Category Archives: Culture

Five for Friday: AI sans Musk, Leadership + culture, and black swans

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Well, after a few busy weeks that wreaked a little havoc in my writing time, this week we’ll start with the pending downfall of mankind due to the rise of the machines.  Wait, no, that’s not what this is about … that was a few weeks ago.  But look at this article about how a couple of robots came to be the newest hires at a Wisconsin factory in search of reliable workers. It’s just the title of the article this time.  Also, there was that story about how Facebook pulled the plug on some AI that developed its own language that humans couldn’t understand, and while nothing wrong with being excited about all the opportunities that AI will bring for the future, at the same time we need to look at its consequences from all perspectives while Salesforce set out to create “AI for everyone”—to make machine learning affordable for companies who’ve been priced out of the market for experts. They’ve promised to “democratize” AI.  While we’re at it, all that big data has to be stored somewhere.  Look at how it’s impacting one small Oregon town.  Then there’s the rise of AI forcing Microsoft and Google to become chip makers and the business of artificial intelligence.  Oh, and Microsoft replaced Mobile with AI as one of its top priorities in their most recent annual report.

Think that AI isn’t really touching your life?  Check this out from Venture Beat.

I was a little surprised when I read this article from Business Insider about what three of the potential black swans are that will likely trigger a global recession in 2018 as I didn’t see any of the others I’ve seen a lot of news about of late, but I think they do a great job of laying it out.  What with the current potential instability from governmental posturing, it’s likely that the global economy will be impacted sooner rather than later, but these are some more to keep an eye on.  That said, it’s logical that we should see a major market correction based on historical data and trends.  What’s odd is how changes in the trading systems have likely artificially inflated the markets as well.

You may have heard the news about how some hackers stole a whole bunch of money from the Ethereum platform, but did you hear the story about how a bunch of other hackers stole it back?

Both Gates and Zuckerberg are sounding alarms about jobs.  Should we listen?

Being a week full of cheer and merry-making (I mean, it wasn’t a week full of bad news, just odd news, which seems to be our current era), let’s move to some leadership-focused articles.  Strategy+business has had a few good ones of late, from one about how improving company culture is not about free snacks, to another about how leaders can improve their thinking agility, to this article about what the body tells us about leadership. Along with that is an article I think every leader or hiring manager should read about why emotional intelligence is so important to consider when hiring (this is a key area I focus on with every candidate I interview) and somewhat unrelated but still “fitting” in the category is this article from HBR about the personality traits of good negotiators.

Any time I feel like I’ve had a circuitous route to the world of tech, I come across another article about how those of us with humanities backgrounds are in high demand in the tech world.  Why?  It seems to boil down to ideas explored in this article: making stuff vs. making stuff people want.

Right, so I know I’m avoiding the elephant in the room with the Google memo that came out, but I’ll leave you with this orthogonal piece instead: not only has Kalanick been removed from his job as CEO at Uber, now Benchmark Capital (an early investor) is accusing him of fraud in an attempt to have him removed from the board of the company as well.

I realize I was just bragging a bit about the liberal arts cohort to which I belong, but we can’t deny the importance of science in the world around us.  This TED talk from Naomi Oreskes gives a historical view of why we should trust scientists.  Check it out.

 

 

Five for Friday: AI + Musk, Employee Productivity, Human Curiosity + More

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Yea, well, it’s more than five for sure this week, and just like Blockchain, I’m auguring in on AI plus a few other topics, but here goes …

If you’ve never checked out Wait but Why, you should. Tim Urban does a great job of going deep on every topic he touches, and he does a good job at it.  This week I thought I’d share his dive into the AI Revolution as a primer for a few other articles that follow.  So, the first few in this list are Elon Musk related … apparently he thinks that one of the biggest threats to humanity is AI.  He recently told America’s governors that we need to regulate AI before it is too late.  Maybe he had read this piece about how AI is inventing languages humans can’t understand (obviously it’s not that linear or simple, but it’s somewhat funny, and the guy is wicked smaht), but to quote him “Until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react because it seems so ethereal,” he said. “AI is a rare case where I think we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive. Because I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it’s too late.”  As Wired rightly points out, we need to worry about first things first with AI before we worry about the killer robots.  The flip side of this one is Parc CEO’s Tolga Kurtoglu’s belief that humans and AI will work together in almost every job.

Don’t take this as meaning it’s time to break out your Ouija boards and Tarot cards, but the U.S. Military believes that people have a sixth sense.  At least, that’s how they view the phenomena of premonition and intuition, which they spent four years and close to $4M researching.  While I’m not trying to comment on the cost of the research, it’s interesting to see the U.S. Military trying to understand these phenomena to the end of accelerate the spread of them throughout the military institution.  And incredulity aside, the article from Time is actually pretty interesting for the applications the military is looking at for this research.

Interested in how the next financial crisis may unfold?  Jim Mooney from Baustop Group says it is tied to two things: leverage and volatility.

So, there are two interesting articles this week that are related about how people do (or don’t do) the work they do: first, from Fast Company, is this piece about how our employee’s lack of productivity might be on us as managers/companies (hint: task switching), and then this piece from HuffPost about the potential big miss of coworking.

A quick side trip back to last week’s delve into digital: small nations and islands are winning the digital revolution race.

MIT is now offering a master’s program that doesn’t even require a high school degree.  How?  By letting students take rigorous courses online for credit and then, if they perform well on exams, place into master’s degree programs on campus.

The long read (from Longreads) this week is our last topic: human curiosity.  In an interview this week, astrophysicist Mario Livio is asked about what he discovered on his journey to understand what makes humans curious.  If you’ve got the time, it’s is in my opinion worth it, given the range of topics.

Two TED talks for you this week: first, from psychologist Adam Alter on why our screens are making us less happy and what to do about it, and second, this time from Tricia Wang, the human insights missing from big data, a talk in which she demystifies big data and identifies the pitfalls the lead big companies to make massive mistakes based on data.

Five for Friday: Wannacry, Attrition, Amazon + more

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A photo by Kristopher Allison. unsplash.com/photos/6x90rJDo-WA

It’s been a few weeks since the WannaCry incident, and while that attack was shut down in a very novel way, it brought to the forefront again how adept hackers are becoming at leveraging our human weaknesses to penetrate networks en masse.  Two articles for you to consider as you start your week in this area: one from Business Insider where a malware researcher talks about the latest evolution in ransomeware, and then this article from strategy+business on how to resist future attacks.

Why do people choose to quit their jobs?  Well, Inc. thinks there’s one sentence that sums up the entire reason.  Then there’s the recent outcome of the culture investigation at Uber, a culture for which Bloomberg posits we’re all to blame.

Good news coming down from the Supreme Court when it comes to Patent Trolls, and the direct results could be a big win for innovation.  And speaking of innovation, how did America become so against it?

Here’s a question to consider: are you even aware of how Amazon is eating the world?  Yes?  No?  Maybe?  Zack Kanter has his own views on it and it makes for an interesting read.  Hint: you know that looming apocalypse in the world of retail and commercial real estate?  Yup, you can than Bezos for that. Especially with this news … every commerical real estate entity just woke up to a very bad morning.

