ATT’s growing network: New York City, Washington, DC, Baltimore, Las Vegas, Detroit, and Philadelphia.The six new cities put ATT’s total number of 5G cities at 19 (and total 5G+ cities at 25), although the carrier only offers a single 5G phone to date: the $1,300 Galaxy Note 10 Plus 5G. Still, the addition of major metropolitan areas like New York and Washington, DC are encouraging to see especially as more devices start to feature 5G support in 2020.
China announced that it would complete its competitor to the U.S.-operated global positioning system network by the first half of next year, increasing the pace of its decoupling from U.S. technologies.China’s Beidou network of satellites will be the first service to compete with the global positioning system and already has a massive user base since over 70% of Chinese smartphones are ready to use its positioning services.Chinese smartphone manufacturers accounted for over 40% of sales worldwide. China’s global positioning system and fifth generation wireless networking technologies work in tandem.
3D printing is now showing up all over retail. Customers upload designs for office products from home, Staples employees print them in-store, and the final product is delivered. A hardware manufacturer has even taken this a step further, allowing customers to print hardware. You can have high-performance shirt—or suit, blouse, and pants—3D printed while you wait. It takes 90 minutes. With 4,000 individual needles and a dozen different yarns, the printer can create any combination of materials and colors desired, with zero waste.If you want 3D-printed clothing, all you need is a smartphone.
There are a lot of companies that claim to do artificial intelligence (AI). You’ll find the omnipresent initials appended to domain names or within the first few words of a pitch deck, but a lot of it is BS. A true, robust AI system enables in-the-moment decision-making with the influx of new data — all without human oversight (*some initial assembly required). Legitimate AI companies are mixed in with vaporware like puffed cheese snacks in party mix, More often than not, many solutions are labeled “AI” simply because it excites executives and VCs.
Top influencers are deciding to disconnect from the video-sharing platform, worn down by the demands of YouTube’s algorithm for fresh content to promote. YouTubers say they are afraid to take time off, out of fear it will hurt how their videos are highlighted on the site, which uses an algorithm to determine which ones to recommend. Many influencers say it rewards accounts that post frequently with more page views.YouTube has posted a series of videos aimed at influencers to offer tips on how to balance all the work that goes into being an influencer.
Sociability involves understanding others’ emotions and seeing situations from alternative points of view. It enables empathic collaboration with colleagues and customers. Variability is our capacity for managing change and variety; detecting outliers, multitasking, and learning. Jobs that require high levels of sociability and variability are some of the most susceptible to burnout. Because the qualities that set us apart from machines are so taxing, leisure has become increasingly necessary. By encouraging our minds to wander, it can improve our ability to generate novel ways of thinking. Leisure is an activity that robots cannot perform, and makes better thinkers and workers.
In New York City, retail clothing jobs declined by 9% from 2013 to 2018, even as overall employment in the city jumped 14%. The number of national retail chain stores in the city shrank 4% this year, the biggest drop since 2008.As brick-and-mortar stores scramble to justify their existence, they’re trying to be all things to all customers, to blend instant gratification and infinite selection. And it falls upon the workers on the front lines to make it happen. The retail worker is cashier, cheerleader, personal shopper, visual merchandiser and database manager.“Retail is not looking for salespeople, they’re looking for retail transaction enablers.”
Machine learning is a collection of approaches of various types applicable in different scenarios. Deep learning is being applied successfully in natural language processing, computer vision, machine translation, bioinformatics, gaming, and others where classification, pattern matching matter. The disadvantage is that since deep learning consists of many layers, with interconnected nodes and different weights there’s no way to understand how decision, clustering, or classification is done. Which means deep learning networks are unexplainable. Systems used to make decisions of significance need to have explainability to satisfy trust, compliance, verifiability, and understandability.
The General Language Understanding Evaluation, GLUE, is a widely accepted benchmark for how well an AI system understands human language. A language model that scores highly on GLUE can handle diverse reading comprehension tasks. Out of of 100, the average person scores around 87 points. Baidu is the first team to surpass 90 with its model. It considers the ordering of sentences and the distances between them to understand the logical progression of a paragraph. It uses continuous training that allows it to train on new data and new tasks without it forgetting those it learned before. This allows it to get better at performing a broad range of tasks over time with minimal human interference.
