Every medium that has ever been popular online — from email to the web to social networks like Facebook — has been pervaded by things that are passed along from one user to another. This is not the case on Snapchat. Though Snapchat has introduced some limited means of forwarding people’s snaps, the short life of every snap means there is no means for content to become a viral hit within the app. There is, instead, authenticity.
More adults live with their parents areas where the cost of living, and thus the bar one must clear to live independently, is high. Having more education means it’s less likely you’ll live at home. Males and females are virtually even when it comes to living at home.
While fully autonomous cars might still be some years off, it’s not too early to start thinking more broadly about the role that cars play in today’s society. By 2020, up to 98 percent of new vehicles will ship with internet connectivity.As we approach higher rates of connectivity among vehicles on the road, we can unlock new opportunities to drive value from the network as a whole.
Daily active use among U.S. iPhone users is less than 4 percent of what it was at its peak in August. (The company) has responded with a steady stream of changes, including tweaks to gameplay, rewards for users who play more often and special events that make it easier for those at higher levels to advance.
The FCC writes that sponsored data plans from the telecom giants are a threat to net neutrality. “We have reached the preliminary conclusion that these practices inhibit competition, harm consumers, and interfere with the ‘virtuous cycle’ needed to assure the continuing benefits of the Open Internet.”
The gap these companies are trying to fill is between customer expectations and costly execution. On the retailer’s side, the end of Black Friday madness is the beginning of a long, expensive period of return madness, a norm they created. In the early grab for online market share, retailers went for sales at any cost—free delivery, free returns and cart optimization. Sales have grown, but shoppers have been re-educated and returns are growing faster than sales.
The shift of spending from stores with inventory controls to online marketplaces where it's tough to distinguish between fake and authentic is fueling a rise in counterfeiting. Counterfeits made up $500 billion of global imports in 2013. A hot-sell(er) on Amazon encourages counterfeiters to make knockoffs, steal sales and damage a brand with few consequences. Amazon (now) requires merchants to prove they have the brand's permission to sell them online.
There's an exodus of digital talent from (traditional businesses) to digital-native companies. (And) Google has more yo-yo'ers than the other digital natives combined, which seems to validate the ROI on those features of its work culture. Facebook, Apple, and Amazon also consistently attract talent from other digitally native tech companies, including younger ones. (But) Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb have no trouble luring away Big Four alums with offers of equity
There are about 300 to 500 key components and subassemblies (in your phone). But pull apart the mini cluster-assemblies, and the number is 2,000. With sales of 1.5bn a year, smartphones are a monster market. But what’s the next big driver? 80m cars shipped a year would equate to two weeks of smartphone production.The numbers pan out miserably for the 2m virtual reality headsets expected to be sold; the 12m annual servers sold or even the 20m Apple watches
Interacting in a new data-driven culture can be difficult. One particular challenge is how (managers) request new data or analytics from data scientists. They don’t know the right questions to ask, the correct terms to use, or the range of factors to consider to get the information they need. In the end, analysts are left uncertain about how to proceed, and managers are frustrated when the information they get isn’t what they intended.
HP has created a working prototype of an unusual system that leans heavily on memory technology to boost calculating speed. In conventional computers, processors are the focal point of design while memory is regarded as a scarce commodity. (It's) designed to lower the cost of sending data over fiber-optic connections and could make it as fast to transmit data from one machine to another as within a single system. It could also stack components vertically to save space
While most economics models assumed people were basically rational, human decision-making is biased in systematic, predictable ways. The advice world is built on the premise that we are chess masters who make decisions. But when it comes to the really major things we mostly follow our noses. If we want to understand and shape behavior, we should look less at decision-making and more at curiosity. “The way the creative process works is that you first say something and later, sometimes years later, you understand what you said.”
Deliveries from autonomous, six-wheeled rolling cooler bots are handling the “last mile” of food delivery from takeout restaurants.These bots are designed to be tamper-proof, so passers-by won’t just smell your delicious delivery curry and crack one open to score an unpaid meal.
The evolution points to the role that nontraditional education organizations might play in addressing the needs of workers and employers in the fast-changing labor market for technology skills.“For every Stanford graduate, there are hundreds of people without that kind of pedigree who can do just as well. ”Acquiring skills is one thing, but more than 900 graduates have obtained jobs, including more than 20 workers at Google
Official data in China still lack key metrics, such as a regular survey-based unemployment rate. The question is, will the government allow this type of thing to flourish? If they start showing things starkly at odds with official data, that’ll be a real test of whether the regulatory environment is going to be supportive of these types of gauges.
