It is always difficult for me to hear a story about massive unmet demand for something in the marketplace without exploring why its being under-served and finding creative (profitable) remedies. Especially when its a service that can easily and cheaply be provided. American Public Media’s Radio Show “Marketplace” ran an interesting piece today about how thousands of immigrants to the US are being turned away by English language training schools in New York City due to the classes being constantly booked. The students, from all corners of the world, are trying to learn English as quickly and efficiently as possible so they may become more productive members of the American economy as quickly as possible.

There’s a lot of political debate around immigration and what our “National Language” ought to be here in the US. I won’t be touching on any of that. I think there’s too much money to be made in satisfying these unmet demands.

Language schools of this nature are obviously not very profitable. If they were, there wouldn’t be so many students being turned away. Its not like there’s a shortage of people who are able to teach English to others in the US. Monetization of this under-served market gets more interesting, however, as you look further down the human resource “supply chain”. These immigrants want to get jobs and contribute to our economy in both unskilled and skilled positions. From bus boy to doctor, they are typically motivated and hard-working individuals that want to integrate as quickly as possible.

The unmet demand in this space is actually two-fold. Not only are there not enough English schools, there are not enough skilled workers in the economy to meet US business’ demands. This is exemplified by US businesses lobbying so strongly for increases in the H1B work visa program over the past decade.

After learning English, many of these immigrants will be eager to join the work force. Many will need training on computers or simple accounting so they may effectively fill office jobs in the US. In a strong economy, such as the current one in the US, staffing companies and temp agencies need to continually replenish their supply of these types of workers. What if the language school these immigrants attended also provided computer and other types of training for a fee? The school would take the student from not knowing any English to full-time employment in a skilled job. If the student could not afford the fee (probably a common scenario) the school could loan the student the money and allow gradual payback once the student is employed and income-producing. The real bread and butter here is the healthy fees from the staffing and temp agencies the school would earn. It would eventually make sense for the school to become a staffing/temp agency itself because it would have such an excellent supply of freshly-trained and eager human capital.

Done properly, the school/staffing agency could be quite profitable and would likely have many of its operating costs subsidized by the government all while fueling the strong growth of US businesses by providing quality workers. If the upcoming immigration bill mandates that English proficiency be a prerequisite for attaining visas or citizenship, your customer base just got substantially bigger.
Today’s Marketplace transcript on this topic: Marketplace: Huddled masses yearning to learn free

By Adam Jackon

Many services here in the US that were once expensive are now progressively becoming less so. Broadband Internet access seems to be in a race to the bottom, largely thanks for fierce competition between providers. Local and long distance phone service is much more affordable now thanks to competition from VOIP.

Conversely, some services that were once free or cheap are lately becoming more expensive. Television, for instance, used to be either free or very inexpensive for the average American household. Now its probably the largest monthly bill in the household behind the mortgage or rent payment. Admittedly, television has gotten a lot better over the years: more channels, better picture, DVR capabilities. I think the price increase is justified. Celular service, if not increasing in price, seems to be maintaining its premium pricing as time goes by. Sure we can TXT and PIX each other now, but does the service really need to be as expensive as it is?

Before we get into what this cellular provider of the future might look like, let’s establish what sort of technology we’re dealing with in the average American’s cell phone here in 2007.

Phones these days are location-aware. Even if you’re not using or paying for the service, the phone always knows approximately where on the planet it is, provided there is cellular coverage. The accuracy is even good enough to build a driving directions (GPS-like) service into the offering. Blackberry’s and other devices offer this - for an additional usage fee, of course. Cellular location technology is much better than GPS, though, because you don’t have the line-of-sight issue. GPS units must be able to “see” the satellites that give it geographic positioning information. If you try to use one indoors they’re useless. Modern cell phones use the cell towers for this information and thus will work anywhere that the phone work gets a signal.

They may not be doing it now, but cellular service providers are able to easily track where their users are, geographically. We know this because some of them even offer a “track your kid” feature as an add-on service. The location sensors in the phone beam the location of the kid to the cellular provider’s servers, which host a map that the parent can watch to track the location of the child. As long as the child’s phone is on, the location is known. I’m not going to get into the (very real) privacy implications here. Instead I’d like to think about some potential service offerings that could defray cellular operational costs.