Last is a great piece from The New Yorker, titled “How to Call B.S. on Big Data: A Practical Guide.  It’s short and to the point, and more of a general-life approach to data than anything technical, but I like it because it reminds us that any data can be manipulated to tell a story.  And yes, even machines can be racist – remember Tay?

I’ve recommended Tim Ferriss’s podcasts before, and this week he has a new TED talk where he discusses why we should define our fears instead of goals – check it out.

Now for Something a Little Different …

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I’m establishing a new rhythm for these collections and with that have a need to try a new format with them as well.  This month’s collection is a broad range, and while where I can I’ll bucket certain topics together as I have in the past, there are over 100+ articles that I’ve found interesting enough to read since my last missive and that gets a bit of a challenge from a curation standpoint.  I’m also looking at creating more evergreen content for you similar to what I’ve thrown together on machine learning or artificial intelligence, but more on that another time.

First this week, please pay attention: there is an incredibly effective Gmail scam out there right now.  Go read up about it, but essentially, a sender who looks like a trusted contact, sends what looks like a pdf but is actually an image that will take you to a fake google login page and from there, your identity is history. There’s a similar ruse going on with Apple IDs, but there’s less press about it.

If you’ve not heard and you have an iPhone, go update to 10.3 – it’ll save you on average 3gb of space on your phone, although it does convert to a new file format that is troublesome for a few.  Oh, and Apple also acquired Workflow, which is an amazing automation app for iOS devices and they made it free – go check it out.

Ever wonder which country in the world has the happiest people?  No?  Well, ever wondered how the data is analyzed to determine who are the happiest people in the world?  If you said yes, you’re in luck.

Middle management may seem like a thankless job, but according to HBR, it’s also an exhausting one.  It has to do with the constant need to code switch as you deal with different levels of the hierarchy of an organization, and they’ve got some suggestions on how to lessen the toll from it.

Robots, robots everywhere!  Not, necessarily, to the extreme that we see in Asimov’s I, Robot ( the first person to recite the three laws to me gets a prize), but they are becoming more present in our day to day lives.  Heck, I even heard a story of how robots are being tested in D.C. to help “augment” the current food delivery process.  I say augment in quotes because that’s what the company rep in the article said when asked if the robots would replace people.  Well, one person who doesn’t seem to get how robots are going to impact our society in the near term is Steve Mnuchin.  In his mind, robots won’t be displacing U.S. jobs for at least 50 to 100 years.  Problem is, he’s wrong – robots have been replacing humans for a while now.

strategy+business had a good piece recently on the Ten Principles for Leading the Next Industrial Revolution.  I don’t think there’s anything that would surprise you in these principles, but it does put them together in a logical order and is worth exploring.  Ah, and they’ve also replaced “fail fast and often” with “innovate rapidly and openly.”

Deloitte also has an interesting exploration of how the auto industry is going to change in the near and mid-term, and how massive that transformation is going to be.  With more millennials opting out of car ownership and into a sharing economy, the automation of delivery vehicles that we’ll see culminate in the next five to ten years, and the looming death of a generation who have driven car sales most of their lifetime, the auto industry is on a precipice and they’ve done a good job of analyzing and detailing all the possible outcomes.  While many of us aren’t tied directly to the automotive industry, this in addition to the previous piece on the next industrial revolution should get you thinking differently about your own challenges.  By the way, one trend that you’ll find between them has to do with data.  Oh, and stratechery wrote on the same topic with greater brevity and a very different approach, but the same outcome – car ownership is going to change.  It already is.

Speaking of data, here’s something about how big data is helping find the Achilles heel of each individual cancer.

Well, there’s been a little bit of news this last week about how individual privacy on the internet is being betrayed by “235 stooges in Washington” to quote one news source, and while I think we’ve been giving up more and more of our privacy for a long time, if you are concerned about yours, check out this article from Kevin Mitnick on how to go invisible online.  By the way, at a minimum, you should be using a virtual private network (VPN) on your personal devices to keep your personal data from being stolen as you enjoy a coffee at your local Starbucks.  And yes, I know I’ve said this before.  Also, there’s this article from the Pew Research Center on what the public know about cybersecurity.  They even have an interactive quiz.  Also, take a look at what the future of passwords may hold.

Speaking of stolen identity, check out this story on a $30k sting operation one person pulled when hackers stole her website.

Time for a quick video break: this week Fast Company has an interesting (and short) one on how circular runways could lead to more efficient airports.

We’re in the midst of Spring Break season, and with that, Legoland Florida has launched an educational, road-trip friendly app for kids.  It seems pretty cool and is a good indicator of where how we’ll continue to see content and experiences evolve.

Tech will lead to new sub-prime crunch.  That’s a bold headline, even without the missing preposition, and TechCrunch makes the case that while in the past P2P lending rates in the subprime arena have been indicators of coming economic contraction (note:  the overheated economy and tightening labor pools is a more classic indicator), the gist is that more people are going to be pushed into a lower wage earner bucket with a continuing stagnation of salaries (which have been stagnant since the 80s compared to economic growth and corporate profits – just ask a real economist), and that will push the sub-prime market to continue to grow and with that growth, eventually blow up.

OK, so, I’ve written about AI before on many occasions, and with good reason as it is a topic that is getting a lot of press these days.  I took the time to try and explain the differences between narrow and general AI, and as well to keep us all up with how it is intersecting with machine learning.  What this article points out, however, is that that interest in AI and machine learning has created so much different data sets itself that it has started to skew the data and what is “real” about … data, much less the preponderance of actual fake news that is out there.  To quote ”this pairing of interest with ignorance has created a perfect storm for a misinformation epidemic. The outsize demand for stories about AI has created a tremendous opportunity for impostors to capture some piece of this market.”  Oh, and then there’s the latest about how AI will change everything … again.

Also speaking of data, here’s an interesting article about how Charity: Water is using it to connect donors to the people they are helping.

A fun article (maybe) that relates to the world of AI and algorithms: When Machines Go Rogue.  To wit, complex systems have lots of parts, and that means there are lots of ways they can fail.  Also note, however, that there are lots of redundancies for that reason.

Google has been in the news little of late, from a big headline standpoint, but one interesting read is their approach to creating the next Silicon Valley.  Oh, and then there was the demise of Google Fiber.

In case you’re interested, here’s a look at Goldman Sachs’ Annual Report.  It’s a treasure trove, as most annual reports are, at the direction the company is going … especially when you read between the lines.  While on the topic of Goldman, take a read as to why the firm is going on a buying binge for delinquent mortgages … again (2008 sound familiar?).

I’ve written a lot about how we need to change how we are recruiting and hiring women.  Here’s an article about the need to change our strategy around this, and for obvious reasons – we’ve seen a desire by millennials to change how we work, and how we work is, in fact, changing.  Let’s not hold women to a standard and antiquated version of the workplace when we’re willing to accommodate others.

