New Trade Routes

Drawing digital pathways on the new trade maps.

Seattle, WA USA

Trade drives the way people interact.  People, products, money, and ideas follow the trade routes and impact everything in their path.  Keeping pace with the way trade routes are changing is essential to success or even survival.  New Trade Routes is working to better understand the changes so we can help our clients, investees, and grantees improve their chances of success.

 

Our Areas of Focus

February 20, 2013  /  Jay Leon

At New Trade Routes we are thinking about how the paths between the makers of things and the buyers of things are changing.  We believe that this focus will give us insights into the opportunities and risks resulting from the changes.  Today we are launching the following three areas that we will be paying particular attention to:

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  1. Integrated Systems:  We expect that the pace of innovation with respect to the use of data to more effectively operate business systems, currently referred to in the media as Big Data, will bring about a rapid rate of change.  This phenomenon is currently visible in industries including finance, advertising, healthcare, and government. We see new manifestations arise almost daily and the complexity and impact of these systems will be even more dramatic when fully featured application programming interfaces (APIs) enable them to interact with each other.
  2. Virtual Currencies:  Non traditional means of storing value and transferring funds have  been around for a long time, but have accelerated significantly in the past five years.  One way to see this acceleration is to watch the Bitcoin exchange rate.  Bitcoin is probably the most visible example, but there are dozens of others including everything from Linden Dollars to Amazon Coins to loyalty points, rebates, and so on.  
  3. Vendor Relationship Management:  New tools are being introduced every day that give individuals more power in the maker / buyer relationship.  The Berkman Center's Project VRM is the best place to watch the rapid introduction and evolution of these tools.  It is possible that individual buyers of things will be able to efficiently issue an RFP and get multiple vendors competing for the opportunity to provide services --- instead of dictating terms.  

Starting next month we will be launching new sections on our website that will track these trends and present you with tools and commentary to keep pace with developments.  If all goes well we may even publish some reports giving you a comprehensive updates.

You can check back here for updates, or sign up for our email list to make sure you don't miss anything.

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