There’s not much in the ads —just the Golden Arches and the product name (and not even that for the fries), against solidly colorful backdrops. The point is that McDonald’s food is so well known and understood that it speaks for itself, even in its absence. Also, it’s “so good that in the end, there is only one crumb left.”
In the 100 largest metro areas in the U.S. between 2012 and 2016 a 10% increase in Airbnb listings leads to a 0.39% increase in rents and a 0.64% increase in house prices.“Between 2012 and 2016, rents rose by 2.2% annually [on average], so a 0.39% increase isn’t small." Airbnb takes supply out of the long-term rental market, which caters to residents, and reallocates it to the short-term market, which caters to tourists. This reduces the supply of long-term rental units and increases the price.
Researchers discovered that an ad purchaser can see when a person visits a location within 10 minutes of that person’s arrival. They were also able to track a person’s movements during a morning commute by serving location-based ads to the target’s phone. A target needed to stay in one location for roughly four minutes before an ad was served. “Anyone from a foreign intelligence agent to a jealous spouse can easily on a modest budget use these ecosystems to track another individual’s behavior.”
The robots are 50 percent more productive than their human counterparts and can scan shelves significantly more accurately and three times faster. Store employees only have time to scan shelves about twice a week. the move is part of a broader effort to digitize its stores to make shopping faster.
Whether personalized pricing catches on is now up to consumers. Will shoppers be comfortable knowing that the prices they are offered may be higher than those presented to others? Will buyers relish “electronically bargaining” to outwit sellers? Retailers first “negotiate” with each customer by personalizing prices based on their profile. Will (shoppers) check prices on different devices, asking friends what price they’re quoted. Or will they become fed up and steer clear of web retailers that price profile? Amazon is stating that all of its customers see the same prices — will other retailers be so clear-cut?
One knock on venture-backed, e-commerce startups over the years is that they are sometimes built around the tastes of venture capitalists and big-city entrepreneurs, and not the vast majority of average Americans who live outside of U.S. technology hubs.In recent years, that blind spot has become a problem for companies like Fab, One Kings Lane and Juicero, each of which raised north of $100 million in investments only to find that their core customer base was much smaller than they had hoped.
Large retailers including Target, Bed Bath & Beyond and Best Buy have legal rights in lease agreements that allow them to limit what Amazon can do with nearby Whole Foods stores, and where it can open new ones. While restricting how neighbors operate is standard practice in retail, Amazon is new to feeling the heat. With all of Whole Foods’ 473 stores subject to lease agreements, Amazon has launched into brick-and-mortar with more constraints and entrenched enemies than in the online world it dominates.
Solving A.I. problems is not like building the flavor-of-the-month smartphone app. In the entire world, fewer than 10,000 people have the skills to tackle serious AI research. People with a few years experience can be paid $300,000 to $500,000 a year in salary. With so few A.I. specialists available, big tech companies are hiring the best and brightest of academia. They are limiting the number of professors who can teach the technology. “There is a giant sucking sound of academics going into industry.”
Microsoft PowerPoint is still the market leader. It has hundreds of millions of users—most of them creating the same boring slideshows. With the right tools, people could create visual aids that felt more engaging. You could pepper it with images and animations, then zoom in and out to focus on specific things at specific moments during a talk. The tool, which they named Prezi, uses "a spatial metaphor" rather than simple paginated slides.
There’s room for Alexa's presence to expand, both in your home, and out into the world. And with more third-party product integrations on the horizon we haven’t hit peak Alexa just yet. She’s going to make her way into scenarios that could be incredibly useful—like the kitchen. You can also use Alexa in the car now, with the $150 Garmin Speak.
In six markets, Facebook has removed posts from Pages in the original News Feed and relegated them to another feed. That means Facebook's main feed is no longer a free playing field for publishers. Instead, it's a battlefield of "pay to play," where publishers have to pony up the dough to get back into the News Feed. Facebook released a post after publication of this article clarifying that they “currently have no plans to roll this test out further.” Facebook said the same thing in the statement included in this article.
Where 10 or 20 years ago we looked to start-ups as a font of future wonders, today the momentum has shifted to the big guys. In addition to the platforms they own, the Five own artificial intelligence, voice assistants, virtual and augmented reality, robotics, home automation, and every thing that will rule tomorrow. Start-ups are still getting funding but fewer than 1% end up as $1 billion companies. Their chances of breakout success — and especially of knocking the giants off their perches — have diminished considerably.