Take a moment, if you will, and go look at Business Insider’s list of the most powerful female engineers in 2017 and what they are working on.

Thank the Boston Globe for this one: the biggest threat facing middle-aged men isn’t smoking or obesity … its loneliness.  I know it’s a little off-topic, but given the audience of these missives, I thought it relevant.

There’s been a lot of news lately about the new Amazon play into the grocery business, and how they plan to make it so that we not only ever have to wait in lines, but we never even have to talk to another person!  (Now do you see my reference to loneliness above?).  Well, the ‘zon is trying to break into that $800 billion market with a splash, what with their foray into physical stores after online has failed in that domain for them.  Read about the genesis of that journey here.  And speaking of Amazon, check out why ad agencies are so afraid of what Bezos might be planning next given the 60% jump in revenue from advertising last quarter.

So why are employees at Apple and Google more productive?  Is it the swanky digs?  The free lunches?  The compensation packages?  Nope, it’s what they do with their star performers and their internal development programs.  Note: companies that lack development programs will always play in the minor leagues.  Along with that is this article about why the best employees quit, even when they love their job.

I just like the title of this article (because it’s true): iteration is not design. The point, really, is that while iteration is a great design tool, it doesn’t create great design because it can’t innovate, solve usability problems, or create delight.

SXSW has come and gone for another year, and as always there was a flurry of “new” and “hot” technology this year mixed in with weird films and lots of bands.  According to Forbes, AI dominated the SXSW conversation this year; while CNET has a good round-up of everything that happened and WIRED claims that tech is finally trying to clean up the mess it made.

Uber has been in the news of late, and while I’m sure a lot of you have already seen many articles about all that has passed, there are a few I think are important because of what they mean for the future of the company: did Uber steal their driverless car tech from Google? (If they did, there’s a company big enough to take them down). Doubtful?  Check out this timeline.  Then there’s this piece from Pando about the economic evidence that shows that Uber isn’t as innovative as we all claim it is.  And Newsweek had something to say on the matter as well and The Verge asks if Uber can be saved from itself.  And while The Guardian states that every time we take an Uber we’re spreading its social poison, one of the most interesting tidbits to come out in my mind is that Uber has been using a fake app to get around legal blocks in certain markets.  You know what really annoys me, though?  The lack of the umlaut.  Seriously, is it that hard to have a stinking umlaut in your brand?

Seriously, not to make light of all the news that has come out, it’s clear that Silicon Valley has a “bro” problem, and Über epitomizes it, even with their recently released diversity report and bringing Arianna Huffington in to clean up their image.  That’s going to be tough given all that has passed.  This goes back to the fundamental question, mind you, of why is Silicon Valley is so awful to women.

This article does a good job of exploring why sexism/harassment/discrimination is such a rampant issue in Silicon Valley.

There’s a new project at Google where they are using facial recognition software to measure gender equality in films.

Would you spend $25bn to acquire 100m new customers?  Well, Mukesh Ambani did, with the goal of transforming the telecom market in India.  And transform it he did.

So, Warren Buffet sold basically his entire stake in Wal-Mart recently, and we’re seeing a continued downward spiral with brick and mortar retail stores as more and more shopping is done online.  So what’s next for the American Mall? Oh, and if that trend continues, there will be a collapse of commercial real estate in the next few years.

Viacom may be onto something in the VR space with its new VR experience, The Melody of Dust.

There’s a really interesting conversation with Chris Anderson on how and why we should close the loop on all the new and old systems that are out there and how ongoing innovation is making that possible.  It’s worth a read.

Last time around I spent some time talking about Moore’s Law and Quantum Computing (note to self: that may be a good future deep dive), but this time around there’s an article from Quartz about how two small changes may make your phone battery last forever, even if Moore’s Law won’t.  Or, better put, how the desire to have longer lasting devices that don’t catch on fire may finally force manufacturers to think differently about design.

Another interesting piece of telecom news came out recently: NYC is suing Verizon for failing to provide fiber broadband to all its households.

We all spend so much time in meetings, and while we can’t control how others run their meetings, we can certainly control how we run ours.  HBR has a great article on that point, and, in fact, it was refreshing to see their take as it reinforces how annoyed I get when I go to a meeting without a set agenda and clear purpose.

Let me follow that up with two articles from HBR on something completely different: blockchains, how safe they are, and how they’ll move beyond finance.  Along with that is this piece from the NY Times about how blockchain is a better way to track everything from pork chops to peanut butter.

Seeking Alpha did some analysis lately on Seagate and why the hardware provider will continue to face end market challenges.  I read it as “without innovation, Seagate will decline.”

It looks like the worlds of voice recognition, AI, and Alexa is being taken on by a small outfit in Japan, whose IM Line is working on a virtual assistant to topple Amazon and its market dominance.

Oh, and remember that little glitch a few weeks back with the internet because of an errant keystroke in an AWS data center?

Elon Musk has started investing (as have others) in how we turn people into cyborgs.  No, really.  The flip side of that is using humans to teach AI to “perform” smarter.

Something else AI might lead to?  The useless class.

I’ll tell you, there’s a lot of doom and gloom out there, like this old topic made new again: medical devices are the next security nightmare.  I say old because I’m pretty sure I talked about this around this time last year.

Snap recently had their IPO, and was it a day.  This piece from the New Yorker highlights the trouble with all the SV IPO optimism.

McKinsey has a really great study that’s just come out that is all about connecting talent with opportunity in the digital age.  It’s a good read, especially with some people predicting that Big Data will make human recruiters obsolescent as early as next year … which I think is a stretch.

Almost last this week is this article on LinkedIn that captures twelve lessons on leadership from the Navy SEALs.  Most salient: there is no such thing as a bad team, just bad leaders.

So last I’ll leave you with two TED talks: the first, Dan Bell taking us through the inside of America’s dead shopping malls and the second with Joy Buolamwini on how she is fighting bias in algorithms.

2016 Global Innovation 1000 Study, The Decline in Chinese Cyberattacks (and the takedown of the Internet of Things), Microsoft/Apple round up + more

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There’s been a bit going on from a tech standpoint in  the news of late, so first this week, take a look at strategy+business’s 2016 Global Innovation 1000 Study.  In it they capture not only who the top innovators and spenders are, but also trends in that spending as well.  For example, Healthcare is expected to pass Computing and Electronics to become the largest overall industry in R&D spend by 2018. Speaking of Healthcare, there’s a coming $1.5 Trillion shift in the industry according to the same people.

To follow on to that is a piece from Techonomy of the Corporation as technology.  They believe that technology is redefining business and society (duh), but they go one to discuss how the corporation is a technology for organizing labor, resources and capital towards the creation of economic and social value.

Next this week is an article from Techcrunch on the darker side of machine learning.  As we opt-in to machine learning technologies through the platforms we use, we need to be wary of their invasiveness of user privacy.  For example, blurring and pixelation are common techniques used to preserve privacy in images and video. They’re practices that have proven their effectiveness in obscuring faces, license plates and writings from the human eye, but it seems that machine learning can see through the pixels.

