This week I had an opportunity to show up at Chris Hull’s presentation on “Where in the World is Geolocation Going?” at Web2.0 expo in San Francisco. The speaker was trying to find an answer to the question “Why do geeks and hipsters all have startups that do the same thing?.” What he talked about started to make me wonder why are the smartest people in capitalist society of America are rushing into a small and crowded market.,
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To prove his point he used Maslow’s theory. Psychological theory of human motivation proposed by Abraham Maslow portrays the human needs in the shape of pyramid with the largest and most fundamental levels of needs at the bottom,
Office 2010 Home And Student, and the need for self-actualization at the top. If the marketers have historically looked towards consumers' needs to define their actions in the market,
Office Pro Plus 2007, why are the developers and investors ignoring the fact? According to the diagram below, about 17,000 dollars annual per capita is spent in Physiological Needs v/s about 4000 dollars in Self actualization. But every one is trying to get a piece of a small pie and hence fewer innovations are happening at the bottom section of this pyramid. When you think beyond just the social photo sharing application,
Office Standard, there clearly is the bigger need for applying these trends for the mainstream users and there are many examples. For example The Egyptian revolution didn’t begin with guns and terror,
Microsoft Office 2007 Standard, but with tweets and texts.
One thing I can take away from this discussion is that the key to technology advancement is practicality. As smartphones become more common, practical applications and tools catering to the mainstream users will become more interesting and hence will generate more economic value.
Cheers!!!
Rasesh Shah (Technology Evangelist)