Top 100 Exponential Organizations
From exponentialorgs.com:
“The business world has learned over the last two decades how to scale technologynow it’s time to scale the organization. A new breed of Exponential Organizations (or ExOs) are delivering 10x or better performance benchmarks compared to their peers. We present below the 100 most scalable organizations in the world, based on the diagnostic survey in the award-winning book, Exponential Organizations.”
Here’s How Airbnb Disrupted the Travel Industry
By both following historical trends and looking ahead
MONTREAL, Canada—Airbnb became the successful brand it is today by following trends of disruption in the hospitality business that have been around since the 1950s, and by understanding shifts in consumer behavior. So said Chip Conley, head of global hospitality and strategy at Airbnb, who talked about the company's role in the history of the hospitality industry at the C2 conference in Montreal on Wednesday.
Conley, who has plenty of hotel experience under his belt as the founder of the Joie de Vivre, a boutique hotel chain, was intrigued by Airbnb's business plan when he was approached to join the company three years ago. "In 2013, I didn't know what the sharing economy was. But I thought it was interesting that they were trying to democratize hotels, and they were trying to improve hospitality for people who were traveling, but they were doing it without their own employees."
He said that the hospitality industry's transformation followed three rules of innovation: innovation doesn't happen without foreshadowing; innovators address a human need that isn't being met, and over time, the establishment embraces innovation that was once disruptive.
15 Surprising Facts About $5.5 Billion Rideshare Giant Lyft
See how much you really know about the rapidly growing rideshare innovator.
Peer-to-peer ridesharing company Lyft made headlines last week with the news they've just closed a round of massive round of funding. Widely known as the quieter, gentler rideshare company (thanks to rival Uber's polarizing CEO, who famously called the entire taxi industry an asshole in 2014), Lyft is still no slouch when it comes to innovation and growth in this disruptive and relatively new industry.
Perhaps you've used its service, but what do you really know about Lyft? Check out these often surprising facts...
Waze Carpool expands to compete with Uber and Lyft in California
Traffic navigation app Waze is expanding deeper into ride sharing with the California-wide launch of its carpool service. Owned by Google, the service has an opportunity to be a huge source of data on routes, how long rides take when there are multiple stops along the way, and what makes for a good group travel experience—all information that may be beneficial to Alphabet’s self-driving car developments. Waze head of business development, Josh Fried, says that, for now, the only thing Waze and Waymo share are the cafeterias on Google’s campus.
The new carpool service will particularly focus on Los Angeles, where drivers suffer the worst traffic jams in the world. There it will compete with taxi-sharing services Lyft Line and Uber Pool. Fried says the Waze Carpool is fundamentally different, because it matches regular people (often commuters) along a route and booking mostly happens in advance. He also wants people to feel compelled to fill the empty seats in their car: “All the seats in your car should be seen as an opportunity to give you coworkers and friends a ride in the direction that you’re already heading.” Fried says he doesn’t know how or when Waze Carpool will come to the rest of the U.S., but notes that it will probably start with states that participate in its data exchange program. Waze Carpool is also supposed to come to Brazil later this year. —
How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood
To understand how people look for movies, the video service created 76,897 micro-genres. We took the genre descriptions, broke them down to their key words, and built our own new-genre generator.
If you use Netflix, you've probably wondered about the specific genres that it suggests to you. Some of them just seem so specific that it's absurd. Emotional Fight-the-System Documentaries? Period Pieces About Royalty Based on Real Life? Foreign Satanic Stories from the 1980s?
If Netflix can show such tiny slices of cinema to any given user, and they have 40 million users, how vast did their set of “personalized” need to be to describe the entire Hollywood universe?
This idle wonder turned to rabid fascination when I realized that I could capture each and every microgenre that Netflix's algorithm has ever created.
Through a combination of elbow grease and spam-level repetition, we discovered that Netflix possesses not several hundred genres, or even several thousand, but 76,897 unique ways to describe types of movies.