Researchers at University of Texas at Austin and Cornell Tech recently succeeded in training an image recognition machine learning algorithm that can undermine the privacy benefits of content-masking techniques such as pixelation and blurring. What’s worrying, the researchers underlined, is that the feat was accomplished with mainstream machine learning techniques that are widely known and available, and could be put to nefarious use by bad actors. Paired with that is this piece about when algorithms work against us.

Since Virtual Reality continues to be a hot topic in the news these days, I thought we might take a look at the top 25 innovators in VR, courtesy of Polygon.

Well, it seems like Detroit has a little less to worry about from Silicon Valley, as the big players out west have decided that it is just too hard to build a car.  There’s more to the story than that, and I don’t necessarily think that means that the auto industry will remain undisrupted.  It does point, in my mind, to how challenged Google and Apple are these days to be as innovative as they once were.

Eighty billion dollars … it sounds like it should be a punch line from a b movie where the bad actor demands it in exchange for NOT releasing a badly ginned up neurotoxin into the atmosphere over a major city, but no, it’s what the AOL/Time Warner deal was originally announced at by the media.  That linky link points to a great summary by and collection of articles around the merger, and while I won’t say whether I think it will or won’t go through, this post from Wikipedia might be of interest for context.  That’s not to say I don’t care about the deal though.

While the current administration has been touting a marked decrease in commercial cyberattacks, the real story behind that is a bit different.  Technology Review explores the reasons why in this piece.  Who is defending us from those attacks?  Here’s the oddest 15 under 15 list I’ve seen of late, and it answers just that.  Paired with that, however, was the coordinated distributed denial-of-service attacks which took place last week.  These are attacks that are designed to keep legitimate users from accessing a site.  There’s more going on than just that, however: a variety of probing attacks in addition to the DDoS attacks.  Hackers are testing the ability to manipulate Internet addresses and routes, seeing how long it takes the defenders to respond, and so on. Someone is extensively testing the core defensive capabilities of the companies that provide critical Internet services.  The access point, in this case, were a slew of hijacked internet-connected devices.  That’s right, we were responsible for your favorite website being taken down because we’ve gotten lazy about the security protocols built into our favorite internet-connected devices.  The Internet Society warned last year: “The interconnected nature of IoT [internet of things] devices means that every poorly secured device that is connected online potentially affects the security and resilience of the internet globally.”

Despite what we’re hearing in the news, start-ups are not, in fact, getting cheaper to launch today.  In fact, if anything, the opposite is true.

There were several articles out this last week about years of research done by Google about the key to good teamwork.   What was that key, you ask?  Being nice.  Did I mention that this was based on years of research?

One of my favorite reads this week was on an Aussie bank’s 7000 mile blockchain experiment and the impact that it could have on trade.  It involved shipping 88 bales of cotton around the world, but how they did it is what is fascinating, and it could point to how the shipping industry could be disrupted.

How can I not mention, though, the news this week that Uber delivered a truckload of beer with a driverless truck?  Well, not entirely driverless, but Bob and Doug McKenzie would be floored.  Then there’s this interview with the head of machine learning for Uber on how pattern-finding computing fuels Uber’s success.

So let’s start with this guy who says that Macs, long term, are three times cheaper than PCs for companies to maintain.  Sounds crazy, right?  Must be some yahoo from some small, boutique start-up that’s catering to a bunch of millennials, no?  Nope, he works for IBM, and he’s replaced thousands of PCs with Macs for that company over the past few years and has the data to back up the claim.  Next, both Microsoft and Apple had a few announcements this week, Microsoft’s top eight are summarized here, while Apple’s top seven here.  For Apple, most people are swooning over their new touch bar.  For Microsoft, it the Surface Studio. Check them both out for yourself.

What could a future driverless world look like?  In this Ted Talk, transportation geek Wanis Kabbaj broaches that topic and thinks we can find inspiration in the genius of our biology to design the transit systems of the future.

Musk’s Plan for Mars, Computer Chips that can Reprogram Themselves, How Goldman Sachs lost $1.2B of Libya’s Money + more

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There’s quite a bit that’s reported on in a week, and when one misses a week because of a stomach bug, well, it leads to an even longer list for all of you.  I do hope to shift to more evergreen material in the future as time allows, but that said, here’s the round up for the last few weeks:

First, Elon Musk is at it again, this time with travel to Mars.  For the low-low price of $200k (later to be reduced to $100k), you can travel to the Red Planet.  Musk hopes to have the space program up and running in the next ten years “if things go super-well.”  Key to the success of this program?  Reusable rockets.  Ars technical notes that this is either a moment of audacity, madness, or brilliance, or perhaps all three for Musk.  CNET looks at the ethical questions around building a city on Mars – and they do make a reference to Space Jam in the process.

If you recently updated your phone OS, you likely had thirty-six pages of terms of service to read through, and it’s likely you didn’t bother.  Heck, I didn’t either.  There are some funny stories out there of companies and developers hiding jokes into their terms of service to highlight that no one ever reads them, but Quartz this week digs into how terms of service are actually changing ownership rights in a way that many of us don’t realize.  A good example of that is how John Deere owners can’t legally fix their own equipment, they are required to take it to a John Deere certified mechanic (at quite the price difference over a local shop).

Ever wondered how equity compensation works at a startup?  Fortune covers that here.

The Federal Reserve has failed, despite its best efforts over the past twenty year and three administrations, to stabilize inflation at the targeted 2%.  In the past four years it has stayed well below that, which those of you who studied economics at some point will realize speaks to a major issue in our economy: wage stagnation.  Don’t take my word for it, though, check out what Time said on the issue in 2015 and how New Constructs thinks the root of it is the Internet Economy.

As we’re on the topic of the internet, it seems that the police are raiding houses based on IP addresses … but the only issue is that sometimes those addresses can be spoofed or point to the wrong place.  Fusion had a piece a while back on a farm in Kansas that has the unfortunate fate of being the default address for MaxMind, an IP address tracker, for any IP address they couldn’t map.  MaxMind says its IP geolocation is inaccurate in the United States 12% of the time. That’s a bit more than a standard deviation, but there are extra steps the police can take, like seeking out additional information about who actually owns an IP address from an Internet Service Provider.

As a tag along to that, Venture Beat has a great article this week on how machine learning can help the security industry.  ML has been used successfully for implicit authentication, and if it lives up to the hype, it should be an excellent tool for addressing authentication-based hacks in the future.

Did you know that women launch more than half of all internet companies in China?  I certainly didn’t, and this article from Bloomberg explores the how.

Brexit hasn’t been as much of a headline of late, but The Guardian had a great article on the orchestrator of the movement and the long road he slogged.

Well, it seems the whole E-Waste recycling thing may be a sham (I don’t think this is really a shock to anyone), and Motherboard does a great job of digging deep into how the current system works and what the actual net value of many of those recyclable parts is.  That said, some good news to follow on: a UC Irvine Doctoral student accidentally invented a battery that lasts 400 years.  Seriously.  Four hundred years.

