Intelligence Briefs

Craigslist meets YouTube: Realpeoplerealstuff.com lets individuals post homemade video commercials to sell goods & services. — Springwise.com

Tree-Nation is an ecological project with a focused objective: to plant 8 million trees in the Sahara to fight desertification. — Marcus P. Zillman

Tipping point: U.S. corporate spending on wireless voice & mobile data services will exceed business spending on all wireline voice & data services by 2010. — In-Stat / Computerworld.com

India is one of the fastest-growing markets for the pharmaceutical industry, with huge potential. Several factors, including the acceptance of intellectual property rights, a robust economy and the country’s burgeoning health care needs, have contributed to accelerated growth in that country. — IMS Health

Competitive intelligence for law firms: A new version of the atVantage software has features intended to help law firms analyze growth opportunities, identify trends and evaluate competing firms. The “Firm Trends” feature gives users the ability to assess and track their market share of litigation for a particular client, market or industry. — LexisNexis

Pharmacist group plots strategies for dealing with future workforce challenges

Here’s an association — the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists — that’s making a serious effort to take a long-term view of challenges its profession faces in the future. Bravo! The association has come up with a long-range “vision” document covering the following critical issues:

• Credentialing
• Residency training
• Teamwork within the pharmacy function and the entire patient care process
• Role and credentials of pharmacy technicians
• Experiential learning requirements
• Expanded and specialized areas of pharmacy practice
• Role of automation and technology

And a second task force, on “pharmacy’s changing demographics,” made long-term recommendations for coping with workforce trends such as a shortage of pharmacists and demands for better work-life balance, as well as “generational differences, a changing gender mix, and ethnic and racial diversity.” (Notably, “the task force was composed of a diverse group that included health-system pharmacists, a nurse, a physician as well as a futurist and a sociologist.”)

Lunar jobs will be tough on mental health

In the extreme isolation of lunar settlements (or even space stations), anxiety and depression are likely to spread from worker to worker in a form of social contagion, according to Chester Spell, an associate professor of management at Rutgers University. Sound far-fetched? Spell says it already happens in quasi-isolated workplaces such as remote Australian mining towns and Antarctic stations.

Can we manage a world of superslums?

A United Nations report on urban population trends makes for powerful, moving, often-depressing, sometimes-hopeful reading. The chief conclusion:

In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half of world population, 3.3 billion people, will be living in urban areas. This number is expected to swell to almost 5 billion by 2030. In Africa and Asia, the urban population will double between 2000 and 2030. Many of these new urbanites will be poor. Their future, the future of cities in developing countries, the future of humanity itself, all depend very much on decisions made now.

Open source: Deconstructing… Arianespace

There’s a striking amount of competitive intelligence to be found in a recent Wall Street Journal article about closely held Arianespace. ( “French Firm Vaults Ahead In Civilian Rocket Market,” 25 June 2007 )

“After decades of struggles, Arianespace managed to outmaneuver the incumbents with innovative engineering, cutthroat pricing and moves that parlayed the financial clout of the European Union to beat out U.S. rivals in launching private satellites.”

Here are some of the tidbits we learn from this article:

Market share: Doubled to “well over 50%.”

Technology: The Ariane 5 uses new dual-launch technology to simultaneously propel two spacecraft into orbit — an idea U.S. competitors scoffed at initially.

New market: Manned space flight. NASA’s administrator is considering Arianespace as “Plan B” if the agency stumbles in developing its own replacement for the aging space shuttles.

Secret sauce: Operates more like an airline, and outsources ancillary work.

Costs: Cut its supplier base by nearly 15% and forced those that remained to cut prices.

Motto: Deliver “any weight, to any orbit, at any time.”

Plans: Details about future plans for the Spaceport at the equator.