A Motorcycle Helmet That Will Call Ambulance, Text Your Family After Accident

Digital motorcycle helmets may actually help inform the development of self-driving cars because there are so many motorcycles in use in developing countries and the helmets can be deployed now.

That the startup which created the helmet is in Islamabad, Pakistan tells us a lot about the spread of technology and programming competence. JL 

Samar Warsi reports in Motherboard:

Let’s Innovate has designed a helmet that will call emergency services and text your relatives if you fall off your motorcycle. If a rider falls off the bike, the helmet automatically notifies emergency services nearby using its GPS. It comes equipped with Bluetooth, speakers, a heart rate sensor (which measures the heartbeat from the head via a blood oxygen sensor), and a dashcam.The company (also) plans collect data and sell it to third parties, such as advertisers.

MoviePass App Adds 1Million Subscribers As Multiplexes Fume

For those who dont want to watch all their movies at home on Netflix. And for those who want the customer data MoviePass will collect and re-sell. JL

Brooks Barnes reports in the New York Times:

MoviePass introduced a cut-rate, subscription-based plan, go to the movies 365 times a year for $9.95 a month. Members use a MoviePass smartphone app to check in at the theater. The growth has prompted criticism from theaters and studios that MoviePass will never make money by charging $9.95 a month. They say that will cause MoviePass to raise prices or go out of business. (But) the real treasure in this venture is the data about consumer tastes and habits MoviePass collects to sell that data to studio marketers.

Why the US Renter Boom Has Ended

Economic cycles: the rental boom was largely an affluent urban phenomenon.

But millennials et al are now making enough income to justify purchasing rather than renting, especially as rental prices have skyrocketed. JL


Henry Grabar reports in Slate:

The number of Americans who rent their homes declined in 2017 for the first time since 2004. The foreclosure crisis dumped a lot of high earners who have traditionally bought homes into the rental market. Rapidly rebounding housing markets, with skyrocketing home prices in big cities, kept them there.  It’s been largely a high-income phenomenon.  60% of the growth in rental households has occurred in households making more than $50,000. The share of new units renting for over $1,500 a month has risen from 15% to 40%. Now the number of renters has reached a plateau.

The Future of Grocery Shopping Has Arrived - In China

Chinese online retailer appears to have succeeded where Amazon stalled. JL

Karen Hao reports in Quartz:

Amazon’s rival JD.com, the second biggest online retailer in China announced  it plans to open hundreds of unmanned convenience stores with technology more advanced than Amazon’s. Its trial shops have already been tested. JD’s shops will use RFIDs and cameras with facial recognition and image recognition to track each customer’s movement and product selection. As the store learns from a customer’s preferences over time, it will also begin to show personalized advertisements and  help restock inventory.

What Will Happen to America's Hundreds of Dead Malls?

Real estate close to major urban areas - where most malls are - is valuable.

The dead malls will be 'repurposed' - as auto show rooms, ecommerce logistics and distribution centers, entertainment venues, churches, community centers and anything else where imagination, hope - plus money - can be applied to attract business. JL


Leanna Garfield reports in Business Insider:

In the mid-1990s, the number of American malls peaked at about 1,500. Today, about 1,000 are left."The development climate of malls were driven less by demand and more by opportunity." 2,000 store locations have announced closures since mid-April, and analysts expect that number to swell to 8,600 by the end of 2017. A new report predicted that 20% to 25% of malls — about 220 to 275 shopping centers — would shutter over the next five years, largely because of store closures.

Amazon's Echo Dot Was the Best Selling Holiday Product, Highlighting Cost of Apple's Delay in Home Speaker Category

Given the success of Amazon's Echo, Apple's bet on the smartwatch, in retrospect, may well have been a serious financial and strategic miscalculation.

