Inventions: IdeaFestival: The 3 things businesses need to focus on to stay relevant

At the 2015 IdeaFestival, business leaders discussed how their companies stay relevant and profitable in the shifting global marketplace.

For businesses, staying relevant can mean life or death in the marketplace. But, with a rapidly changing marketplace, it's often difficult to predict what ideas will stick.

At the 2015 IdeaFestival in Louisville, Kentucky, a panel of experts explored how their organizations stay relevant with customers, employees, and their community.

To open the discussion, Inc. editor Ledbetter asked the three panelists (The Immunity Project CMO and co-founder Naveen Jain, On Second Thought founder Maci Peterson, and Carey Smith, the founder of Big Ass Fans) to share their key metric for measuring relevance:

Jain - "Did I talk to my customer today?"

Peterson - "How many times were we (the app) used today?"

Smith - "What are we going to do in terms of developing new products?"

After establishing baseline metrics, the conversation shifted to focus on the three key areas where businesses must maintain relevance in order to be successful: Customers, talent, and community.

Customers

As anyone in business will tell you, customers are the lifeblood of your company. So, remaining relevant to those customers is vital.

The Immunity Project is a nonprofit working on developing a nasal-inhalable, room temperature stable vaccine for HIV. The major challenge that Jain faces is the diversity of customers that his organization interacts with. Their customers include general supporters, people in the HIV/AIDS community, people in the scientific community, and people in the tech community. With that many different constituents, Jain said his main goal is communicating effectively and maintaining relationships with all of those groups.

Peterson's company, On Second Thought, built an app that allows users to delete SMS messages after they have sent them. And the mobile market she's in is highly competitive. Users of the app tend to set it as their default SMS app, Peterson said, to have the "texting insurance" it provides. To stay relevant, though, they continually listen to their customers about what they want from the product. To meet the demands through other channels, Peterson has extended the model to other chat apps and social media. The company is also working with mobile banking in places like Kenya to become more of a broad utility for mobile users.

Big Ass Fans, which was founded in 1999, produces just that — big ass fans and other industrial equipment. Smith said that his biggest challenge in staying relevant has been understanding the risks of developing products and moving forward.

Understanding the product development cycle requires a keen eye for changes in what the customers want. By selling directly to customers, Smith said they are able to more quickly see what customers want. The biggest changes that he's seen in customer need over the past 18 months has been the introduction of IoT smart home products, and they responded by creating an IoT consumer fan.

Talent

In addition to remaining relevant to their user base, businesses must also strive to maintain relevance to their employees. For many companies, especially in tech, providing an equity stake in the company has become a useful way to increase employee engagement.

Smith's company, which is still private, set aside 25% of the company as an equity pool that any employee in the company can buy into. Also, Big Ass Fans provides all employees with a bonus. The bonus was smaller during the recession of 2007-2008, Smith said, but he made the promise that he wouldn't lay anyone off. He said that has paid off in dividends as the company has experienced massive growth since 2008 and they receive almost 15,000 resumes a year from prospective employees.

When asked why more companies don't operate this way, Smith responded: "Because they're lazy, greedy, and maybe not so smart."

As a smaller startup, On Second Thought is just now hiring the company's first employee. Peterson said they used the contract-to-hire method, where the employee begins as a contractor for three months and is brought on full time if it is a good fit. It has allowed them to mitigate the risk of hiring someone full time, while being able to offer a stake in the company as well.

While Peterson and Smith may be facing similar issues when it comes to talent, Jain's relevance challenge for new talent is completely different. As a non-profit, he typically can't offer an inflated salary so, to attract talent, he has to appeal solely to the mission of the project. He, too, receives many resumes a day from people he said "just want to help."

Community

Outside of your customers and your talent, staying relevant to your community is also an important aspect of success. How you define the community around your product or service will inform how you can remain relevant.

For Smith, it's simple. He takes care of the community by paying competitive salaries and offering equity ownership. Additionally, he said, most of their suppliers are within 40 miles of the Big Ass Fans headquarters so he's supporting the geographic community as well.

Peterson just hired a community manager, an essential employee in helping bring together the plethora of communities that the company is a part of. Peterson said they have five distinct communities — users, team, investors, minority community, and women in tech. For starters, On Second Though focused on developing a brand voice and persona and made sure it was consistent across channels.They engage their communities on social media, and Peterson herself does some work with women in tech initiatives

In the medical space, The Immunity Project remains relevant by remaining as open and transparent as humanly possible for each constituent at the proper time, Jain said. For example, Y Combinator founder Paul Graham was among the early group of people who donated blood for the organization's experiments and Jain feels that he owes that early group clear communication when new information is available.