The goal of the metrics is to gauge customer satisfaction and a customer’s intent to recommend (the company) to friends. It looks at trends in the metrics as a way to measure and improve the customer experience. (The company reviews results) weekly to see if guest satisfaction is building over time and if there is any variability between different areas of the establishment. Customers who have a better experience have more interactions with the staff.
Worldwide smartphone shipments are projected to rise just 0.6% this year compare(d) with 10.4% in 2015. All signs point to 2016 being the first full year of declining shipments for Apple's iPhone. Apple's shipments declined in the first three quarters of this year and are expected to decline again in Q4. (But) Apple took 106% of smartphone industry profits in the third quarter. Its share is more than 100% because other vendors lost money in the business,
Uber’s huge valuation was always predicated on global dominance. If Uber’s valuation and dominance were to be welfare enhancing, Uber’s efficiency and competitive advantages would be overwhelming, and there would need to be clear evidence of Uber’s ability to generate large profits and consumer welfare benefits out of these advantages. The question becomes why haven’t these “disruptive innovations” yet produced competitive cost advantages or profits?
Congress passed a law protecting the right of US consumers to post negative online reviews without fear of retaliation from companies.The act voids penalties or fees on customers for posting online reviews as well as those that require customers to give up the intellectual property rights related to such reviews.
As the electric power industry shifts from a model where individual local utilities have a monopoly on electricity provision in a region to a much more dynamic market, prosumers will be able to make and sell a variety of new products and services like frequency regulation. In addition to selling power reductions, companies will be able to sell other currently-hidden services produced by their buildings, solar systems, or vehicle fleets back into the grid.
Silicon Valley has become rich like ancient Rome because it collects “tributes from all its provinces”. We have gone through various globalizations. From nomadic to the discovery of the "new world", industrial and post-industrial. In previous "globalizations" the times of innovation diffusion were slow. Now the change invades our daily lives (with) increasingly aggressive competitors who come from distant worlds.
The global insurance industry is worth nearly $5 trillion, and insurance companies are at risk of losing share to new entrants.because these legacy players have been even slower to modernize than their counterparts in other financial services industries. This has created an opportunity for insurtechs. These startups are leveraging new technology and a better understanding of consumer expectations to increase efficiencies in the industry.
In the 1990s merchants were guided by instinct, and planners adhered to the calendar with four seasonal collections. (But) Gap’s market value has shrunk to $10 billion, from $40 billion at its 2000 peak. (The company) is pushing executives to pay more attention to Google analytics and market-research data to monitor consumer tastes and to stagger product releases throughout the year and shorten the time for items to go from drafting to stores to take into account the most recent data trends. “There is now science and art, and they can come together,”
You might guess that manufacturing in the US is in a secular downtrend. It's not. Real output is at an all-time high. It has nearly doubled in the past 30 years.The downtrend in the importance of manufacturing employment is more than 70 years old. Manufacturing jobs have fallen with new technology and other means for increasing productivity. The number of employees needed to make the same output has more than halved in the past 30 years.
The cybercrime disrupted Muni's internal computer system and email but did not affect the actual running of buses, light rail, historic street cars and the city's famed cable cars. It’s unlikely the transit system was specifically chosen as a target; ransomware is an opportunistic and financially motivated attack method. "We never considered paying the ransom. We have an IT team on staff who can fully restore all systems."
A lot of data is useless and even the good stuff needs to be laboriously cleaned of erroneous bits and duplicates. Social media in particular requires a good scrub. Thousands of fake Twitter accounts post misinformation that can affect stock prices. “Humans have created a huge amount of low-grade data, but failed to realize the rule that quantity does not equal quality.”
Patients must give their informed consent before undergoing any other genetic test. There are no laws that restrict what patients can do with their genetic information, or that require patients’ family to be involved in the consent. This raises questions about who owns an individual’s genetic code, since family members share many genetic traits and may harbor the same genetic abnormalities associated with certain diseases. “Your genes don’t really belong to you.”
Marketers tend to become obsessed with customer acquisition—at the expense of driving loyalty. In CMO profiles on LinkedIn, 90% highlight customer acquisition, while few speak about customer retention. It’s happening (because): the solutions on the demand gen side outweigh those on the loyalty side, it’s easier to measure impact on the lead gen side, and it is easier to measure new revenue from new customers than revenue saved by reducing churn.