Initial shipments of Apple Inc.’s new iPhone X will total 20 million units. That is only about half the total number forecast the company would be able to ship in 2017. Apple shares fell 1 percent in Frankfurt on the news. The "biggest hurdle" for ramping up volume production of the iPhone X is the flexible printed circuit board for the antenna system.
As organizations collect more data and build more-accurate models, change managers will be able to use them to prescribe strategies to enable organizations to meet their goals. Organizations should start building dashboards now and automate them. Today, change dashboards are vulnerable to version control issues, human error, and internal politics. These are not one-and-done installations, but multiyear commitments to capture data, build models, and establish reliable data sets. Data quality is an issue everywhere.
Netflix has a war chest its willing to burn through to own its own TV and film content
Finance departments are seeing results from the increased sophistication of robotics and automation tools: digital transformation can cut labor and outsourcing costs by 20% to 35%. Automation can cut error rates by up to 66%. It would also facilitate more analysis and smarter decisions by allowing employees to reduce the time spent on data collection by 24%.
Alibaba and Amazon dominate the business of selling stuff online in their home markets. Increasingly, they are competing against each other on neutral ground. Both are spending billions of dollars on Asia — particularly Southeast Asia and India — as they look for a place that could repeat China’s explosive transformation into the world’s biggest online shopping market. Southeast Asia’s e-commerce sales could total $88 billion by 2025.
How will a self-training A.I. system be biased when learning from the #MeToo hashtagged posts? Would a lack of engagement teach the algorithm that you are not interested in the subject or not empathetic to the cause? What if you were saddened by the content of a post but preferred not to comment? Would posting or sharing graphic details of a traumatic event re-characterize your profile and associate you with a kind of content you're not used to seeing?
Apple claim(ed) Samsung had blatantly ripped off the iPhone.“The Court finds that the jury instructions given at trial did not accurately reflect the law and that the instructions prejudiced Samsung by precluding the jury from considering whether the relevant article of manufacture… was something other than the entire phone.” At stake is $400 million of the $548 million Samsung already paid.
A new study suggests hedge fund managers who exhibit what health professionals consider psychopathic traits actually perform worse than their peers over time. The most “psychopathic” managers had the worst investment records. Those who ranked in the top 16% on the psychopathy scale lagged the average by 0.88% per year. Narcissistic managers turned in mediocre returns, but their clients had to endure more volatility. Psychopaths are difficult to work with (!). Investing can require collaboration.
Every time one of Facebook’s two billion monthly users opens the app, a personalization algorithm sorts all the posts that a person could theoretically see, and dishes up the fraction it thinks she or he would like to see first. The system autonomously scans links, suppressing ones that match what it learned from human-generated data. Facebook’s master algorithm now can extract meaning from our posts and photos; capturing 50 minutes of every American’s day, up from 40 minutes.
“Games are now being designed, marketed and sold in ways customized for a particular country or region.Gaming conventions are more common around the world, and at the same time the advent of game streaming tools like YouTube and Twitch are allowing anyone with a web browser to see these games for themselves in whatever language they choose.”The global games market is $105 billion.
Voice is so effective at conveying emotion (because) speakers are less able to alter their tone to disguise their feelings. An(d)with multiple modes, a listener must focus on many kinds at once: facial expressions, words, body language, and the speaker’s tone.“There’s a lot of discussion about how to hide less desirable emotion states using non-verbal communication. People might mislead listeners with nonverbal communication. Controlling vocals is much harder to do.”
Baidu, a search giant turned autonomous vehicle powerhouse, unlike Alphabet, has a presence in China and the United States. Baidu wants to beat America in developing a self-driving car. Baidu started its driverless car later than Google, but China’s populace may not need the hand holding Americans crave. Chinese were more favorable to riding in a driverless taxi than U.S. respondents in a World Economic Forum poll. They own fewer cars. And China has a robust automotive industry, which Baidu can supply the driverless brains for.
Marketers who buy into the long tail concept just aren't honest with themselves about how they use the internet. There (is) research on how as people accumulate hundreds of TV channels, they only watch seven. In a sea of millions of mobile apps, people stick to half a dozen. The common thread with internet use is, they're not the right moment for you to hear about new recipes from Kraft, or how great you'd look in a 2018 Suburu. Yet marketers are sold on right audience, right time, environment be damned.
Hordes of engineering and business graduates secretly dream of building the new Facebook, the new Uber. Every big city now boasts startup accelerators. Throngs of technology entrepreneurs are reshaping, “disrupting,” every aspect of our economy. Today’s big businesses are arthritic dinosaurs soon devoured by these nimble, fast-growing mammals with sharp teeth. Right? Er, actually, no. That was last decade. We live in a new world now, and it favors the big, not the small.