Tesla Theater was introduced in the V10 software update that went out in September via over-the-air-update, and added streaming media from Netflix and YouTube, as well as Tesla vehicle feature tutorials.Musk said that Disney+ will be “coming soon” to the list of available streaming services drivers can access in their cars. Tesla Theater’s streaming media options are only available when the car is in park, not driving. But it’s a feature that is more valuable to Tesla owners than you might think when you consider that Tesla cars require time to charge at charging stations, meaning you’ll likely be looking at a wait of half-an-hour or more.
For years, the prime malls with the best locations escaped the havoc being wrought in the retail world by internet competition. But now, even they are beginning to feel the pain. Retail analysts considered 260 top-tier malls to be protected from store closings that plagued their lower-tier peers. These centers typically boast an attractive assortment of stores and restaurants, making them more appealing and relevant to customers. But the bankruptcies of big-name retailers are beginning to fan further. Signs are growing that even when malls appear full, revenue growth is slowing because landlords have to cut rents to keep them there.
When 2019 wraps, Amazon’s advertising business is projected to be more than 50% bigger than it was a year ago—when advertisers spent nearly $5 billion—as it continues to challenge its much bigger rivals, Google and Facebook. 60% to 70% of Amazon Advertising budgets are allocated to sponsored products. Even when shoppers search for a brand’s products by name on Amazon, they may still see the brand’s competitors first. Agency reps have seen prices go up 200% across Amazon’s search units in the last two years while Google and Bing have remained flat.
88% of Americans "use a second digital device while watching TV." 71% of Americans "look up content related to content they are watching," while 41% of Americans are busy messaging "friends/family about content they are watching." Mental clutter is the point, as we seek to be "distracted from distraction by distraction." We are "filled with fancies and empty of meaning" in order to keep ourselves from the terror of our own deeper thoughts, our own existential despair. Or perhaps you're simply bored out of your mind.
Nobody has any time. Everybody is busy, burned out, swamped. No matter what work we do, we never seem to have enough time. In the 20th century, labor-saving household technology improved dramatically, but no labor appears to have been saved. A lot of modern overwork is class and status maintenance. American parents—particularly college-educated mothers and fathers—have doubled the amount of time they spend raising, teaching and helping their kids. Americans use new productivity and technology to buy a better life rather than to enjoy more downtime. The thing that finally reduced labor in the home was labor outside the home. Better technology means higher expectations—and higher expectations create more work.
First, do no harm...JLMany doctors fear that the tech industry, which lives by the mantra “fail fast and fix it later,” is putting patients at risk. Systems developed in one hospital often flop when deployed in a different facility. Software used in the care of millions of Americans has been shown to discriminate. And AI systems sometimes learn to make predictions based on factors that have less to do with disease than the brand of MRI machine used, the time a blood test is taken or whether a patient was visited by a chaplain.“While it is the job of entrepreneurs to think big and take risks, it is the job of doctors to protect their patients.”
For many young urban professionals in the U.S., the typical midday meal involves shoveling in a lightly dressed salad alone at a desk, or maybe on a curb outside listening to a podcast on double speed. It’s not because they hate drinking in the middle of the day. It’s because they lack the expense accounts, disposable income, and stretchy sense of time that previous generations apparently had. Knowing all this, an entire ecosystem of start-ups and start-up-adjacent food dispensaries has appeared. Together, the companies are working both to kill the concept of waiting to eat, and to optimize lunch.
Americans in low-income and rural areas get slower broadband speeds even though they pay similar monthly prices as their counterparts in wealthy and urban areas. The country’s biggest broadband provider charges more in markets without competition. Low-income areas and high-income areas pay similar median monthly costs— $66—for stand-alone internet, but poorer areas get 40% slower speeds. Customers in high-income areas get a median speed of 150 Mbps, while the median speed was 100 Mbps in low-income areas. Bills in low-income areas had a median of $10 in added internet-related fees. Most people dont have a choice.
I didn’t just buy into the lore of Google—I helped write it. My first job was ghost-writing executive emails extolling Google’s culture, values and editing the Internal News blog. It was my solemn duty to reflect that specialness back to those responsible for it—Googlers. The day before I left for my first maternity leave, I received a glowing performance review . “When you come back, you can do anything here.” I got involved in the Walkout because I cared about Google and what I believed it stood for. This was the company whose corporate code of conduct states “don’t be evil,”(But) after twelve years at Google, I was unceremoniously escorted off the premises.