Apple's continued determination to go high end with its devices - the iPhone X and Smartwatch in particular - may give the advantage to Amazon's decision to go with lower price points in order to lock consumers into its electronic ecosystem. Photo above is of Apple's as yet unavailable Homepod.  JL


Megan Dickey reports in Tech Crunch and Chris O'Brien reports in Venture Beat:

This holiday season, Amazon’s Echo Dot was the top-selling product available from any manufacturer across all categories on Amazon.com. Apple’s failure to deliver its own HomePod smart speaker in time for the holidays, looks like a huge missed opportunity. It’s hard to say that Apple bet on the wrong device category by deciding to focus on wearables. But it  seems the upside for smart speakers is far greater than for smartwatches

How Tech Is Enabling the Imagination Economy

The concept is that humans now have the capacity to imagine the future they want and the tools to realize it. Whether it plays out like that will be up to both the tools - and the humans. JL

Raya Bidshahri reports in Singularity Hub:

65% of the jobs elementary school students will be doing in the future do not even exist yet. The imagination age is a theoretical period beyond the information age where creativity and imagination will become the primary creators of economic value.The “imagination economy" is defined as “an economy where intuitive and creative thinking create economic value, after logical and rational thinking has been outsourced to other economies.”

GM's Cruise Is Launching Self-Driving Pilots in Cities; That's Where the Money Is

The key to self-driving success, operationally and financially, is data.

There are more potential uses, more data and more opportunity in cities. JL


Johana Bhuiyan reports in Re/code:

Autonomous cars more quickly learn to navigate difficult driving situations better than humans can.Cities also provide a significant business opportunity. “We have the biggest impact by impacting the biggest number of people in the most complex environments. That’s where the people are, and it’s where the business opportunity is.” “Part of  this utilization equation to get the cost per mile down (is) beyond moving people. In e-commerce and last-mile delivery we see multi-modal uses as a key of getting utilization rates up and total cost per mile down.”

40% Of Comments Critical Of Fiduciary Rule Are Fake

Which is worse: the growing use of fraudulent digital submissions - or this Administration's willingness to ignore the evidence when it contradicts their policy goals?  JL

James Grimaldi and Paul Overberg report in the Wall Street Journal:

40% didn’t post the comment listed under their name, address, phone number and email.The Labor Department is the fifth agency to have posted unauthorized comments on its website. The Journal found fraudulent postings under names and email addresses at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission. The findings were cited by Congress to delay repeal of the net-neutrality rule.

The Evidence That Alphabet's Larry Page and Sergey Brin No Longer Need Adult Supervision

Alphabet's primary operating company, Google, is such a well-run, profitable machine (literally, these days, as well as figuratively) that it may well be no humans are needed to run it, let alone corporate icons like Eric Schmidt.

That there are rumors of numerous Schmidt infidelities - some with women at the company - also suggests that human frailties played a role in the timing of his departure. JL


Advertising Age reports:

Eric Schmidt is relinquishing his executive chairman role, recruited from Novell Inc. when Google had just 200 employees. Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin know how to take it from here. And they have help from newer leaders like Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai, Chief Financial Offer Ruth Porat and cloud head Diane Greene. "They've been acting like a more mature, long-term thinking company for a while now."

Many Unhappy Returns For Online Shoppers

The dark underbelly of increased ecommerce purchases is a vast increase in ecommerce returns.

And given the cost to merchants, the return process is nowhere near as simple or convenient as the buying process. JL

Douglas Quenqua reports in the New York Times:

Between Dec. 26 and Jan. 31, 45% of Americans will try to return at least one gift. That gift is more likely than ever to have been purchased online.Returns cost retailers $260 billion in 2015. And about 30% of items bought online end up being returned, versus 9% of items bought in stores. Returns to stores cost companies half as much as returns to distribution centers, and allow retailers to get the items back on shelves faster. The good news for retailers: 62% of consumers prefer in-store returns.

Why Innovators Need To Focus Less on Nodes, More On Networks

In an increasingly connected economy, the power of new ideas is enhanced by the extent of the network first exposed to them. JL


Greg Satell reports in Digital Tonto:

Great innovators are able to see things others can’t because they function as effective knowledge brokers. They are able to build networks that connect them to diverse knowledge and insights that help them to solve tough problems. Ideas don’t change the world alone, but depend on small groups, loosely connected but united by a common purpose to truly make an impact. Innovation is always about networks, not nodes.