1. Tracking the rate at which individual cell phones are traveling on surface streets and freeways is the most accurate possible way to monitor traffic congestion in real-time. In California CalTrans uses our FastPasses and assorted highway sensors to give a general view of freeway traffic speeds, but cell phones would be a much larger and more accurate sample and would transcend past the freeways onto congested surface streets. This data stream could be sold as a subscription service to be integrated with the very phones providing the data or with in-car navigation systems.
2. The social network possibilities here are endless. Have you ever decided where to eat a meal based on how crowded you thought the restaurant would be? What if you could jump online and see for yourself? “Restaurant X has a dining capacity of 120 and there are currently 145 cell phones in the building.” Sounds like there’s a wait - even after you count the staffs’ phones. The best part is that the restaurants and bars wouldn’t have any way of cheating and making their place look more full or empty than it really is.
3. Imagine a new social networking site thats let users create profile pages similar to MySpace and associate them with their cell phone. Users can choose whether or not they want their location to be known and who should be able to see it on a map, live. Maybe you only want your friends and not your coworkers to see it on the weekend. Better idea - maybe you never want your coworkers to see it. It’s similar to twitter or dodgeball but with far less effort and better accuracy. This social network would be much more compelling than existing ones because it dives more deeply into our offline lives. Collecting basic demographic data on cellular subscribers, combined with this rich stream of location data would yield such unique information as:
   • Which bars and restaurants are most popular and which days/times of the week/month. Consumers and competing bars would love to know.
   • What demographic frequents different bars and restaurants. I know some guys that would probably pay to see where all the girls were hanging out each night of the week.
   • Where do the different age groups tend to live? That would help make outdoor advertising more targeted and relevant.
4. I saved the most obvious and most irritating for last: targeted marketing. It doesn’t get much more targeted than this. You walk into a Target and you start receiving coupons for Walmart. You walk into Starbux and a $2.00 off coupon for Peets along with walking directions to the Peets down the block pops up on your phone. Annoying? Maybe. Profitable? Definitely. Maybe customers who don’t want the ads offers pay a slightly higher monthly subscription fee. Perhaps the cellular provider can ask the customer on the web, during signup, which offers he or she wouldn’t mind seeing. The service could, if done right, actually be a feature to some users who value saving money on purchases they’re just about to make.

The data the cellular providers have access to provides an unprecedented view into the offline habits of almost every citizen in the country. There are probably many more business models that could leverage this data that someone smarter than I will think of. The point, however, is that if a smart provider decided to build some new service offerings around these under-utilized assets and then use the new revenue streams to lower the cost of the basic cell phone service (maybe even to $0), they would be unstoppable in stealing market share from their competitors in a what has turned into an increasingly commoditized industry.

— Would you sign up with a cell phone provider if you could get free (or say under $20 / month) cell service if the provider was engaged in the businesses outlined above?

Compelling Newsweek article about how the pendulum has swung away from adoration of the alpha male and toward the beta male (presumably the opposite of the alpha). In Hollywood, Beta Males Best Alpha Dogs - Newsweek Entertainment - MSNBC.com

Interesting premise: Hollywood is portraying more male heros and stars as “beta” males - guys who aren’t concerned with climbing the corporate latter the fastest, being the wealthiest or really even being competitive at all.

• Take Jim Halpert from NBC’s “The Office” for example. “He’s a guy who isn’t concerned with status,” says Justin Spitzer, a writer for TV’s “The Office.” “He’s more concerned with getting through the day and not engaging in a pissing contest with the alpha males around him.”

Reasoning: The article make the argument that the country is tired of chest-pounding alpha males that have gone too far and are embarrassing us as a nation. It cites:

• President George W Bush
• Don Rumsfeld
• Don Imus
• Mel Gibson
• Steve Carrell’s character on “The Office”, Michael Scott
• Stephen Colbert’s pseudo alpha-male character from the “Colbert Report” on Comedy Central
• President Bill Clinton (while he was serving as president)

And references Al Gore, present-day Bill Clinton and Jim Halpert from “The Office” as successful “beta” males.