Our bodies function in accord with a natural rhythm that comes from the Earth rotating on its axis once every 24 hours – give or take a few minutes. We aren’t made to live our lives in artificial light, waking to an alarm clock and sleeping to the blue light from a smartphone. The great circadian disruption through which we have lived since the invention of the electric light is bad for our physical and mental health.
The move to self-order systems and table service is one way to address one of the biggest problems the restaurants have faced: slower food delivery to customers, caused by more items on the menu. The thinking is that customers will be more willing to wait if they are sitting at a table instead of waiting at a counter. The new system would not reduce costs. But it would mean that workers might have slightly different jobs.
"In the next five to 10 years that the air fares on Ryanair will be free, in which case the flights will be full, and we will be making our money out of sharing the airport revenues; of all the people who will be running through airports, and getting a share of the shopping and the retail revenues at airports.”
At first, the fact that everything from Barbies to tea kettles were now hackable was kind of funny. (But) many devices have such abysmal interfaces and control systems that hacking and modifying them is the only path to securing them. Regardless of what you think about regulation vs. market solutions, governments will get involved in IoT because the risks are too great and the stakes too high. Computers are able to affect our world in a direct and physical manner.
The problem with voice assistants is they don’t have a screen on which to display ads.
And analysts have noticed. (So) voice searches would be harder for the company to monetize with ads. You could insert sponsored suggestions into a voice assistant’s answers, but it would never offer as many ads as a Google search results page. History shows that legacy media businesses are often vulnerable to new media tech.
Amazon said that mobile orders on Thanksgiving topped Cyber Monday last year, for example, while Walmart said that over 70 percent of website traffic on Thanksgiving was mobile. Target said that 60 percent of Thanksgiving sales were from mobile devices. iOS continued to drive larger sales than Android.
It uses real time data to you how busy a location is. It uses anonymised data to predict the number of people inside - and even makes a guess at how long they are likely to stay.
A kilometer-sized testing site began construction in the French village of Tourouvre in Normandy. The 2,800 square meters of solar panels are expected to generate enough to power all the public lighting in a town of 5,000 for a year. The next two sites will be in Calgary in Canada and in the U.S. state of Georgia. (There are) also plans to build them in Africa, Japan and throughout the European Union.
Instead of teaching ourselves to cook, we're teaching a machine to cook.
Retailers should be thinking not just about how to make the most of this holiday shopping season but also about the bigger picture: how to use big data to ensure their entire enterprise functions as one seamless unit. Sophisticated retailers are ensuring their marketing strategies are geared toward enabling customers to convert on any channel. “Why? Because they realize that a shopper who buys from them in-store and online is their most valuable kind of customer.
Shoppers (could) spend $27 billion on Black Friday, but will account for only 4.3 percent of spending. People are expected to spend $632 billion this season, up from $607 billion last year. But for the first time, more than half that growth will come from online shopping. Young people are turning to their computers and phones. Crowds Friday will tilt older. The low-end consumer is looking for the best deal, but the higher-end are looking for the best products and services.
Technological revolutions involve important activity becoming cheap, like the cost of communication or finding information. Machine intelligence is a prediction technology, so the economic shift will (result in) a drop in the cost of prediction. As the cost of prediction falls, activities that were prediction-oriented become cheaper but we will also use prediction to tackle problems for which (it) was not historically an input. The value of prediction-related human skills will fall, and the value of judgment-related skills will rise.
Can using computational tools to digest far more literature than a single human could read in the same amount of time tell us things we’d never have noticed on our own?
Experimental malware repurposes the speakers in earbuds or headphones to use them as microphones, converting the vibrations in air into electromagnetic signals to clearly capture audio from across a room.
49 million Americans will take to the roads. 90% of these trips are by car. The average trip is 400 miles, that implies five billion miles of road traveled. That means about 278 million gallons of gasoline. With gas averaging $2.13 per gallon, that means $592 million. The U.S. eats an estimated 50 million turkeys on Thanksgiving. The average 16 pound turkey costs $24 this year. That means Americans spend about $1.2B on turkeys for Thanksgiving.