Yelp Adds 5 New Platform Partners, Enabling Transactions With 100,000 Businesses
From the official Yelp blog:
With the addition of five new Yelp Platform partners, including Whittl, TicketNetwork, delivery.com for laundry, Peek.com and foodjunky, it’s now easy to book appointments, schedule services, and buy things directly on Yelp from more than 100,000 local businesses. People can purchase tickets to sporting events and concerts, schedule laundry pickup or delivery, order food from even more restaurants, and book brewery tours, go swimming with sharks, discover an underground art scene and so much more! Here’s more about our new transaction partners:
- Whittl: An online booking service that brings salons, spas, and other personal care businesses onto Yelp for appointment booking, like Spa Soak in Chicago.
- TicketNetwork: One of the nation’s leading online ticket marketplaces, TicketNetwork enables Yelp users to purchase high quality, sought after tickets for concerts, sports and theater events at thousands of venues, like the Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati, directly on Yelp.
- delivery.com for laundry: Outsource your dirty work with pick up and delivery for laundry services from local businesses like JC Eco Laundry in Jersey City.
- Peek.com: Peek.com is a one-stop shop for travelers and locals to book amazing tours and activities.
- foodjunky: Order food or get delivery right from a Yelp business page through foodjunky.com.
The Sound of Disruption: Innovation in Music Streaming
As part of an ongoing series celebrating the CNBC Disruptor 50 List sponsored by Nasdaq, MarketInsite will provide insights into industries being disrupted by those companies that made the 2016 list.
In a decade Spotify has transitioned from a small Scandinavian start up into a global music streaming service with over a 100 million users and an estimated valuation of $8.5 billion*. In total, the company has raised $2.1 billion** in venture funding, boasting backers such as Technology Crossover Ventures and Fidelity Investors.
What set the company apart from its main competitor, Pandora, when it first launched was the fact that it allowed listeners to choose the songs they want to play and create their own playlists. Reporter Morgan Brown put it this way:
Options for accessing music online were limited prior to Spotify—consumers could listen to streaming services like Pandora, though they couldn't actually pick their own songs.
The Stockholm based company operates under a “freemium model” in which basic services are offered for free and premium services, such as ad-free listening, are available for nearly 10 bucks a month. Currently, the company has 30 million paying customers.
Why Apple Is Experiencing Another Growth Spurt
SAN FRANCISCO — At 41 years old, Apple is a respected elder of the tech industry. But rather than easing slowly into retirement, the company is going through another growth spurt.
On Wednesday, Apple’s stock surged 5 percent to a record high of $157.14 after it reported surprisingly strong financial results. It is now worth $822 billion, more than any other company in the stock market. And that is before it releases a hotly anticipated new lineup of iPhones this fall, on the 10th anniversary of the original model. Analysts say the new phones could drive sales up by more than 10 percent next year.
Apple is not alone. Other aging tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet, the parent of Google, and younger players like Facebook have also managed to post strong growth despite their tremendous size. The secret to their vigor, according to analysts and investors, is the vast amount of data they have about customers and their ability to sell all sorts of products to those customers.
“This handful of companies is writing the operating system for the new economy,” said Brad Slingerlend, lead portfolio manager of Janus Henderson’s global technology fund. “The bigger companies are both able to collect data and use that data to build into adjacent businesses.”
The Amazon Growth Narrative Refuses To Slow Down
Summary
- AMZN reported blowout third quarter earnings on October 26.
- Across most of the business, growth rates just aren't coming down in any noteworthy way.
- Growth is actually accelerating in the high-margin, recurring revenue subscription business.
- AMZN stock remains a buy even at all-time highs.
E-commerce behemoth, cloud giant, and now major grocer Amazon (AMZN) reported blowout third quarter earnings on October 26. AMZN stock jumped to all-time highs, and is now up nearly 50% year-to-date and about 360% over the past 5 years. We do not think this run is over. The law of large numbers is simply not hitting Amazon's business like its hitting other businesses (growth rates across the board remain impressively large), implying that Amazon's growth narrative is still in its early innings. Moreover, growth acceleration in certain high margin recurring revenue streams like Subscription Services further implies that profit growth is on track to catch up to revenue growth soon.
Overall, we remain bullish on AMZN stock.