For the last few weeks, Alexander Osterwalder has been in Silicon Valley to talk about his must-read book, Business Model Generation, and to see what his next step in the area of facilitating business model will be.

We talk a lot about the fast-changing environment in which companies are evolving and how hard it is for traditional players to grow and change. One of the most painful points is the lack of easy tools to assess the situation and imagine a new paradigm.

This need for fast adaptation strikes a chord in Silicon Valley and its “lean startup” movement led by Eric Ries which tries to democratize the idea of quick iteration for startups and making pivot points to find the business model that best fits them.

Osterwalder’s book deals with business strategy and how to better define and draw business models. The book is full of well-designed concepts created by a team of 470 practitioners, which makes the reading experience painless. But the key asset for the business community is the book’s business model canvas, which the creators give for free on their website, encouraging people to use it:

This canvas is very useful for putting complex ideas on paper in a way that no one has addressed completely in the past. All the simple tools we now use in the business strategy area were created decades ago - the BCG matrix or the Porter’s five forces, for example - so it’s time for change.

This canvas can be very useful for all kind of businesses, from startups to big corporations, to better define their business model and to imagine new ones.

Osterwalder is working on an iPad application that will let people “play” with a business model with virtual post-its to stick on the business model canvas, while collaborating to create a new one. One cool idea could be to create an online business model library. Another idea could be to play with this app on large touch-screen walls. Is this the next revolution in the boardroom and at Sand Hill Road, where the VCs dwell?

When you live in Silicon Valley, there is one thing that you forget after a while: users here are on the cutting edge of innovation.

Massive check-ins on Foursquare, Twitter updates, Yelp stickers on every restaurant door, geeky events that attract thousands of people . . . it’s a long list of signs showing how people here have jumped into innovation. As a result, living in Silicon Valley is at the same time enlightening and blinding.

Start-ups are proposing new services and products meant for improving other start-ups’ products. (See: the vast Twitter 3rd-party ecosystem.)

Because Internet evangelization doesn’t seemed to be the priority of start-ups – it’s not their job, true – the Silicon Valley ecosystem appears to be a huge innovation marketplace massively dedicated to hyping geeky users.

Yesterday’s Forrester study about location-based services shows that only 4 percent of online American adults have ever used a location-based app on their phone, and less than 1 percent are using them more than once per week. Within this 1 percent of users, 80 percent are male and 70 percent are aged 19-35.

More people are active on microblogging sites than using location-based apps: one-fifth of U.S. Internet users are now on Twitter. They are mostly between 18 and 44 years old, are already using social networks (Facebook, MySpace). As for all social media, a very small number of users is creating the content for the vast majority of the others (10% of users are tweeting for the 90% others).

If there is one thing that marketers and entrepreneurs should never forget, it’s to always weigh the very large majority of Internet users that are staying at a simple level of utilization. Facebook is the first social media tool to be used so massively and it doesn’t mean that everybody is ready to plunge into the web tornado.

Tuesday night, Atelier hosted our latest TechRadar event, which focused on the latest in mobile innovation.

From location-based gaming and discovery to real-time traffic analysis (and new models of crowdsourcing) to mobile app design, the companies presenting at Tuesday’s TechRadar highlighted some of the many computing innovations brought about by the mobile revolution.

We thank Booyah, Aloqa, Waze and Bamboudesign for presenting their wonderful products at the event. A huge thanks goes out to Cathy Brooks for moderating the event, as well.

We’ll follow up with posts on each of the presenting companies.

Atelier’s TechRadar series explores the latest computing innovations, presenting companies that we believe highlight the best of the Silicon Valley ecosystem.

The theme of our next TechRadar will be payments. Please check back – or feel free to contact us – for more info.

The digital divide between developing and developed countries is widening, warns the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in its Information Economy Report 2009: Trends and Outlook in Turbulent Times.

While the big questions in Silicon Valley – What’s the next Twitter? What do teens really do online? – seem to mark the end of Web 2.0 and its entrance into whatever comes next, many in the world still do not have access to the resource that makes it all possible, broadband.

