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The Nature of the Realtime Network Economy is Expanding and Collapsing Opportunities

01 Mar 2010

In the blink of an eye, hundreds of new micro corporations have captured public attention. A startling shift is apparent in the decentralization of information authority. Broad distribution of information flow and media usage have revealed a bounty of opportunity to small analysis teams (you and me). In the past, large business structures (Reuters) and institutions dominated the realm of information collection and business analysis. But unless all raw information flows through a filtering choke point, the challenge of identifying every dominant opportunity is beyond centralized organizations. Eureka!

A hefty portion of the disruption of information authority is due to the change in media. We don't all read the same newspaper, or watch or listen to the same news broadcast. In fact, many of us have chosen not to passively listen, but to create and add to the flow of information by sharing our observations and perspectives. The same activity shift holds true for tools. We can all swap and share our own open source or app store tools instead of relying on BigCo to make them for us*. Instead of short lists of large known corporations, analysts have been forced to look for trends in distributed community patterns. Seemingly overnight, new norms of infomation consumption and distribution are taking hold. The changes are chaotic, beautiful, but dangerous if you expect to coast along.

Resource Juggernauts Want In

Managers of vast capital wealth are trying hard to find a way to maintain and grow their holdings by pushing into the venture capital market. But the venture asset class can't meet the level of growth and payout desired by investors. It's a case of too many "hungry mouths" to feed. Venture capital works best for exponentially growing and disruptive startups, and only a limited selection of proto-companies meet this criteria a year. Many smaller business opportunities aren't of sufficient size to justify limited investor time, and can't execute expenditure of capital for optimal growth even if they had it. Add to that the falling cost to lock in to viable models (fast iterations around user/market models). It's cheaper to fail and to find breakout success, so many founders are setting terms in their favor, or getting by with seed/family funding and savings/day job.

*note to self: add the real time tweet ticker mods, and real time image table jquery scripts to git hub.