Both Uber and Tesla used an initial product or service to enter a market with serious barriers to entry. For Uber, ride-sharing required serious human capital and powerful regulatory influence. Tesla needed to build a mass-produced automobile from scratch. Both companies have an obsession with driverless cars. Tesla is using car-sharing to boost vehicle utilization rates. Both companies are betting on autonomous driving to reduce transportation costs.
The consignment business model is one area that retailers are concerned about, as Sports Authority had $85 million worth of consigned items in stores at the beginning of its bankruptcy. Sports Authority’s downfall came several months after Quiksilver and American Apparel filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This spring Aeropostale and PacSun filed for bankruptcy.
The E-class offers an optional driver-assist feature that Mercedes calls “Drive Pilot,” which includes advanced adaptive cruise control and automated steering that allows the sedan to follow traffic and keep its lane at speeds of up to 130 mph. Advocates, including the publisher of Consumer Reports said the ad overstates the capability of automated-driving functions available on the sedan and asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate
In the long term, fiber is cheaper. In the short term, wireless is vastly cheaper. Wireless is cheap to install initially but the equipment needs to be replaced every two or three years whereas fiber can generate consistent revenue without major maintenance after the initial expensive build out. Wireless internet can be installed in a matter of hours.
The two big psychological negatives of city living (are) social isolation and social threat. There is good evidence that urban environments amplify anxieties, increase the intensity of hallucinations, and weaken self-confidence. (But) You can't talk about social life without accounting for its richness, complexity, contests, ambiguity
The algorithm is the new shift boss. What is the future when more and more work can be done by intelligent machines instead of people, or only done by people in partnership with those machines? What happens to workers, and what happens to the companies that depend on their purchasing power? What’s the future of business when technology-enabled networks and marketplaces are better at deploying talent than traditional companies?
81% of U.S. adults expect artificially made organs to be routinely available for transplant by the year 2066. 66% say scientists will probably cure most forms of cancer within 50 years.None of the techniques that anchor this study are available for enhancing purposes today. 54% think the idea of implanted computer chips is likely to be a routine occurrence in the future. Half say they would turn such options down.
With the latest technology—a combination of more affordable and advanced 360-degree cameras and quicker post-production editing programs—360-degree wedding videos are no longer a wildly expensive idea. (services range from $2,000 to $10,000). Imagine you had a grandmother who couldn't make it —now she could, with 360-degree goggles. Literally anyone can attend your wedding—virtually, at least.
Ridesharing services like Uber and Lyft have had no impact on the country’s overall rate of drunk driving fatalities, which claim around 10,000 lives a year, since they started in 2009. The researchers say it's partly because drunk people aren’t willing to pay for the cost of a ride.
Reasons for China’s robot interest, while many, partly have to do with a changing population. Wages are rising as the working-age population shrinks. The government is pushing manufacturers to automate to compensate for the labor shortage and catch up with others in the use of industrial robotics.
You’ll never compete on prestige or financial returns but there are other strengths a small company can offer. Equity in the company is a common enticement (as well as) the chance for autonomy and deeper job satisfaction. Millennnials have a desire to accomplish something that resonates with their values. And small businesses provide a career booster since each position normally moves outside of the job description to include opportunities for more experience
Elusive as cool is, the way we experience it stems from some very specific places. Cool turns out to be a kind of economic value that our brains see in products that enhance our social image. This abstract good—social approval, reputation, esteem, or status—plays a central role in our motivation and behavior, and it is the currency that drives much of our economy and our consumption.
In six years, Kickstarter has helped employ 283,000 part-time collaborators and has created an estimated 8,800 companies and nonprofits and 29,600 full-time jobs. Every dollar pledged to a successfully-funded project garnered $2.46 in additional revenue for the creator. Of the 8,800 organizations created through Kickstarter, 82 percent still operate.
The new schedule will make them pay much more for the electricity they draw from the grid in the evening, while paying customers less for the excess power their solar panels send back to the grid. As a result, solar may never pay for itself. There was no guarantee the rates were going to stay the same as the world changed. But the changes are so significant that it’s impossible for a customer to have any sense of what they’re likely to save on their bill over time.
Defaults (and their designers) hold immense power – they make decisions for us that we’re not even aware of making. Most people never change the factory settings on their computer, the default ringtone on their phones, or the default temperature in their fridge. Someone, somewhere, decided what those defaults should be – and it probably wasn’t you.
Rhetoric aside, change is harder and frequently far more expensive than most organizations imagine. How many of us truly want positive changes to happen around us – but still want to leave our own little worlds intact? How many of us really want our familiar, comforting routines replaced with radical changes in our ingrained habits, established relationships, hard-earned skills, fundamental attitudes, and treasured beliefs?
This is the gist of the billboard: It is kind of hard not to do what they want. (Such as) an ad urging motorists to “TEXT AND DRIVE,” with the words “Wathan Funeral Home” listed. Though novel in its technological implementation, Rio de Janeiro’s “sweaty” public service billboard follows in a long tradition of loss-leaders meant to renew endearment to large, public advertising.
