Puny Little Human

The advancement of location based services and under prediction

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When foursquare first came out, I had a thought that this whole location based service thing is all good and nice, but how many apps would I have in my life that would rely on location? I just could not think of any other applications for being contextually aware.

Today, it may be one of the most important aspects of mobility ever. Just a quick perusal through the Location Services menu in my mobile shows an astonishing 41 apps that use location. Some that I use constantly: foursquare, Yelp, Waze, Primospot, Facebook, Groupon. A quick read through shows that context matters a great deal for social, commerce, and transportation.

That just goes to show the limitations of my own imagination about how wide ranging the applications for location can be. Nokia, whose venture group I work for, has even created a dedicated business unit around Location and Commerce to exploit this opportunity.

And I think the ultimate point of this experience is: that it can be dangerous to be certain that we can predict the level of change in the future. It is easy to be overconfident about how little things can change, especially in the easily disrupted world of Internet and mobile.

This is discouraging and encouraging. It is discouraging because it shows the limits of our ability to predict and plan for the future. It is encouraging because it shows that we can and should be daring and courageous in our visions for the future and how things could be. That we shouldn’t be thinking about technology based on the how things are today. The computing power and connectivity that we have today are a pale shadow of how things may be in 10 to 15 years.

Food!

Earlier, I posted a graph showing the FAO’s World Food Price Index. The price of food is soaring once again.The point I wanted to make is that I believe that the real (inflation adjusted) price of food is going to go up over the next few years. And this will not just be staple foods, but also high end stuff (think meat and seafood).

For sure, climate change will play a big part in this. But there is also the growing demand for food in emerging economies (China and India). When I was back in Beijing over the Winter, I found a lot of items marked up 15-25% on menus. This was from only leaving at the end of August. Even here in Ithaca, I have been able to pay for my takeout dinners with a credit card because the price for a 2 item combo now exceeds the minimum purchase amount to use credit. Even if food prices were to drop back down, we are definitely entering a period of high volatility in the cost of food.

What does this mean? Opportunity. Solutions which help individuals or groups of people secure the price of food will be crucial. Chris Kurdziel was describing a startup coming to Ithaca as “Groupon for food.” It basically was supposed to be a way for a group of people to buy an order of, say rice, that would be economical for the farmer. It makes a lot of sense. I think it may be 3 years too early, but it’s an intriguing idea, nonetheless. And they are coming to Ithaca, which I think is something unique about this place, the meeting place of man’s oldest industry: agriculture, and world class engineering and cutting edge high tech research.

Investors should be on the lookout for startups and intrapreneurs who are working to solve the food scarcity problem. Food may be a physical thing, but the pricing and delivery of it from farm to table relies heavily upon information flows. Ways to disintermediate and disrupt distribution systems will be HUGE.

Could I be wrong? Absolutely. In the 1960’s, people thought India was going to be unable to feed itself and face widespread starvation. Along came Norman Borlaug, who invented a new strain of wheat that tripled their grain output. I don’t know the specific details. As Jed Bartlett said, “What am I, Famer Bob? It was wheat and there was more of it.” A similar invention could come along and turn my thesis on its head. And the cool thing is, being at Cornell, that invention is probably being cooked up in the next building over.

One last note: there is a very interesting class being taught at Cornell this semester called Creative Design for Affordability, which is modeled after a similar class at Stanford. It’s a joint class between the business school and the college of human ecology’s design department. The issue that they are tackling this year is… food security. 

Related articles

• “FAO says food prices highest in over 20 years” and related posts (bloggingsbyboz.com)
• World food prices reach new high (bbc.co.uk)