One of my oldest friends works for Illumina and so I’ve been hearing about their tech for a long while.  Fast Company has a good long read about the company this week – if you’ve ever looked at finding out who your ancestors were via genetic testing, they’re the ones who sell the machines that do the analysis.

Speaking of machine learning, one of the issues we face is the implicit gender bias that is created by our language and society and then can impact the results of even a simple search.  A group of researchers trained a machine learning system using Google news stories and then asked the question “Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to X.”  The answer the system came back with was homemaker.  This study revealed the bias that can be programmed into a newly created machine learning system based on the inputted data.  The team of researchers ended up having to (and were successful at) explicitly remove gender stereotypes from the embedding the machine learning algorithm was using.  This also speaks to why the AI that Microsoft unleashed on the world months ago went so hilariously awry.

Microsoft had a couple of interesting articles come out about it this week, including one about how Nadella thinks AI will transform Microsoft and another about computer chips that can reprogram themselves on the fly.  There’s a lot of hype around AI this year, so the latter article is more interesting to me for a few reasons: for one, it captures some of the culture that existed in Ballmer’s day at the reigns of the company and highlights the stark contrast under Nadella’s leadership.  Another is that the chips in question, FPGAs, let engineers build chips that are faster and less energy-hungry than an assembly-line, general-purpose CPUs, but customizable so they handle the new problems of ever-shifting technologies and business models.  Oh, and Microsoft also just announced yesterday that they are merging the Research, Bing, and Cortana divisions to create a 5000 person strong AI division.

Five thirty eight has a good piece this week on AI and bots, and it’s worth looking at just for the opening paragraph … you’ll see why.

Did you know that over 50 million people under the age of 21 are on the app musical.ly and the app has over 11 million uploads a day with a user base of 120 million worldwide?  The New York Times had a good piece on the app recently, but Vice has a better one out this week, explaining both the popularity of the app and its potential impacts in the 13 – 24 demographic.

Remember Google Glass?  It’s likely that they were simply ahead of their time as I think we’ll see the how we use computers change drastically over the next ten years (especially with VR), but they failed nonetheless.  Now Snapchat is getting into the eyewear business, and there are varying opinions on whether they’ll see success.   Techcrunch spoke to the hopes and headaches of Snap, Inc.’s new frames, and Stratechery had a good piece this week on the future of wearables as a while.

Speaking of Google, they who shall “do no evil” have a plan to try and take down Amazon’s Echo that will be unveiled next week called Google Home.  It’ll be interesting to see if they can catch up where Amazon is so clearly in the lead.

HBR has a good overview of the platforms that are effectively disrupting businesses today.  Many of them won’t be a surprise to any of us, but what’s interesting is that the authors posit that it’s not traditional business being disrupted by platforms, but businesses which already play on a platform (albeit antiquated in some cases).  This leads to the conclusion that even platforms that are seeing success today can be disrupted and changed even further.

There’s a trio of articles to do with bandwidth and data speeds this week worth a read: Who Cares About 5G Wireless?  You Will, Why is America’s Internet So Slow?, and Teleportation across Calgary marks ‘major step’ toward creation of ‘quantum internet’.  That’s right … teleportation.  What’s most interesting is that in order for us to realize the full potential of the Internet of Things and Virtual Reality, how devices connect online we’re going to need a completely different way for those devices to do so, and with how the world is still going more and more mobile (even with odd claims that the mobile phone is dead out this week), that change is likely going to have to be on the order of the creation of the internet at Darpa or the iPhone by Apple for us to realize that potential.

Moving on to culture and values, there’s a great piece from GeekWire about how Zillow created a culture around six core values that empower employees and then another on how Warby Parker is getting better results by reducing managers’ control over their workers.  It seems that WP is taking some advice from GitHub.  Oh, and another one about Tower Paddle Boats, where the CEO made a commitment to five hour work days for his employees, and his employees have made up for that change by a marked increase in productivity.

There was also a bit of news in the past few weeks after the Federal Government released its thoughts on autonomous cars, leading to The Atlantic to remark that we’re entering a new era for the automobile, strategy+business to comment on the auto industry’s real challenge, the New York Times to state that in backing autonomous cars, the Fed has told automakers to figure it out, and last from O’Reilly their thoughts on how AI is propelling autonomous cars and what that means for the future of transport.

Bloomberg has a phenomenal, in-depth article into how Goldman Sachs lost $1.2 Billion of Libya’s money, but it’s interesting not just for the details of the deals that went awry, but also for how the article sets the stage and presents the history leading up to the deals as well.  All in all, well worth the long read.

No Ted talk this week, instead take seven minutes and watch Musk’s presentation on how we build out a space exploration program that will take us to Mars.

 

 

Uber’s Driverless Cars go live, Apples, Apples everywhere, Revisiting Gartner’s Top Ten for 2016 + more

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As we get close to Q4 in 2016 and the release of Gartner’s Top Ten Tech Trends for 2017, I thought it’d be good to take a look back at what they predicted for 2016  to refresh our memories plus share a few articles from the world this week.  First, the news:

Uber is now letting riders experience their autonomous cars in Pittsburg.  This article highlights what the experience is like – while the writer felt safe for most of his drive, he was glad he could override the technology a couple of times as well.  It’s pretty cool to see the technology being leveraged, including LiDar on every vehicle.

The income and poverty report for 2015 came out this week, and good news: we’re as rich as we were in 1998.  Aside from the cheeky and insightful analysis from the New Yorker, there is good news in the report, although tempered.  I’ve not had a chance to finish it yet, but you can find the entire thing here if you’d like to dig in.

I, apparently, need to get a job with Wells Fargo … well, no, I don’t because I missed the window to cash in on a $124M bonus package for defrauding customers, costing the company a nearly $200m fine.

Microsoft beat Facebook in, of all places, Github with open source code submissions.  Why is that a big deal?  Well, this is the company that, under Gates and Ballmer, tried their hardest convince CIOs that open source was rife with issues.  Well, under Nadella that has changed.

There are two articles worth a look this week from HBR: to succeed in tech, women need more visibility and how cybersecurity is every executive’s job.  Definitely take the time to read the first article, as it points to an ongoing epidemic of sorts for tech companies: the highest-profile losses in tech are those at the senior level. Women at these levels “often are less satisfied with their careers, perceive that they are unlikely to advance at their current organizations, or believe they must change jobs in order to reach the next level.”

A round up of some Apple articles for the week: first, I’ve downloaded iOS 10 and between the price of the 7 for lack of innovation and some of the “features” of that new OS, it might be enough to push me off the platform, but at least I was able to get it to install.  Next, apparently the “boys” of 1 Infinite Loop are rethinking autonomous cars.  I used quotes there because then there’s this piece on leaked emails that shows how Apple is still a sexist and toxic workplace for women.  There are a few others, including how Apple will leverage ear buds to make Siri smarter, that the age of Apple is over, and what’s next for Apple now that smartphone sales continue to decline, much less stratechery’s look at beyond the iPhone.  But I feel like I buried the lead there – Cook may be much admired, but there’s critical work to be done at Apple to get rid of the “bro” culture that we thought was only an epidemic as Unicorns.

