By leveraging billions of historical data points, predictions are made and then real-time performance data is applied to revisions. This is not a one-off process. The technology is constantly taking insights from user behavior and feeding them back into the algorithms, enabling personalized content experiences at scale.The power of machine learning and artificial intelligence lies in their ability to achieve massive scale, while maintaining relevancy.
As the supply of books and comics ripe for adaptation dwindles, TV producers are looking to podcasts for fresh material—and finding stories with audiences as loyal as any book club's inner circle.Like books, podcasts prove that a story works, that listeners like it and will keep coming back to follow it. More importantly, podcasts can prove an idea's viability at a fraction of the cost of producing a TV pilot. “It’s essentially a prototype of a produced franchise.”
Amid lackluster apps with rote learning and shoot-em-up games, Lego Boost stands out because children build both the objects and the code to make them come alive. Lego executives say Boost isn’t goal-oriented like educational programs, though children come away with coding fundamentals like sequencing and looping. The Lego app communicates how to use it without any text or tutorials. It does provide motor and sensor controls for the type of children who go to Harvard at 14.
Their automated valet system is debuting at the parking garage for the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, making it easy for drivers to leave their vehicle, trust the system to negotiate the multi-story parking facility, find and park in a spot. There are sensors throughout the structure, and on the car, providing info about where vehicles are located throughout the facility, as well as for the vehicle to sense and react to objects in its path, including pedestrians.
High-end models of Roomba, iRobot’s robotic vacuum, collect data as they clean, identifying the locations of your walls and furniture. This helps them avoid crashing into your couch, but it also creates a map of your home that iRobot is considering selling to Amazon, Apple or Google. "Everything that can be connected will be connected, and a corollary is that all the data that can be collected will be collected.”
Think about (how) telecommuting and telepresence change the interaction people have on a day-to-day basis in an office. Consider the context in which you use robots, AI, and machine learning; determine if it’s really the best solution for the situation. Explaining AI and how it’s working and maintaining systems will create demand for tech skills, but also for soft skills, such as empathy trainers to help machines analyze the needs of customers to ensure machines are effective in dealing with them. "If you completely automate, people feel helpless."
Amazon is trying to get a trademark through the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for every iteration of the cyan blue rings that appear when Amazon’s Echo smart speakers are listening to a person. The other ring colors that the Echo can produce—including red for muted, orange for setup mode, yellow for messages, and green for calls—were not included in the trademark filing.
"You have to build one with clean IP. That is nearly impossible. The consequence is that everybody's going to be infringing everybody's patents eventually." The implication, in this case, is that everybody will be blocked from building the best version of the product being developed unless all participants play well together. (But) the leaders in this space are willing to spend more time in court over the next five years protecting their self-driving patents than perfecting the driverless car.
Despite its appeal among celebrities and public figures, Twitter has struggled to sustain its user growth even as it invests in features and live content to help draw viewers and boost user engagement.The positive contributions to MAU growth from product improvements were offset by lower seasonal factors. It is in competition for advertising dollars with Facebook and Snapchat. "If you can't accelerate MAU interest given the daily tweets from POTUS, not sure when you will."
Venture firms realized that teaching a founding CEO how to grow a company is easier than teaching a professional CEO how to find the new innovation for the next product cycle. The problem was that, at some point past employee 1,000, the big payoffs from pre-public stock ended. The CEO never noticed that the payoff ended for 95% of his company. He didn’t realize the mantra of “You really have to want to work here or you ought to leave” rang hollow for the latest employees.
Fiber was largely a symbolic project meant to shame the biggest ISPs into offering faster internet speeds, thus creating an environment of ubiquitous lightning-quick internet that Google could service with its bread-and-butter products like Search and YouTube. (But) digging up city streets to lay fiber-optic cable is wildly expensive. Alphabet revealed Fiber made up the majority of capital expenditures for its “Other Bets,” (and) there’s scant evidence that consumers are willing to pay for gigabit internet.
Technology is creating winners in real estate even as it disrupts traditional industries such as retailing. While mall owners face growing pressure from the rise of e-commerce, the increase in web activity is fueling demand for wireless infrastructure and racks of telecommunication equipment that need to be stored somewhere. Total returns from data centers were 22%, up from the 4.9% return of all equity REITs, and the 8.8% return for the S&P 500-stock index. Total returns from infrastructure REITs, which include cell towers, were (also) 22%.
People will be able to choose the things they want to learn about. For $80, Helix sequences the most important part of the genome. That information is digitized. Helix doles out information to companies selling apps through Helix. People can choose from categories like ancestry, fitness, health, and nutrition and pay as they go. The average customer probably can’t discern which products are based on sound science. “Promoting tests with little scientific backing runs the risk of inflating customer expectations and undermining confidence in clinically useful genetic tests,”
Marketing and advertising technologies chiefly serve two separate purposes. Ad tech focuses on the delivery of creative and communication of actual ads (programmatic or otherwise), while mar tech is more holistically about loyalty and one-to-one customer relationships. “Context is as nuanced in digital environments as it is in physical interactions. It requires historical data, as well as current, last millisecond data that describes the situation. Profiles must be globally accessible and contextual. And they need to be fresh and scalable for real-time decision making.”