A statistic is just a number. And numbers are as easily manipulatable, incomplete, and misleading as words are. Facts are complete and unbiased enough to tell you something relevant to understanding the past or predicting the future. They don’t care about your goals. They’re uninterested in your politics.The more context, the closer you get to fact.
The electronics retailer’s operating margins have rebounded and same-store sales are up. The first step aimed at preventing showroomers from buying elsewhere. The company committed to matching competitors’ prices and brought its prices in line with Amazon’s. Best Buy’s stores do double duty as e-commerce warehouses. Half of online orders are now picked up in store or shipped from a store, and 70% of Americans live within 15 minutes of a store.
"This is not a good setting for conflict resolution."
The problem is how smartphone apps such as Google Maps, Apple Maps, and Waze display routes. Their presentation is between minimalist and impoverished. Might overreliance on our apps' navigational systems atrophy the hippocampus? Based on animal studies and work in humans, people stand at greater risk of memory loss, Alzheimer's, dementia, depression, schizophrenia, and post-traumatic stress disorder. And, of course, getting lost.
Amazon has broached the idea of an exclusive package that could be sold alongside its Prime subscription, which could help attract new customers to the $99 a year service. (In addition to the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL and MLS), Amazon has also shown interest in sports leagues like the World Surf League, Liga MX and the Indian Premier League (cricket) as it prepares for the global expansion of its streaming video service.
Snap positioned its new glasses as a “toy,” which differentiated Spectacles from Google Glass, the failed smart glasses that made everyone question the future of wearables. Spectacles are for filming your friends partying at the football game, not for answering email. Who cares if there isn’t a killer use. What the company has done is create the kind of buzz and excitement around a product — and thus the Snap brand, which is prepping for an IPO.
Samsung's customers (are) fiercely loyal to their brand. Some 91 percent of Samsung users would purchase another Samsung smartphone, and 92 percent would buy another Samsung product. That was similar to the brand loyalty among iPhone owners. The recall was mostly limited to early adopters rather than the majority of Samsung's customer base, which limited negative user experiences."Your own personal experience trumps what you read."
For this year's holiday season, Wal-Mart is focused on improving in-store pickup of online orders and working to speed checkout times. E-commerce sales added 0.5% to the U.S. same-store sales figure, the largest to date. Wal-Mart has also slowed the pace of new store openings, instead investing to improve existing stores.(It) raised employee's' wages, added management training programs and trimmed inventory.
On the surface, empathy and “empathy” mean the same thing: the ability to put yourself into the shoes of another. But empathy connotes compassion and a broader concern for humanity, while “empathy” is a rebranding of the same, tired advice that’s been taught in business circles for thousands of years: know your audience.
A robot called Xiao Pang or “Little Chubby,” went wild at a Chinese trade show, shattering glass and sending a human bystander to the hospital. The robot is designed for education and aimed at children between the ages of 4 and 12. After this incident, however, parents will likely think twice before leaving a kid alone with this machine.
Recent deals to integrate the company’s digital assistant Alexa into various car brands point to the possibility that Amazon is increasing its focus on the $1.2 trillion in annual new/used car sales. Research revealed that half of Italians were willing to buy a vehicle online but 97 percent still preferred to pick it up at a traditional dealer. It’s not clear if Amazon has its own inventory of vehicles.
In practice, managers generally tend to discourage creativity. Nonconforming, creative individuals present more challenges for those who lead them. In a recent survey half the respondents reported they feel the need to conform. This need to hide your true self at work makes people more likely to feel burnt out or be looking for another gig. Pushing people to obey too many rules saps them of their energy, creativity, and commitment.
This year, I’m sharing my holiday shopping plan, honed from the advice of e-commerce insiders and data firms. It doesn’t require extreme couponing, or even sniffing out Black Friday doorbuster deals—just the command of an army of digital Santa’s elves: apps, bots and smartphone cameras. When websites haul out the virtual holly, it pays not to believe the hype.
