A Year of Growth

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It’s been a little over a year since Neal Silverman and I launched Traction Technology Partners to bridge the gap between emerging tech and the enterprise. We’ve come a long way since that time. In our first year, we launched four executive Councils with great partners, including:

• The Emerging Tech Council with WIRED Media Group.
• The Digital Banking Leadership Council with American Banker.
• The Target Marketing Tech Council with NAPCO
• The IoT Global Council with ReadWrite.

And we are about to launch with another major partner this week (stay tuned).

And that’s just the Councils. We also:

• Started working with large enterprises to create a custom Innovation Discovery Programs.
• Helped our partner Outsell program and launch the stellar DataMoney Conference in New York City earlier this month.
• Raised an angel round with amazing investors.
• Began hiring (we are now a team of 8, and looking for more — if you know a good growth marketer, please send them our way).
• Started building our own Traction Network — a private, professional online network for all our Council members where they can research enterprise startups, see upcoming events, and connect with each other (reply to this email if you would like to be a beta tester).

What to Expect from the Traction Report

And now with this first newsletter, we are launching the Traction Report. Every week, you will get an in-depth look at a new area of emerging tech, along with analysis, data, and links to other articles and blog posts to help you keep abreast of new technologies.

In addition to myself, you will hear from other writers such as former Internet.com Executive Editor Chris Nerney, who will help me kick off the Report in the coming weeks. As we source and vet startups for the Councils, or unearth new trends at our events, we will share those insights here with you.

Our focus will be on emerging tech for the enterprise. But we won’t just be covering the shiny and new. Our bias will be towards those technologies, products, and startups that are gaining real traction with customers — that sweet spot when a company has found product-market fit and its growth curve is just taking off.

We are writing this for a very special audience of senior executives with a deep interest in technology — CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, CMOs, Chief Data Officers, Chief Innovation Officers, and their teams. You will discover new products and startups here, but we will try to err on the side of those that are ready to be adopted by the enterprise.

Traction. That’s our filter.

(If you would like to get the Traction Report in your inbox, please sign up here).

Deep Links:

Unexpected Consequences of Self Driving Cars — Roboticist Rodney Brooks throws some much-needed cold water on all the hype surrounding self-driving cars, and dives into some of the unintended problems that may arise from the social interactions between autonomous vehicles and people (both the drivers and pedestrians with whom they will share the road).

AI 100: The Artificial Intelligence Startups Redefining Industries — Everyone loves AI. Here’s a map from CBInsights of the “top” 100 startups in the space that have raised $3.2 billion over the past 5 years. A good place to start to get your bearings on the AI startup landscape.

Mathematical Model Reveals the Patterns of How Innovations Arise — Good overview of how innovations arise out of the “adjacent possible” — “all those things that are one step away from what actually exists” — and some new evidence backing up how that works.

What is 5G, And When Do I Get It? — 5G is coming. Get ready for real wireless broadband.”5G will be crazy fast, crazy stable, and crazy versatile.” 10Gbps speeds? I’ll believe it when I see it, but even getting a few Gbps on wireless will enable an entirely new class of enterprise applications and consumer services.

The next WIRED Emerging Tech Council virtual meeting will be on March 2. The topic will be AI/Machine Learning. Sign up.