like Web 2.0 technologies — show strategic plays in security, energy and robotics. Like many investors in Southern California and elsewhere today, Idealab seems to be just flying below the radar.

Employee retention lessons from In-N-Out

Most Californians have indulged in local favorites like Jamba Juice, Baha Fresh and of course In-N-Out Burger (I went through a low-carb phase years ago relying on their bunless, lettuce-wrapped cheeseburgers). For those not familiar with the burger chain, In-N-Out is a bit of an oddity in the fast food industry — it’s healthy, cheap, has a very limited menu and it’s not usually fast… it’s very rare to find a location where there isn’t a line up around the block waiting for the drive-through.

I knew about the religious background of this chain (there are biblical references on the bottom of their cups), but I didn’t know a lot about its successful business practices. A new book by Stacy Perman delves into the details of how the chain remains successful — by focusing on its people. Of note, the chain grows organically — opening stores only when new management grows from within employee ranks. Managers make 100K plus bonuses. As a result of their best practices, they have a low turnover rate, which is a rarity in the fast food industry.

If you’re interested in the story, BusinessWeek also has a good article on how In-N-Out is professionalizing fast food. And of course, next time you’re in California, try the burgers.

Commercializing new inventions

Could be another useful Webinar from Caltech: Assessing the Commercialization Potential of New Inventions, covering key topics on recognizing and capitalizing on opportunities:

• Nine key questions to better assess the commercial potential of new inventions
• Critical skills your company should possess to move inventions to the marketplace
• How to involve your customers in the commercialization process
• Taking technological leadership through acquisition of external inventions

Yellow Tail and the Australian wine industry

I discovered Yellow Tail Shiraz several years ago at Trader Joe’s here in Southern California for less than $5 a bottle. I know almost nothing about wine, but I instantly took to Yellow Tail. And you couldn’t beat the price.

An interesting article in Slate describers how the economic crisis has affected the wine industry in Australia, and how labels such as Yellow Tail may be responsible for tarnishing the Australian brand by propagating the expectation that Australia only produces cut-rate, discount wines. The prestigious names have suffered, with wine makers clamoring to rectify the situation and preserve their brands. But Yellow Tail still continues to be popular. It is good discount juice!

A simple word cloud generator

Here’s a simple and fun new tool from IBM alphaWorks: Word Cloud Generator. Building on the Wordle technology, also created by Jonathan Feinberg, an engineer at the IBM Research Collaborative User Experience lab in Cambridge, MA, this tool lets you generate interesting (and pretty) word clouds based on a set of words. The lab is also responsible for previous visualization technologies on alphaWorks including Many Eyes and History Flow Visualization Application.

Does the economy need Ayn Rand?

I discovered Ayn Rand in an unexpected way on my first day of university in Toronto. Prominently painted on one of the arts buildings was the question “Who is John Galt?” It seemed like a challenge — one probably taken up by many, including myself. While I wouldn’t have called myself an Objectivist, I found the philosophy interesting and read everything Rand ever wrote.

If you’ve got an opinion, one way or the other, about Rand, you can join the debate right now on BusinessWeek, arguing whether The Economy Needs Any Rand. And even if you don’t buy into Objectivism, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead are still books worth tackling at some point in your life.

The Blue Sweater may change you…

I just read a new book called The Blue Sweater by Jacqueline Novogratz. For weeks I’d seen reviews of this woman’s account of her journey to fight poverty in Africa, including one review that began, “Be careful, this book will change you…”

Novogratz herself begins the book with Nelson Mandela’s words: “There is no passion to be found playing small in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”

This book does a great job of combining a personal narrative of finding one’s true calling with concrete examples of what any of us could do to help fight global poverty. It tells Novogratz’s story from her childhood to working in the banking industry evaluating foreign investments to starting her own fund to invest in entrepreneurs in poverty-stricken countries. The journey that her old blue sweater takes from her hometown to a child in Rwanda is a great story in and of itself about how we are all interconnected.

Novogratz delves into practical steps each of us can take, including some that are written about really well in another book called The Life You Can Save by Peter Singer. Singer’s book asks you to take a look not so much at what you are doing — and whether that makes you a good person — but at what you are not doing. This is more philosophy than biography, if that’s your preference.

I make no claims of being a great humanitarian. I try to do my part each year by donating to UNICEF and volunteer now and again for organizations serving my local community, but these books really did inspire me. And truth be told, made me feel guilty about how little effort it would take on my part to make a bigger difference.

Even if you don’t have time to read the whole book (which I rarely seem to do anymore), next time you’re at Barnes & Noble, flip through a few chapters of The Blue Sweater. It’s well worth it.

100 meters of existence

This is very cool … my friend Marc told me about this photo by Simon Hogsberg called “We’re all gonna die … 100 meters of existence.” At 100 meters long, it’s a compilation of shots taken over the course of 20 days from the same spot on a bridge in Berlin. Based in Copenhagen, Hogsberg takes a lot of other great photos too.