Since the 1980s, a central focus of antitrust has been a dominant company’s power to increase prices. But there is a debate now about nonprice components of competition. A loss of privacy to a data-harvesting giant like Facebook or Google can be cast as reducing the quality of the service and thus a signal of monopoly power. (There is a) very different climate now compared with the antitrust case against Microsoft in the 1990s, and the extent of the bipartisan support for pursuing the big tech companies. “The environment is radically different than it was even a year or two ago. It’s a grass-roots rebellion against concentrated power.”
Amazon is a big company. But how big? Hundreds of billions are thrown around, but is that big in relation to US retail? What should we compare it to? Amazon has 35% of US ecommerce. But, it competes with physical retailers as well. On that basis, Amazon’s real market share is closer to 6% (it’s 2/3 the size of Walmart). Walmart was also once the bogeyman of terrifying efficiency and scale but also failed to crush all other American retailers. Amazon won’t either. If you think Amazon will go towards taking over ‘everything’, then your definition of Amazon’s market share has to be its share of, well, ‘everything’. Today, that’s around 6%.
In 2010, artificial intelligence was more likely to pop up in dystopian science-fiction movies than in everyday life. A lot has changed. How did AI come to invade so many different parts of our lives over the last decade? The answer lies in technological advancements in the field, combined with cheaper, easier access to more powerful computers. Major developments over the last decade focused on deep learning, modeled after the way neurons work in the brain. "Ten years ago, deep learning was not on anybody's radar, and now it's in everything,"
Instead of being the “Uber for X,” like every app startup used to want, now IoT and gadget makers are aspiring to an even less appealing standard: becoming the Keurig of their niche marketplace.The Keurig model was simple: buy the coffeemaker, and then buy its branded single-serving K-Cup pods of coffee separately. We won’t see an end to such gadgets because too many products rely on what economists refer to as the “two-part tariff,” where you buy the product (razor, floss dispenser, coffee maker) and then pay a per-unit fee for the items (blades, floss, coffee pods) that make the product usable.
The world today compares to a time when people did not have a clear notion of property rights. Once those rights were institutionalized and protected it helped revolutionize economies.When people go online, data is stored on centralized servers that are vulnerable to attack. But (researchers) believe that by marrying specialized computer chips and blockchain technology, they can build a system that provides greater scalability and privacy protection. “You can have the integrity that the blockchain ledger provides and also you can have privacy or confidentiality for the smart contract execution that’s provided by the secure enclave.”
The “Expectations” market is where you bet on the future value of shares of stock. The value of those shares connects to success in the Real market but the market price of a company’s stock is influenced by myriad forces that have little to do with the fundamentals of the business. Corporate boards are operating in an increasingly complex arena as expectations about how companies should be managed according to personal values and principles. It requires business acumen and emotional intelligence, and an acceptance that corporate purpose is less about mission statements and more about managing at the intersection of a healthy business and a healthy society.
The phenomenon has become so common that mental-health experts have named it phantom phone syndrome: Smartphone and smartwatch users so alert to incoming messages they sometimes feel devices vibrate when they don’t. Some people detect a buzz even when the devices are put away.The perceived sensations aren’t recognized as a mental-health disorder. Instead, the phenomenon tracks the deep reach of personal technology as a habit as well as a physical and psychological adaptation. Researchers say phantom phone syndrome is related to the social-media driven fear of missing out, so-called FOMO.
The costs associated with complexity can be more expensive than standardized ones, reducing an organization’s efficiency. As complexity increases, a system’s understandability decreases. Lack of understandability can lead to unmanageability. As companies grow, leaders have less understanding of how each element is intertwined with others; thus may be unable to assess the impact of removing any one. The connections and elements that produce complexity cannot be easily divided into “good” and “bad.” Complexity is increasingly necessary for competitiveness in today’s unpredictable business environment.You can manage complexity only by looking at the whole picture, and that’s really the job of senior management.
Rather than just being able to show us our physical movements, it would perfectly replicate our personalities, our insecurities, our senses of humor, knowledge, memories. It could mine our media history to see the digital interactions we’ve had with others, the issues important to us, and the curated versions of ourselves we’ve chosen to present.Our phones could record our conversations, then integrate that information for our AIs. (But) would my AI portray the real me? Would it portray the best me? What if it went rogue, or someone else took control of it? Could I send my AI to have conversations with people I don’t want to talk to? If they send their AI , what would it mean for our digital selves to converse instead of our real selves?