As the financial world faces dismal returns and investor criticism over high fees, hedge fund managers are turning to computers to make decisions that used to be left to humans. Celebrity investors are being replaced by Ph.D.s who develop mathematical equations for trading and systems to scrape huge sets of data for patterns.With more investor money going toward firms that build models to trade on, there is some concern that these models will begin to look similar.
Cloud computing doesn’t always get the same attention as consumer apps and phones, but it could dominate the balance sheet at these companies. Amazon and Google, known for consumer-oriented services, believe cloud computing could become their primary source of revenue. AI services will provide tools that allow businesses to build machine learning services they couldn’t build on their own.
A primary reason for leaving is poor management. 84% believe it’s important for managers to admit mistakes, yet only 51% say their employer or supervisor takes responsibility for their actions. An employee is nearly 10 times more likely to be very satisfied with their job when they are led by someone they feel is honest and trustworthy. Those who feel that their superiors do not exhibit such behaviors are four times more likely to be looking for a different job.
The presence of gigabit service is associated with a $27 decrease in the average monthly price of broadband plans. The data suggests even customers who don't purchase gigabit Internet benefit from its availability. (With) two providers of gigabit Internet (in a market), the price for gigabit Internet will decline between 34 and 37 percent
An in-store sign showed a picture of a chorizo burrito and a calorie count of 300. The chorizo was 300. Once you add a tortilla, white rice, black beans, tomato salsa, and cheese you get 1,050 calories. Consumers deserve accurate information about products, and many companies deserve to be sanctioned for misrepresenting ingredients and nutritional value. But a single misleading sign does not a fraud make.
The SEC sets in motion a timetable to bring to reality its Consolidated Audit Trail, a single data warehouse that collects the millions of orders and quotes that daily pass across US equity and options markets in real-time. (It) would be the world’s largest repository of securities transactions. It would have to be able to process more than 58bn records of orders and quotes a day, and maintain data on more than 100m customer accounts.
The nature of our cities, AirBnB’s business, and trends in politics means Chesky will forever have an evolving task to keep AirBnB on the right side of public and official opinion. The problem has never been the individual renters that are renting part of their home when they’re on vacation, (it's)property owners dedicating entire buildings to AirBnB. So, in many respects, broadening out what the company does is a wise move.
Organizations sabotage their own performance by providing financial incentives for hitting certain goals. Organizations would be wiser to tap workers' intrinsic motivation — their desire to do a good job for the sake of doing a good job. Human motivation is complex. Financial incentives can be demotivating. "When we pay, we see an increase in productivity, but we also create long-term disassociation: 'Really? That's it? That's the reason I'm here?'"
To create its Best Of lists, Uber looked at restaurants where users have requested rides to the most. For example, its top 10 brunch spots are determined by spots that receive the most traffic on weekends, while best fine dining are places where most UberBlack or UberSelect riders frequent. The most interesting is local favorites, which identifies businesses where the same rider repeatedly visits.
Only a third of Newman’s Own customers said they realized the company gave away its profits. That figure was even lower among millennials. (And) Millennials especially have demonstrated a propensity to favor companies with a generous mission. “This is a perfect example of a great model that is not positioned well for the generation they’re trying to influence.”
Much has been made of wearable technology—wristbands, glasses, and other such devices—but as the apparel industry prepares for a connected tomorrow, it’s the clothing itself that designers are hooking up to the internet. The big task ahead is to combine these functions to make RFID tags work directly for customers.
With greater use of technology in many facets of life going forward the biggest beneficiaries will typically be those who get there first, not the second or third adopters. This is how competition works. Early adopters reap the biggest gains which attracts competitors who (want) that same edge. Eventually this levels the playing field and competitive advantages slowly subside.
Helping cities to run more efficiently – water management, parking, safety, energy stuff - (is one opportunity). The second is consumer-facing products and services that make life better, easier, and more convenient for inhabitants of cites. How could you make construction itself more affordable? How can you build homes for 30 percent less? Could municipalities make money from selling data?
The two TV and movie services have been duking it out over customers and original content for years, but Amazon's new expansion raises the stakes. Earlier this year, Netflix expanded its streaming video around the world and has been burning cash to make it profitable. Amazon, on the other hand, is flush with cash.
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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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