A couple years ago I saw a great presentation (on climate change and business) that pointed out that while in every other country in the world ‘sex’ was the most common search term on Google, in the United Kingdom it was ‘weather’. And ‘property’ isn’t far behind (source: Google Trends):
(compare to results for ‘All Regions’:)
So you can understand why we invested in Weatherbill and Zoopla… (There were a few other considerations as well, but this makes for a more fun story.)
So where was I…? Oh, that’s right, I just wanted to draw attention to Zoopla’s nifty new property value widgets and what a great addition they would make to any website targeting a British audience. The great thing is that it’s not just UK or England or even London prices you can track but areas and postcodes. Local is the new global. (Or something like that.) Write a blog for hedge fund managers? Keep the readers coming back with a nifty NW8 price tracking widget for example:
Or appeal to their bonus envy with this cheeky London Dream Homes listings widget:
I’d be willing to bet it has more pulling power than showing the latest price on the FTSE100 index…
Carlota Perez is one of my heroes. Her fantastic articulation (in Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages) of how technological revolutions mark turning points in long economic cycles, building on the work of Schumpeter and Hayek, is in my opinion an incredible lens through which to understand long term economic growth and its effect on financial markets. Her approach is a key foundational pillar for our investment thesis, and is why we feel confident that it is possible to generate excess returns by catching the long term secular economic waves that ultimately govern capital markets. (Think of it as the polar opposite of day trading.)
In her thesis, each successive long wave of the economic cycle is initially catalyzed by a technological revolution, usually only visible in hindsight:
My suspicion is that we are living through a “phase change” now (be careful, “now” in this context means a period of a few years, not “today” or “this quarter”…) – and so I’ve been wondering what will come to be seen as the foundational technological revolution of the sixth paradigm. The previous five, as defined by Perez, are below:
There are many possibilities, but I’m starting to think that the transition to cloud computing (enhanced by ubiquitous wireless connectivity) just might be it. And for the sake of taking a punt on what might be a good symbolic starting point for this revolution, how about the launch of Amazon‘s S3 and EC2 in 2006?
Amazon today said it would bring web-scale computing power for use in workloads such as web indexing and data mining to just about anyone. The bookseller now offers MapReduce (a programming model created by Google to help deal with incredibly large data sets) using Hadoop on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Storage Service. This allows AWS customers to access the power of a Google- or Yahoo-style server and programming infrastructure to model business decisions and analyze huges sets of customer or corporate data without having to invest in thousands of servers (as well as dozens of programmers). Dana Gardner over at ZDNet says one could think of it as having access to a personal supercomputer.
Just as Intel’s 4004 microprocessor was the catalyst for a wave of creative destruction in the 70s and 80s, will AWS prove the same for the 00s and 10s? Probably. We’re seeing it already. And it’s going to disrupt the hell out of the mastodons of industry across most sectors of the economy. Why? Because their cultures and leaders are entirely ill-equipped to face such a fundamental paradigm shift. They know how to play by the old rules. The strategic competitive advantages they built up over decades risk suddenly – poof! – to become obsolete. (from Dan Gardner:)
Think of it as having your own tuned supercomputer that you can plug gigantic data sets into and ask questions that will determine the course of your businesses for the next decade. Oh, and you can pay for the pleasure on a credit card.
This high-end BI value has pretty much been the sole purview of large, skilled and deep-pocketed enterprises. But there are plenty of people, researchers, government agencies, academics, small to medium enterprises, venture capitalists and the like that would hugely benefit from sussing out important trends and findings from the growing reams of raw data generated by modern businesses and societies. Talk about metadata on steroids!
“This high-end BI value has pretty much been the sole purview of large, skilled and deep-pocketed enterprises.” Not anymore… Think about that for a moment.
Size used to be an advantage in almost any industry…now? Not so much. New rules, new winners.
Thought experiment: Let’s take, oh say…banking. Which would you rather run (if say your life depended on success, which I know these days is a bit far-fetched but humor me…)?
A greenfield start-from-scratch-bank (assuming you had access to sufficient capital to get started, say $100 million or so)? Or,
[insert favorite megabank here] (assuming you had access to sufficient capital to not be immediately insolvent, say $100 billion or so)?
Well unless you are a sociopath as per Hughand see the key metric of success being how many people report to you and whether or not global political leaders will take your call, I think the answer is pretty bloody obvious.
