The document discusses how the internet is disrupting existing industries by shifting power away from large institutions to individuals and smaller entities. It also discusses how the internet allows for more capital efficiency and lower transaction costs. Several industries are mentioned as being next to experience disruption, including consumer finance, education, energy, and healthcare.
4. Power To The People To us, this appears to be one of the great constants of the web. It is taking power away from existing large institutions and pushing it out to smaller entities and often all the way to individuals. In the process it is building up new institutions (such as Google), but the net result appears to be a distinct shift of “power to the people.” http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2008/09/power_to_the_pe_1.html
5. Capital Efficiency It takes about 1/10th the hardware, software, bandwidth, storage, and other expenses to build a web service compared to what it took in the 1999/2000 time period. That was before services like Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, 10Gen, and other "cloud computing" platforms emerged as real options. It's gotten even less expensive now. http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/10/capital-efficie.html
25. The Smart Grid Smart Grid infrastructure consists of electronic meters at each residence and business, an information network to carry data from the meters to the utilities in near real-time AND to bring information on the instantaneous price of electricity back to consumers; gadgets which help us automatically adjust our electrical use to prices in whatever way we want to do that; and lots of electronics and other devices in the electrical grid itself, which let the grid use the information on usage to adjust transmission and supply and accommodate the varying output from alternative energy sources. http://blog.tomevslin.com/2009/03/whats-a-smart-grid-and-why-does-it-matter.html