Google’s Chrome and ads team aren’t singing from the same sheet. Tracking web users across domains via cookies and identifiers gets difficult when moving data between one framework and another. Buying or selling external inventory, rather than moving it within Google’s system where it has visibility across the whole ecosystem, will push out others, leading to a net positive for Google and making its garden walls higher.It’s balancing user privacy and the performance of its ad tech platforms with its competitive position and being broken up for anti-competitive behavior.”
The AI talent grab is real. The big tech companies have for some time been vacuuming up AI talent through acquisitions 635 AI acquisitions since 2010, topped by Apple with 20 acquisitions. While the AI talent pool may be growing, a significant shortage remains. Those with the necessary skills — ranging from robotics to computer vision and natural language processing — are in high demand, and they face a clear choice: Take a paycheck at one of the big tech companies, chase a longer-term moonshot at an emerging startup, or launch their own business from scratch.
Across the United States, gig workers on apps including Uber, Lyft, and UberEats saw precipitous drops in their income this year, as companies slash wages in anticipation of initial public offerings on the stock market. Uber slashed driver pay from 80 to 60 cents a mile. Postmates cut pay by 30%. Instacart axed its ‘quality’ bonus for delivery couriers, which can amount to 40% of pay on an order. As independent contractors, minimum wage laws don’t apply to gig workers. The companies have also flooded the markets with new workers. The changes have left gig workers struggling to pay for food, utilities, and medical bills.
The walls around siloed customer data in financial services are coming down. The data layer, when it becomes open and ubiquitous, will erode the competitive advantage of data-rich financial institutions. Basic financial services will become simple open-source protocols, lowering the barrier for any company to offer financial products to its customers. Fintech will become part of the basic functionality of non-finance products. Financial services, rather than being offered as a standalone product, will become part of the native user interface of other products, becoming embedded.
Amazon attaches the badge to products regulators have raised safety concerns about, that make false claims or whose listings have been manipulated by sellers to get the endorsement. Amazon gives the badge to items that violate its own policies.(And) the badge favored Amazon’s own products: the AmazonBasics brand had the most Amazon’s Choice badges of any brand identified. Amazon’s Choice status is valuable to sellers because it can garner a 25% bump in sales.A big reason “Amazon’s Choice” gets onto problem products is that an industry of sellers, consultants and software developers has sprung up to help game the algorithm.
Putting together a computer that can solve a single problem is easier than building a general-purpose computer. Such a particular quantum computer allows engineers to show that a quantum computer is faster than a classical computer on this single problem, while allowing them to avoid producing a generally useful computer. The hope this success would provide might reassure people who control budgets, providing researchers with the funding necessary to turn a special-purpose (that is, not very useful) quantum computer into a general-purpose (that is, very useful!) quantum computer.
There’s no accepted, standard definition of what artificial intelligence really is.At the abstract level, AI is machine behavior and functions that mimic the intelligence and behavior of humans. (But) the vast majority of narrow AI solutions are trying to achieve the specific problem the technology is being applied to: there are specific things humans have been doing that they would now like machines to do.Rather than trying to build artificial intelligence, enterprises are leveraging cognitive technologies to automate and enable a wide range of problem areas that require some aspect of cognition.
Emotional AI hasn't reached the level of sophistication needed for widespread deployment. In a 2019 meta-analysis of 1,000 studies on inferring emotion from human facial expressions, scientists concluded that the relationship between faces and emotions is more complex that meets the eye. “20 to 30% of the time, people make the expected facial expression,"… But the rest of the time, they don’t. "We're still far from a kind of human intuition having an AI being able to analyze all of these different signals and understand emotion."
Facebook has had a tumultuous past few years, with growing public concern over its approach to data privacy and the spread of misinformation.For most of Facebook’s history, since its founding in 2004, the company hasn’t advertised heavily, particularly in more traditional formats like television. But in recent years, Facebook has been ramping up its marketing efforts. Facebook also rolled out a new corporate identity last month.
Among others: advertising will come to smart speakers(Amazon and Google dominate the smart speaker landscape, but neither is making substantial income from sales, and the absence of paid services means that they aren’t taking 30% cut of revenue either), VR will have a second mini-boom, Amazon's Alexa expansion will slip, Apple will experience worker activism (with the company coming under increasing pressure for its craven stance towards both Donald Trump and Xi Jinping), Google will gain from (the European Union's) Article 13 ( they are well placed to build and license the content filters required to police copyrighted material.),
The retailer has weathered the shift to online shopping and Amazon. Sales have risen for 20 straight quarters. Walmart has increased market share (and its) stock has surged 30% this year. Stores could be the base for new ventures like fast delivery, health clinics and could act as a base for technology infrastructure or business-to-business services. "Edge computing" capacity, in which data is processed physically close to where it is being collected, spread out among retail locations, could be rented out. Warehouse and shipping capacity could be sold. Walmart could collect fees for processing and shipping. And online orders for Walmart's groceries and other items could increasingly be fulfilled by traditional stores, where customers pick up goods.