So what does all this mean? Well, for us it means investing in companies that are positioned to ride this wave (not build a levee against it, hoping it won’t break.) Some – like cohesiveFT are right in the heart of the technology facilitating this new paradigm. Others, like our most recent investments Zoopla and FX Capital Group, are building new business models adapted to the new technological landscape that will allow them to disrupt and extend existing markets. But it also means remembering that you can be right (about the future) but still not come out on top:
A few weeks ago, I issued a call to action with respect to creating a W3C working group focused on advancing the implementation of semantic web technologies and approaches in the financial services domain. Chris kindly responded, and in particular took issue with the usefulness/appropriateness of using (the existing) semantic web toolkit (RDF triples, OWL, etc.) due to their innate complexity. He writes:
At the moment though it seems that you have a problem if you need somebody that understands derivatives OR XML schema, and a real headache if you want somebody that understands derivatives AND XML schema.
Two thoughts. Firstly, I’m not a developer and so my enthusiasm for any particular solution or outcome with respect to software and code is necessarily (due to my lack of knowledge) more conceptual than practical: ie it is hard for me to have a robust opinion on the underlying path taken to achieve a certain result. What excites me and I think is important, is to build on the technologies of the web and ultra-cheap storage and bandwidth, to create rich, linked, open data and metadata sets in finance. Much of course already exists as Chris correctly points out, but so much more remains to be done. Secondly, it might be ‘a real headache’ but what 21st century finance needs is exactly people that understand derivatives and XML schemas.* I’m sorry but it isn’t that hard to develop these kind of people, and in a nutshell encapsulated the vision we had for Digital Markets at DrKW several years ago. I suspect that many Digital Generation finance professionals already (or could easily) fit this criterea. (The barriers however are cultural. When we built Digital Markets, while I knew there would be many challenges, I completely underestimated just how threatening such a vision was to the status quo: in particular, the very idea of calling into question the distinction between front and back office staff, even if just a subtle blurring of the line for a few dozen employees, caused the corporate anti-bodies to go on full alert. Removing the distinction between star-belly and plain-belly Sneetches was not something the organization was ready to condone.)
Indeed one of the most important and valuable objectives of setting up such a working group (whether or not it is under the auspices of W3C, although I lean toward not reinventing the wheel and building on the existing infrastructure of such a collaborative industry forum and think there is a better cultural fit with the objectives of such a project at W3C than say at any financial sector industry association…) is to create a focal point – not a gatekeeper (!) – for the community to innovate around a common theme and purpose. Another is to cultivate a shared respect for and understanding of the value of open standards, something that is taken for granted in many other industries but is still anathema on Wall Street and in the City. Of course there are glimmers of light to be seen in things like the FIX Protocol, but even here the underlying cultural mindset was more Microsoft than Unix… Way back in 2003-ish (?), when I was running syndicate at DrKW, we published (on the web) an XML schema describing a new bond issue, with the goal being to help others create e-bookbuilding platforms that would be able to communicate with ours. (I tried to find the link but was unable, any current DKIB folks know if it is still live?) Pretty tame stuff right? Well suffice to say the reaction of our/my peers was various combinations of:
what the hell is XML and what are you guys on about?
you guys have the best e-bookbuilding platform, why on earth would you give away your data structure???
is this some kind of trojan horse? what are you trying to pull?
I no longer work day to day in a big institutional banking environment, so it’s hard for me to judge how much, if at all, these attitudes have evolved over the past couple years. I may be naive but I don’t see why we assume finance and derivative professionals can understand (and apply) concepts like convexity, but balk at expecting them to understand ontology and its implications. I thought these folks were supposed to be clever. In my view it’s about leadership. If the folks in the corner office think ontology is important, so will the rank and file.
So maybe semantic web tools aren’t the only – or even the most important – path to enabling my vision; I’d still think it would be useful to catalyze a more formal community of interest around creating a truly rich set of linked data in financial services and markets. And I hope Chris, and others like him, would be keen to get involved.
* If a few more of these kind of people had populated the top of securitization groups of the last several years, we may have avoided some of the worst excesses; securitization is nothing but managing vast and complex sets of (inter-related) data. Data quality is more important than credit quality: garbage in, garbage out…
As you know, one of the key fundamental foundation pillars of our investment thesis here at Nauiokas Park is the migration of value in many (most?) markets from transactions (matching, broking) to data. Quick and dirty: technology is driving the marginal cost of matching buyers and sellers to zero, and is driving the ability to collect, store and analyze previously unimaginable amounts of data and metadata to a different dimension. The value (and creativity and innovation from a business model point of view) now lies in thinking up ways to harness this new ability to good effect. The possibilities seem vast to us and we love discovering clever entrepreneurs and technologists who identify opportunities along this vector.