Gauging the success of those advertisements has been a struggle, highlighted by Facebook’s recent admission that it had miscalculated video viewing metrics for years. Today’s metrics around online video say “if I get you 10 million two-second impressions, that’s 20 million seconds of viewing, and that is the same thing as one million 20-second impressions." But those two things are not the same thing at all.
The idea of starting your online shopping on the Monday after Thanksgiving is a vestige of the pre-smartphone era. Social media mentions of Cyber Monday have fallen a staggering 82 percent compared with last year. 108.5 million people shopped online over the holiday weekend, compared with 103 million last year. A record $3.34 billion was spent online on Black Friday, up 21.6 percent from the previous year.
To be intelligent is not merely to be capable of inferring logically from rules or statistically from regularities. Before that, one has to know which rules are applicable, an art requiring awareness of sensitivity to situation. Programmers are very clever, but they are not yet clever enough to anticipate the vast variety of contexts from which meaning emerges. Hence even the best algorithms will miss things
I.B.M. exposed its algorithms to the entire recipe archive of Bon Appétit, as well as to recent research in “hedonic psychophysics”—“the psychology of what people find pleasant.” The algorithms also took note of which ingredients tended to be combined, and inferred the roles they seemed to play in a dish. The result is a browser-based Web app that allows users to generate recipes by selecting a permutation of ingredients and a style of cuisine.
Metaphors are valuable tools in business, particularly when people need to communicate complex, dry ideas. By associating an unfamiliar idea with one that is commonplace, you can spark better understanding of complex ideas.Neuroscientists know there's a connection between emotions and decision-making. If you can't offer your audience an emotional reaction, chances are they won't feel spurred on to action—encouraged to make any real decisions.
This year there have been 96 IPOs, compared with 170 for all of 2015. Those offerings have raised $17.2 billion in 2016, below last year’s $30.3 billion. Market volatility, along with the paperwork and expense involved in going public - it can cost $1 million or more to do the regulatory work necessary to make an IPO - (are deterrents). (And) they fear having to answer to public shareholders each quarter—as opposed to a few private-equity executives.
Customer relationships and data are at risk for capture by new-entrant mobility providers offering increasingly integrated travel planning (including) mobility services and information. The number of companies operating in the mobility space will increase and become more diverse, likely leading to more co-opetition. And as the transportation landscape becomes more diverse and competitive, the revenue pie will be split more ways.
As humans, we crave being known for something. Agile work is the new organizational pattern, in a long tradition of companies styling themselves after the technology they consume. We’re trying to figure out the right ways to collaborate. If you’re constantly moving in and out of teams, what’s your identity? Brief periods of personal control become huge, like individual lighting or heat, or a quiet corner where you sit alone."We don’t talk about work/life balance. It’s work/life mix."
The course of history was determined by a small chance event which had no seeming importance when it happened. This is why predicting the future, even with immense computing power, is impossible. The effects of randomness, with small inputs (be)ing disproportionate and massive, makes prediction very difficult. That’s why we must appreciate the role of randomness. “Each of us human beings is the product of a long sequence of accidents, any of which could have turned out differently.”
Desperate measures to solve a festering market-share debacle? IE has dropped to 4th place with a 10% share. A few years ago, before the arrival of Chrome, IE was the number one browser.
Donald Trump's supporters are more likely to live in areas where economists expect technology to replace jobs in the near future. Counties with the most “routine” jobs—including manufacturing and clerical work, which are more susceptible to automation and offshoring— were far more likely to vote for Trump.
Researchers achieved a leap in the speed and performance of a machine learning system by, among other things, imbuing technology with attributes that function similar to how animals are thought to dream. (This) helped the system learn faster by asking it to maximize several different criteria at once, similar to the way newborn babies learn to control their environment to gain rewards -- like increased exposure to visual stimuli they find pleasurable or interesting.
People think Ive might be on his way out since his promotion to chief design officer. The skeptic’s take is this allows Ive to be less involved and that the chief design officer title is ceremonial. (But) Ive loves Apple, feels a responsibility to the legacy of his collaboration with Steve Jobs, and whatever aspirations he has for the remainder of his career, they’re only possible at Apple. If Ive (has) one step out the door, he’s one step out the door of being a designer. That doesn’t sound right
Funding of R&D has shifted dramatically. Support from the government has waned, from nearly 2% of GDP during the 1960s to 0.6% today. Corporate R&D has grown to 2%. (But) not all R&D is created equal. For companies, spending is speculative with an uncertain, far distant, payoff. “As we became more sophisticated in quantifying things we became less and less willing to take risks. The spreadsheet is the weapon of mass destruction against creative power.”
 |
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 |  |