China's Electric Car Head Start Could Produce Its First Top Global Auto Brand

Largest market, largest EV fleet, the most experience - and a burning desire to show the rest of the world it can lead in complex engineering initiatives. JL


Bloomberg Businessweek reports:

China has become the world’s largest automotive market. China already leads globally in EV sales, passing the U.S. in 2015. "Chinese carmakers want to sell their cars abroad. China’s manufacturers know it will be tough for them to compete on combustion engines. But the shift to electric cars may become an opportunity for them.” “With the development of smart electric vehicles, Chinese automakers are embracing opportunities to build higher-end brands.”

How Email Open Tracking Took Over the Web

Um, yeah, about that trust economy thing...JL

Brian Merchant reports in Wired:

There are some 269 billion emails sent and received daily. That’s roughly 35 emails for every person on the planet, every day. Over 40% of those emails are tracked. "One out of six people that emails you is sending a tracker, and it’s real life"—not marketing, not spammers. “It could be your friend, your wife, your boss, you give up a lot of privacy just opening emails."

Is Bitcoin Just Like the Dotcom Bubble?

Nah. It's always different 'this time.' Isn't it? JL

Annie Lowrey reports in The Atlantic:

Right now, this is just like the dot-com bubble, tulips in the 1600s, and oil and gas speculation. Things get to be a mania. The retail market gets hits with advertisements and media pitches: You’re going to miss out on the next Microsoft! You’ve got to get in now, because it’s going up and up and up! The difference with cryptocurrencies, the bitcoin mania, is that the technology ramps up quicker and so the mania goes faster. The mania on oil and gas took two years—this is taking two months.

Google's Voice-Generating Artificial Intelligence Now Indistinguishable From Humans

Of use to marketers, customer service reps - and politicians - the new capability will make it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish between human and technologically generated 'voices.'

The larger question is whether, at this stage, consumers will care. JL

Dave Gershgorn reports in Quartz:

A research paper published by Google this month details a text-to-speech system which claims near-human accuracy at imitating audio of a person speaking from text. The system consists of two deep neural networks. The first network translates the text into a spectrogram (pdf), a visual way to represent audio frequencies over time. That spectrogram is then fed into WaveNet, a system from Alphabet’s AI research lab DeepMind, which reads the chart and generates the corresponding audio elements

Home Depot Considers Buying $9 Billion Logistics Co.: So Amazon Doesn't Get It

As retailers like Home Depot and Walmart hone their ecommerce strategies, Amazon is developing its bricks-and-mortar counter-thrust.

Eventually they will all look alike, but who most effectively executes the plan will determine the ultimate winners and losers. JL


Jason Del Rey reports in Re/code:

XPO is best known as the company that manages the home delivery of heavy items such as furniture and appliances. The company calls itself “the largest provider of last-mile logistics for heavy goods in North America.” Amazon has taken more control of its logistics, buying cargo airlines, handling more package delivery itself and leasing thousands of trucks. If Home Depot were to make an offer, one impetus would be to keep XPO out of the hands of Amazon — which (it) believes has also considered buying.

Stores Are Getting Built: They're Just Not In Malls

The convergence of convenience with ecommerce delivery and walkable experiential retail is changing how real estate developers are creating new living and shopping combinations. JL


Esther Fung reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Despite a glut in U.S. retail space, developers are building more, alongside new homes. The target clientele: Americans who are looking for cheaper housing in the suburbs but favor areas with urban trappings such as restaurants, offices and shops. These projects, often joint ventures between a housing developer and a developer with retail expertise, are sprouting up around the U.S., especially in Florida, Massachusetts and Arizona. The focus is on a design that is pedestrian-centric.“The single biggest change is walkability,”

Design In the Age of Anxiety

The very point of good design is not to ignore or evade or escape anxieties, but to plan for, address and help prevent in the future the anxieties that exist in every situation. JL


Erika Hall comments in Medium:

Removing anxiety from the design process can decrease the potential for anxiety in the world. A reactive process leads to me-too products, solutions for non-problems, feature-creep, and tone-deaf communication. If we do our job right, our work together also gives our clients the tools they need in order to protect that intent from future anxieties, and to adapt the system to those changing scenarios. We can’t predict the future, but we can use information to give our part of it a nudge in the right direction.