Google (Alphabet) is the second largest company in the world by market capitalization. (Apple is the largest.) It’s done that by its control of profits from advertising. The advantage in advertising comes from data and tracking. The digital advertising industry depends on snippets of data we call “cookies”. Hundreds of billions of dollars depend on this lynchpinof digital data architecture. Get rid of the cookie and everyone in the digital publishing industry is truly screwed.
While many in the West fret about AI eliminating jobs and worsening wealth and income inequality, China seems to believe it can bring about the opposite outcomes. “The U.S. and Canada have the best AI researchers in the world, but China has hundreds of people who are good, and way more data. AI is an area where you need to evolve the algorithm and the data together; a large amount of data makes a large amount of difference.” The goal is to upgrade thousands of companies across China using AI.
It’s not a question of whether neuroscientists can detect if someone is lying using a fMRI but whether the court system is willing to let the technology in. Experiments suggest that the fMRI machines can detect lies. “For any algorithm-based lie detection that could lead to conviction or acquittal, […] it should be an aid to conviction or acquittal, not the decider. It should not take away the prerogative of judge and jury.”
Employers’ last-mile programs help companies get workers with the right attitudes and attributes ready for the job. Plus, it allows them to recruit from a broader group of potential hires by dropping lengthy experience requirements in favor of sharpening young talent in-house. Companies also reason that the academies, which have emerged over the past five years, are less expensive than hiring more experienced workers who don’t end up being a good fit for the role.
Blockchain, the technology that created Bitcoin, can be used to create other cryptocurrencies that compete against Bitcoin, as already it has done. Like Etherium, Litecoin, and Ripple. A larger supply of cryptocurrencies could eventually crush Bitcoin prices for good, the way a larger supply of different varieties of tulips crushed tulip prices back in the 17th century. Big governments and big banks will crush Bitcoin, but they won’t kill it. The technology that created Bitcoin will do it.
IBM doesn't want to be IBM. Microsoft's platforms offered familiarity; the thing you use at work, you use at home. This propelled Windows. Abandoning the smartphone reduces Microsoft's ability to reach consumers, especially in developing markets (w)here for hundreds of millions of people their smartphone is their computing platform. Microsoft's consumer-facing products and its enterprise-facing products are not independent from one another. Where Windows falls out of public consciousness, so do the other offerings.
The next big thing always starts out looking like nothing at all. So by instituting financial targets for a business that you don’t fully understand, you will almost guarantee that your second and third horizon opportunities end up getting scaled back to a first horizon ideas and, despite the best intentions, you will end up trapped in your P&L. The truth is that every business is eventually disrupted, so it’s absolutely essential to be able to look beyond your current business and explore new horizons.
The plan is to combine Google’s treasure trove of personal data with machine learning algorithms to help news publications grow and maintain its subscriber base. For each new subscriber Google brings to the table, the company will take up to a 30% finder’s fee. The agreements will reportedly be similar to the deals Google has with traditional advertisers through its AdSense business.
The developers of FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer set out to reflect reality. They have succeeded in helping alter it. Ibrahimovic said he would “often spot solutions in the games that I then parlayed into real life," Wenger’s assertion that Messi was a “PlayStation footballer” was meant more as an explanation than an insult: his conception of what is possible was forged by fantasy. Pep Guardiola’s vision of soccer stemmed from computers: his “gentle programming of players” is pure “PlayStation.”
Walmart has been the most vilified corporation in America, if not the world, for its labor policies, its supply chain practices, and its impact on small-town merchants. Given the history, many of its critics were surprised in 2015 when Walmart pledged to give more than 1 million of its workers a raise. CEO Doug McMillon draws a straight line from the decision to boost pay to the need to counter Amazon. McMillon’s insistence that better pay is smart business is potentially reshaping a national debate over income inequality.
While humans are still struggling to understand each other, emotionally intelligent AI has advanced rapidly. Face-tracking software is advanced enough to analyze facial expressions. The most advanced cameras are able to tell fake emotions from the real Artificially intelligent systems can look at our faces and recognize such qualities as sexual orientation, political leaning, or IQ.The technologies used to analyze emotional responses in many areas exceed the abilities of all but the most skilled humans.
Wall Street is entering a new era. The fraternity of bond jockeys, derivatives mavens and stock pickers who've long personified the industry are giving way to algorithms, and soon, artificial intelligence. Hedge funds and asset managers are using predictive analytics for tasks such as timing stock purchases and assessing risk based on market liquidity. Computers are also digesting vast data sets -- everything from car registrations to oil-drilling concessions -- to help predict how stocks will perform.
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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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