There is life beyond apps - New Venture Showcase

The New Venture Showcase at the NYU Stern School of Business is a premier event where carefully screened (peer reviewed applications!) start-ups get to present their idea or new business. I don't know why I have only heard about it this year, but I am glad I finally did.

Some 38 start-ups were present, competing for $200K in venture money. You obviously find plenty of apps and marketplaces; but not too many. And even those that were there are quite innovative, such as one helping you to train your voice to sound better during presentations and not loose it altogether after an all day event (Speech Empowerment).

What I found truly exciting however, were those entrepreneurs that created whole solutions made up of physical components, engineering models, technical infrastructure, service elements and the business model as the glue to hold it all together. My favorite thus has to be EdenWorks: Build a small farm with IKEA-ease and use the waste from fish (Talapia!) as nutrition for the produce. Restaurant owners redefine 'farm-to-table' when a 'farm comes to the table'.

Another one that doesn't go the easy route of staying all virtual would be Spruce. It's a good idea to create a marketplace for sellers and buyers of higher quality furniture - especially in NYC. It's another good idea to build an app that makes it easy to list and to find stuff. But going all the way and collecting, storing, and delivering the sofas, tables etc. is a different endeavor. That requires warehouse space, trucks, insurance, security and everything else that lives not just in the virtual, but the physical world.

Obviously, there were many more. Like K-Tram, a clever simulation that let's cable owners (power cables, submarine telecommunications cables etc.) optimize their power consumption. Atikus, a B2B insurance for lenders of Microloans especially in Africa, making the business model of lenders more cost effective and thus broadening the portfolio of loans. A curated site for fashionable fitness and sports apparel, Haute:Athletics (for women: how to do sports and look good. for men: how to do sports and not look silly). Skinesiology, where you wear fitness tights to increase the resistance of your day-to-day activities, transforming a walk into a workout. And even a venture that raises awareness for AIDS by organizing not just a 3 week bike ride through South Africa, but also making sure that all the learnings from interactions during that ride with locals are being followed-up on.

So as much as I like the digital world, seeing young innovators bringing ideas to life that work directly with real world elements is exciting. We must not all chase another app, just because somebody spent $18B on one.

Information infrastructure cost and performance

Whenever I see the bill for Internet access, TV, fixed and mobile phones from my parents in Germany, it drives tears into my eyes as I have to compare it to what we pay in New York. While over here it is practically impossible to pay less than $100/month for net, TV and phone (or just net and phone for that matter), they pay a third of that - and the same is true for wireless phone&data. In addition, network speeds and reliability appear to be better as well, even at lower costs. So I was curious to understand more when Netflix published a recent analysis of network performance for the countries they operate in to provide insights into a real world application: Watch streaming movies.

The original Netflix data highlights how pathetic the performance is in the US compared to nearly every other country served by Netflix, especially when you see a decline while every other country sees an improvement. So even though Germany is not on the list, it certainly proves my perception of having to endure a rather mediocre performance.

So how does it look when you factor price in?

To come up with a comparable graph, I picked a provider from Netflix' detail list for each country. Not the very best one, but from the top 5 and checked their monthly cost for the base package (which for Finland is 100Mbps). Normalize that against US dollars (Jan 14th exchange rates) and plot it against the performance achieved in the most recent Netflix survey (October 2013 data).

Not unexpected, the US is again at the bottom of the pile, and they are by a wide margin. Only Ireland "keeps up", but they had other problems over the past few years, even though their knowledge economy does require better and more cost effective infrastructure if the return to growth should be sustainable. And my Norwegian is not good enough to figure out how much more one might get for the price (which could be significant, as the Energy utility is also the Internet provider).

As an expat I am always amazed what people here keep up with. So I am keen to put some additional light on the stories and perception by adding real live data. This is one. Another will be healthcare in a later post.