What Drives Consumer Adoption Of New Technologies? I'm participating in a panel discussion this morning during the offsite of a major media company. They sent me a list of questions in preparation of the event. One of the questions was the title of this post; "What drives consumer adoption of new technologies? ". It's an interesting question and one I've never tried to answer directly in writing. But it's also a question we attempt to answer every day in our firm as we evaluate thousands of new startups every year. Let's take ten of the most popular new consumer technology products in recent years (with a couple of our portfolio companies in the mix): iPhone, Facebook, Wii, Hulu, FlipCam, Rock Band, Mafia Wars, Blogger, Pandora, and Twitter and let's try to describe in one sentence or less why they broke out (feel free to debate the reasons they broke out in the comments): In most of these cases, the breakthrough product or service delivered a new experience to consumers that they had never had before.
All of Inflation’s Little Parts. Consumer lab in second life. Broadband file on bbc site. The UK is falling behind other countries in the push for ultra-fast broadband based on networks capable of delivering speeds of up to 100Mbps. Concern that the UK is losing out is driving a new push within the country for the issue to be addressed. The old copper-based voice network was never designed to carry data and, while BT is convinced that there is more bandwidth to be squeezed out of it, others are less certain.
But with a nationwide fibre network estimated to cost around £15bn, there is going to be a lot of talk about the wisdom of committing to such costs without being absolutely sure that there is a need for such an infrastructure. In Australia the issue of next-generation broadband played a big part in the recent election campaign and while it is yet to hit the headlines in the UK it is slowly creeping up the political agenda. He will also be providing a written response on the BBC News website to some of the points raised.