The value of (mobile) payments is still 0.58 percent of the $4.65 trillion spent in-store this year. The issue is customer-centric, (not) transaction-focused. How we pay for things is an ingrained consumer behavior, and pulling out your phone rather than your credit or debit card to pay isn’t easier or faster. One factor is age. Another is wealth. 67% of millennials have used mobile wallets, compared to 51 percent of (those) 35 to 54 years old. 63% with incomes greater than $60,000 have used mobile wallets, compared to 39 percent with incomes below $60,000.
Law enforcement across the globe use semi-autonomous technology to do what humans find too dangerous, boring, or just can’t. In Dallas earlier this month police strapped a bomb to an explosive-detonation robot, and boom: a non-lethal robot became a killer. Human rights activists worry these robots lack social awareness crucial to decision-making.
Promoted User Posts give marketers the ability to sponsor user posts. If someone creates a giant replica of a TacoBell hot sauce packet and shares it on Reddit, the chain could sponsor that. Reddit will display it on its website and target users the brand wants to reach. Reddit will seek permission from the person who created the original. The company will have a team who will work with brands to inform them of organic posts that have potential. The move to generate revenue will ruffle some feathers among Reddit users
Google encourages employees to fall short of some of their goals. Superstar Googlers set goals that they know will be ridiculously hard to achieve. Each Googler sets a goal and three key outcomes that result from achieving that goal. They get a grade between 0 and 1 on each key result. The ultimate aim is to land between 0.6 and 0.7. If you score a 1, your objective was too easily achievable.
If you were vying with (someone) for a job, you could try to use that information to suggest that they might be unfit. You could be in a custody battle where DNA could suggest there’s a predisposition to psychiatric illness. For people concerned about genetic privacy, know the laws in their home states for getting DNA removed from a police database, and read through the agreements before they send a sample off to a consumer site.
In a world where disruptive offerings and the constantly morphing mobile platform are proving a challenge to all businesses, relationships are becoming increasingly thin and fragmented. Data (from financial services) shows that since 2010, customers expanded the number of firms they use by one-third or more, putting significant pressure on profitability
Over the course of her four-year tenure, (Mayer) acquired more than 50 companies and spent more than $2 billion. (But) Yahoo did not have the system in place to cultivate the new talent and make them feel part of the new company. Yahoo has a bad habit of killing the products [it buys]. (And) Yahoo didn't have a systematized way of analyzing what a company is worth and whether or not the serious financial investment would lead to promising returns.
Research examined the pay of some 800 CEOs at 429 companies during the decade ending in 2014, and also at the total shareholder return. $100 invested in the 20% of companies with the highest-paid CEOs would have grown to $265 over 10 years. The same invested in companies with the lowest-paid CEOs would have grown to $367. Equity incentive awards now make up 70% of CEO pay in the U.S. The equity portion of CEO pay (should) be more conservative.
Steve Jobs was famous for his refusal to put a license plate on the back of his car, a Mercedes-Benz SL55 AMG. Jobs spotted a loophole in California DMV regulations allowing six months of grace before a license plate had to be attached to a new car. As a result, the Apple supremo maintained a rolling six-month lease on a series of new SL55 AMGs, replacing one with another just before the grace period ran out.
Uber hopes to replace its human drivers with self-driving cars, in part because robots don’t require pesky niceties like compensation or collective-bargaining rights. Self-driving cars require maps persnickety in their detail. Many self-driving cars navigate city streets less by taking in footage of the world and negotiating it as-is, and more by accessing a highly accurate facsimile of the world and effectively driving through that simulation.
Chinese authorities have strengthened patent laws, offered rewards to recipients and created specialized courts to hear intellectual-property disputes. The push for better protection comes from giants like Huawei, which compete globally and see a patent portfolio as crucial to selling overseas without drawing lawsuits or paying royalties. Lawyers say the country is fairer. (But) "the good news is China is interested in IP, and the bad news is China is interested in IP,"
The early trials of autonomous technology have taken place in closed proving grounds that automakers have used for decades. But more testing is being done on public roads. Google’s fleet of driverless test cars has logged more than 1.5 million miles in California. The fatal Tesla crash “heightens the need” for a cooperative test center
Customers are taking longer to upgrade their phones. Many analysts have raised concerns that the global smartphone market is saturated. And overall sales in China, touted as Apple's next big market, fell by a third from the previous year. Welcome to the new Apple, where success is defined as not having sales fall even more.
Just like the best managers customize how they manage people on their teams, the same is true about the experience and content needed to train a generation of leaders. How could it not be? One size most definitely does not fit all. Focus on the bosses. Can they identify new challenges without being handcuffed by career ladders that often limit potential? Is that work being integrated into other leadership activities?
Programs were little better than random at choosing the correct meaning of sentences. The best were correct 48 percent of the time, compared to 45 percent if the answers are chosen at random. Common-sense reasoning will become more important as smart appliances or wearable gadgets become more common.
