Brandon Donnelly
Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly.
Brandon Donnelly
Daily insights for city builders. Published since 2013 by Toronto-based real estate developer Brandon Donnelly.
Each year, tech analyst Benedict Evans publishes a "big presentation" on the macro trends in the tech industry. This year's presentation is now out (link here) and it's called "Three Steps to the Future." Not surprisingly, crypto, web3 and the metaverse feature prominently in his exploration of what tech might look like by 2030 (obligatory market cap chart shown above). But there's also a lot about ecommerce, logistics, TV/content, and a number of other topics and industries. The back half is filled with some great charts and I think that many of you will find it interesting.
This recent post by Benedict Evans talks about the firehose that is the internet. To illustrate this point, he gives the example of unread emails. If you were to look at your phone right now, how many unread emails would it show?
Benedict Evans asks some great questions in this recent post about ecommerce penetration. Instead of just looking at the product itself and/or the way in which we buy it (online versus offline, for example), he focuses on the logistics model that accompanies the transaction.
What can be parceled and shipped via Amazon? What can be delivered using a bicycle? What requires some sort of special delivery or collection method?
The point he is making is that different things need to happen for a new fridge to make it to your home, compared to say a Chipotle burrito. And these differences matter when it comes to how we should be thinking about ecommerce and the real estate in our cities.
Personally, I find it helpful to reframe the questions in this way.
Here's an excerpt from the post:
But if I buy online and then drive to the store to collect it, is that different to phoning and reserving it? We didn’t have a statistics category for ‘telephone ordering’. If I use an app to order pizza instead of phoning the restaurant, has that become ‘ecommerce’ or is it still pizza delivery? 30 years ago, if I drove to Walmart instead of walking to a neighbourhood store, or drove to Best Buy instead of going to a department store, we didn’t call that ‘car-based commerce’. So is this a tech question, or a retailing question, or an urbanism question?
For the full thing, click here.
Chart: Benedict Evans
Each year, tech analyst Benedict Evans publishes a "big presentation" on the macro trends in the tech industry. This year's presentation is now out (link here) and it's called "Three Steps to the Future." Not surprisingly, crypto, web3 and the metaverse feature prominently in his exploration of what tech might look like by 2030 (obligatory market cap chart shown above). But there's also a lot about ecommerce, logistics, TV/content, and a number of other topics and industries. The back half is filled with some great charts and I think that many of you will find it interesting.
This recent post by Benedict Evans talks about the firehose that is the internet. To illustrate this point, he gives the example of unread emails. If you were to look at your phone right now, how many unread emails would it show?
Benedict Evans asks some great questions in this recent post about ecommerce penetration. Instead of just looking at the product itself and/or the way in which we buy it (online versus offline, for example), he focuses on the logistics model that accompanies the transaction.
What can be parceled and shipped via Amazon? What can be delivered using a bicycle? What requires some sort of special delivery or collection method?
The point he is making is that different things need to happen for a new fridge to make it to your home, compared to say a Chipotle burrito. And these differences matter when it comes to how we should be thinking about ecommerce and the real estate in our cities.
Personally, I find it helpful to reframe the questions in this way.
Here's an excerpt from the post:
But if I buy online and then drive to the store to collect it, is that different to phoning and reserving it? We didn’t have a statistics category for ‘telephone ordering’. If I use an app to order pizza instead of phoning the restaurant, has that become ‘ecommerce’ or is it still pizza delivery? 30 years ago, if I drove to Walmart instead of walking to a neighbourhood store, or drove to Best Buy instead of going to a department store, we didn’t call that ‘car-based commerce’. So is this a tech question, or a retailing question, or an urbanism question?
For the full thing, click here.
Chart: Benedict Evans
Whatever the purpose, it's almost impossible to keep up. And since having unread asymmetric emails of little consequence doesn't bother me in the slightest, I let it go.
This is one way to deal with the firehose -- acceptance. And in Benedict's post he makes the argument that maybe the push that we are seeing toward the metaverse is exactly that -- full acceptance. "When software eats the world, it's not software anymore."
But the opposite way of dealing with information overload is extreme simplification. And there is something so beautiful about minimalism in a world of too much.
Today I learned about a bookstore in Tokyo called Morioka Shoten (shoten = bookstore). It is located in Ginza (pictured above) and the proposition is "a single room with a single book." The bookstore consists of, you know, a single room and at any given time there is only one book for sale.
Each book is available for six days, after which time a new book is made available. In addition to selling one book at a time, the single room shop is used for things like events and exhibitions.
It's a radical idea and perhaps it is best suited to Japan. But maybe we all need things that slow us down and focus our attention on only a few things or even a single thing. Maybe we need it to offset the information firehose.
Image: Morioka Shoten
Whatever the purpose, it's almost impossible to keep up. And since having unread asymmetric emails of little consequence doesn't bother me in the slightest, I let it go.
This is one way to deal with the firehose -- acceptance. And in Benedict's post he makes the argument that maybe the push that we are seeing toward the metaverse is exactly that -- full acceptance. "When software eats the world, it's not software anymore."
But the opposite way of dealing with information overload is extreme simplification. And there is something so beautiful about minimalism in a world of too much.
Today I learned about a bookstore in Tokyo called Morioka Shoten (shoten = bookstore). It is located in Ginza (pictured above) and the proposition is "a single room with a single book." The bookstore consists of, you know, a single room and at any given time there is only one book for sale.
Each book is available for six days, after which time a new book is made available. In addition to selling one book at a time, the single room shop is used for things like events and exhibitions.
It's a radical idea and perhaps it is best suited to Japan. But maybe we all need things that slow us down and focus our attention on only a few things or even a single thing. Maybe we need it to offset the information firehose.
Image: Morioka Shoten
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