Wille Faler’s Buzzword Bingo

I follow a lot of news sources and blogs about entrepreneurship and start-ups, both European and Silicon Valley based. Perhaps the most notable of all is TechCrunch, which almost without fault reviews a few products from start-ups every day. What is becoming painfully obvious is that the pace of innovation is starting to slow down. Most new start-ups that are mentioned are “me-too’s”, they are at best slight angles on pre-existing ideas and companies, but quite often just plain rip-offs. Not only that, a lot of the so called “businesses” are just plain features, they have no business model, no compelling idea and their technology could easily be copied by a talented engineer in a week or two. Hardly a high barrier of entry. There seems to be around 30 mee-too’s for every new idea that comes out, good or bad.
Even Mike Arrington of TechCrunch, a guy who makes his bread and butter of the start-up scene seems to think that the fun has gone out of Silicon Valley.

It seems that it is back to the old model of looking for “eye-balls”, just as back in 2000. It didn’t work back then, and it probably will work even less so now: there is a lot more competition for eye-balls, just raising above the static is a challenge, and as a consequence there simply won’t be enough eye-balls to go around.

So why isn’t there any new compelling innovation, technology- or business-model wise? Hard to say, but one thing is for sure: I find it very hard to see the next Skype’s, Google’s or even Flickr’s or Blogger’s. Maybe it is the fact that the economy, both in Europe and the US is doing well?

It seems that innovation is often born out of necessity and scarcity, but at the moment we are living in a period of ample abundance and relative stability. Maybe our own financial well-being and level of comfort is actually slowing down the rate of innovation?