New times, new crimes

Certain criminal practices are also subject to technology disruptions.

In a 2001 story, the New York Times reported that there were 23,068 reported pickpocketing incidents in the city in 1990, amounting to nearly $10 million in losses. Five years later, the number of reported incidents had fallen by half, and by the turn of the millennium, there were less than 5,000. Today, the NYPD doesn't even maintain individual numbers on pickpocketing. "It's hardly a problem anymore," says a department spokesperson.

Check forgers and horse thieves are gone too.

tags: technology, evolution, d, disruption, 4q diagram

$400K per green job

Last week, Business Week published an article by former CEO of Intel, Andy Grove, where he, among other things, pointed out that now it takes tons and tons of money to create jobs in America. The chart below shows that in 2010 dollars high-tech job creation costs went from about $2K in the 1950s to $100K in the 2000s.

Andy Grove thought it was a gruesome trend that spelled doom for American workers. He said that unless we learned how to create jobs more efficiently, the gap between the haves and have-nots is going to grow. Pretty bad, isn't it.

But just three days later, real life events exceeded his gloomy forecast:

"President Barack Obama, under pressure to spur job growth, said on Saturday two solar energy companies will get nearly $2 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to create as many as 5,000 green jobs."

It's $400K per job! Four times greater than the current already absurdly high level. This looks like the disruption pattern described in The Innovator's Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen. That is, we keep "producing" more and more expensive jobs (products/services), while our growth model is being disrupted by China and other formerly 3rd world countries.

tags: innovation, problem, trend, energy, infrastructure, disruption, economy, growth

A further confirmation of the hypothesis that mobiles are going to displace PCs as the next innovation platform for personal computing:

For the first time criminal hackers may have succeeded in creating a network of "zombie" cellphones, infected without the owners' knowledge with software that can be used to send spam or carry out cyber attacks.

via NewScientist.

Porn leads the Great Mobile Disruption:

“A mobile is far handier than a computer for Internet access -- I seldom use a PC outside the office,” said Tokyo travel agent Takeshi, 32, who declined to give his surname.

Takeshi and other pornography fans are feeding a surge in demand for movie downloads in Japan, home to the world’s first third-generation wireless network. While profiting from the traffic, Tokyo-based mobile carriers DoCoMo and KDDI Corp. say they’ve been forced to impose limits on the heaviest users as the $74 billion network feels the strain.

Zipping to money

June 10 (Bloomberg) -- Zipcar Inc., the world’s largest car-sharing company, is gearing up to publicly sell shares in 2010 as it fends off rivals such as Hertz Global Holdings Inc.

Below is a 10X diagram that describes the disruptive nature of ZipCar. Note that their business model, i.e. control sub-system) targets delivery of a $10 transportation service on a community scale (delivery resolution) with a 1hr usage interval. Traditional car rental agencies are less nimble. You can't move them with a tenner, and you would have a hard time getting a good service outside of a major airport or attraction (town vs community delivery scale).  

On the left is a screenshot of ZipCar's price list. Note that they don't compete with Car Rental majors in the daily rental category. Not yet.

update: 1. Hertz' response
2. NYC cab rates.

Encarta is dead...

h/t Arstechnica:

"On October 31, 2009, MSN Encarta Web sites worldwide will be discontinued, with the exception of Encarta Japan, which will be discontinued on December 31, 2009. Additionally, Microsoft will cease to sell Microsoft Student and Encarta Premium software products worldwide by June 2009."

This is one of the few examples of a genuine business disruption, as defined by Clayton Christensen in The Innovator's Dilemma. Wikipedia, with 3 regular employees (including the secretary), killed the whole encyclopedia industry. Simply amazing.

Steve Balmer at CTIA show ( on mobile phone):

The goal of the industry--and of Microsoft--should be to create devices that work for both home and work and are capable of handling running business applications, unified messaging and gaming.

"In a sense we have to think about the phone as almost a universal remote control for your life," Ballmer said.

Ballmer even conceded that the phone is taking on a more central role than the computer for many people.

"The phone has a unique role," he said. "While the PC is the most powerful device, the phone is most popular device." In a world of services (think Windows Live) that run over a variety of devices, it is the phone that any individual is most likely to have at any given time, he said.

In some cases, the phone will be the computer.

"In many countries the phone will be the PC for people that have very little money," he said, pointing to a scenario in which the phone plugs into a docking station and connects up to a keyboard and television to act as a PC-like device, something Microsoft has been developing in its labs and hopes to start testing over the next 12 months.

As I noticed earlier, the phone becomes a disruptor for the PC ( displacement would be a more precise term). There are several factors that help it: the moore's law, maturing communications infrastructure, and, of course, opening up of APIs ( see Apple's announcement earlier this month).
Ad social networking, and you get an incredible potential for growth.