If you are a data geek, (or just a wannabe/groupie like me) you need to add Joshua Reich’s i2pi blog to your RSS feed. Not only does he know alot about data and technology, but he can leverage that knowledge through his excellent and lucid understanding of markets and business:
The premise that led us to this mess was that with only a modicum of data and some threadbare models trading would be the final arbiter of value and the collective intelligence of efficient markets would result in fundamentally sound pricing. Now that liquidity has gone from the markets, traders of these illiquid instruments are bulking up their data and models to try and better their understanding of fundamental value. And so it is that when markets are liquid the market relies on trading to assimilate the information of individual agents. Without this method of price discovery these agents need to gather their own data as the market no longer performs the role of grand aggregator. Data trades inversely to liquidity.
And he gives great math lessons too (which is great for those of us having mid-life worries about having forgotten more than they’ve remembered…) He’s just (re)started his consulting business i2pi, but I’ve got my eye on him for my new bank so if you are interested in his services, you better move quickly!
Well after 6 days essentially without email or web access, I’m back online. From the giant number of unread emails in my inbox, I’m sure one or two of you are wondering why the radio silence. Apologies. Now you know.
I must admit, although I wouldn’t say it was surprising per se, this episode did open my eyes on how indispensible (only 15 odd years after it’s popularization) fast, unfettered, continuous access to the web is for the way I (and many others I’m sure) work.
Had I known that I would not have access to the web for 6 days, I obviously would have organized my time differently (and I wouldn’t have spent the better part of three days in a futile bid to fix it) – there are still things that can be done offline, but even for many of these – reading, research, writing – my default mode has evolved to weave in annotating, footnoting, elaborating, complementing these activities with online tools (the most common, but by no means exclusive being Google, social bookmarking, wikis, social networks…)
I guess if there is a silver lining to this disaster (I feel like I’ve fallen a month behind in my ‘to do’ list…), a ‘learning’ to take away, it is that the productivity enhancing power of the ubiquitous web (at least or especially for ‘knowledge workers’) is truly incredible. And I’m not sure we really appreciate it. It’s like aging: if I look in the mirror, I don’t think I look much different than I did 15 years ago; until I look at a photo of myself from 15 years ago!
So here’s a challenge. Take a moment to reflect on how you live and work today. Now try to transpose this to 1994: could you do what you do today? more slowly? at all? And if you have the luxury and inclination to do so, try switching off the internet/email and your mobile phone for a week (landlines and fax machines allowed.) If you do, what you might find will surely excite – because you will appreciate how much more productive you now are – and frighten you – because you will realize how dependent you are – in equal measure.
If banks are systemically important to our economic and social system, then telecommunications infrastructure is vital. I wonder if our politicians understand this.
The mission of the Semantic Web Health Care and Life Sciences Interest Group, part of the Semantic Web Activity, is to develop, advocate for, and support the use of Semantic Web technologies for biological science, translational medicine and health care. These domains stand to gain tremendous benefit by adoption of Semantic Web technologies, as they depend on the interoperability of information from many domains and processes for efficient decision support.
The group will:
Document use cases to aid individuals in understanding the business and technical benefits of using Semantic Web technologies.
Document guidelines to accelerate the adoption of the technology.
Implement a selection of the use cases as proof-of-concept demonstrations.
Explore the possibility of developing high level vocabularies.
Disseminate information about the group’s work at government, industry, and academic events.
Now if I were 20 years younger, I might well be diving feet first into the realm of data, meta-data, and the semantic web. In 1990, there was a lot of opportunity and value to extract if you were skillful and comfortable understanding and manipulating cashflows; being a bond or interest rate swap trader was both financially and intellectually rewarding. That time has passed. (Although this didn’t stop the banks from flogging the horse until well after it was dead and decomposing…) In the 2010′s (the teens?), I suspect an analogous opportunity will exist for those that have mastered the art of managing or “trading” data. Hal Varian at Google articulates this well:
I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it.
I think statisticians are part of it, but it’s just a part. You also want to be able to visualize the data, communicate the data, and utilize it effectively. But I do think those skills—of being able to access, understand, and communicate the insights you get from data analysis—are going to be extremely important. Managers need to be able to access and understand the data themselves.