Musk and SolarCity unveil ‘world’s most efficient’ solar panel

The sun is a virtually endless supply of energy that goes mostly untapped. The solar panels you see covering the roofs of an increasing number of homes and businesses capture some of that energy, at least during the daytime and when there isn’t extensive cloud cover, but, by most standards, they are incredibly inefficient.

The sun is a virtually endless supply of energy that goes mostly untapped. The solar panels you see covering the roofs of an increasing number of homes and businesses capture some of that energy, at least during the daytime and when there isn’t extensive cloud cover, but, by most standards, they are incredibly inefficient.

SEE ALSO: How solar panels could capture a lot more sunlight on slanted roofs

Experts say the average solar cell panel can convert 14-to-20% of the energy it collects into usable electricity. By photosynthesis standards — a plant is 5% efficient — that's not bad, but humans believe solar panels should do better.

On Friday in New York City's Times Square, SolarCity, the nation’s largest installer of residential solar panels, and company chairman Elon Musk introduced what they claim is the world’s most efficient rooftop solar panel, achieving a peak efficiency of 22.04%.

SolarCity said the rating was verified by the Renewable Energy Test Center, a third-party certification testing provider for photovoltaic and renewable energy based in Fremont, California.

The panels are the same size as traditional panels, but, according to SolarCity, produce 30-to-40% more power. They also claim that the panels perform better than competing products in high temperatures.

Peter Rive, SolarCity's co-founder and CTO, told Mashable in an interview that the new panels are sufficiently cheap to produce that they will allow the company to continue to make money off of them even if government policies to provide tax breaks for panel installation expire.

“That’s been the singular focus of the company… to continue to get the costs down,” Rive said.

“I’m really excited about this… it’s the best solar panel on the planet and it empowers us from 2017 and beyond to control our own destiny,” he said.

SolarCity’s efficiency leap, however, may not be that big when compared to the current state of the art.

Solar energy expert John Farrell, who serves as Director of the Democratic Energy Program for The Institute for Local Self-Reliance told Mashable that typical solar panel efficiency is, at 18%-to-22%, actually in the same range as SolarCity’s new panel.

“In the lab they get to 40%,” said Farrell, but that’s with special materials that would likely jack up the cost of solar panels by 50%. Out in the field, companies like SolarCity must balance efficiency with cost.

When I asked Farrell about the increased power output he said, “That sounds like a lot. Not sure what they would be comparing it to.” If SolarCity’s current panel tech had a peak efficiency of, say, 16%, a 37% jump to over 22% could account for the difference.

Farrell does agree that heat management is an issue worth tackling. With solar energy, the very thing that lets these panels produce energy is also the thing that overheats them.

“In Minnesota, we have less sun, but that means the panels can work better here and be more efficient for the sunlight we have because it’s colder. So I’m not surprised that’s one of the things they work on,” said Farrell.

Are SolarCity’s new panels a true solar energy breakthrough? As far as Farrell is concerned, dramatically better solar panels is not the story, “I think the big story is SolarCity Installed one-third of all panels on residential property in the U.S. in the last year, so whatever they’ve done will get to a lot of customers.”

Still, 22% efficiency is nothing to sneeze at, especially wen you consider that, unlike traditional energy sources, you do not pay for the fuel — the sun — you put into solar energy.

When the SolarCity 1 gigawatt factory in Buffalo reaches full capacity next year, SolarCity said it plans to produce as many 10,000 solar panels a day.

How Congress Helped Save Goldman Sachs From Itself

In October 2011, things were looking bleak at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s commodities business. Revenue was down, competition was up, employee attrition was at an all-time high and new regulations were on the horizon.

Beyond the usual rivalries with Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs executives saw an upstart doing deals they couldn’t do and throwing lots of cash at traders: Glencore Plc. The commodities company wasn’t tied down by rules that applied to banks and had become even more of a presence since a $10 billion initial public offering earlier that year. It boasted strong growth and higher stock multiples than Goldman Sachs was receiving for its commodities unit.

“Glencore competes with GS Commodities but has a broader business mix, including significant production, refining, storing and transport activities,” Goldman Sachs executives said in a presentation that month to the bank’s board later made public by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. “May be model for evolution of commodities trading.”

