One thing common to these experiences is that they have to do with things so common. For instance, I sell bikes, right? And although I in many ways see bikes as works of art, they are also pretty common. Most of the 350 million people in my country know how to ride one and most have owned a few over the course of their lives. But yesterday at the coffee shop I read an article in Fast Company about IBM's investment in something even more common - water. Can't get much more common than that, right? Not considering the average American consumes 575 liters per day! And although we have oceans of the stuff, getting the right quality in the right places is no easy task, thus IBM's focus on the fast growing water-management market, projected to reach $20 billion by 2015. $20 billion!
Another common thread continues to be the good 'ole PRC. That's right, the People's Republic of China. You know, the country where 1 out of every 5 people that exist live? The same Fast Company article highlighted the growth of Alibaba.com and it's subsidiary Taobao.com. Now I remember coming across Alibaba.com just a few years after it launched. I registered an account there thinking I might come across some cool cycling products someday. I never took time to really investigate the site although I still see the occasional Alibaba.com email come through my spam filter. What I had never heard of though was Taobao, a online consumer marketplace similar to eBay, but in Chinese. This company I'd never heard of boasts 145 million registered users. Alibaba also has a service called Alipay which competes against eBay's PayPal. Or should I say, there's this company called eBay that has a service called PayPal which competes against Alipay? You see, Alipay has over 200 million registered users and it's global numbers are now larger than PayPal's.
Does anyone else have stories about seeing the world more clearly through business?
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