I may no longer be young enough to master a completely new domain like this, but I think I’m wise enough to spot something important when I see it. And the semantic web and financial markets were made for one another. But even if I had the time, I don’t have the knowledge or the skills to get a Financial Services and Markets Interest Group up and running, even though the mission statement is pretty much a cut and paste from the one above. But I am fairly confident that amongst the very clever readers of the Park Paradigm and beyond – amongst your network of friends and colleagues – there is the Ocean’s 11 dream team needed to make this happen. And I’d be thrilled just to ‘hang around the edges’ shouting out ideas from the peanut gallery and pouring coffee so to speak.
This is big. This is important. President Obama calls for transparency in financial markets (hallelujah!): the financial semantic web is an important piece in that puzzle. Perhaps Secretary Geithner and the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets can lend moral and financial support to this project?
Zoopla.co.uk is a unique property website offering users information and tools to help them make better-informed property decisions. Our aim is to provide the most comprehensive source of residential property market information in the UK to help buyers, sellers, owners and estate agents alike and give them an advantage in the property market…
…We have started by providing FREE value estimates, sold prices and local information as well as letting users add content by editing information and uploading photos. We are the UK’s fastest growing property website and by far the largest and most active property community in the UK, with over a million user contributions to our website in 2008 alone…
…Our value estimates are calculated using a proprietary algorithm (a secret formula) that we have developed by analysing millions of data points relating to property sales and home characteristics throughout the UK. The algorithm works by comparing relationships between home prices, economic trends and property characteristics in given geographic areas. Our estimates are constantly refined, using the most recent data available and a variety of statistical methodologies, in order to provide the most current information on any home.
We are still testing and improving our features and tools and recognise that things aren’t perfect yet…
So what’s so interesting about Zoopla!? Or perhaps more specifically, how does Zoopla fit into Nauiokas Park’s investment universe? Two words: rich data.
In Zoopla, Alex and Simon Kain (co-founder and CTO), have leveraged the web to feed intelligent algorithms that allow them to bootstrap basic, publicly available data, into an increasingly more robust, accurate, rich and granular dataset of UK residential property.
They have built the site in a way that naturally compels visitors to improve and enrich the dataset. This user-generated data is not only very valuable but is itself subject to Metcalfe’s Law and so adds tremendously to the sustainable advantage of the site and their database. This is not trivial. When I was running a Credit Trading business, complex-data quality issues were absolutely critical to running the business efficiently and having effective risk management. We, like other banks, were plagued with bad quality (inconsistent, out-of-date, missing, etc. etc.) data. As a part of the ‘web-ification’ of our business (pre Digital Markets stuff), one of the single most effective things we did was to expose our various data structures to broad populations of users within the bank and allow users to correct and enhance the data on an ad hoc basis. Of course the ‘data priests’ were aghast…but it worked. Really I think it’s just applying a variation of Linus’ Law: “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”
But how does a unique, rich, ever-improving, granular, transparent, database of UK property prices fit with Nauiokas Park’s focus on disruptive business models and technologies in financial services and markets? Well, we think Zoopla is ideally positioned to drive and benefit from a fundamental shift in the economic structure underlying the property markets. (This is a theme regular readers will recognise,) ie the shift from a market predicated on information scarcity to one build on information abundance. And you don’t even have to be particularly clever to work out how this is likely to play out, as property is the ith market in a series of [N] markets to have this thrust upon them. I don’t want to give too much away, but for the City types out there just think back to the bond markets of 1990. (For Wall Street types you only have to think back to oh about, 2004…) All other things being equal, as this “phase change” occurs in an industry, value moves away from transactions (matching) to data. (Think Merrill Lynch vs. Bloomberg LP over the past few years as a reasonable pair trade in this vein. Or all investment banks vs. Markit Group…)
Post-2008, even the proverbial man-in-the-street knows there was a data… how would you say… “issue”… when it came to the intersection of residential property and finance… Now I’m not suggesting (not quite anyways) that had Zoopla existed and been well-established globally years ago that the sub-crimeprime crisis would not have occurred (stupid is as stupid does)…but having easy access to the kind of readily “digestable” data available from Zoopla would clearly have been a boon to any responsible mortgage underwriter or securitization professional. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that today were I an institutional investor in UK RMBS, I would require that the underwriters/originators of the pools provide me with a FTP feed of the individual Zoopla data of every property in the pool. And if I were running say a big UK mortgage book and/or originator, I would certainly be interested in having an independent automated external mark-to-market run at least monthly, probably weekly…you get the idea.