Saguache (County) isn’t alone in lacking broadband. Using data from 240 million voting-age Americans, only 5.6% of adults were estimated to have broadband. For $30 a month, New York City internet providers offer basic packages of 100 Mbps service. In Saguache, if a household wants a download speed of 12 Mbps with an upload speed of 2 Mbps, they can expect to pay $90. If broadband was as good in rural areas as it is in urban ones, online retail sales would be “at least $1 billion higher.”
(Glass) alerts mechanics when they need to use a torque wrench. When the Wi-Fi-enabled torque wrench starts to apply torque, it shares the information with the server. (It) then tells the mechanic whether they are properly tightening and sealing (and) will verify the correct value in real time before the mechanic moves on to the next step. Efficiency improvements were between 8 and 11% which might grow once the learning curve for the devices is mastered.
The bot’s victory gave Big Blue a shot at conjuring up a new line of business at the perfect possible moment. Six years later, IBM is even more urgently in need of new business, with quarterly results showing that revenue has declined for 21 consecutive quarters. IBM turned Watson into an umbrella brand promising a bewildering variety of bold new applications, from understanding the emotional tone of Tweets to scouring genomes for mutations. (But) Watson risks being eclipsed by competing AI platforms from Google, Amazon, and Microsoft.
The influx of capital has helped startups stay private longer with money that in past eras would have been raised on the public markets. Last year, U.S. venture firms raised 30 funds totaling at least $500 million each. That is up from 17 in 2015 and the most in a year since 2000 when there were 54. “It feels like people are saying, we want to double down on the winners.” Those returns, however, are mostly on paper since so few startups are holding initial public offerings,
NFC chips are an extension of the chips you’d find in contactless smart cards or microchipped pets: passive devices that store very small amounts of information. A Swedish rail company also lets people use implants as a substitute for fare cards. They contain “no GPS tracking at all” — because again, it’s comparable to an office keycard. Participating employees will have the chips implanted between their thumb and forefinger. In the US, installing them is a form of biohacking.
Rather than Google, Facebook or Microsoft, increasingly Chinese duo Alibaba and Tencent are the driving forces behind the Southeast Asia’s most promising startups. Southeast Asia has 260 million internet users with 3.8 million more going online per month. China has 731 million internet users, half of which are mobile — but it does mean that, alongside India, Southeast Asia is a region of serious tech development potential. The region’s ‘internet economy’ — i.e. all business generated from the web — will be worth $200 billion by 2025.
Nondisparagement clauses are increasingly found in employment contracts, sometimes in an offer letter, to create a blanket of silence around a company. Their use has become widespread in tech, from venture firms and start-ups to the biggest companies. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board (are) studying whether they have a chilling effect on speaking up about wrongdoing. Employees “have to give up their constitutional right to speak if they want to be part of the work force.”
The key factor in Alphabet's second quarter earnings was an increase in traffic acquisition costs (TAC) in the core Google search business. It's clear that pricing is coming down in the basic paid clicks space, and that is a result of both competitive pressures and a shifting revenue mix. Google charges a lower cost-per-click for mobile ads, and algorithmically-generated ads, called programmatic in the industry, are also lower priced than core desktop search query ads.
Picking is the biggest labor cost in most e-commerce distribution centers, and among the least automated. Swapping in robots could cut the labor cost of fulfilling online orders by a fifth. Each attempt—successful or not—feeds into a database. The bigger that data set, the faster and more reliably the machines can pick. “This thing could run 24 hours a day, they don’t get sick; they don’t smoke.”
“Digital” used to be synonymous with “IT.” Now, digital drives goals from marketing to sales to HR. Top performers, reporting revenue growth and profit margin increases above 5% for the past three years and expected growth of 5% for the next three have a better understanding of the human experience that surrounds digital technology, prioritizing user experience specialists and creating better customer experience through their digital initiatives. (But) despite the importance of digital, investment in emerging technologies (has grown) just 1% in 10 years.
“Over the past quarter, the AR industry witnessed several notable moves by major players, including Facebook and Apple, which immediately led to a robust increase in developer activity, as well as extensive coverage in the market. “These strides are driven primarily by device infrastructure and software development tools.”
Data science jobs in industries like information technology can take twice as long to fill than the national benchmark average for B.A.+ jobs of 45 days.1 Data science and analytics jobs are often multidisciplinary and require an ability to link analytics to creating value for the organization. Candidates must also demonstrate skills related to problem-solving such as communication, creativity, and teamwork. 67% of the job openings are analytics-enabled and require functional or domain expertise outside of data science
Economists and industry experts agree that the United States faces unfair competition and artificially low prices that have damaged the domestic steel industry. (But) retaliation by exporters hit by the tariff (China) and importers that would absorb the steel no longer headed to the US (the European Union) seems a certainty. “Many countries view food security as a legitimate national security concern. If the US cites national security others will do the same.” (And) there are far more manufacturing workers in industries buying steel than selling it.
