Ged Carroll

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  • Five star living

    Trendwatching is back with a pattern that they call five star living, where property developers and high-end resort or hotels sell a home away from home to the super dumb but loaded.

    They put a whole pile of luxury living brand experience about it, but what they are seeing is the window dressing not the trends in five star living. Five star hotels are capital intensive and unless you have high occupancy all the time, expensive.

    Apartment complexes can draw on the service aspects of five star hotels; but farm off a lot of the capital risk to apartment purchasers and still charge them for premium rate services. Five star living is about hotels hedging their bets in a post-September 11 world. I realise that this is a less romantic and stylish explanation of this trend, but its all about the money.

    Mandarin Oriental have built suites in their Hyde Park hotel which would be a great example of five star living. Luxury brands like Giorgio Armani have extended into interior design to try and capitalise on this trend in combination with luxury property developers. 

    You also have people like the Trump Organisation extending themselves from real estate into hotel services and tourism in the opposite direction with its golfing themed resorts. More five star living related content here.

    Apple spoof product lifecycle article which can be found here. Its funny because there are a lot of underlying themes which are close to the truth as consumers see it.

    Finally, the New York Times have got a great interactive presidential election guide that they are going to keep updated. So go to this link, have a play and bookmark it until November. Interactive data like live dashboards in business allow you better understand the data. It makes for shareable content and is sticky in nature. 

  • Cash divide

    The 1990s had a cash divide. A number of years ago in college, I wrote an essay about the role of technology exclusion in society. This internet as a thing was only really starting to get going and we had just changed over the web browsers at the college from Mosiac to Netscape.

    I used to surf the web in 16 shades of grey available on my battered PowerBook 165, when I jacked into the JANET network. Why am I rambling about a geriatric computer and the ‘net before Google?

    Well, I used the web to research my essay and came across an article on the Washington Post about the cash divide discussing a ‘cash ghetto’, increasingly if you had to deal in cash you were on the margins of society. Part of this was down to the laundering of money from organised crime, including the drug cartels. It made sense to move as many people as possible out of the cash economy, but it created a cash divide. The cash divide separated illegal migrants from citizens; criminals from law abiding citizens.

    An article in the Arizona Daily Star, which my RSS feed aggregator picked up talked about the pervasive nature of Visa and MasterCard where cash was once king reminded me of the college essay.

    Visa and Mastercard have moved in alongside cheque cashing services and remittance businesses to bridge the cash divide profitably. Poor people tend to pay more charges than richer members of society.

    You don’t even need to have a credit record or a banking account. There are ways to provide pre-loaded credit cards in the US to bridge the cash divide. From intern payments to staff bonuses can be provided on cards form Visa, Mastercard and even American Express.  Interesting reading check it out. More finance related posts here.

  • Pitching VCs

    Eric Dunn, general partner with Cardinal Venture Capital wrote the following guide for pitching VCs. This was originally posted on AlwaysOn:

    Figure out what the audience already knows. If you have included a long market overview in your presentation, but are presenting to an industry veteran, you almost certainly win points for skipping quickly through the overview. Figure out what the audience doesn’t know. Conversely, there’s no rule against giving a brief introduction before starting your prepared pitch: “Just in case you aren’t familiar with the automated test equipment market, let me outline for you the major categories and who the market leaders are….” Then take a few minutes off the cuff.

    Pretty basic business presentation skills summed up in pitching VCs – there are no silver bullets beyond nepotism.

    Explain acronyms and terms of art. Your audience is probably ashamed to ask what the LEAP protocol or the IFX standard is, so unless you are sure that everyone in your audience knows what it means, give them a break.

    Track your audience. If you are getting blank stares from the audience, it could mean that they don’t understand, or it could mean you’re belaboring the obvious. Break stride and ask to find out which it is.

    Answer questions crisply. It’s better to say “I don’t know” or “I’ll have to get back to you on that” than to waffle with an incomplete or inaccurate answer.

    What Doesn’t Work

    Unbalanced presentations. Don’t succumb to the temptation to dwell on your personal area of expertise. A dozen slides on the technical attributes of the product, or on the details of the proposed sales organization, is almost certainly too much.

    Spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors. Although your audience will cut some slack for non-native-English speakers, there’s really no reason not to get this stuff right.

    Math errors. Not fatal, but math mistakes definitely chip away at your credibility.

    Hiding the ball. If your CTO is about to resign, you lose far more points when potential investors find out later than if you are up front about it.

    Arrogance. Most entrepreneurs have a lot to be proud of, but the best I have seen retain their humility no matter how successful they become.

    Selling the wrong point. If the critical question is price performance, don’t spend 15 minutes on channel strategy.

    Preaching to the choir. If an investor says “OK, we accept that this is a $5 billion market,” stop! Once you have convinced your audience of a point, you lose ground (for obtuseness) by going on to make additional arguments.

    For many entrepreneurs, these suggestions for improving investor pitches will be old hat. But all entrepreneurs should recognize that even a great business can’t shine through a low-quality pitch. Good pitches mean investment decisions are made on the merits of the underlying business, and that’s in everyone’s interest.

    More related content here.

  • Anoto digital pen

    Anoto are a bunch of mad Swedes who have invented a digital pen. The magic stuff they have came up with is a special spotted paper with unique markings so the pen can tell what kind of document its writing, the colour the ‘ink’, where it is on the page, should the writing be sent as an email. Despite featuring in a major feature article written for Wired magazine the company is doing quite well and coming up with cool stuff.  (Wired built up a reputation amongst superstitious techies after a preponderance of companies profiled in the magazine hit problems. Let’s hope that this doesn’t happen to Anoto). As any bureaucrat would tell you the pen is a lifesaver for meetings. While the   TabletPC makes more sense for mobile applications such as the UPS man.

    Anoto have licenced this technology to a number of people most notably Logitech; the mouse and speaker people.

    Logitech’s io is a neat piece of kit. Unfortunately they haven’t released any Mac drivers for it and won’t be doing so for the forseeable future. What I’d like you to do is help them forsee the future by completing this form requesting Mac drivers. (Re the product and serial number, they have a very handy prompt that tells you how many digits that you need to fake up). More related posts here.

  • The number

    Whilst catching up on my backlog of mails I came across this from CBS Marketwatch on Yahoo! making the number. The number is the consensus that market analysts think that a company will make in a given quarter:

    NOT MUCH SHOUTING GREETS YAHOO EARNINGSYahoo shares (YHOO) got the boot after the company kicked off a fresh earnings season for the online-media group by only just measuring up to expectations, demonstrating what American Technology Research analyst Mark Mahaney called a mantra: “in-line quarters don’t cut it for Internet stocks.”

    Ok, basically what this guy Mahaney is saying that because Yahoo! managed to get their profit for the quarter in line with what a number of market anlaysts expected them to be (based on a guestimate set maybe 90 to 180 days back) then they deserve a kicking.

    Unbelievable, accountancy despite the use of numbers is not an exact science, why?

    • Bills and sales are constantly coming in and out of a company
    • What does a sale really mean? If you sign a 3 year deal for online advertising, should Yahoo! claim that as a sale all at once or claim as the money comes in
    • When is the money in? When you invoice for it, or when it sits in your bank account
    • Is the capital gains made on the building you own and work out of profit?
    • If you had a bumper quarther this time but you know that the next quarter will be soft, should you avoid booking all the sales in to give you an income cushion next quarter?
    • How should you write off the depreciating value of computer equipment, chairs or a forklift truck? There can be more than one way of doing it that will affect the figures

    With this in mind, I would recommend that you read The Number by Alex Berenson, which takes you through the insanity of it all in greater depth.