Digigram Newsletter of March 2021
This is my wishlist for post-COVID tech trends. Gert Christen’s Digigram Newsletter of March 2021
All posts tagged: XaaS
XaaS – Everything as a Service – The backend is a BIG business opportunity
Using an app to order your dinner delivered from your favorite restaurant? You just Xaas’d your food, a business that is growing at 25% per year, according to McKinsey. They predict that online deliveries could eventually make up as much as 65% of all food deliveries. Can your favorite restaurant even cook this volume? And does it make sense to cook a meal at a restaurant when the meal ist to be delivered? Apart from the kitchen, the infrastructure to prepare food for delivery is different than the one in a dine-in restaurant. What if – the kitchen could become a service? Some prominent entrepreneurs work on precisely this: Travis Kalanick, Uber’s former CEO, is buying up industrial kitchens and renting them out (per hour? per stove? per meal cooked? I don’t know). His customers are those who need to use a kitchen for a couple of hours to deliver ordered meals: Only pay for what you need; the kitchen as a service, the XaaS of food. You don’t think this will be big? Apparently, …
Digigram Newsletter of December 2019!
The bi-monthly newsletter of December 2019. Covering TikTok, the next hot trend, Xaas – Everything as a Service – and the backend business opportunity. Top of the month: 26 Swiss managers & HWZ master students in Silicon Valley, and one of my teams reached 4th place in the startup competition at UC Berkeley.
Meet me here: At UC Berkeley’s “Deplastifying the Planet” course starting in Jan 2020
On my table: Thanks are on my table. Wish all happy holidays and happiness & success for 2020
Hot Trend: XaaS – Everything as a Service is how we work and live today
In my last Digigram, I wrote about XaaS and wondered what would be next for this trend. Since then, I have concluded that XaaS includes much more than only technology platforms that virtualize assets in value chains: XaaS covers how we work and conduct business today, and how we consume modern products and services. New work = Gig economy = Work as a Service We all agree that companies such as Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Upwork, and WeWork disrupted the value chains and asset distribution in many industries. Like it or loathe it – the fact is that these models fit the way many people live their lives today. Both as consumers of services (e.g., getting even small items delivered by Amazon or bike couriers instead of going to a store) or as a provider of services (e.g., teaching via the internet or contracting via Upwork). The megatrends of changes in life- and work styles are what enabled the XaaS phenomenon in the first place. Especially Gen Ys love both sides of XaaS! It provides them …
Digigram Newsletter of September 2019!
Gert Christen’s DIGIGRAM newsletter of September 2019. Topics are: XaaS – Everything as a service focusing on the Gig economy and ways of Crowdsourcing.
New trend: XaaS stands for everything as a service!
A very common form of disruption is to “virtualize” traditional business models by moving them to the internet. Email sent letters with an electronic service, displacing the physical letter monopoly by the postal services, iTunes sold single pieces of music in a download service, displacing the CD records industry, Airbnb did the same to the hotel industry, Uber to the taxi industry, Netflix et al to cable TV, Amazon AWS to the computer server industry. Companies that escaped disruption by virtualized services realized that they needed to jump on the “as-a-service”-bandwagon before being displaced by yet another outside company: Microsoft’s Office 365 and Adobe’s Creative Cloud are such examples. Both were once sold as CDs in a box and now they are sold as subscription services and with features that can be activated online only. What is next for this trend? What comes after “software as a service”, “entertainment as a service”, “hospitality as a service”, “mobility as a service”? I believe that technologies today enable everything to be offered in a service model: The “virtualizing” of assets and packaging them as a …
Digigram Newsletter of July 2019!
Thank you Thank you to the more than 4000 of you who saw my first Digigram. I am surprised, delighted and very humbled. And I appreciate all of you who gave me your comments and feedback, I will try to incorporate them. Please enjoy a wonderful summer, happy reading and ‘till soon, Gert Explore Digigram – July 2019 Hot Technology: Blockchain, look beyond the noise and it’s very real! New trend: XaaS stands for everything as a service! Top of the Month Congratulations to Scoot, a pioneer in the electric moped rental space, for the acquisition by Bird, the electric scooter rental heavyweight. Meet me here: Meet me in Berkeley from next month. I am excited to have been appointed an Entrepreneurship Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. I wanted to continue to teach part-time ever since moving back to California and I couldn’t be happier to do it in Berkeley. Check out my first course here! What’s on my table? Summer reading: “Make Elephants Fly. The process of radical innovation” by Steven S. …
Automation of services
Services involve the delivery of an intangible product, usually immediately. Services can’t be trialed, can’t be stored, and rely on a leap of faith by both the buyer and the seller. The buyer only knows afterward if the quality was acceptable and if the user experience felt good. The provider only knows during delivery if they’ll stay within the estimated time and cost. Such latent dissatisfaction and distrust are problems that firms try to overcome with many measures; from freemium offers and money-back guarantees to end-user license agreements (EULAs) and contracts the size of phone books (remember those?!). I predicted the trend of “XaaS – Everything as a Service” in a previous DIGIGRAM. Now, I see the next wave arrive — the automation of services. Technology can now automate routine services and mediate between sellers and buyers at the same level as well-trained service associates—but faster, more scalable, and better able to continuously learn. Unlike many humans, software is very patient – it can run for hours and hours with unchanged high precision, and without …