Mapping Channels into China

Met with Len Rust today. He just returned for hosting a trade mission to China. All he could say was that everyone is going there looking for business opportunities. Agencies are important in China, so if you can leverage off someone else's trusted agent then the process could be simplified significantly.

On the same topic I was in a 4 way Skype call with the Bazilian trade centre, along with some partners in Italy and China. They also have just been in China. Their challenge is to facilitate many agricultural co-operatives into a focused apporach to exporting to countries like China.

There is definitely an opportunity for Industry Mapping here. All we need is the data!Sounds like a CRM system with a visual network front end to me.

We are working on it! Have a look at this:

http://www.optimice.com.au/industrymapping.php

Industry Map of the Tourist Industry

My wife and I love travelling, so we spend a lot of time surfing the Internet for deals etc.. We are often torn between using the faithful local travel agent to do this work or hitting the net ourselves looking for a better deal. What becomes obvious very quickly is how interconnected the industry is, but also how hard it is to see all of these connections. So I was intrigued recently when offered the opportunity to suggest a way of mapping the Italian Tourist Industry. Italy is one of our favourite destinations, so I could imagine that if it works out well the rewards could be significant. But the big question is, who will benefit from the increased visibility that we may be able to bring to this industry? The experience with trying to gain more business transparency in the larger capital markets has been resisted by the advisory sector who make their living out of selectively providing privately gained information. A former CEO of mine use to say "there is margin in the mystery" and therefore this increased transparency may in fact be resisted by some companies profiting from the complexity of the tourism network.

I think we'll try and do it anyway!

A new way of visualising competitiveness

How would you hope to show vendor competitiveness, say in the IT outsourcing market? Perhaps you would have a bar chart showing relative revenues and market shares. This is useful, but is that enough to act on? Continuing my extracts from our Visual markets publication, here is a view of market competitiveness you will never have seen before.



Just looking at vendor contracts and joint ventures, this map plots the % of a vendor's connections that are unique to them against their total number of connections. Clearly the ideal competitiveness is indicated by multiple monopoly situations, so vendors are measured on this map against this ideal. The nodes are sized by revenues for added information.

What do you think? Any new insights? ... my recommendations? avoid the bottom left corner, not many clients or partners, none of whom are unique to you.

Oracle / Sun Merger completed - the impact?

We've finally seen the completion of the mega merger of Oracle and Sun. The question on most commentator's lips is "what will the impact on the market be?" How timely! Our Visual Markets report is literally in print now! In it we have an analysis of the merger from a visual markets percpective. Here is a sneak preview:



Keep watching http://www.visualmarkets.net/ for the full report availability.

Why my injet is better than a multi-zillion dollar book printer

Unfortunately our Visual Markets report is still not ready for purchase. Myself and our copy editor have learnt the hard way about images for book printing (I think he already knew .. it was mostly my problem). How is it that I can print out a report with images that look perfectly fine on my inkjet, but when it gets printed on the multi-zillion dollar book printer, they look crap! Now my graphic designer daughter just laughs and tells me I have no idea. And she's right. I absolutely have no idea why this is so .. but I have now changed all the 40+ images to higher resolutions to suite the multi-zillion dollar book printer.....maybe the printer manufacturers and the book printing folks have conned us all :)