About 21% of Americans over the age of 12, or roughly 57 million people, listen to a podcast monthly, up from 17% last year. The 15-second skip button allows listeners to avoid commercials. The big barrier to (advertising) is measurability and the fact that you have to A) take on trust that a podcast is being listened to and B) that your particular ad has not been skipped over within that
Transportation agencies in at least 27 states have unpaved roads. The costs of asphalt, concrete, and cement have jumped. With those extra expenses factored in, public expenditures on transportation infrastructure relative to cost fell by nine percent between 2003 and 2014. The American Society of Civil Engineers gives the country’s roads a D grade
Tractor owners can’t repair their own tractors—and if they do, they’re in violation of the DMCA. So, if a machine stops working, its owner can’t pop the hood, run some tests, and find out what’s going on; he or she is legally required to take the tractor to a service center (one owned by the manufacturer, since that’s the only entity allowed to analyze the tractor’s issues).
Enhanced connectivity among devices, properties and individuals will increasingly affect the exposures, costs and premium base of traditional insurers. The most impactful shift (is) telematic monitoring of a driver’s performance. The IOT is creating "smart” homes and businesses, to watch over insured properties. IoT may enable carriers to become primarily the ensurers of safety and productive use of properties, rather than just the insurers of damages
Google is chasing Amazon and Microsoft for control of the next generation of business technology, in enormous cloud-computing data centers. Cloud systems are cheap and flexible, and companies are quickly shifting their technologies for that environment. According to analysts at Gartner, the global cloud-computing business will be worth $67 billion by 2020, compared with $23 billion at the end of this year.
Arcade City’s service, which the company markets but does not claim as its property, is a Facebook group called Arcade City Austin / Request A Ride, where people offer and request rides. It boasts 26,000 group members. Officers were looking to cite Arcade City for operating a ridesharing service sans operating authority —a misdemeanor and up to $500 fine. Arcade City won’t accept the regulatory structure. “Their rules don’t apply to us, and we are happy to have that conversation, even if it’s in court."
Cuteness can be used as a device to draw people toward products without blatant branding.Cuteness is culturally specific, and that itself has become a rich focus of inquiry. Kumamon earned $1 billion in 2015, Hello Kitty four or five times that. But what is cute? What is the basis of its appeal? Society’s embrace of cuteness has led to wonder whether (it) trains women to be childlike, or whether it could be a means by which young women take control.
As machines grow more powerful, deciding who must go and who must stay becomes harder. A guiding principle: Just because technology can do a job brilliantly doesn’t mean that it should.
Closely held startups can choose their investors. And in Silicon Valley, where companies often profess to work toward a public good as well as profits, the choice of investors can reflect the sincerity of that mission. Not every entrepreneur will feel comfortable with sovereign-wealth funds from countries with different priorities and belief systems
Employees perceive the legal department as the killer of new ideas and approaches. But the real problem (is) that not a single legal representative ha(s) been involved in these new business initiatives from the beginning. The opportunity lies in collaboration that includes embedding legal teams in the design and innovation process. Google and Facebook decided that legal teams function as integral business partners keeping management informed of risks.
Verizon faces market saturation and limited growth prospects in its traditional business. Its purchase of Yahoo, which follows its acquisition of AOL in May 2015, provides more evidence that it sees online content and advertising as a primary way to increase growth. Yahoo will bring in hundreds of millions more viewers to complement Verizon’s popular properties like TechCrunch and Huffington Post. comScore puts Yahoo at No. 3 among digital properties.
The delivery took place on July 11th when an autonomous drone flew a mile from a 7-Eleven location to a private home in Reno. The initial delivery included a chicken sandwich, donuts, coffee, candy, and Slurpees. Once they arrived, each container was lowered to the ground and retrieved by the homeowners.The drone flew autonomously from the store to the household, using the vehicle's GPS system to navigate.
domain names of seven characters or less, excluding the dot.com or other suffix, tended to yield higher traffic. Visitors to a website would decrease by seven percent if the domain name was expanded to 10 characters.
The real problem for Mailchimp is making sure that those emails end up in people’s inboxes, not their spam folders.
Hard bargaining has gone the way of the abacus in most economic spheres. The process of swapping an old ride for a new one and making up the difference in their values with a cash payment was an established practice in horse trading. Car buyers demanded that car sellers continue that tradition by accepting their old vehicles as partial payment for new ones.
The e-commerce giant inked a deal with Wells Fargo to offer interest rate discounts on loans to students who are Amazon Prime members. The bank, which is the second largest student lender in the US, will shave off half a percentage point for Amazon “Prime Student” customers who take out student loans to attend college or are looking to refinance their existing student loans.
The active, methodical pursuit of happiness is so normalized in U.S. culture that it may encourage people who are truly unhappy to try to change their situation. There’s a bit of a placebo effect with these activities—if you believe they’ll make you happier, they probably will. Of course you can measure happiness, the question is whether it’s useful or not. It’s a fine line between helping people and preying on their dissatisfaction.
 |
Subscribe via RSS |
|
Subscribe via Email |
As a Partner and Co-Founder of Predictiv and PredictivAsia, Jon specializes in management performance and organizational effectiveness for both domestic and international clients. He is an editor and author whose works include Invisible Advantage: How Intangilbles are Driving Business Performance.
Learn more...
| View on Amazon |  |
