The 21st Annual Genesys Partners Venture Dinner — Genesys XXI– Tuesday night at the Union League Club in New York included more than 100 invited venture capitalists, investors, journalists, entrepreneurs, and industry executives. As always, Jim Kollegger — CEO of Genesys Partners and one of the pioneers of the information industry — was an elegant master of ceremonies. Jim announced a new conference called Agility First! Forum which was held the following day. He introduced the various collaborators and sponsors, next day panelists at Agility First!, several startup CEO’s, and a few of us who speak at the dinner each year. Following is a synopsis of what I had to say.
Like a broken record, I offered my normal upbeat view of the future of the Internet but prefaced my remarks by asserting that we are still only 10-15% of the way there. In other words, of all the things that could be done on the Internet that would save us time and make our lives better, only 10-15% of them are there. It may sound low, but consider retail e-commerce. Although there has been continuous double-digit growth of retail e-commerce for twenty years, it still represents just 6.5% of total retail.
I observed the total United States retail e-commerce for 2014 came in at $305 billion. This represented 6.5% of total retail sales. One company — Amazon — amassed nearly $90 billion in revenue during the year. Why is retail e-commerce 6.5%, not 25% or more? Much is written about that at Attitude LLC and in my book, Net Attitude, but the short answer is that there are still a lot of lame web sites. “Click here for the location of our nearest dealer where you can visit.” or “Call to buy the product you just found.” or “Click here to download this form and fax it to us.” How about healthcare? How is it fairing in terms of exploiting the Internet? If only it could be 5% of the way there! Don’t you love the ubiquitous clipboards at doctor offices where we take a pen and provide a lot of information they already have? In the years ahead, I am hopeful healthcare delivery will operate more like Amazon. I attempted to unravel and solve the complexity of our healthcare system in my new book, just published last week. It is called Health Attitude.
I then offered my view of the status of the Internet and health care. This is one man’s view of the evolution of the Internet including the seven characteristics I discuss every year. The things going on under each characteristic continuously change and Jim asks me once a year to do a thumbnail sketch of my latest thinking. The seven characteristics I discussed are: Fast, Always On, Everywhere, Natural, Intelligent, Easy, and Trusted. I will share my comments on each in the next post.