One-third of people with multiple jobs say they do them out of financial necessity. 48% of those with multiple jobs do it to earn extra money or some other reason. Such jobs are supplementing traditional employment, not replacing it. In 2017, 17% of tax filers indicated receipt of self-employment income, the highest share since 1957.55% of self-employed workers also receive a W2 from an employer, a share not changed since 2000. 92% of tax filers receive W2 income as employees, also steady in recent years.U.S. workers are finding it harder to make ends meet in the face of growing income inequality and rising costs for health care, education and housing.
Improved translation software can significantly boost international trade online, a notable case of machine learning having a clear impact on economic activity. After eBay improved its automatic translation program in 2014, commerce shot up by 10.9% among pairs of countries where people could use the new system. (But) adoption of AI technologies produces a “J-curve” in productivity. AI technologies “require significant complementary investments, including business process redesign, co-invention of new products and business models, and investments in human capital” to have a large economic impact.
Most of us live in a state of ignorance about our physical surroundings. Centuries of technological sophistication and global commerce have distanced us from making physical things, and even from knowing how they are made. Algorithms have taken over many day-to-day procedures. These algorithms are driven by algorithms, in a cascade of interconnected calculation. Automated decisionmaking is efficient, but it has contributed to a crisis of accountability. If no one understands what is really happening, how can anyone be held responsible?
Use the term “polluted information” as opposed to disinformation or misinformation. Polluters who are trying to pollute obviously pollute. But so do people who aren’t intending to. We have so many incentivizing structures that encourage polluting information. The internet exacerbates issues we’ve already been dealing with. It asks us to rethink assumptions about the marketplace of ideas and free speech. We’ve got to start thinking “what have we normalized, what have we internalized, what assumptions do we make about our own speech, about responsibilities to ourselves and other people? I don’t think that we should wait to see what Facebook does."
Making these tests unreliable is that their ancestry component is based on self-reported surveys from people who say they belong to one ancestry or another — an inherently flawed practice. Sample sizes vary by location and by testing company, so there’s a big disparity in data quality. Europeans are much more represented in DNA databases. As more people submit their DNA to genetic testing companies, and government agencies figure out ways to use this personal genetic information, it could be used against us. There are few legal safeguards on what companies and governments can do with data from direct-to-consumer genetic tests.
The garment industry creates enough leftover textile per year to cover the entire republic of Estonia with waste.That was a best-case scenario. Worst case would be enough to cover North Korea. "On Instagram I had maybe 2,000 followers, and the most likes I had ever gotten was 95. I posted this selfie of a shirt I’d made out of my own trash because I was too poor to go shopping, and it instantly got 200 likes. It was the most popular thing I’d ever done. Good designers have careers and see their stuff in stores. Great designers change the way people dress."
Interpersonal connections, time to contemplate, jobs and the intangible pleasure of being part of something larger than yourself.Amazon offers shoppers unlimited choices. But a limited selection of well-chosen options offers a different—and more useful—kind of convenience. Shopping in physical space sustains more than just the retailer. Foot traffic creates nonautomated jobs for real people. Foot traffic means coffee, or lunch, or drinks, and those mean tips for tipped workers. Foot traffic means standing with neighbors. What is retail therapy for you as an individual is therapeutic for public spaces. It’s no accident that urban mixed-use real-estate developers have taken the blandly pleasant aspects of the public square and nestled them in the heart of commercially zoned real estate.
A device changed what it means to be human. A gadget that as it gained functionality, altered the way we navigate the world, our relationships, ourselves. But it also began to navigate us—in ways we sometimes didn’t realize and shouldn’t have welcomed. The smartphone has changed the way we navigate the world itself: not just what we do and think, but also how we feel. Each person could always be hooked to an individualized information stream maximized for attention and engagement. “Just because the smartphone was the conduit for manipulative, ill-intended activity, doesn’t mean (it) couldn’t exist without the bad stuff."
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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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