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This column is intended to guide the angel investor to identify investment opportunities in early stage.
The best way to identify these opportunities is studying the new consumer habits and the new problems related with them. In terms of innovation, at stake is both the technology itself and its ability to affect the lives of people in the space of a decade or more.
A cultural reading of technologies, we are always on a more rigorous social paradigms that are changing question. Any product that facilitates simplifying change is an opportunity to invest in innovation.
If in the previous article talked about these new businesses related to whether the organization should be hierarchical or chaotic, in this article I want to address the way in which users prefer to consume products that come into your life. The opposite I choose is: Products package or disaggregated?
The answer seems obvious, is directly related to our conception of time and space now how mashup culture gives the individual the power to choose only what you want and need.
This very well could see what Steve Jobs and could transform the music industry with iTunes. The online store through which you can buy only those songs you really want to hear. This seems so logical, it was not 40 years ago.
The products are sold in package as did the unthinkable media and formats that can be packaged singly. Is there a sheet for each story you imagine? A CD for each song? Economically impossible. The content was designed according to the packaging it support.
Today when the songs are a digital file, the books are obtained from a link and news are consumed at a click, is absolutely outmoded thinking about buying encyclopedias, CDs and even newspapers, in case the interest purchased is in an article, a song or a story.
One of the first industries that revolutionized the type of packaging of their product was banking. The whole system of facilities, products and services around money, is complicated.
Electronic money came to simplify the whole problem of storage, transportation and distribution. Customers go to their banks by exception.
However the model of the financial institution that gave exclusively services will relativizing.
The bank will found new channels in networks peer-to-peer lending for consumer finance. And alternative forms of collaborative funding, where the investor, not to mention new markets criptocurrency aimed at decentralization of saving, sharing and assessment units.
It is no coincidence that in markets with exchange problems such as Venezuela and Argentina, the bitcoin community is rapidly developing.
As an investor in NXTP Labs we decided to invest in companies like BTCTrip Koibans and growing rapidly. The first bitcoin as background and the other as a means of recovering that quickly grows.
The second trend unbundled mention is consumer education. While the centralized university model requires urgent restructuring, the Web is changing our conception of what we consider “must have” for learning.