When a guest requests, hotel staff can fill the 3-foot robot with the necessary items, punch in the guest’s room, and the robot wirelessly calls the elevator. Using Wi-Fi and 3D cameras to navigate, (it) calls the phone in the guest’s room when it arrives. A Residence Inn in Los Angeles (said) guests sometimes call to order things from the front desk just so they can get a visit from the robot.
Thomas Edison. His name is on 10,000 patents. He did not invent a single thing. He marshaled people together and knew how to spot innovations and put people together like. And Jobs? All he did "was notice patterns and put people together to finish projects... If he doesn't have [Steve] Wozniak, there is no original Apple, right. If he doesn't have [Jony] Ive, there is no iPod. If he doesn't have Tony Fadell, there is no iPhone."
Facebook’s news feed algorithm is surprisingly inelegant, maddeningly mercurial, and stubbornly opaque. The social network has been running a test in which it shows some users the top post in their news feed alongside one other, asking them to pick the one they’d prefer. The result? The algorithm’s rankings correspond to the user’s preferences “sometimes.” An algorithm can optimize for a given outcome, but it can’t tell you what that outcome should be.
With about 70 percent of the U.S. population living in the snow belt, learning how to navigate in rough weather is crucial for mass appeal, reduc(ing) road deaths and overcom(ing) traffic congestion. “I don’t think that we should expect that in a blinding snowstorm the autonomous vehicle will be fine. We have to be a bit careful when we have real customers."
Who knew "zero" could be so valuable? The Canadian Intellectual Property Office rejected Coke's trademark application, ruling "zero" simply relayed caloric information. Coke had argued "zero" could refer to many things, including no alcohol, sodium or animal products.
Based on a belief that the companies would succeed once they grew to enormous scale, entrepreneurs and investors are beginning to find that the economics of making a delivery service work are far from easy. The general consensus is that drivers really only stick around for three to six months.
Eyeriss allows cores to talk to each other directly so they don’t need to use up a phone’s main memory. But perhaps the biggest advantage of Eyeriss is that it would mean smartphones would no longer need to talk to a distant server over an Internet connection. All algorithms could be run locally, meaning personal digital assistant services like Google Now and Siri would be much speedier
There are more than 1,000 chemicals in a typical cup of coffee. Scientists have nailed down the big players in terms of taste and potential health benefits.
Before Roomba hit store shelves, other devices could detect land mines. And IRobot’s PackBot searched for survivors in the ruins of the World Trade Center after the September 11th attacks.The maker of cute robotic vacuums is also the largest supplier of ground-based robots to the U.S. Department of Defense. After the many fat years fed by Afghanistan and Iraq, defense procurement is drying up. IRobot plans to sell its defense and security business
One of the common fallacies is that data is opposed to intuition.Data is a tool for enhancing intuition.
Facebook's tracking of non-users by placing a cookie on their browser without informing them when they visit a Facebook page did not comply with French privacy law. Facebook uses cookies that collect information then used for advertising without Internet users' consent.
Hiring a new employee now takes 63 days, up from 42 in 2010. Meanwhile the average time to deliver an office IT project increased by more than a month from 2010 to 2015, and now stands at over 10 months from start to delivery
"NHTSA (US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) will interpret 'driver' in the context of Google's described motor vehicle design as referring to the (self-driving system), and not to any of the vehicle occupants,"
In thousands of villages across rural China the Alibaba kiosk, connected to the Internet for free on an Alibaba-provided computer, places an order. And (for those who've) never ordered online, an Alibaba service center manager who hails from the same town is by his side.Alibaba is mak(ing) sure as many of China’s 1.3 billion people as possible can shop online.The purchasing power of rural Chinese consumers remains largely untapped. And Alibaba knows it.
The factory isn’t for cars, but for batteries, which Tesla is making in partnership with Panasonic. Nevada is suddenly taking on industries more closely associated with Asia than with the Southwest, and it’s unclear if the state will see the domino effects it’s predicted. The job is to offer the best chance of success to a company, while minimizing the pitfalls so the state does not "suffer unduly. We don't pretend to be able to predict how these companies will do."
New technologies would not offer speed benefits over silicon transistors, suggesting that chips may stop getting faster at the pace that the technology industry has been used to. The new technologies would, however, improve the energy efficiency of chips, important for many leading uses of computing today, such as cloud computing, mobile devices, and robotics.
Analyzing more than 200 companies around the world identified key digital strengths in four areas—strategy, culture, organization, and capabilities.
Despite similar market caps, Alphabet enjoys a much higher valuation than Apple. What gives?
If you start to do the work of your executive team, you’ve hired the wrong people. They should share their decisions and strategy with you, but you shouldn’t be creating it for them.
It will no longer unveil clothes six months before they are available in stores.It will no longer separate its men’s wear and women’s wear shows.And it will no longer bother with traditional seasonal denominations; twice-yearly collections will be called, rather, September and February, “reflecting the time they are in-store/online,”
- Today, core population is 5,284,000 above the level 16 years ago. Core employment is 796,000 below the level 16 years ago.
At its almost most dystopian, Twitter wants to take the serendipitous global conversation we’ve been having and instead replace it with a living dream world chosen for us algorithmically.
