Lawyers Create Scarcity

November 18, 2009 · Posted in abundance, economics · Comment 

Almost all scarcity is either artificial or limited to a time or location. Let me make it clear that there are some valid uses for solutions in law. When law is used in the wrong situation it will always create scarcity. Monday I ran into a perfect example of how lawyers create artificial scarcity.

Sunday I got a flat tire. My tires were old and worn so it was time to replace them. Fortunately I had a complete set of tires in my garage. My friend had taken a car to the scrap yard but saved the nearly new tires. The tires were a different size from what his new car used so he didn’t have a use for the tires. It was junk to him but useful for me. I put them in my garage to safely save them for when I replaced the tires on my car.

Monday I loaded the tires into my car and went to Sam’s Club to have my used tires mounted. Sam’s Club offered this service free to members. I was so happy with this service that I frequently recommended membership just because of this service. To my surprise they don’t provide that service any more. Was it because of cost cutting? No. Lawyers stopped the service because of fear of liability.

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Hyper customized video, voice, language

November 9, 2009 · Posted in innovation · Comment 

In my last video post I said that hyper customized video is an area for innovation. Here is an example of some emerging technology. http://cubo.cc/ The realistic animation of a woman responds to the movement of your mouse. Combine that with face tracking of a web camera and voice chat and you could literally put on a new face to talk to different people. Text to speech software like ReadPlease uses a phoneme based system to let you choose the voice. A&TT Natural Voices is virtually indistinguishable from a person talking. Voice recognition and automated language translation could allow you to appear to be anyone you want to be. And the viewer might be able to select how you sound and appear to them.

Predicting the next Disruptive Innovation

November 6, 2009 · Posted in innovation, prediction, strategy · 2 Comments 

In The Perils Of Extrapolation: Who Knows What The Next Disruptive Innovation Will Be Mike Masnick points out how important it is for an entrepreneur to be able to respond to changes. If you can accurately predict the next big innovation its easier for you to respond to change or even be first to market.

Traditionally forecasting doesn’t work well for innovation. Trend analysis isn’t very accurate for predicting the future because it’s looking at the past rather than what makes the future happen. That is why most people thing, “It’s always difficult to predict which innovation is actually going to hit”.

Predictive Innovation changes that and puts you in control, increasing profits, decreasing risks, and neutralizing competition.

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