And finally, whenever you have good, digital, reproduce-able data, well there my friend you have the makings of a myriad of listed and OTC markets in that underlying. Think Case-Shiller only better.
We are truly excited by the myriad of business opportunities available to Zoopla as it continues to grow and improve its core database and builds products and services on top, but perhaps most exciting is being able to participate once again at the early stages of a company that is set to play a key role in transforming an important and large marketplace, reducing friction and creating an entirely new value paradigm. Even reminds me a little of another UK start-up you might have heard of called Betfair… And we can’t wait to see what Alex and the team will achieve in the next few years and look forward to helping them in any way we can.
So, if you live in the UK, what are you waiting for? Go Zoopla! your home, claim it, enhance the data and presto, you now have effectively a pretty good proxy ticker-tape for (probably) the most important asset you own.
With so many column inches these days dedicated to analyzing the storm clouds engulfing the world’s economy, its nice to have a good excuse to have a more positive cloud story to tell. One of our portfolio companies – cohesiveFT – just announced their new VPN Cubed ‘packaged service’ for enhanced cloud security (from the Elastic Server Blog:)
VPN-Cubed is an encrypted virtual private network (VPN), enabling customer-controlled security inside a single cloud, across multiple clouds, and between clouds and private infrastructure.
One of the key elements we see driving the emergence of the disruptive business models in markets and financial services is of course the ever decreasing cost of computing, storage and communication. This inexorable and exponential trend is absolutely critical when considering many opportunities in financial services and markets as more often than not they involve very high volumes of data processing, computational intensity or both, usually in real time. Indeed one of the most significant historical barriers to entry in finance was the cost and complexity of the required ICT infrastructure. In our minds, clearly the trend towards computing as a utility will underpin a new paradigm in a number of different industries and will fundamentally change ‘what is possible’. We think companies like cohesiveFT will play an important part in facilitating this transition, especially with young innovative companies that aren’t trapped in any particular legacy infrastructure. That said, we also believe that ultimately this trend will affect everyone. Indeed as the cohesiveFT team points out, the current poor economic conditions could actually end up catalyzing such a move sooner rather than later:
We see the current economic downturn as actually increasing Cloud Computing interest. Rather than writing that $2M check for your data center hardware refresh, wouldn’t you rather manage your infrastructure as a service? Moving part of your infrastructure to the cloud turns capital expenditures (or fixed costs) into operational expenditures (or variable costs). According to IDC, a global provider of market intelligence, cloud computing is poised to capture 25% of IT growth spend by 2012. Yet, in a recent IDC survey, 74% of IT executives/CIOs cited security as the top challenge preventing their adoption of the cloud services model.
So for any of you out there – whether you are working in a big bank, a small hedge fund or a ‘sixth paradigm’ start-up, I encourage you to engage your management and your IT leaders in a discussion about your cloud computing strategy and perhaps to have a look at VPN Cubed and cohesive’s other products. I think you might like what you find.
Disclosure: My company is an investor in cohesiveFT and we are represented on the Board by Amy Nauiokas. Further, Craig Heimark, cohesiveFT’s CEO is an advisor to Nauiokas Park.
I have to admit it’s always exciting to see validation points for strongly held convictions. As you know I firmly believe that the confluence of technology and emerging – or in the new jargon more precisely ‘frontier’ – markets will generate significant and exciting new innovations and opportunities, and I remain convinced that fundamentally new and robust business models will emerge as a result. The fact that this might improve the human condition in some of the world’s heretofore least fortunate corners is of course icing on the proverbial cake. And so I was happy to read that Google, for example seems to share (at least some of my) sentiments on this:
We believe that the Internet is a transformational force for societies. And it’s making us all much more powerful as individuals, regardless of whether one is in New York, Stockholm, Bujumbura, Ouagadougou, or Cape Town. Regardless of background, education, social status, gender, age or economic situation, online access to information enables people to create opportunities for themselves. Seeing a student in a cybercafe doing his research using a search engine, a businessman chatting with a colleague abroad with instant messaging, or a young woman posting her photos to a social networking site – it’s clear the extent to which academic, business and social life is fundamentally changing all over Africa.”
