“I’m excited about augmented reality because unlike virtual reality, which closes the world out, AR allows individuals to be present in the world but allows an improvement on what’s happening. Most people don’t want to lock themselves out from the world. With AR you can, not be engrossed in something, but have it be a part of your world, of your conversation. That has resonance.”
Whole Foods reported its worst performance in a decade, announcing its sixth consecutive quarter of falling sales. The company is closing nine stores. Organics have become so thoroughly mainstream that organic chains now have to face big-box competitors. Mass-market retailers were responsible for 53.3% of organic food sales in 2015. Whole Foods created this space and had it all to themselves for years but now there's a lot of competition.
Should a customer in New York pay a higher price than someone from Ohio for the same service? Should a doctor in Ohio pay a higher price than a New York taxi driver? Should a Mac user be steered to a pricier hotel when shopping online? Hint: It's already happening.
Firms are experimenting with charging customers different prices and using alternate pricing plans, based on data and analytics that can maximize revenues and customer satisfaction.
A Kelley Blue Book poll in 2016 found that 51 percent of respondents would rather have full control of their vehicle, even if it would not be as safe as an autonomous one. And a AAA survey from the same year found a staggering 75 percent of respondents were afraid to ride in an autonomous car.
The printing press spread ethnic conflict as well as erudition, and did as much to deepen the theological division in Europe as it did to breed tolerance among different faiths. It has become simpler and cheaper to build supporters and align what they do. The technological gap between establishment parties and fringe movements has narrowed, as has the ability of outsider candidates to win. Neither wholly good nor wholly bad, social media favors the outsider over the insider, and the forces of instability over the defenders of the status quo.
VR amounts to exhilaration followed by discomfort and apathy—a journey that mirrors the technology’s trajectory as a business.VR headsets and software missed sales predictions by 29% last year. (Analysts) slashed projections for the market to $25 billion by 2021. Augmented reality (e.g., Pokémon Go), would generate a whopping $83 billion by the same date. VR is isolating - taking snubbing real-world companions for the distractions of your phone—to a new level."The hype surrounding VR reminds me of 3D printers."
More than ever, guests look to their phones and computers to research, book, stay in and communicate with hotels. That translates to critical technology needs in information security, mobile development and systems integration. Travel brands strive to understand how the experiences they provide make travelers feel.
Seven flights were conducted by Berkeley-based 3D Robotics on Jan. 10 at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, the busiest airport in the world. The permit required three spotters to be watching the drone during its flight and to coordinate closely with air traffic control.
What we underestimated was the effort that the entire company would have to make remote work work. Work boundaries break down, people missed out on things, technology is iffy, ideas happen in person, efficiency suffers, differences in working style get more acute. We still value giving our team flexibility to work efficiently. However, we don’t need to say “yes” to every new hire who wants to work remotely before proving themselves.
Apple stores have found a winning strategy by not following the conventional logic of using automation to lower labor costs. The company has deployed an army of tech-savvy sales employees toting digital gadgets to offer a novel shopping experience and to profitably expand its business. "We always wanted to increase productivity. The solution is not to hold back on innovation, but how do you keep people engaged." Machines are tools. If ownership is widely shared, people could boost productivity and increase both earnings and leisure.
A man was indicted on arson and insurance fraud after his Pacemaker data contradicted the story he was telling when (his) home burned down . Police obtained a warrant for the data stored on the device. Doctors concluded that the story the man's heart was telling didn't match the narrative coming out of his mouth: it was "highly improbable," due to his medical conditions, that (he) could do the collecting, packing and removal of items from his house, then carry them in the short period of time indicated
Musk argued that as AI becomes more sophisticated “there will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot can’t do better.” So we enter the realm of brain-computer interfaces. The theory is that with sufficient knowledge of neural activity it will be possible to create “neuroprosthetics” that could allow us to communicate complex ideas telepathically or give us additional cognitive or sensory abilities. (But others say) “the idea that digital machines will one day surpass human capacity is total baloney.”
"Soft costs"—which include signing up customers, installation, and maintenance—remain high, especially when you compare the U.S. with other leading markets, including Germany and Australia. Soft costs comprise about 67% of a total [U.S.] residential price. So while continued hardware cost reductions and technology innovation will continue to bring down overall system prices, 'dramatic' cost reductions will primarily come from reducing soft costs."
We have met the global supply chain, and it is us.
Leveraging emotion recognition technology that senses and analyzes expressions of emotion, cars will soon come equipped with the ability to perceive our reactions and moods and to respond accordingly. These “emotionally aware” vehicles will benefit the automotive industry and consumers.
The real risk isn’t that deep-pocketed internet giants would be unable to pay for telecom play. Rather, it’s that any would-be next big thing will instead be smothered in the cradle. In Snapchat’s IPO filing, the company listed the end of net neutrality as a potential threat to its long term prospects. Imagine what these changes might mean to a startup at the seed stage, with only a few million in investment.
