Pain

Andy Monfried writes that that best businesses are those that solve a customer's pain. Without that pain, it's hard to build a solid and long lasting business that makes money.

Sometimes things that are really cool, technically innovative indeed, do not have a focused and clear way of making something easier, cheaper, faster for a customer, taking their problem and offering a solution that is significantly better that what currently exists.

In my opinion much of the current talk about mobile advertising and marketing lacks a clear focus on precisely what customer pain is being solved in a material way. Getting pinged with a starbucks coupon as I walk past the store not only seems marginal, it may even be intrusive.

I'm still waiting for a huge, important business to come from all this.