At the same time, a couple of days ago, a very interesting article in the NYTimes also leant support to my thesis that the infrastructural constraints and challenging business environment of sub-Saharan Africa would engender innovative and resourceful approaches and a unique approach to harvesting the potential of information and communications technologies:
Still, Nairobi is home to a digital brew that invites optimism about its chances for creating unusual innovations. The city has relatively few wired phone lines or networked personal computers, so mobile phones are the essential digital tool. Four times as many people have them as have bank accounts. Text messages are far more popular than e-mail. Safaricom, the dominant mobile provider, offers a service called M-pesa that lets customers send money with text messages. Nokia sells brand-new phones here for as little as $33.
While engineers in the United States lavish attention on expensive phones that boast laptoplike features, in Kenya there are 10 million low-end phones. Millions more are used elsewhere in Africa. Enhancements to such basic phones can be experimented with cheaply in Nairobi, and because designers are weaned on narrow bandwidth, they are comfortable writing compact programs suited to puny devices.
“Applications are heavy in America,” says Michael Wakahe, a Nairobi code writer. “Here we have to make them light,” because simpler hardware requires smaller programs. These can have advantages in wireless systems…
…The prospect of marrying low-end mobile phones with the Internet is earning Nairobi notice from outsiders, who wonder whether the city might emerge as a test-bed for tomorrow’s technologies. One intriguing possibility is broadcasting local television programs on mobile phones.
In Nairobi’s highest-profile validation, Google opened a development office here last September. “Africa is a huge long-term market for us,” Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said by e-mail. “We have to start by helping people get online, and the creativity of the people will take care of the rest.”
One of the most obvious – yet no less powerful or potentially transformational for it – themes is the combination of mobile communications, internet and geo-location technologies to disseminate information and increase connectedness from the bottom up. This emergent collective intelligence is all the more remarkable, given the typical history of entrenched ‘top-down’ politico-economic structures in place in these countries. Much of the early innovation is centered around information gathering and crisis management with tools like Ushahidi (quickly developed in response to the post-election political unrest in Kenya earlier this year) and FrontlineSMS being quickly adopted by citizens and NGOs and having an immediate positive impact on the ground. It doesn’t take much imagination to start dreaming up additional – more commercial – potential applications for these kinds of platforms. Ken Banks, the man behind FrontlineSMS describes his view as developing the ‘long-tail’ of mobile applications as the right approach for not-for-profit “social mobile”:
low-end, simple, appropriate mobile technology solutions which are easy to obtain, require as little technical expertise as possible, and are easy to copy and replicate. From my own experiences the number of NGOs present in this space is by far the greatest, making it the area to focus on if we want to create the highest amount of mobile-enabled social change. Add up all the value here, and it easily outweighs the rest along the higher (more lucrative) parts of the tail.
I would suggest that this approach might work equally well to enable commercial, for-profit, applications as well. Indeed on the other side of the continent you find Mark Davies esoko/TradeNet: Africa’s first mobile2mobile peer2peer trading platform and market information network:
…designed to provide the very latest agricultural market information to stakeholders. Accessed via SMS, fax, web, PDAs, farmers and traders can get daily price information, download video/audio files, access research documents, post buy/sell offers to the community, and contact other market participants. The concept is to make african markets more transparent and efficient, improve intra-regional trading, and provide stakeholders with enough recent and accurate information to make better decisions on bringing products to market and at what price.
I’m sure it won’t be easy or without enormous challenges but the opportunity is vast. Africa: it just might be the new new new thing.
Here at the Park Paradigm, I try to post only when I see an opportunity to add to the conversation – a unique point of view, specific analysis, a different angle – and so generally have avoided simply pointing to other articles or commentaries I am reading and find interesting. This approach has worked well for me – and I hope for you as well – but left me somewhat frustrated with a virtual pile of links and articles in my groaning ‘to blog about’ inbox: a back-log that probably would never get cleared even if blogging was my full time job. (To be fair, this is almost certainly a good thing for my poor readers who would be drowned in a sea of ranting repetitive ramblings…)
So when I discovered Tumblr (via Stowe I think…) it seemed to be the perfect solution: giving me a clean and easy outlet to record and share my ‘stream of consciousness’ without diluting or cluttering up the Park Paradigm. Most importantly, readers can take it or leave it. We’ll see how it goes but it will be interesting to see how you react – I’m curious to see if my tumblr blog ends up helping me decide what to write about in more depth.
I’ve linked to it in the sidebar and you can find it at (I’ve borrowed one of my favorite quotes from Pablo Picasso as a title):
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) of how technological revolutions mark turning points in long economic cycles, building on the work of 
and see the key metric of success being how many people report to you and whether or not global political leaders will take your call, I think the answer is pretty bloody obvious.
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