How Augmented and Virtual Reality May Reshape the Food Industry

From employee training to marketing to experience, AR and VR are already changing the way food is presented and enjoyed. JL

Jenny Dorsey reports in Tech Crunch:

Human resources, customer experiences, food products have seen the most concentration of AR/VR development and will push AR & VR within the industry. “Experiential marketing” changed the purpose and construction of food and hospitality driven events. Millennials view experiences as a means of social capital, and sharing  participation at an en vogue experience is an important piece of their curated social identities. Augmented and virtual reality play naturally into this shift. 

Google's Origin Lies Partly in CIA-NSA Research Grants For Mass Surveillance

In tech, means and ends have often been indistinguishable. JL


Jeff Nesbit reports in Quartz:

The US intelligence community worked with Silicon Valley to track citizens in cyberspace. Google’s creation was funded to find ways to track individuals and groups online. Computer scientists could take non-classified information and user data, combine it with the internet to suit the needs of  intelligence and the public.It succeeded  more than anyone could have imagined. “Its core technology, which allows it to find pages far more accurately than other search engines, was partially supported by this grant."

The Danger of Betting Your Business On a Platform

There are very good reasons why there are so few great platform businesses. JL

Greg Satell reports in Digital Tonto:

Platform businesses don't need significant investment in physical assets to get started, (but) have few barriers to entry. Although network effects make platform businesses almost infinitely scalable, they also result in winner-take-all markets in which one player does well, but many others go bankrupt. The combination of low-barriers to entry and winner-take-all markets makes platform businesses hyper-competitive, which often leads to extremely high marketing costs.

Will the Rapidly Shrinking Store Save Retail?

Ecommerce has changed not just shopping habits, but living habits: millennials working gig economy jobs cannot afford the big houses their longer-lving boomer parents bought.

Which means the shopper of the present - and future - may not have the time, the space or the income to accumulate all the stuff previous generations did. JL


Abha Bhattarai reports in the Washington Post:

Retailers such as Walmart, Target, Macy’s and Nordstrom are experimenting to distill their inventory into smaller, more-focused locations. As Americans flock from the suburbs to city centers, space is at a premium. Big-box stores are no longer practical for millennials with tiny apartments and no car. Sales at smaller-format stores are projected to grow 3.9% annually until 2022, outpacing 0.8% sales growth for their big-box counterparts “Nobody needs a gazillion square feet of store space anymore,”

Why Digital Transformation Is Now On the CEO's Shoulders

When the threat - or opportunity - is existential, leaders must lead. "Tinkering is insufficient." JL

Thomas Seibel reports in the McKinsey Quarterly:

We are seeing a mass disruption in the corporate world like recurring episodes of mass species extinction. Since 2000, over 50% of Fortune 500 companies have been acquired, merged, or declared bankruptcy, with no end in sight. In their wake, we are seeing a mass “speciation” of innovative corporate entities with new DNA, such as Amazon, Box, Facebook. In the current extinction event, the causal factor is digital transformation. In past 70 years, innovation was driven by IT departments. The CEO was briefed periodically. Now the adoption cycle has inverted, initiated and propelled by the CEO.

As the US Tightens Visas For Tech, Canada Is Open For Business

 In a global war for talent, cutting off potential reinforcements is not a winning strategy. JL

Liz Robbins reports in the New York Times:

While much attention has been paid to President Trump’s policies cracking down on illegal immigration, the administration has also moved to restrict legal immigration, especially in the tech industry. Canada’s immigration agency started the Global Skills Strategy for high-skilled workers from abroad to get a work permit in two weeks. “The No. 1 priority of business today is where they can get the talent they need from the global talent pool,”

Apple Sued After Admitting It Purposely Slowed Down Older iPhones

Which just goes to show that tech, for all its accomplishments, still doesnt seem to believe - or care - that consumers' opinions matter all that much. JL

Carla Herreria reports in Huffington Post:

One lawsuit claims the tech giant engaged in “deceptive, immoral and unethical” practices. [Apple] could have avoided controversy by being more transparent to begin with. Because Apple was not transparent, it’s natural for people to suspect it of deliberately crippling their devices to get them to buy new ones.

