Andrew Knez's Profile

Thanks Zack, so far, from a consumer perspective, I’ve been pretty underwhelmed by the NFL’s mobile app and how they’ve thought about capturing value from “connecting with connected fans”, so I’m glad to hear they are investing more here for the future. That being said, it seems like their biggest challenge is figuring out how to increase the quality of their content as they continue to increase the number of days per week and the weeks per season that NFL teams are playing. I mean, a Jaguars/Browns game on a Thursday night is not going to capture a huge audience, regardless of how the league plans to evolve their TV viewing experience.

Thanks for sharing George. I couldn’t agree more that now that Nike has missed the boat with Fuelband, they have to leverage new partnerships with established wearables and hope to extract value from this market as a brand some other way. That said, I think Nike missed a HUGE opportunity to capture marketshare as consumers started to adopt this technology. No other company I know of has more entrenched, meaningful, relationships with professional and amateur athletes and if they had built something even marginally useful for consumers, they could have put themselves in a position to be the market leader faster than any other company in fitness-related wearable technology.

Thanks for sharing Joanna. I’ve always been fascinated with how grocers are thinking about competing or partnering with businesses like FreshDirect, Instacart, Postmates, etc. While I think there’s opportunity for B Fresh to increase it’s in store efficiency using this technology, the long term reality is that the traditional brick and mortar grocer is on the decline as consumers are becoming more and more comfortable shopping for food online. B Fresh seems to have created their own in house delivery system (shop.bfresh.com/en/p/delivery). This seems like a sound strategy but as a on demand delivery labor becomes increasingly competitive, this may also be unsustainable.

Thanks for sharing. I think Airbnb has in fact changed the way people travel. Like most collaborative consumption models their greatest challenge and success has been establishing trust on both sides of the marketplace. The question I have about their sustainability is not so much regulation, but how they maintain this trust and tackle customer service issues that can be extremely damaging to the brand. We’ve seen them have traveler and home-owner problems in the past, but I wonder if there is a breaking point where consumers no longer become comfortable allowing strangers into their home.

Thanks for sharing Spencer. I’d like to propose an alternate theory as to why e-book sales stagnated last year on both the Amazon and Apple platforms. The ebook trend has in a sense democratized the publisher market in the U.S, but initially the AAP, a co-op of established publishers set prices for all of their content on Amazon and Apple. Now, however, you are starting to see non-AAP publishers who are not beholden to this high set pricing start to increase as a percentage of ebook sales and Big 5 publishing decline as a percentage. In my opinion, overall we’ll see e-book sales continue to overtake print in a big way as traditional publishing houses are dis-intermediated, and Amazon should be cautious about making too much of an investment on brick and mortar locations.

Thanks for the post Ari. I’m glad to see that Coke has taken a proactive approach to their supply chain as well as innovation around refrigeration. Considering Coca-Cola is a massive organization that owns over 500 sub-brands, the place where I think they could have a lot of impact is in implementing these best practices through the entire corporation and adding environmental consciousness to their criterion for acquiring new businesses in the future. Given the fact that consumer preferences for soda are changing rapidly, Coca Cola has the ability to invest in some potentially massive opportunities with new food and beverage brands that, with the right guidance from their parent company could also make a large scale impact on sustainability in the next 100 years.

This article succinctly presents the current challenges faced by one of the industries most reliant on current fossil fuels. While Maersk is showing real leadership in striking a balance between efficiency and environmentalism, and even adopting new routing based on the current realities, I question whether it is too little too late. Given the fact that is is “unlikely” that we will be able to prevent global climate change in the next 20-30 years, I wonder if it would make more sense to invest more in innovative technologies and more sustainable energy solutions rather than focusing on optimizing current processes to reduce overall emissions. Either way, this seems like a pretty daunting challenge for the shipping industry.

I think New Belgium represents a great example of business that has reached a certain threshold of scale where they can actually work to improve energy efficient, best practices for the broader industry. The primary question this raises for me is what the increased price of raw materials will have on the fast growth of micro-brewing and whether this trend will be massively curbed by a higher entry cost for the market. In turn, will we see a greater degree of consolidation in the industry when building high efficiency breweries and distribution methods comes at a much higher upfront cost.

This is a really interesting example of an industry where a large portion of the target market has disposable income, and tend to be insensitive to price, and yet the effect of climate change will have a drastic impact. The one thing to note is that the estimate of 2040 as the tipping point would seem to be pretty conservative. At least in the Northeast, I feel like the quality of snow, which already can be pretty bad on the fringe of each season will drive a much lower adoption of skiing by new consumers, even if the mountains are able to open for 100 days.

Great article! I feel like a lot of businesses further up the stack discount the environmental cost of their own cloud computing based on the fact that it’s highly distributed, and they do not take it into account when calculating their own carbon footprint. That being said, it would be interesting to see if there was a way to quantify the positive environmental effects of businesses customers that have scaled using AWS rather than other storage options and how that would net against the AWS data center electricity usage.