Advocates of net neutrality say that, by selecting the applications and services made available, zero-rated initiatives like Facebook’s Free Basics give private companies too much control over which parts of the Internet people see and use, and which they don’t. Free Basics is not really “free Internet”; it includes low-data versions of Facebook and other services from independent developers that must be submitted to Facebook for review.
People like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk don’t succeed on their own. We live in a world of the visceral abstract, in which our most important products come from the most unlikely ideas. Look at any marvel of our technological age, whether it be an iPhone, a self driving car or a miracle cure and you’ll find three things: An academic theory, a government program and an entrepreneurial instinct. Innovation is complex, requiring us to integrate a variety of efforts.
Being poor makes you suck at using money as a resource. My time was always cheaper growing up, so I'd rather spend time than spend money. Tangible inequalities — that which can be seen and measured, like money or access — get the majority of the attention. But inequalities in your mind can keep the deck stacked against you long after you've made it
Repair groups announced that they have formed The Repair Coalition, a lobbying and advocacy group that will focus on reforming the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to preserve the “right to repair” anything from cell phones and computers to tractors, watches, refrigerators, and cars. It will require manufacturers to sell parts to independent repair shops and consumers and prevent them from artificially locking down their products to would-be repairers.
A Chinese-led investor group is buying the Chicago Stock Exchange, also known as CHX, to eventually list Chinese companies on it, and also may use CHX's technology and model to start an equities exchange where it is based in China.
Put a value on this new transparency: an extra glimpse inside Alphabet's main profit engine has added $24 billion to the company's value, or more than twice the value of Twitter Inc.There is precedent for this. In the past 1 1/2 years, Amazon.com Inc., Netflix Inc. and Expedia Inc. disclosed more information about different parts of their businesses. Shares of all three rose.
While messaging has become central to our everyday lives, it’s currently only used in the narrow context of personal communications. What if we could extend messaging beyond this? What if messaging could transform the way we interact with computers the same way it transformed the way we interact with each other?
IBM is under a lot of pressure these days to turn itself around as its huge, cash-cow hardware business has been shrinking. (The acquired) companies are joining the IBM iX unit, which now employs a whopping 10,000 people. IBM claims that iX is the largest digital agency worldwide
The market is evolving ownership alternatives. A new one is “fractional car ownership”. General Motors, Ford, Audi and BMW are all reportedly trialling plans for several people to share leasing a car. It works with private jets...
Utilities don’t mind that solar is renewable, zero carbon and enjoys free fuel—as long as they own it. But solar is also modular and decentralized - they don’t want to compete with their own customers. Rooftop threatens both sunk utility investments in centralized fossil power plants and their rigid, “big to small—guaranteed return on capital” business model. Rooftop solar will force utilities to transform their business model to accommodate the small generator to large grid flow.
With $80 billion, Google could buy Uber and its Indian rival Ola and still have enough left over to buy Palantir. Or it could buy Goldman Sachs or American Express or Costco or eBay or a quarter of Amazon. Surely it could use those acquisitions to earn more than 2 cents on the dollar. General Motors now holds nearly half its value in cash. Apple holds more than a third.
If the CJEU rules that every web user, in Europe and beyond, is expected to verify the copyright status of every item on a page before linking to that page, it could effectively destroy the web as we know it today.
The retail team’s mission is to reimagine what shopping in a physical store would be like if you merged the best of physical retail with the best of Amazon.
Digital transformation is a threat to management practices that have existed for decades. Highly centralized decision-making is the work culture with the most negative impact on digital transformation.
The '1984' ad was to Super Bowl commercials what Joe Montana was to Super Bowl quarterbacks: a new standard of excellence. Before “1984,” nobody ever claimed that they watched the Super Bowl for the commercials. (But) it is a surprise that Apple is also responsible for the worst. During the 1999 Super Bowl, Apple cast the murderous computer from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey to frighten consumers into buying a Macintosh
When people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And there’s a cognitive cost. Multitasking makes it more difficult to organize thoughts and filter out irrelevant information, and it reduces the efficiency and quality of our work. Subjects who multitasked while performing cognitive tasks experienced significant IQ drops similar to what you see in individuals who skip a night of sleep or who smoke marijuana.
No other large countries have managed to build the vast 4G infrastructures the U.S. and Japan have deployed, yet American and Japanese LTE networks can’t match the speed offered by most of the world’s 4G operators.
A cryptic Apple error message is informing some iPhone owners that their devices, repaired by outsiders, are dead, in what some people view as an Apple effort to exert more control over repairs to its products. Killing a phone because of a replaced or faulty fingerprint sensor is harsh because the replaced sensors are often recycled Apple parts and function as well as the original. The policy appears to fit a recent pattern to undermine third-party vendors.
Seventy-one percent of Millennials are disengaged at their jobs. The disparity between expectation and reality is the reason.
Why are we still watching it? Is it stupid habit? Is it a sense of obligation? Are we hooked to the annual Super Bowl party? Are we addicts who like combining all of our drugs—watching football, drinking, eating, gambling—into one glorious binge. No other major sporting championship consistently falls as flat as does the Super Bowl. Sociologist Émile Durkheim described “collective effervescence”: in which members of a community, catalyzed by some overwhelming ritual observance, become of one mind. The concept is useful to understand sporting manias. Just as the ties that bind us to faith seem to defy rational explanation.
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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.
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