Four years later, that envious assessment is looking wrong, and Goldman Sachs executives are probably breathing a sigh of relief. Glencore shares plunged 29 percent Monday, extending their decline to 78 percent in the past five months. The Baar, Switzerland-based company is seeking to sell assets and cut debt to avert a credit-rating downgrade. It has sold new stock and scrapped its dividend as part of a $10 billion debt-reduction program amid a broad commodity rout spurred by China’s economic slowdown. Last week, Goldman Sachs analysts said the company’s efforts were inadequate, sending the stock lower.

Fed Scrutiny

Goldman Sachs and other banks have the U.S. Congress and the Federal Reserve to thank. While you won’t hear many bankers praising regulation that limits their activities, the Fed’s scrutiny of banks’ physical commodities units came at a fortuitous time for the largest Wall Street firms.

The Fed was already overseeing the commodities units of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as a result of their 2008 conversion to bank holding companies when Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, held hearings in 2013 on the risks those businesses posed to lenders and markets. He pushed regulators to review banks’ commodities activities and the exemptions that allowed firms to own such businesses.

Gregory Agran, co-head of the global commodities group at Goldman Sachs, during the Senate Subcommittee hearing.

Gregory Agran, co-head of the global commodities group at Goldman Sachs, during the Senate Subcommittee hearing. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg.

The Senate subcommittee held hearings last year and released findings from a two-year investigation that concluded Wall Street’s role in owning physical commodities provided unfair trading advantages and could threaten the financial system if a bank’s business suffered an industrial catastrophe. While the Fed still hasn’t introduced its promised new rules, banks didn’t wait to act.

Morgan Stanley in July 2014 sold its stake in oil-transportation company TransMontaigne Inc. and some physical inventory to NGL Energy Partners LP for about $750 million, in part because of the regulatory attention. It booked a $101 million gain on the sale. Since then, the publicly traded subsidiary of TransMontaigne has dropped by a third and oil has fallen by $60 a barrel.

JPMorgan Sale

JPMorgan sold part of its physical commodities business to Mercuria Energy Group Ltd. in October. Morgan Stanley tried to sell its oil merchanting business to OAO Rosneft last year. After that deal fell apart because of U.S. sanctions against the Russian company, the bank found another buyer in Castleton Commodities International LLC earlier this year.

“We don’t think we need to be in the physical oil assets or merchanting business to be effective,” Morgan Stanley Chief Financial Officer Jonathan Pruzan said at an investor conference in June. “Ten years or 15 years ago it was important, and we thought it was a competitive advantage, but we don’t think that’s the case today.”

Spokesmen for Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan declined to comment. Peter Grauer, the chairman of Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News, is a senior independent non-executive director at Glencore.

When Glencore went public in 2011, the stakes of the company’s top six executives were valued at $23 billion, surpassing the wealth generated by Goldman’s own IPO 12 years earlier. Goldman Sachs executives told their board that year that the combination of commodity production and trading was proving attractive to investors and that Goldman’s business would be valued more highly if it looked more like Glencore.

Goldman’s commodities business at the time boasted more than 1,000 clients in dozens of countries and had earned more than $10 billion in pretax profit over the previous five years, more than Amazon.com Inc. and Starbucks Corp. combined. Still, trading across the industry was in a decline that has continued. Commodities-trading revenue at the 10 largest banks generated $12 billion in the two and a half years ended in June, less than it produced in 2009 alone, according to data from industry research firm Coalition Ltd.

‘Dangerous Business’

While Goldman Sachs hasn’t expanded as it may have wanted and sold two of the largest physical commodities operations it owned, it has cut back less than others. Deutsche Bank AG and Barclays Plc are among banks that have slashed their commodities units, and Goldman Sachs CFO Harvey Schwartz said earlier this year that the firm saw less competition in commodities trading from other banks.

In 2007, then-CFO David Viniar dismissed the threat of other banks bulking up in commodities.

“It’s a dangerous business to be in if you’re not expert,” Viniar said at the time. “It’s a dangerous business to be in even if you are expert.”

Trade NEWS

Because of the delay to re authorize EXIMBANK, "GE will be exporting more from UK. 

OUR POLITICIANS ARE EXPORTING JOBS! Contact your congress person and give your opinion regarding this matter. 

http://action.exportersforexim.org/15577/urge-congress-to-move-quickly-on-export-import-bank-reauthorizati/

The agreement announced last Thursday, September 24th, with the UK export credit agency will give GE access to export financing for up to $12 billion. The agreement will initially support confirmed and potential orders from Brazil, Ghana, India, Mozambique, and other international markets in the solar, power generation and oil and gas related export opportunities.