We’ve lost the ability to discern that a short-term benefit for some users that’s subsidized by an unsustainable investment model will lead to terrible long-term consequences for society. We’re hooked on the temporary infusion of venture capital dollars into vulnerable markets that we know are about to be remade by technological transformation and automation
Many on Wall Street believe that strong sales of the iPhone 6S two years ago have left a larger-than-normal base of customers ready to upgrade.Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway said in a filing it more than tripled its stake in Apple during the December quarter to 57.4 million shares from 15.2 million shares.
People are not patient for long-form content. They want to skip to the part they need. There’s big money at stake: Companies spent an average of $1,004 per employee on training and certification materials. “It’s worth making the investment if you want top people to stay longer and do their job better.”
We need a new open source model that enables enterprises to contribute and leverage not just the AI and ML build technology but the information that reveals the assumptions and biases in AI & ML models (at the data or feature level) and feedback loops that enable consumers of AI & ML models to contribute back important data and feedback to all AI & ML products serving a certain use case or scenario.
When a worker is replaced by a machine, the wealth created benefits the shareholders. I propose, therefore, to tax this wealth—by applying the social contributions on the whole of the added value and not just on the work. Where robots outdo human productivity, the taxes on them would increase. But it also raises questions: What exactly is a robot's "added value," and can it be measured by the number of humans a machine replaces?
If your car can drive itself, why do you need a license? In October, the California Department of Motor Vehicles announced that it won’t require drivers licenses for self-driving cars if the federal government deemed them safe enough.
Data illustrate a binge-and-purge cycle to holiday spending.After the holidays, spending dropped in “vice” categories like alcohol, fast food, and beauty. At the same time, there was an uptick in spending on “virtue” categories like health clubs and diet foods.
Information is one of the most valuable assets of an organization. Global card fraud losses have reached over $16.3 Billion and will exceed $35 Billion by 2020. The most prepared firms are those who have already experienced some kind of a breach. They don’t just attempt to prevent attackers from getting in, they know that eventually they will, and take the next steps. They also understand that it isn’t a security technology issue, it’s a business issue.
Chinese mobile payments were nearly 50 times greater than those in the US last year. Digital payment platforms remain a critical part of the underlying fintech infrastructure in China but are also an important source of transaction and financial data that is increasingly being leveraged by the payment companies for new fintech platforms, products and services.
Humans’ reactions to bots’ interventions matter, and inform how we design bots and what we tell them to do. Calling out Twitter users for racist behavior ended up reducing those users’ racist communications over time – if the bot doing the chastising appeared to be a white man with a large number of followers, two factors that conferred social status and power. If the bot had relatively few followers or was a black man, its interventions were not successful.
Algorithms are aimed at optimizing everything. They can save lives, make things easier and conquer chaos. Still, experts worry they can also put too much control in the hands of corporations and governments, perpetuate bias, create filter bubbles, cut choices, creativity and serendipity, and could result in greater unemployment.
In Buzz, which reflects what consumers have heard about brands, five achieved statistically signifcant improvement: the NFL, Avocados From Mexico, Skittles, T-Mobile and Bai. In Word of Mouth, reflecting how much respondents have said about brands, just three made a statistically significant leap: the NFL, Bai and Busch. But in Purchase Consideration, scoring just what it sounds like, nobody made an immediate statistically significant gain.
A vast majority of the value that rolls out of factories is not produced in the factories themselves. It’s produced by people sitting in front of computers in their office — and increasingly, in their own homes. These are the people who tell the machines what to do.
Dorsey pointed to the growth over the last three months in statistics like daily active users, engagement, and tweet impressions that people see. The company has been breaking away from its traditional firehose, real-time format to help users find more interesting tweets that they may have missed.That seems to be paying off in terms of getting more current users to engage more often. And Dorsey credited the company’s machine learning efforts for that success.
The success rate for organizational redesign efforts is less than 25%. (It) is not a static, one-time event. It is an ongoing management discipline. Competitive work must be organized for effectiveness and mastery. Designing optimal organizations takes hard work, sacrifice, and significant trade-offs. They must be balanced against the realities and constraints of real life.
A businessman in southern France is suing ride-hailing company Uber over his wife's discovery of rides he took to see his lover. Despite logging off, the application continued to send notifications to her iPhone afterwards, revealing his travel history and arousing her suspicions.
We already know that people can form emotional bonds with Roomba vacuum cleaners and other relatively rudimentary robots. How will we relate to AI agents that speak to us in human voices and seem to understand us on a deep level? The descendants of Siri and Alexa could change our daily lives, thoughts, and relationships
"I never meant for it to get this big, to be honest."
As AI progresses, we will see even more applications that are super-intelligent in a narrow area and incredibly dumb everywhere else. The areas of successful application will get gradually wider and the areas of dumbness narrower, but not disappear. We will develop a zoo of highly diverse AI machines, each with a level of intelligence appropriate to its task
Financial dependence among 20-somethings has steadily grown in the past few decades. In the 1980s, fewer than half of this age group received parental support. By 2010 nearly 70% did. This helps explain the country’s decline in internal mobility. When the barriers to moving to metro areas with high-paying jobs are too high, it undermines the long-held belief that people can simply uproot themselves for better job opportunities.
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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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