In the Po valley, cities such as Milan, Pavia, and Cremona were well placed for commerce, being situated at the confluence of roads or rivers.
Instead, it is being designed for machinery, the servers, routers and switches that are the physical underpinning of the rapidly growing electronic commerce being conducted on the Internet.
And the overseers of some 30,000 state and local taxing authorities are drooling over the unlimited possibilities in the explosive amount of commerce being conducted via the Internet.
I expect e-commerce to be disrupted by many of these ponds and the move toward all commerce being e-commerce creates massive potential.
Groupon is not a gimmick or a game, but a successful example of offline commerce being driven by an online storefront and transaction engine.
WeChat has in a way written the playbook in China for how to leverage a popular social platform to move into other related services (commerce being one of the biggies), and it seems that would-be competitors are following suit.
