Influencers

The centre of the tech startup universe is moving from the USA to Asia

A string of data and opinions have been released in recent days that support the view that the global tech startup ecosystem centre is shifting towards Asia and Australasia – where population growth and performance are increasingly leading the world.

These new data points reinforce our long held view that global tech startups will increasingly be created and executed from Asia and Australasia (indeed anywhere with electricity, internet and a desire for education and entrepreneurship) because of the largest population pool, growth rates, capital and increasingly education and thriving local tech startup ecosystems based on reaching global markets.

Your portfolio can get exposure to these opportunities via Cooper & Co.

The future of tech is outside Silicon Valley

Peter Thiel – known for his investments in Paypal, Facebook, AirBnB and Palantir – spoke in Saudi Arabia about his strong views on the topic of ‘the future of tech’ this week.

He believes tech will increasingly be created outside the US and California has lost their monopoly.

This reinforces the views we have long held here at Cooper & Co that while California led the way for decades and wrote the tech startup playbook initially, in the future global tech startup formation will increasingly align with population distribution that has education, capital and a thriving local tech startup ecosystem.

Asia is the world’s largest population region and has many of the fastest growing economies in the world.

The Way Forward for Innovation in Australia

Old innovation ecosystem models are broken, it is time to realise the open models based around startups (particularly scalable global product based tech startups) are the key to our future.the-way-forward-for-innovation-in-australia

The above diagram by StartupCommons summarises the change in focus at a macro level, we also need to look at the basics of our cultural approach to select digital natives from diverse global backgrounds to represent our interests. Run your eye over most of our nation’s government and industry bodies and the focus and representation is a woeful, old, monoculture with computing science degrees a rarity and real recent internet entrepreneurship dangerously absent, they are similarly rarely constituted of independent non-aligned experts with fresh experience.

If these people can’t serve real customers ever let alone recently (in the last decade) how can they serve our society?

This path forward is so obvious other nations have ‘productised’ the right approach in order to give (and sell) to the world.

Read the full (non country specific) report from StartupCommons here.

Facial recognition goes mainstream

Home and office facial recognition is now a plug and play exercise set to go mainstream (thanks to crowd sourcing) in homes, small businesses and maybe even departmentally in corporates and government from as little as $200.

Combine this with integration services that are now also rapidly becoming cheap and simple and cost effective tailored service and security systems are within reach for each family and business.

NSW Govt International Video Prize at SydStart 2014

NSW Govt International Video Prize at SydStart 2014.

via NSW Govt International Video Prize at SydStart 2014.

Microsoft Has Just Launched Its First Android Smartphone, The Nokia X2

This new MS CEO is unlike any other, after Office on iPad and Salesforce.com now there is this droid phone, talk about changing strategy …

Internet Trends Analysis

Here at Cooper & Co we have a long standing appreciation of the work of Mary Meeker who is now @KPCB and continues to produce her excellent Internet Trends report on a semi regular basis.

Here are our top points extracted from the rather wonderful 164 pages of charts Mary and her team provided.

Many of these points are stating the bleeding obvious but now they are fact not opinions. Most are underlined with not just 50%+ pa movements but often by 2x and 4x trends.

  1. Real-time and personal is the new norm.
    Daily/Weekly consumption of information e.g. email, facebook is moving to mobile and realtime as the new norm for most people led by you guessed it – the young and trendy and connected millennials.
  2. Intimate and easy is the new norm.
    The social graph (and associated broadcast of information) as represented by facebook is being replaced by the contacts list on mobile with more frequent communication to a smaller more intimate audience as represented by whatsapp, snapchat and the like. Larger sophsticated apps and sites and being smashed by simpler single function apps that (often in the background) get used more often.
  3. Mobile has won. Globally. Led by US firms for now, but soon CN.
    The move from web to mobile is happening much faster than expected with more than a third of traffic now mobile and growing at 25% pa and accelerating. This is accompanied by the real-time trend and powered by an explosion of sensors (from 1-3 in early smartphones to 5-10 now) which is driving a new age of transparency, privacy challenges and also safety and market insights. All major companies are leading with mobile, simple functionality, multi-platform apps. US leads operating systems but challengers are expected especially from China which dominates with 80% mobile and 4 of the top ten firms garnered in just a few short years. Media channels are increasingly consumer more as apps than linear TV with multi-screen consumption now the norm. Cameras are dead, phones won years ago, the new messaging apps are underlining that with three orders of magnitude.
  4. Integrated commerce wins.
    Destination shopping is fading fast, integrated content plus community plus commerce is winning. Audiences (consumers on linear timelines) are being killed by fanbases (who share, comment, curate and create) all the time.
  5. Cloud wins.
    Cost reductions year on year of 30-40% (repeatedly for decades now) mean all three major inputs to innovative technology enabled businesses are being smashed: processing power (CPU), persistence (storage) and passing stuff around (bandwidth) means big data, disruptive mobile startups and cloud computing have never been more competitive and hence easier and cheaper. Amazon web services is winning with innovation, volume, market share, investment, pricing and product range – for example just their s3 persistence service has 3 trillion objects (files, movies, photos etc) in that product alone now.

Thats about it, the report is information dense a wonderful read if you get time. We loved it as usual. But most of the themes fit in above.

Just one last note on China, in the 1820s it was a third of the world’s economy now it has overtaken India and Latin America combined again and is about to overtake US and Europe but more importantly will exceed all four combined in less than 20 years on current trajectories.

http:/kpcb.com/InternetTrends is the latest report, happy reading. Or call us and we can help you adjust your business to incorporate these and other meaningful insights.

What We Do

For some time now the question ‘What do you do?’ has been a little bit of a long answer here at Cooper & Co.

We have a diverse range of interests but there are key underpinning motives, values and desires about improving our world with a mix of commercial and non-commercial sustainable activities.

These are captured in our revised one pager ‘ Cooper & Co: What We Do’ which holds at the core our values of developing best practice entrepreneurship, disruptive and sustaining innovation and business technology strategy.

The activities are grouped as follows, all around the core activities of Business Technology Strategy which we define as tech and tech enabled business large and small.

Cooper & Co – Investing, delivering and managing Business Technology Strategy

Enterprise & Mid Market Segment

Commercial

  • Large Transaction Due Diligence Consulting (pre and post transaction, buy and sell side representation e.g. acting CIO/COO)
  • Expert Opinion and Mergers & Acquisition consulting – advisory support with a focus on technology, operations, strategic alignment and execution
  • Project Consulting (e.g. acting CIO/COO and similar) strong background in marketplaces, real-time, finance and trading and high volume retail

Non-Commercial (Pro Bono / Volunteer)

  • Social channels sharing best practice
  • Special Interest Groups (advocacy)
  • Best practice and industry commentary blogs

Tech Startups

Commercial

  • Angel equity – cash investment
  • Advisory Consulting – commission based referral to experts facilitating trade sales
  • Products (creation, development, experimentation, joint ventures)

Non-Commercial (Pro Bono / Volunteer)

  • Tech Startup Ecosystem Advocacy
  • Mentoring / Assistance (e.g. Pitch coaching for SydStart)
  • Community Events (e.g. SydStart now StartCon) and Industry Associations / Policy