Google's robot car

I know this is old news and I know that it's geeky, but these videos of Google's robot car are awesome!

How the mainstream auto industry can claim that we're 25 years from a commercial self-driving car is beyond me. The benefits in terms of road safety and fuel efficiency are too great to pass up for uninformed or pre-meditated concerns about handing over control of a fast moving lump of metal to a computer. After all, most new cars are "drive-by-wire" - a computer is already between you and the major controls, you're just not aware of it!

Doubtless the cost of laser radar and the computer systems will be substantial, but I wonder whether they're much worse than the battery packs and charging gear of an electric car. Given the hideous compromises in environmental impact and convenience of the latter, perhaps governments should be promoting self-driving rather than "zero-emissions" as a way of reducing carbon emissions? Probably too far fetched - sadly politicians don't dream...

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Impacts of a handset leasing model on mobile telcos

Following yesterday's post, here's some related thinking on the impacts on operators of handset leasing. Handset sales represent around 25% of operator revenues in a typical European market, but generate only around 5% of margin. It may therefore be the case that the scenario described would lead operators to a more profitable structural model than exists today. Oil companies are consistently and acceptably profitable, despite being (literally in some cases) the ‘dumb pipe’ that operators are so desperate to avoid becoming. One of the reasons for the oil majors sustained profitability is clear focus on their role in the value chain – to supply the fuel that enables transportation, relying primarily on location, then brand and finally product innovation to compete. BP or Shell do not need to subsidise the purchase of a car in order to drive consumption of fuel because consumers are ‘hooked’ on it (it gets them from place to place) and there are many credible car manufacturers an...

Differences between Industrial and Digital businesses

Since I'm stuck on a Eurostar crawling through western France I thought I'd use the downtime to share this table I've made on the differences between Industrial and Digital companies across the main business functions. A strange insight into how my mind works... but hopeful a useful summary!

Value drivers for telecoms retail

I've been doing a really large number of driver trees recently - we've taken to using them on every project to get really into the guts of value creation for businesses and thus decide where to focus initiative development (How To Win, if you're keeping score). Anyhow, I had to pause for thought recently to work out how to represent the subscription aspect of telecoms retail for a client. Since it took me a minute, I thought I'd share... its lack of elegance suggests that its not quite right, although it was enough to demonstrate that there was a certain lack of coverage in the initiatives that my client was pursuing and thus spark a debate. Enjoy.

Versatile Amphibian

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