There’s a good piece this week about the state of computer science education in the United States.  While it’s important to look at how primary education is filling the pipeline of secondary education in computer science (and, thereby, industry), we also need to face the reality that we’re moving towards a degree-less future in development in part and figure out how to enable future success without straddling another generation with unnecessary debt.

Tesla and Elon Musk have been in the news of late (what with the acquisition of Solar City).  Curious about the future of the company?  Check it out here.  Hint: we’re back to autonomous cars.

For those afraid of AI, Venture Beat has an opinion piece this week about how it can actually save us from future stock market failures.

Now for Gartner:

Gartner defines a strategic technology trend as one with the potential for significant impact on the organization. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to the business, end users or IT, the need for a major investment, or the risk of being late to adopt. These technologies impact the organization’s long-term plans, programs and initiatives.

The top 10 strategic technology trends for 2016 are the device mesh, ambient user experience, 3D printing materials (hmmm), information of everything, advanced machine learning, autonomous agents and things, adaptive security architecture, advances system architecture, mesh app and service architecture, and IoT platforms

 The Device Mesh

The device mesh refers to an expanding set of endpoints people use to access applications and information or interact with people, social communities, governments and businesses. The device mesh includes mobile devices, wearable, consumer and home electronic devices, automotive devices and environmental devices — such as sensors in the Internet of Things (IoT).

While devices are increasingly connected to back-end systems through various networks, they have often operated in isolation from one another. As the device mesh evolves, we expect connection models to expand and greater cooperative interaction between devices to emerge.

 Ambient User Experience

The device mesh creates the foundation for a new continuous and ambient user experience. Immersive environments delivering augmented and virtual reality hold significant potential but are only one aspect of the experience. The ambient user experience preserves continuity across boundaries of device mesh, time and space. The experience seamlessly flows across a shifting set of devices and interaction channels blending physical, virtual and electronic environment as the user moves from one place to another.

 3D Printing Materials

Advances in 3D printing have already enabled 3D printing to use a wide range of materials, including advanced nickel alloys, carbon fiber, glass, conductive ink, electronics, pharmaceuticals and biological materials. These innovations are driving user demand, as the practical applications for 3D printers expand to more sectors, including aerospace, medical, automotive, energy and the military. The growing range of 3D-printable materials will drive a compound annual growth rate of 64.1 percent for enterprise 3D-printer shipments through 2019. These advances will necessitate a rethinking of assembly line and supply chain processes to exploit 3D printing.

 Information of Everything

Everything in the digital mesh produces, uses and transmits information. This information goes beyond textual, audio and video information to include sensory and contextual information. Information of everything addresses this influx with strategies and technologies to link data from all these different data sources. Information has always existed everywhere but has often been isolated, incomplete, unavailable or unintelligible. Advances in semantic tools such as graph databases as well as other emerging data classification and information analysis techniques will bring meaning to the often chaotic deluge of information.

 Advanced Machine Learning

In advanced machine learning, deep neural nets (DNNs) move beyond classic computing and information management to create systems that can autonomously learn to perceive the world, on their own. The explosion of data sources and complexity of information makes manual classification and analysis infeasible and uneconomic. DNNs automate these tasks and make it possible to address key challenges related to the information of everything trend.

DNNs (an advanced form of machine learning particularly applicable to large, complex datasets) is what makes smart machines appear “intelligent.” DNNs enable hardware- or software-based machines to learn for themselves all the features in their environment, from the finest details to broad sweeping abstract classes of content. This area is evolving quickly, and organizations must assess how they can apply these technologies to gain competitive advantage.

 Autonomous Agents and Things

Machine learning gives rise to a spectrum of smart machine implementations — including robots, autonomous vehicles, virtual personal assistants (VPAs) and smart advisors — that act in an autonomous (or at least semiautonomous) manner. While advances in physical smart machines such as robots get a great deal of attention, the software-based smart machines have a more near-term and broader impact. VPAs such as Google Now, Microsoft’s Cortana and Apple’s Siri are becoming smarter and are precursors to autonomous agents. The emerging notion of assistance feeds into the ambient user experience in which an autonomous agent becomes the main user interface. Instead of interacting with menus, forms and buttons on a smartphone, the user speaks to an app, which is really an intelligent agent.

 Adaptive Security Architecture

The complexities of digital business and the algorithmic economy combined with an emerging “hacker industry” significantly increase the threat surface for an organization. Relying on perimeter defense and rule-based security is inadequate, especially as organizations exploit more cloud-based services and open APIs for customers and partners to integrate with their systems. IT leaders must focus on detecting and responding to threats, as well as more traditional blocking and other measures to prevent attacks. Application self-protection, as well as user and entity behavior analytics, will help fulfill the adaptive security architecture.

 Advanced System Architecture

The digital mesh and smart machines require intense computing architecture demands to make them viable for organizations. Providing this required boost are high-powered and ultraefficient neuromorphic architectures. Fueled by field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) as an underlining technology for neuromorphic architectures, there are significant gains to this architecture, such as being able to run at speeds of greater than a teraflop with high-energy efficiency.

 Mesh App and Service Architecture

Monolithic, linear application designs (e.g., the three-tier architecture) are giving way to a more loosely coupled integrative approach: the apps and services architecture. Enabled by software-defined application services, this new approach enables Web-scale performance, flexibility and agility. Microservice architecture is an emerging pattern for building distributed applications that support agile delivery and scalable deployment, both on-premises and in the cloud. Containers are emerging as a critical technology for enabling agile development and microservice architectures. Bringing mobile and IoT elements into the app and service architecture creates a comprehensive model to address back-end cloud scalability and front-end device mesh experiences. Application teams must create new modern architectures to deliver agile, flexible and dynamic cloud-based applications with agile, flexible and dynamic user experiences that span the digital mesh.

 Internet of Things Platforms

IoT platforms complement the mesh app and service architecture. The management, security, integration and other technologies and standards of the IoT platform are the base set of capabilities for building, managing and securing elements in the IoT. IoT platforms constitute the work IT does behind the scenes from an architectural and a technology standpoint to make the IoT a reality. The IoT is an integral part of the digital mesh and ambient user experience and the emerging and dynamic world of IoT platforms is what makes them possible.

I was in the midst of a conversation with a colleague yesterday when we both noticed an ant on the wall next to us.  We both watched it for a few moments before I “helped” it to the ground so it could get where it was going faster.  It reminded me of this TED talk by Deborah Gordon where she explores how ant life provides a useful model for learning about many other topics, including disease, technology, and the human brain.

