Green Bank, West Virginia is home to the National Radio Quiet Zone: no cell service, no Wi-Fi, and no radio waves. “Electromagnetic hypersensitives” flock to the town because they claim they are allergic to radio frequencies. Use of a cellular phone is illegal and prosecutable. Income per capita is just under $17,500, 41% lower than the national average. The poverty rate is 51%, compared to the national rate of 15%.
Cities (are) squabbling over what to do with adults on electric scooters. Residents see them as a burden, not a benefit. Users unlock them with a QR code, and pay $0.15 per minute to ride. When users are done, they leave them wherever they want. Locals argue the scooters are cluttering sidewalks and endangering pedestrians. The San Francisco City Attorney’s Office served a cease and desist order to for recklessly operating . While governments are now considering scooter-specific laws, the masses have taken matters into their own hands—by destroying, pooping on, vandalizing.
“If you aren’t paying for it with money, you’re paying for it in other ways.” Whether it’s your time, your privacy, or your intellectual property, you’re giving over to Facebook something of value every time you use it. Users’ time, like money, is a scarce resource. To the extent that our personal data has become a product, it’s because we—and our representatives in government—have allowed it to happen.
YouTube said it took down 8.28 million videos during the fourth quarter of 2017, and 80% of those videos had been flagged by artificially intelligent computer systems. (But) users still play a meaningful role in identifying problematic content. The top three reasons users flagged videos involved content they considered sexual, misleading or spam, and hateful or abusive. Users raised 30 million flags on 9.3 million videos during the quarter.1.5 million videos were removed after first being flagged by users.
In-car delivery is an extension of the existing Amazon Key service, which allows you to give the delivery drivers access to your house with the help of a compatible keypad on your door and a smart security camera. It’s worth pointing out from the outset that Amazon’s delivery drivers won’t track you down wherever you are and deliver to your car. This is about delivering to your car in your driveway or an office parking lot.
10% of the money raised for initial coin offerings has been stolen.The losers are ill-informed buyers caught in the spiral of greed. The result is a massive transfer of wealth from ordinary families to internet promoters. "Massive” is an understatement — 1,500 different cryptocurrencies register $300 billion of “value.” Extreme price volatility makes bitcoin undesirable as a store of value. Bitcoins are accepted almost nowhere. It only has value if people think other people will buy it for a higher price — the Greater Fool theory.
Detectives went to the funeral home in Clearwater, Florida, where the body was being held. They attempted and failed to unlock his phone in the course of a separate drug investigation. Largo police spokesman Lt. Randall Chaney says that the detectives didn’t need a search warrant, an assessment backed up by several legal experts, who said that it was “ghoulish,” but that constitutional protections against searches don’t apply to the deceased.
Tracking an index of 54 retail stocks, known as the “Death by Amazon index” most vulnerable to Amazon "encapsulates what is going on." Between February 2012 and January 2018, Amazon’s value rose 560%, the S&P index rose 102%, and the Death by Amazon index grew just 42.8%. What’s the CEO Jeff Bezos’s endgame? It could be a “tax on all economic activity.” Without regulation, Amazon will “continue to extract wealth that other businesses are creating.”
The use of ride-sharing is swelling at an exponential rate (it took Uber six years to mark one billion rides, but six months to get to two billion), and Lyft recently boasted that 250,000 of its customers have given up owning a vehicle. Young people are more likely to use ridesharing services - and those that do are less attached to specific brands. Only 21% of ridesharers said they’re in a “committed partnership” with their chosen transit app, compared to the 33% of millennial car-owners who say they’ll always purchase from the same car brand.