Facebook's AI Will Alert You When Any Picture Of Your Face Gets Uploaded

It's being marketed as a privacy and safety control feature, but is really an announcement that your face is no longer exclusively your own. JL

Hayley Tsukayama reports in the Washington Post:

The social network is framing its new feature as a way for people to control their own images online. But it also demonstrates how Facebook is becoming more familiar with your face. That's in line with moves from other tech titans: Apple this year replaced its fingerprint reader with a camera that relies on your face to unlock its latest iPhone and uses similar technology to sort photos. Google has also introduced features into its photo service that group snapshots by people's images.

The Rise of the Cobot or Collaborative Robot

The data suggest that returns to collaborative automation exceed returns to human replacement. JL

i-Scoop reports:

Cobots are predominantly used for repetitive tasks whereby intelligent support systems, using cobots, assist the worker. The challenges in making robots work alongside staff in a secure and valuable way have been gradually solved and we’re at a tipping point whereby there aren’t too many hurdles anymore to leverage them as real-life applications. By 2018, 30% of all new deployments of robots will concern smart cobots that operate three times faster and are safe for work around humans.

Math Says You're Driving All Wrong and Slowing the Rest of Humanity Down

Another reason why self-driving vehicles will eventually prevail. Emphasis on 'eventually.' JL

Matt Simon reports in Wired:

Traffic is the world’s most infuriating example of what’s known as an emergent property. Meaning, lots of individual things forming together to create something more complex. The math says that if everyone kept an equal distance between the cars ahead and behind, all spaced out in a more orderly fashion, traffic would move almost twice as quickly.

Staying Human-Centered In a Tech-Focused World

Think. JL

Nelson Kunkel comments in Advertising Age:

Fire, the wheel, printing presses, telephones were all intended to serve our distinct needs. Yet somewhere in our post-industrial society we became accustomed to catering to the limits of tech advancement instead of what is optimal or even additive for our needs.All the algorithms, computational intelligence, emerging interfaces and realities, and shiny devices are only as valuable as our ability to use them deliberately and appropriately to enhance relationships, create more natural solutions, and advance the human condition.

An Artificially Intelligent-Enabled Christmas

AI made the retail experience more efficient. But it also limited choices based on algorithmic analysis of past behavior. The question is whether that will ultimately stifle growth rather than enhance it. JL

Bernard Marr comments in Forbes:

Algorithms streamline our shopping experience to reduce the amount of choices we have. Increasingly, shoppers are preferring to use voice-search enabled assistants to shop and ComScore predicts that by 2020, 50% of all searches will be voice activated. In addition to the customer-facing impacts of AI to the holiday shopping experiences, from insights to manage inventory and to optimize supply chains and delivery routes, AI helps make retail more efficient.

People: How Apple Maintains Its Advantage

Commitment. JL

Ray Keating reports in RealClearMarkets:

As the morning proceeded, customer attitudes covered ornery, angry, frustrated, bewildered, and friendly. No matter what was thrown in their direction, the Apple Store employees remained helpful, friendly, and respectful. Even the angry customers calmed down given the response they received from store staff.  It was clear from my experience that most of these Apple employees were enjoying their work, and it seemed, each other.

You're a Bitcoin Millionaire - Unless You Forgot Your Password

Bummer. JL

Alison Sider and Stephanie Young report in the Wall Street Journal:

Many who bought bitcoin years ago now find themselves sitting on an untouchable bounty. Because they can’t remember the complex security codes needed to get to their bitcoins, the coins are in a kind of purgatory. It’s like forgetting a bank account password, but there’s no bank to call to reset it.