Math is Racist, The End of the Bossless Workplace?, The Robot Economy + more

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There are a trio of interesting articles to challenge ourselves with first this week: first from Cathy O’Neil via CNN (and other sources) about how math is racist and algorithms and big data are helping to perpetuate the poverty gap.  From targeted advertising and insurance to education and policing, O’Neil looks at how algorithms and big data are targeting the poor, reinforcing racism and amplifying inequality in her new book “Weapons of Math Destruction.”  Second up is one where researchers found that when artificial intelligence judges a beauty contest, white people win.  The why and the how behind racial preference is being programmed in to the AI platforms is what’s interesting.  Those first articles and the thought process that follows then brings into question the last, or at least, the real impact that artificial intelligence has on customer service – there is a great deal of potential, for sure, but companies have to be wary that their AI doesn’t then created a different, biased experience based on race and gender.

Vanity Fair this week has an exclusive look at how the Theranos house of cards came tumbling down.  It’s a story of silos and secrecy, among other things, and how silos and secrecy got in the way of any defense Theranos and Holmes, the founder, could mount.

Speaking of broken cultures, Inc. has an article this week about startup culture being broken and what to do about it now.

While there is some question as to the all-powerful nature of the mighty Blockchain, this article from Bloomberg unpacks what magical properties it might have.

With the Rio Olympics having come to a close, we get to the real question of the day: if we were to hold the Olympics of Programming today, which country would win and what would the US’s medal ranking be?  You’re likely not surprised to discover it isn’t even close to the top ten.  Not that it needs reinforcement, but we need to add coding to the curriculum earlier in the US.

While Uber is dominant by a wide margin in the US market, there are others out there seeing success in Europe and elsewhere, like Gett, an Israeli ride sharing company that looks to strengthen its hold on Europe and slowly make its way into the US.

As we awake to news of an earthquake off the shores of North Korea, it might bring to mind “the big one” we all fear – most people think of the San Andreas fault or if you’re from the Midwest, like me, the New Madrid fault line.  The New Yorker has an article on another: the Cascadia subduction.  It’s a really well written piece with a good look at the science and impact of that big one.

Many of us have heard about the “great experiment” at companies like Medium, Zappos, and GitHub in holocracy, where an organization is completely flat and there are no leaders.  There are champions and detractors alike, and one of those champions was Chris Wanstrath of GitHub, which started as a bossless culture in 2008 but who two years ago gathered the employees of his software startup to inform them they were all getting bosses.  That said, GitHub still pushes the traditional structure and is experimenting as they can and holocracy at Zappos has for all intents and purposes failed – just ask those leaving the company.  The obvious bigger question lies around how big is too big for a completely flat structure and when do the benefits get outweighed by the faults?

Popular Science does a great job profiling Chris White, the man who lit the dark web, this week, and how data mining is helping cops bust open online human trafficking.  On the subject of online predators, if you’re a parent (or not), take the time to read this article about the subject from the Washington Post.

There’s a pair of articles this week from Bloomberg about the state of the world economy this week: first, how manufacturing and now services are signaling fractures in the US economy and then how Saudi Arabia is on a cost-cutting spree looking to cut $20 billion in projects this year due to slow economic growth and low oil prices.

John Kotter’s name comes up frequently in the world of business and with good reason given his impact on how we run organizations and get organizations to change.  Organizational change management can be a tough nut to crack even when you have intent about it (and organizations fail to change when they ignore it), and this week strategy+business asked Kotter what his required reading was when it comes to change, and the list is short but insightful.  Also from s+b this week is this article on fostering online trust.

Well, the unthinkable has come to pass: the FCC has abandoned the set top box in favor of apps.  It’s not a surprising shift, just surprising that a government entity is an early adopter of sorts.  This shift should be a boon for consumers and cable providers alike.  Time will tell.

So, headphone jacks.  That seems to be the big news everyone is taking away from the Apple event Wednesday and with good reason.  While there are proponents and detractors, one of the bigger complaints is how one can’t charge their phone while using corded headphones.  Maybe Apple is becoming a company focused solely on increasing revenue and not innovation anymore, but recall that when the original iPod came out it didn’t work with most headphone because the jack was set so deeply in the device.  That changed, and it’s likely that wireless charging is what we can expect with the iPhone 8.

Ransomware continues to be an epidemic, but enSilo has a plan that should eliminate 70% of those attacks – learn more from Fortune.

There’s an interesting article from Fast Company about how Microsoft is trying to find and hire autisctic coders.

Last this week is an opinion piece this week outlining how the robot overlords aren’t, in fact, bearing down on us nor will the implementation of robots lead to mass unemployment as some naysayers have claimed.  While an opinion, there is plenty of data to back it up through the article.  Thea reality is that the robots are coming and we need to start planning and training our workforces now to avoid the feared obsolescence of the future.  Along with that, The Guardian explores how our three life stages will not survive much longer.

Speaking of progress, the politics around any progress brings about risk in many ways and on many levels.  Instead of avoiding that risk, however, journalist Jonathan Tepperman says we might even want to think riskier. He traveled the world to ask global leaders how they’re tackling hard problems — and unearthed surprisingly hopeful stories that he’s distilled into three tools for problem-solving featured in this TED talk.

“Active” listening, the”Hidden Curriculum” of Work, the Lost Infrastructure of Social Media + more

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We’ve all heard that as leaders and managers, we have to focus on active listening when we interact with our people.  In the past, that’s been defined as not talking as others speak while making empathetic noises that convey understanding and then synthesizing what was said and repeating it back.  I’ve done this many times, and have always felt like that made me good at listening.  Lately, though, I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people about their personal mission statements, about what drives them and helping them connect that back to the core values and strategy of their company.  I find myself coming out of these conversations invigorated, even inspired by the dialogue and while I did follow that pattern I laid out above, I also did a few things differently, naturally, that are emphasized in this article from HBR on what great listeners actually do.  I found myself asking questions to promote discovery (these were, after all, self-discovery conversations), found myself naturally building the other individual’s confidence and self-esteem because the entire focus was to focus on things they loved to do and how it tied back to their job, I did find myself making suggestions and synthesizing our conversation to allow for a different understanding of the problem we were solving, and I made plenty of suggestions.  Then I had another conversation where I just engaged in classis active listening this week and it seemed almost fake to me, too canned.  Take a moment and read the article and then think about some of the most exciting conversations you’ve had of late.  I think you’ll find that your best conversations have been the ones when you’ve challenged the speaker as you’ve listened.

Would a week have passed without Uber being in the news?  This week, though, it’s for their autonomous car fleet that just debuted in Pittsburg.  Now, they are “supervised” by humans, and they are just in test phase, but they are out there.  Along with that is a great thought piece about we are shifting from a driver to a car culture and the impact of that on Uber and others.

Speaking of autonomous cars, Ford this week stated that they would have such cars ready to go to market in 2021 for automated ride-sharing companies.  They’ll be shipped without steering wheels or pedals (an upgrade to the Johnny Cab in Total Recall) and in this interview, Forbes digs in to how the head of autonomous vehicles at Ford plans to get that done.