Net inflows into passively managed bond funds have outpaced their active counterparts for the past five years. Pimco plans to build out its capabilities in trading bonds and other securities electronically, in a bid to reduce execution costs. The firm plans to launch investment funds driven by trading algorithms. One focus: predicting inflation. The firm aims to add consumer data that will help make faster and more-accurate forecasts on the consumer-price index that informs investment decisions on most debt securities
Robot assisted surgery: estimated value of $40 billion. Virtual nursing assistants, estimated value of $20 billion. Administrative workflow assistance: estimated value of $18 billion. Advancements like these can reduce human error and boost outcomes and consumer trust. (Though) patients and caregivers fear lack of human oversight and machine errors can lead to mismanagement of care, while data privacy remains one of the biggest challenges, the growing involvement of AI in health care is inevitable.
Currently, Alphabet makes 90% of its money from selling advertising on the internet. Google’s advertising profits were weighed down by an increase in traffic acquisition costs — the fees that it pays to make sure its search engine is the default option when people open a browser.“They want to diversify beyond just advertising being such a big part of their business.” That focus on variety comes as the data-collection practices that underpin the entire digital advertising industry are under intense scrutiny.
The city's government believes the traffic/mapping app has made Los Angeles' congestion worse. A Los Angeles city councilman has taken Waze to task for creating "dangerous conditions" in his district, and the politician is now "asking the City to review possible legal action."
Through the first 16 weeks of 2018, the number of films released by Netflix—25—is nearly half the number of films the service premiered all of last year. Netflix has at least 32 more lined up this year that we know about. The elimination of barriers to entry—the price and research and planning that went into the choice—that Netflix celebrates are the things that make them special. They’ve removed themselves from the mythologizing that movies need.
53% of Americans believe big tech companies should be regulated by the federal government, much like big banks are. Public sentiment for tech regulation was significantly higher than it was last fall.Older Americans were more likely to say tech companies should be regulated like banks while millennials were less likely. (But) only 31% said the federal government would be capable of regulating large tech companies
Amazon workers’ median annual salary of $28,446 puts Amazon on par with chocolate manufacturer Hershey Co. , slightly above retailer Home Depot Inc. —and miles below the $240,430 median annual compensation at Facebook. The average pay for software-engineers (at) Amazon in the U.S. is $107,000. Most of the half-million employees unload trucks, drive forklifts and fill orders. The company’s “enormous market advantage” doesn’t appear to be translating into more pay for the warehouse worker."
The data shows that Pampers and Olay ranked No. 4 and 10, respectively, on the list of brands with the most fake followers among their paid influencers; Pampers with 32% and Olay with 19%. Topping the list: Ritz-Carlton, with 78% of fake followers. As use of influencers by big marketers grows, so do questions about how it's measured. Numbers to measure influencer campaigns often come from raw follower counts, without regard to how many followers actually saw posts—or were real.
The new laws are likely to hand Google and Facebook an advantage because wary consumers are more prone to trust recognized names with their information than unfamiliar newcomers. The laws may deter start-ups that do not have the resources to comply with the rules from competing with the big companies. Past privacy regulations have done little to mitigate the power of tech firms. “Regulations help incumbents.”
Account holders discoverd spam emails sitting in their sent folders, and even after changing passwords the emails kept going out. Some of these people had two-factor authentication. A Google spokesperson admitted the issue relates to a "spam campaign impacting a small subset of Gmail users." Google employee Seth Vargo tweeted in reply to one such complaint that the company's "engineering teams are aware of this and are working on a resolution :)"
Musk is discovering that large-scale car manufacturing is hard, and it's not easy to improve on the methods of conventional automakers. While automation plays an important role in car manufacturing, it's not the magicbullet Musk imagined. (In) the 1980s, GM spent billions on advanced robotics, but never saw a return on that investment. Far from leapfrogging conventional automakers, Tesla is struggling to match the efficiency of established rivals. "Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. Humans are underrated."
Machines that represent all genders and races would be infinitely more likely to service us all equally. This will be especially important as AI further penetrates fields like health care, government, and education, impactful and formative spaces that have gendered issues of their own to resolve.“If we don’t get women and people of color at the table - real technologists doing the real work - we will bias systems. Trying to reverse that a decade or two from now will be so much more difficult."