For developed countries like Finland, broadband access is becoming a right; in developing countries, it remains a luxury . . . if even that attainable.

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A lot of time is spent, a lot of internet ink is spilt, trying to figure out young internet users.

This endeavor is so difficult that one of the most ‘authoritative’ of these researches – at least as measured by the amount of press it received – was back in July when Morgan Stanley was able to capture that most elusive of creatures, the 15-year-old boy, and present his insider’s report on high-school habits as the final word on teens and tech.

The generational divide is fascinating and is always a source of crunchable numbers and crunchy ideas. As much as the teen demographic has been dissected and analyzed, it’s still a constant source of surprise, predictable in its utter unpredictability.

For example, this:

In a Junior Achievement survey of 1,000 teens ages 12-17, the most popular entrepreneur was Steve Jobs. The Apple CEO, who received the top vote of 35 percent of those surveyed, was more popular than Tony Hawk, Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Kimora Lee Simmons, Oprah Winfrey and Mark Zuckerberg.

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I was happy to see Sarah Lacy’s semi-scathing article about TechCrunch50, because I was beginning to wonder if I had reacted to the event too negatively.

For me, only a tiny handful of startups were even remotely exciting, and listening to the demos in the hot, stuffy conference room was more fatiguing than inspiring, or even educational.

Lacey writes: “I did interviews with most of the TechCrunch50 experts backstage and there was a common gripe about the companies launching there: Not enough passion, not enough swinging for the fences, not enough trying to change the world. There were too many people building safe businesses, too many companies just trying to make existing things slightly better, and too many people wanting to be the next Mint.com, not the next Google.”

To be fair, this year’s TC50 companies seemed a more diverse group than last year’s. (At first take, at least. Now looking back on last year’s list, I’m not so sure.)

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While the Obama administration gets most of the attention for its Government 2.0 initiatives, most of the really interesting stuff is taking place at the local level.

San Francisco has launched an open data initiative, dataSF.org (beta), which puts city data in the hands of citizens.

“The new web site will provide a clearinghouse of structured, raw and machine-readable government data to the public in an easily downloadable format,” Newsom writes in a Techcrunch guest post.

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Thanks, Google, for livening up what’s been a slow news week. The Mountain View company is taking clear aim at Microsoft, announcing late yesterday that it is developing its own operating system and essentially calling Microsoft obsolete.

“[T]he operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web,” according to Google’s blog.

That’s the equivalent of Wild Bunch action in normally stately Silicon Valley.

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San Jose not only has the most successful pro team in the Bay Area (the NHL Sharks), it is also America’s top tech center, according to bizjournals’ “Top 100 Tech Centers.”

San Jose is the best city in the U.S. for tech, scoring an aggregate score of 12.84 on bizjournal’s “High-tech index.”

Nearly 12 percent of San Jose businesses are classified as high-tech, nearly triple the national average of four percent. There are 182.5 high-tech jobs for every 1,000 private-sector jobs, 329 percent higher than the average of all cities considered in the study, and 47 percent higher than any other market.

Washington D.C. is the second best city for tech, according to the study, followed by Boston (3), Oakland-San Francisco (4) and Seattle (5). All of these areas have over 160,000 jobs in high-tech.

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Atelier was very honored to receive Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, France’s Secretary of State in charge of Strategic Planning and the Development of the Digital Economy, who was in Silicon Valley to study the latest technology trends, part of a five-day fact-finding trip to San Francisco, New York, and Washington D.C.

As part of her “Tocquevillian voyage” (Dom’s words), Kosciusko-Morizet visited Silicon Valley businesses to study infrastructure and actors, as well as services and tech trends, in order to translate successful American models into the French tech ecology.

Kosciusko-Morizet visits ATELIER from Atelier BNP Paribas on Vimeo.

The Secretary of State was also interested in how e-commerce is transforming society.

She was especially interested in how exploring US e-commerce is affecting the recession, in order to bring those lessons back to battle France’s own economic difficulties.

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