An odd thing has been happening on Wall Street – as I’ve noted before, there’s been a drive to hire data scientists, but at Goldman Sachs, their technology division is made up of over 11,000 people, or as they brag, more engineers than Facebook.  It makes since, then, that Goldman would not just sponsor but also host All Star Code this summer on premise.  While the leaders at Goldman haven’t done a whole lot to improve the company’s reputation in the past decade, the people of Goldman are passionate about their communities (part of GS’s core values) and that’s evident in programs they support like ASC.

We’ve all heard stories of the dark net and Silk Road and the various nefarious transactions going on there, but have you heard the story of the dirty cops who tried to take advantage of it themselves?  Ars technica unpacks not just what they stole but also how they got caught.

Inc. this week has a great article on the history and evolution of Craigslist and how Craig Newmark, it’s founder, realized he sucked as a manager.

Strategy+business this week digs into the hidden curriculum of work – all those things that we have to learn/do in order to navigate our places of work that are outside of the job we were hired for, beyond the job description our people applied to.  As leaders, it’s incumbent on us to help our people understand that aspect, from the social and political environment to understanding (sometimes blindly) what is expected for one to advance in the organization.

Gartner has an interesting article this week where they state that 70% of enterprise file synchronizing and sharing companies will be gone by 2018.  Part of that makes sense as smaller companies who provide this service are absorbed by bigger firms.  Part of it will be due to innovation in the space.

For those of you who’ve felt that the past few summer blockbusters you’ve seen was written either a cat on a computer keyboard or AI, you’ll be interested to know the cats are still writing their magnum opus, AI has written its first screenplay.

Scientific American asked some of our leading thinkers about the future of humanity.  One of my favorite Q & As was Q: Will we ever figure out what dark matter is?  A:  Whether we can determine what dark matter is depends on what it turns out to be.

Alex Danco has the first two parts of how we make paradigm shifts in our world posted through Medium – it’s an interesting journey so far.  Check out Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Last this week is another piece  from Medium about the lost infrastructure of social media – it’s a good look at then versus now and how what happened back then could be brought back to bear in the here and now.

TED has a blog post that can describe much better than I the importance of the talk this week – read it here and then watch for yourself.

Ag Unicorns, Leadership Perils for Subject Matter Experts, A Deficit of Leadership + more

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While there’s an abundance of articles out there about any numbers of startups in a multitude of verticals, but we don’t often hear much about the agricultural space.  Since 2008, however, a lot of acquisitions have been taking place, with the “Big Six” ag companies spending upwards of $31B in the past eight years.  What there investing in skews towards digital ag, with the hopes that new technology will allow farmers to make better decisions real-time and tie them to their providers data platform.  That all makes sense, as using data to drive decisions is why big data is and will continue to be dominant, but what makes it hard for big Ag companies is that many times they have to sell to farmers who are using aging infrastructure and technology.  The key challenge? Finding ways to enable farmers to both better leverage their existing equipment while building platforms that takes some of the burden off their shoulders.

There are many chat platforms out there today that one wouldn’t think the sale of Yahoo’s properties to Verizon would have chat users concerned, but apparently the messenger platform is used by more than just consumers; apparently the world of crude oil trading depends on it for both gossip and contracts.

If you’ve never heard of Jet.com until this last week when Wal-Mart announced they’d pay $3.3B for the company, I’m not surprised.  I’d only heard about it because of this guy who put up $18k to “win” a stake in the company.  Well, he’s now $20M richer for his investment, and L2 has a hilarious analysis/analogy that outlines why Wal-Mart would spend so much for a company that, well, has produced so little.

So Uber made some headlines last week, and there’s also some fallout from the Didi deal already: it may line the company up for anti-trust scrutiny.  Also, Quartz asked the question that no one else has: with Uber on an unending ascent and investors clamoring to get in, what does it look like to short it?

Many times we see subject matters experts thrust into leadership positions with little forethought or training.  I think the typical thought process is that if an individual is thriving at the work they are doing, they would be the best person to lead and mentor others because they could then pass that knowledge on.  strategy+business tackles this topic this week, with the three perils SMEs face when they lead: the ability to break free of their comfort zone and then “helicopter,” the ability to “code switch” (or avoid reverting to jargon), and the need to “lead up” to a boss or other person up the hierarchy who may have little expertise with a very specific and technical problem.  We work with seasoned practitioners every day who are likely challenged by these very pitfalls and it provides us with the opportunity to serve them through mentoring.

HBR has two head’s up articles for us this week: the first is about “smart drugs” and how they’re likely going to start showing up in our organizations.  The second, how our diversity programs may be helping out women but not minorities (or vice versa).

We often talk about how the developing world depends not on a PC but their mobile devices for internet access, a variety of transactions, and social connectedness, but we don’t have to look at South Africa or India to see this at play, we can look in our own back yard.  Today, Latino families in the U.S. are much more likely to have a mobile device versus a PC at home.  To me, that means we need to stop catering to a declining population and start pushing more towards a mobile versus desktop interface even in the developer world if we want to win at digital.

Remember Gopher protocol?   Here’s a great article about the rise and fall of it.

It’s funny that this summer has seen many naysayers about Augmented Reality and then Pokemon Go happened.  People didn’t need a headset of any kind, and it’s been almost addictive to its users along with leading some players to interesting scenarios.  What’s next?  Well, it may lead to a change in our zoning laws and even, maybe, selling the “digital rights” to your own home.   Here’s also a great look at how AR can speed up construction projects.

Not to debunk a good thing, but for all the hype we’ve been hearing about 5G, here’s a good reality check for what it will take to make it happen.  Hint: we’re gonna need a whole lot of investment in infrastructure.

There are a lot of naysayers out there who say that Apple has lost its former glory, that the company will never have another iPhone.  Well, yes, of course they won’t.  The iPhone was what is considered innovation on par with the Internet or man flying, the horseless carriage.  It only makes sense that a company would get one of those, not a slew.  Instead of looking for the next iPhone, Apple is in it for the long game, and that game is looking pretty good.

For those who wondered what happened to Here, one of the remnants of Nokia after the sale of its mobile device IP to Microsoft (which has been completely written off at this point), they’re out looking for investment after being bought by a consortium of German auto makers.  Now, this may seem like an odd non-sequitur, however if you look at who the buyers were versus who once owned the mapping technology, and the trend in the industry for who is purchasing mapping entities as a whole (outside of Google, ESRI, Digital Globe and the other big names), more and more of these acquisitions are by either automakers or those who depend on routing (like Uber and their continued purchases).  I’m well removed from this world at this point, but it’ll be interesting to see how the metadata these companies collect are then translated to effective autonomous routing (the backbone of autonomous cars).  Better said, it’s not really about the maps anymore.

I’ll end this week pointing to this excellent piece by Jon Lonsdale about the deficit of leadership we face today, and that while we may have many people who are good managers, maybe even good leaders, there is a lack of great leaders in Silicon Valley.  That’s not just an epidemic there, however – it’s hard to find truly transformational leaders this day and it has me curious as to why.

The barrage of today’s work place has led people to become more and more miserable and disengaged at work.  In this talk by Yves Morieux, Morieux discusses six rules to simplify work.