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was believed to have the greatest impact on people’s daily lives, according to our survey, with 22 percent saying his decisions impact them. He was followed by Google’s Sundar Pichai (18 percent) and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (17 percent). 32 percent of Americans believe Facebook is having a negative impact on society.
AI expertise is focused on developing commercial applications that optimize efficiencies in existing industries, and focused less on developing scientific applications that could give rise to new industries.Companies expect AI to allow them to move into new business segments or to maintain their competitive advantage. These efficiencies are accelerating sectoral consolidation and convergence. (But) AI’s most potent, long-term economic use may be to augment the discovery and pursuit of basic scientific advances that could be the foundations of new industry.
The appeal of DTC (is) by selling directly to consumers online, you avoid exorbitant retail markups, affording better design, quality, service, and lower prices because you've cut out the middleman. Connecting directly with consumers online, you control your messages and gather data about their purchase behavior, enabling a smarter product engine. An "authentic" brand- that stands for something more than selling stuff-can steal the future from legacy corporations. There are 400-plus DTC startups that collectively raised $3 billion in venture capital since 2012.
AI aggregates news from hundreds of sources and create three versions of each story: one skewed left, one skewed right, and one impartial. Natural language processing algorithms trawl through a thousand news sources to identify popular stories for narrative, facts, and bias. Stories can be written in 15 minutes. Its aim is to get machines to distill the most salient facts and narratives. (Since) AI has a strong tendency to pick up human biases, a promising approach may be to broaden human exposure to competing narratives and let them make up their own minds, remov(ing) the “impartial” version
Nest, the internet-connected devices company acquired for $3 billion in 2014, posted a $621 million operating loss against $726 million in revenue in 2017. 40% of Nest’s 2017 revenue came in the fourth quarter, the holiday shopping season. Losses were relatively flat during period compared to the quarter before, which suggests expenses were leveling off. Nest may see more savings now that it’s been folded back in Google’s broader hardware business.
"What if everyone did that?" is not a theoretical question any more. We've democratised scale using tech. My friends at Google, and at much smaller companies, and even my mate in a garage in Romania, have the means to affect human behavior on a global scale.We aren't a craft anymore. We're looking at three-orders-of-magnitude improvements using what is now off-the-shelf tech. Cloud-based services make massive speed and scale increases realistically doable. That's why we'(re) interested in ethics.
E-commerce sales through third-party platforms have resulted in “a sharp increase” in knockoffs. Amazon is facing multiple lawsuits from brands who say the company does not do enough to prevent counterfeits. “The real problem is that it’s possible to set up an Amazon account using totally fictitious information. Amazon said even though the product is in our fulfillment center, we collect the money, we never take the title to it” and so are not legally responsible. “There is no doubt that we live in a time where the law lags behind technology.”
Investors looking to create the next Tesla are turning to seasoned auto executives for help making sense of the complicated and capital-intensive car business.Tesla has struggled to launch vehicles on time, meet price targets and maintain quality levels. Conventional auto makers aren’t entirely committed to a wholesale transition because battery power will siphon sales from the high-margin fossil-fuel-powered cars they’ve sold for more than a century.“It’s very hard to disrupt yourselves.”
Movies are less suited to the all-you-can-watch template of Netflix or the algorithms of YouTube. The filmic format is less addiction-forming than serialized storytelling or a sequence of recommended web videos. Netflix treats movies as an option, not an event. The new selling points are abundance of choice and a low bar for entry. Film snobs, like the ones who run Cannes, are fighting back. Investing in Landmark signaled Netflix’s willingness to view cinema the way the film world does.
