Interesting Companies

I am currently sitting in a Starbucks in San Diego (Market and 4th) watching two vertically challenge women interview two homeless men. This strikes me as Big Lots worthy. Both vertically challenged women are wearing white summer dresses with bright pink Ug style boots. Both homeless guys have a significant facial hair. This is in no way intended to be a slight against any of the above - just one of the more bizarre affairs that I have ever seen.

Anyway, onto interesting companies. This is a bit of a departure for me because I am simply going to wing it. I have no ability to respond to Mary's holiday wish list - other than to say, good job getting it out early.

So, interesting companies. In my job, I have to do research into a number of interesting companies. I think that one of the most interesting companies that I have ever discovered is a company called Insurance Services Offices, Inc. This company owns a number of super cool - analytics companies that insurance companies use to measure risk. Really neat.

In addition, I am fascinated by the areas where I would expect to find more companies, but have not been able to find them - for example - who is the largest weather company-analytics, modeling, etc. It seems that this is done primarily by governments, but why? DTN does a lot of this, but I am surprised at the lack of other companies competing in the space.

I think weather, risk, spatial interface and design could be fabulously interesting areas for the next 20 years - and yet, it seems that I am simply wrong because there is not much going on here.

In addition, I look at food science and food supply transparency as a critical element of the way people will eat and understand their caloric intake over the next decade. Who does that? Nobody. So, you can find technologies but no over-arching entities that carry lots of component technologies. So, you get a Cargill or ConAgra that manage their supply chains - but they don't document that supply so that I know where my food comes from and its impact on the environment or the chemicals in my food, etc. This is a growth industry perfect for Nebraska.

Just to get close to a parallel post here, Mary once mentioned that she is interested in eating locally and she tries to buy organic. Those are two highly relevant areas for the above post.