In exchange, GE will create up to 1,000 new energy sector jobs in the UK as it wins new international orders. This jobs should it be U.S.

The decision followed the shutdown of the US Export-Import Bank, which forced the US giant to seek financing in other countries. In addition to UKEF, GE is looking to move 500 more jobs to France and other European countries after reaching deals with French export credit agency and other unspecified government-sponsored export credit agencies.

The memorandum, signed at Downing Street, residence of the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, sets out a range of ways in which the signatories aim to cooperate. Under the MoU: 

• UKEF confirms appetite and capacity to consider providing financing support for more than GBP 7.7 billion (USD 11.7 billion) worth of projects under consideration, plus a new “top-up” support facility of up to GBP 500 million (USD 760 million), subject to individual project approval and due diligent; 

• UKEF confirms that GE has been approved to be a member of the UKEF Direct Lending Facility Partnership Panel, whose members arrange UK government loans to overseas buyers of UK exports. 

• GE pledges ongoing support for its UK supply chain; 

• GE undertakes to promote UKEF’s exporter support schemes to its UK supply base. 

UK’s Prime Minister, David Cameron, is confident that the agreement will make the UK the best place in Europe to start, finance or grow a business, and that it will provide more jobs and security for the people.

GLOBAL TRADE AND FINANCING AND GLOBAL TRADE INSURANCE, is an approved agent of Export Credit Agencies from other countries besides Eximbank of USA. If you need Credit Insurance of Trade Finance, please contact me. Finance available for small and large transactions. Terms can be short, medium and long term. Export and Import solutions in the world..

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Samsung Pay launched in US: Accepted at more locations than Apple Pay and Android Pay

Samsung Pay not only supports the NFC payment method found in iOS and Android devices, but also supports MST. This means you can use it just about anywhere you swipe a card in the US.

The promise of mobile payments has been held back by carriers, retail outlets, and technology. Thanks to Samsung's adoption of MST and NFC, you can now pay with your phone almost anywhere you can swipe or tap your credit card.

I've been paying for products using Samsung Pay on my Galaxy Note 5 for a month thanks to early access to the beta program. Yesterday, an update appeared on my Note 5 as Samsung rolled out full support for Samsung Pay.

Samsung Pay is now available for anyone in the US with a Samsung Galaxy Note 5, Galaxy S6 Edge+, Galaxy S6 Edge, or Galaxy S6. Your phone has to be running on Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, or US Cellular. Verizon still doesn't accept Samsung Pay.

While I can use my Bank of America credit card, USAA Federal Savings Bank's debit card is not yet supported. MasterCard and Visa are supported, along with Bank of America, Citi, and US Bank. Given that USAA was one of the first to offer mobile payment support, I imagine we will see this bank and many others added soon.

In addition to the convenience of paying for goods with your phone, Samsung also has a Samsung Pay promotion where you can choose to receive a free wallet flip cover or wireless charging pad (not the fast charge one) after you setup a qualifying card.

For Companies with people in them...

CLOUD COMPUTING...Key Trends

The trends over the last several years have been around the adoption of cloud, the boom in building new cloud services, such as high-performance storage, supercomputers on demand, and new ways of storing and processing data. But for the next few years, we’ll move in new directions, and you’ll likely hear the details at Re:Invent.

[ From Amazon to Azure, InfoWorld puts IaaS clouds to the test to find out which is best for you. | Stay up on the cloud with InfoWorld's Cloud Computing newsletter. ]

But why wait until then? Here's what I believe are the key trends for the next few years that AWS Re:Invent will provide more detail on.

The first new direction you can expect is the focus on management of cloud services. As enterprises adapt cloud services, they quickly find that the number and types of services grow out of their control.

You'll see a push to creating abstraction, brokering, and monitoring technology. Chances are that you’ll have two or three of these products in your cloud stack next year.

Second, there'll be more emphasis on the security thing. So far, cloud-based systems have been relatively safe. Ironically, this is partly due to healthy paranoia from IT organizations concerned about security in general and about the security of what they don't control in particular. Cloud providers always seemed to put extra focus on security.

However, there is still much to do. Chances are you’ll see more security offerings announced or released at Re:Invent. These will mostly focus on proactive monitoring to spot patterns of attacks, as well as on preemptive responses. There will also be more focus on identity-based security, which is becoming the standard in the cloud, as well as on advanced encryption.

Whether you go to AWS Re:Invent or not, look for such ideas and products there to keep on the right track.