A mobile app built by a third party for the RSA security conference in San Francisco was found to have a few security issues—including hard-coded security keys and passwords that allowed a researcher to extract the conference's attendee list. The conference organizers acknowledged the vulnerability on Twitter, but they say that only the first and last names of 114 attendees were exposed. The vulnerability was discovered by a security engineer who tweeted discoveries during an examination of the app
Expiring knowledge catches more attention than it should (because) we are anxious to squeeze out insight before it loses relevance. Long term knowledge compounds over time. Expiring knowledge tells you what happened; long-term knowledge tells you why something happened and is likely to happen again. If you read Ben Graham you’ll understand what you should or shouldn’t pay attention to on CNBC. Rather than asking, “Is this company going to face a problem? Long-term knowledge is asking “Does this management team navigate problems when they inevitably arise?”
(People) choose stories with a negative tone rather than neutral or positive stories. People interested in current affairs and politics (a)re particularly likely to choose bad news. Researchers present solid evidence of a "negativity bias," for our hunger to hear, and remember bad news. It isn't just schadenfreude, but that we've evolved to react quickly to potential threats. Bad news could be a signal that we need to change what we're doing to avoid danger. There's (also) evidence people respond quicker to negative words.
The consumer-products industry has relied on selling new or improved versions of products at higher prices to boost growth. That practice is now challenged by weak inflation, Amazon's rising prowess in selling more household staples, and a decline in brand loyalty as consumers use the internet to shop around. Consumer-goods companies, struggle to keep pace with changing consumer tastes toward locally grown, organic food, while being limited in raising prices amid a weak inflation trend globally.
Salaries for top A.I. researchers have skyrocketed because there are not many people who understand the technology and thousands of companies want to work with it. A.I. specialists with little or no industry experience can make between $300,000 and $500,000 a year in salary and stock. Top names can receive millions. Big tech companies were offering (one AI specialist) two or three times what he believed his real market value was. “When you hire a star, you are not just hiring a star. You are hiring everyone they attract. And you are paying for all the publicity they will attract.”
Companies are often successful at applying technologies to new products for the customers they already serve. But they stumble when they try to leverage their technologies in new markets. People whose knowledge base differs can be more productive than contacts who have overlapping expertise. People in other industries sp(eak) different languages from the one they use. The goal should be to find new applications where your technology is superior. Unless managers take steps to figure out the additional applications, they risk leaving money on the table.
The myth of Silicon Valley is that its model can applied to every problem, when in actuality it is a one that was built to commercialize mature technologies for specific markets. Corporate executives seek to inject “Silicon Valley DNA” into their cultures and policymakers point to venture-funded entrepreneurship as a solution for all manner of problems. No innovation strategy fits every problem, so we need to keep expanding the toolbox.
“A wide range of evidence from various industries, products, and firms show[s] that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply.”
It's difficult for us to accept that our small world experience doesn't scale up to the big world. The idea that our personal experiences simply don't translate into executable knowledge in the wider world is hard for most people to accept.(But) to all intents and purposes, we know absolutely nothing worth knowing: you can't convince a human being to trust data over feelings, it's just not the way we're built.
Tech companies have been valued for their ability to replace employees with technology. Now, they are moving on find human beings to staff their systems. They’re doing so because of a series of failures of automation, which have prompted pressure from investors, the public, and governments. But any surge in hiring by tech companies is unlikely to offset the toll on employment from automation. And the jobs that such companies are hiring for at scale require lower skills, and pay lower wages.
Different publications have different audiences and they have different relationships with those audiences. Publications sell ads which command different rates depending on the value advertisers attach to different groups. A strong brand and key audience can command profitable rates because they become a gatekeeper for a given audience. Data Lords have the data and can track and target you. The publication’s role as the gatekeeper to an audience is undercut because the folks who control the data and the targeting can follow those readers anywhere and purchase the ads at the lowest price.
In its first two days online last July, MOVNorth.com got 20,000 views. During the first year of Trump’s presidency, the number of tech professionals who got permanent residency in Canada ticked up 40% from 2016, to more than 11,000. The cap on the number of H-1B visas fluctuates, but in the five-day annual application window in early April, 190,000 people petitioned for just 85,000 spots—in Obama’s last year, 236,000 applied for the same number of visas.
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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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