Earlier this year, Google launched its Google for Jobs initiative and its job search feature in Google Search to help job seekers find the right job. Now it’s launching this new tool to help businesses manage their candidates. The missing piece is giving businesses tools for managing job posting and maybe posting them directly to Google’s new jobs widget in Search. Google is now looking to use the G Suite tools and back-end services it has developed over the last few years to solve problems in very specific verticals.
Identity is not static, with over 75 million people changing their phone carriers every year, 45 million changing their phone numbers, 60 million people moving and 2 million people legally changing their name (in the US). 60% of data is out of date in less than two years. With so much focus on myopic targeting and short-term goals, significant challenges face a complex digital media supply chain (with) inadequate measurement and metrics. Since most online data elements are not tied to the offline world, they rarely give the full picture of your customer.
Over the next five years, the number of tablets in use is expected to decline an average of 1% each year while the number of smartphones should increase by about 7% annually. Big phones are to blame, especially in developing markets like China and India where most — 65% and 62%, respectively — smartphone owners have big screens, between 5 inches and 6 inches in diagonal. Just 6.4% of the population in China and 1.1% in India have tablets,
Intel completely eliminated the group. The company was planning to take a step back from the business after its acquisition of the Basis fitness watch didn't pan out as expected. Intel completely eliminated the group. Intel once hoped that it would rule the wearables category alongside Apple and Fitbit. The company's New Technologies Group, which looks at cutting-edge business areas, is now focusing on augmented reality.
In the future, the ability for deep processing of networks to automatically adjust and tune connections with increasing volumes of data will improve the process of learning. Networks will learn which portions of the data are more predictable than others, in a way that reduces the dependency on human data scientists to guide the process. The potential for getting more accurate results is leading to the excitement that we currently are experiencing as hype.
Americans have an immature conception of technology that fetishizes innovation and demeans upkeep as mere drudgery. "Innovation” refers only to the very early phases of technological development and use. It also tends to narrow the scope of technology to digital gadgets of recent vintage: iPhones, social media apps and so on. A more expansive conception of technology would take into account the diverse array of tools, including subways and trains, that humans use to help us reach our goals. (And) maintenance is a big business.
Generation Z and Millennials now make up 48% of the U.S. generational composition. Both Gen Z and Millennials are more multicultural than previous generations. Gen Z had high penetration numbers for devices and services. They also benefit from the technological choices of the older, and higher earning, members of their households. This generation has the highest penetration numbers for more expensive devices, such as enabled smart TVs (37%), video game consoles (73%) and tablets (78%).
The S&P 500 tech sector is trading at 23.2 times the past 12 months’ earnings. That is far below the 70.3 times the prior 12 months of earnings on March 27, 2000, when the tech sector peaked. The share of net income contributions to the S&P 500 from today’s tech sector is much higher than it was in the dot-com era. Tech stocks have become increasingly profitable, increasing profits by 18% in 2017 from a year earlier, topping the S&P’s 14% growth.
The digital revolution, reducing transactional costs, has accelerated recently with increases in data, mobile interfaces, and artificial intelligence, reshaping customer expectations and creating the potential for every sector with a distribution component to have its borders redefined. Digitization is changing the boundaries of the company by reducing frictional costs of trading, measurement, and maintaining trust. Rising customer expectations mean sustaining customer relationships will depend on factors that defy analytical formulae: brand, message, and the emotions your products and services can inspire.
It’s no longer true that “seeing is believing.” Images are increasingly doctored by algorithms like neural nets to look realistic. New uses of neural networks include generating modern art that 75 % of human subjects attribute to a fellow flesh-and-blood human. (And) A.I.-generated speech and video will be indistinguishable from the real thing. (In) recently published research, respondents misidentified 40% of doctored images as real.
Self-driving cars will create a $7 trillion "passenger economy" by 2050, with 250 million hours of commuting time per year dedicated to these new spaces. Some of that cash could come for automakers by selling in-car advertising but even more could come from the increased productivity of those hours. The car as a smart mobile workspace model is already being put into motion.
Foreigners, led by the Chinese, invested $153 billion in housing in the United States in the year that ended in March, up 49% from the previous year. If foreign buyers are looking for assets and not residences, that housing may sit empty. House prices rise faster than wages, until a good job no longer pays for access to nearby housing (and) it pushes first-time buyers out of local markets. Across an entire city, those costs outweigh the benefits of foreign investment.
How much does a virtual-reality environment enhance the power of storytelling? In traditional visual storytelling, the whole reason to have directors and editors is to provide a (literal) point of view. VR demands that you, the viewer, take on those duties. For most regular people — i.e., not tech types or bleeding-edge creatives — VR requires too much effort. It’s exhausting and, too big a commitment for your average consumer. How big can virtual reality really become? How can VR deliver enough bang for the buck to ever become a mass consumer market.
In the early days of the smartphone, every new model brought huge leaps in functionality. But these days it’s tougher to make major advances that motivate users of older phones to upgrade. Cutting-edge technologies are going to cost more and initially be available in limited quantities. The risk is a top-of-the-line iPhone will make the iPhone 7s look dull, boring, and unworthy. Apple could end up with long waits for the expensive phone and a drop in overall iPhone sales.
 |
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 |  |
