Innovation can be visible in the mission statement.

Recently, I checked a few mission statements:

Google: "To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. "

Amazon: "Our vision is to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online."


Both have some interesting similarities:
1. To be the global leader 
2. To specify its value to its customers
3. They don't talk about a specific product as they have the ambition not to stick to their core business, but rather to continuously grow themselves in new domains.
4. They don't talk about a channel, as they don't want to be constrained by specific channels.

Now compare that to the mission statement of Barnes & Noble:

Our mission is to operate the best specialty retail business in America, regardless of the product we sell. Because the product we sell is books, our aspirations must be consistent with the promise and the ideals of the volumes which line our shelves. ....

Quite a difference, no?

Amazon coins

Amazon will introduce their own "currency": the Amazon Coin.
See link here for more details on the announcement: Amazon Coins

It again illustrates how Amazon continuously keeps rethinking and expanding their business model.  So, this is supposed to be for the app developers....right?  Or is this just the beginning of something much bigger?

My favorite quotes from this interview with Larry Page

My favorite quotes from a must-read interview with Larry Page published today:

Interview Larry Page

"But incremental improvement is guaranteed to be obsolete over time. Especially in technology, where you know there’s going to be non-incremental change."



"A great deal of my effort is spent making sure that we have a great user experience across our core products. Whether you’re in Chrome or Search or Gmail, it’s just Google, with one consistent look and feel. It’s not a good user experience if there are 50 different ways to share something. That requires integration."

"But show me a company that failed because of litigation. I just don’t see it. Companies fail because they do the wrong things or they aren’t ambitious, not because of litigation or competition."

10 CSFs for Health Monitoring Platforms

A successful Health Monitoring ecosystem will need to be ambitious:
- Has to be so attractive that it can get virtually all consumers and patients on the platform.
- Must be able to generate information (without disclosing personal identifiable information) that is of huge value to those who are making the decisions and have the resources to optimize our health care systems of the future.
- It must run on a platform that is world-class in terms of availability, reliability, scaleability and cost efficiency.

Breaking this one step further down, the intermediary who wants to become the keystone of the ecosystem based on such a platform should consider the following Critical Success Factors (CSFs):

Components of a Health Monitoring Ecosystem

What are the key components needed to build a comprehensive ecosystem around health monitoring applications?  Key characteristic of an ecosystem solution - based on a platform - is that you create an environment in which different consumers and providers of health monitoring services are finding each other and can collaborate in a seamless way.
Information and services are aggregated to offer more complete solutions to a bigger community of consumers than any individual offer could achieve.  That is where the value of platform based ecosystem solutions becomes clear.

Value of payment data and payment transactions

Image credit

The payment transaction information  is going to become of high value to those companies who can convert that data into insight that can be monetized, while the cost per transaction that can be charged is under severe pressure.  Here is the link to the full article which I can highly recommend and I fully agree with the key message in this article.
The only part I wanted to comment on is related to this quote related to the charges these companies charge today:

"None of this is to say that the fees charged today are wholly unreasonable and unconscionable; ..."
My position is that a charge of around 2.5% is totally unreasonable and that lowering that could be a real saving to consumers and even to the public services like the healthcare system.  Let me explain by looking at some numbers and comparisons:

Patient data intermediaries

Patient data is a key data source that can give more insight by discovering correlations between various parameters.  Examples could be:
- Disease - Treatment - Outcome
- Patient profile - Disease - Treatment - Outcome
- Environment - Disease
- Lifestyle - Disease
- Disease - Lifestyle - Outcome
and many more...
Getting access to Patient data is the key target for many companies.
New intermediaries build platforms to collect Patient data and to make it available to 3rd parties.  Patient data is no longer that data that is used only by the physician.  It is becoming a key asset for multiple players in the health ecosystem.  This transformation is already happening...