This Is Your Brain On Christmas Music

Repetition and pleasure. JL

Adrienne Berard reports in William and Mary News:

“There are areas in the brain’s prefrontal cortex that are tracking melodic structures independently of individual notes. Once a particular melodic structure is tracked, it can be saved as a memory.” When you look at Christmas music, or almost any pop song, you get very clear resolution.”And the more that music is played, the more those expectations are enforced. It’s why popular music stations rotate through a series of top 40 hits. Why the same holiday classics inundate American airwaves each year.

Why the Highly Motivated Have a Greater Life Advantage Than Those With High IQs

Contemplating the essence of performance. JL

Rebecca Haggerty reports in Quartz:

Kids who scored higher on measures of academic intrinsic motivation at a young age—meaning that they enjoyed learning for its own sake—performed better, took more challenging courses, and earned more advanced degrees than their peers. They were more likely to be leaders and more self-confident. As adults, they continued to seek out challenges and leadership opportunities. The highly motivated excelled even when controlling for differences in intelligence or ability.

Google Claims I'm Dead: I'm Pretty Sure They're Wrong

Sorry. Your problem isn't scalable. Neither is its solution. JL

Rachel Abrams reports in the New York Times:

When things go wrong online, we’re often at the mercy of faceless technology companies  that prefer to interact with us through the web. Correcting the impression about something as simple as whether a person is alive should be eminently fixable. Right? “It is very difficult to submit correction requests to Google for situations that aren’t clear violations of policies or laws,”

Why the Christmas Tree Shortage Could Last For Years

Christmas trees are a market, subject to the same cyclical and environmental factors that affect other assets. JL

Elizabeth Limbach reports in The Atlantic:

The noble fir can take eight to 12 years to reach holiday height, which means that that spurt of over-planting two decades ago led to oversupply about 10 years ago. This flooding of the market coincided with the Great Recession, when many people were scaling back their Christmas spending. Another 10 years on, the effects of that under-planting are now being felt around the country, in the form of shortages and higher prices.

Silicon Valley Techies Still Think They're the Good Guys: The Rest of World Increasingly Begs To Differ

A decade ago the villain was finance. Now it's tech. JL

Erin Griffith reports in Wired:

The issue is bigger than any single scandal. As headlines have exposed the troubling inner workings of company after company, startup culture no longer feels like fodder for gentle parodies about ping pong and hoodies. The greatest success story of this era isn’t a merry band of hackers building cutesy tools that allow you to digitally Poke your friends. It’s a powerful and potentially sinister collector of personal data, a propaganda partner to government censors, and an enabler of discriminatory advertising.

The Strategy Behind Apple's Growing Bet On Hardware

As has so often been the case with Apple, this is about exerting control in order to optimize the customer experience - and its monetization. JL

Neil Cybart reports in Above Avalon:

Alan Kay, a tech industry pioneer, once said, “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."Apple is doubling down on hardware in order to become the most powerful software provider in the wearables era. Apple's hardware strategy is all about controlling the experience found with its products. In the past, differentiation came from doing both hardware and software. Differentiation is now found when there is tighter control over the core components powering products.

You're Not Imagining It, the Internet Really Is Slower

This is a precursor of what will happen when the effect of net neutrality's elimination hits in a few weeks. JL

April Glaser reports in Slate:

Outages result over peering, the connections between websites and internet service providers that determine how they exchange traffic so data can be carried. Sometimes, these companies don’t get along.This slowdown is a reminder of what kind of internet we may have once the new rules axing network neutrality protections hit: They’ll allow internet providers to legally block or throttle access to websites, and are slated to go into effect as early as January 2018.

More Amazon Orders, But In Fewer Boxes

Using intangible data to reduce tangible packages and their cost. JL

Laura Stevens and Erica Phillips report in the Wall Street Journal:

Amazon is trying to ship each order in one package instead of multiple boxes, responding to rising shipping costs and consumers’ concern about environmental impact. Algorithms decide which box to use and how many items should be packed  in each. Machine learning tests out new combinations. The algorithm can scan customer reviews to see if it worked and adjust as needed. Amazon is making progress in persuading manufacturers to rethink packages for online sales.