Tag: Big TEch

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Apple to build smarter devices

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What does Apple’s acquisition of Xnor.ai mean?

Apple has acquired, for an estimated $200 million, Xnor.ai. The company was spun off from the Allen Institute, and began to create a process for making machine learning more efficient so that less powerful edge devices can run artificial intelligence. This may signal Apple’s deeper investment in the Internet of Things (IOT) and/or smart home products. TechCrunch

dis-rup-shun: The next wave of consumer technology is making connected devices much smarter, so that doorbell cams can recognize faces and let you know if your mail man is at the door, or if it is a total stranger. Machine learning is taking place mostly in the cloud, so this move by Apple signals the company’s desire to build smarter products, and differentiate through machine learning. Two contradictory trends are taking place at the current time: edge devices getting smarter and the arrival of 5G, which makes connecting devices to a smart cloud faster and ultimately cheaper. The net effect of faster connectivity to a smart cloud and smarter devices will likely be some amazingly powerful and innovate devices touching our lives at home, in the car, on the go, and at the office.

Alphabet joins trillion dollar club

Google parent Alphabet is now valued at over $1 trillion, joining Apple, Microsoft and Amazon, companies that have all, at one time, broken the trillion mark. Together Big Tech (including Facebook) make up 17% of the value of the S&P 500, up from 11% in 2015. CNBC

dis-rup-shun: While Big Tech is in the sights of regulators, both Federal and state, the companies continue to rapidly grow, crushing smaller companies while acquiring others (see above). The economic engines of GAFAM are some of the biggest job creators, while crushing traditional markets such as print and TV advertising, shipping, brick and mortar shopping, and smart devices, to name a few. The concept of creative destruction is taking place rapidly, and the question is, to what extent should our government regulations protect smaller interests as Big Tech explodes in revenue, influence and value?

Best earbuds for runners

It’s the new year and most of us are resolved to get in better shape. The days of wired earbuds are over, so what is the best earbud product for vigorous exercise? This CNET review looks at 11 possibilities for those most concerned about fit, noise cancellation, water proofing, or prefer an over the head and even glasses configuration.

dis-rup-shun: The hottest product for sale over the holidays was Apple AirPods, with people lining up before stores opened daily in hopes that a new shipment arrived before Christmas day. Investing in things that likely fall off, however, is not helpful and in the gym, being tethered to a treadmill, Peloton or just staying connected to a smartphone with wires is so 2010s.

Kings of the Castle latest Apple Arcade game

Kings of the Castle by Frosty Pop is the newest addition to Apple’s $4.99 per month all you can play gaming arcade service. CNET

dis-rup-shun: According to CNET, Apple’s new gaming service is off to a good start. Apple chose a different path from Google and its Stadia service, which is focused on more serious, traditional gamers. Apple’s Arcade is going for growth by converting casual gamers — people that don’t think of themselves as gamers — into fans of the service. The simple and engaging titles on Arcade are good ways to get another $5.00 per month, of $60 per year from the iPhone faithful, pumping up revenues from the same platform with a host of new services, including gaming, news and Apple’s new credit card. Building new revenues on existing platforms is how Apple the company will continue to grow despite maturing products.

 

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Holiday Amusement: Some predictions

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Many thanks and Happy New Year

As the year draws to a close, it marks nine months of providing you with some daily thoughts on dis-rup-shun.  I have encountered a number of readers over the holidays that have offered their support, endorsement and general satisfaction with this contribution to your inbox, so onward we go. If you have specific suggestions on how this newsletter could be more helpful to you (longer, shorter, more focused, etc.), please share.

A few predictions from off the cuff, after perusing the top daily news sources for the past nine months:

  • Big Tech will face some friction from Congress, the FTC, and states’ attorneys general, but these efforts will do little to check the power and growth of these economic engines. The lack of regulation will result more from the lack of focus of legislators, rather than defensive postures of Big Tech.
  • Amazon understands how to penetrate new markets and new industries. Facebook and Google are not as adept at winning in non-core businesses. Microsoft has a laser focus on closing the cloud computing gap behind AWS, and will make significant progress. Expect Amazon to continue to amaze and frighten, while Facebook and Google will continue to disappoint.
  • Apple will have another strong year, fueled by sales of gadgets such as AirPods, watches and a less expensive iPhone. The company’s services businesses, with the exception of its very successful credit card launch, will struggle to gain significant share, including its Arcade gaming, and Apple TV Plus, as differentiation in services will be more difficult for Apple. The company will continue to slowly move into the uncharted waters of personal health, working more closely with medical experts to find new health applications for its powerful wearable platform, Apple Watch.
  •  Smart home and home automation products will continue to improve in functionality and value, with deeper cooperation between vendors who are attempting to advance in the wake of Alexa and Google Home market penetration. These home ecosystems will grow, providing many more options for home control, however this disjointed approach will not suffice for high-end homes that want an end-to-end system, or those that want a rock solid, monitored home security system. Cool new smart home products and machine learning will continue to transform integrated systems, as systems providers such as ADT, Vivint and Alarm.com seek to keep their systems up to par with the latest hot products.
  • Autonomous machines will continue to pop up, with airplanes, helicopters, delivery carts, and cars that drive themselves being tested in many applications. Until a great deal of test data is released by trusted authorities, consumers will continue to be wary. Autonomous car vendors will need to educate the public that although their cars are not perfect and have killed, they are already safer than 50% of human drivers on the road today — a tough assignment for the marketing agency.
  • Trade wars will be resolved by mid-year, with the Trump administration claiming some wins, and with China’s tech industry and especially Huawei strengthened by adversity. The resolution of the trade wars will spur the economy to an exceptionally strong second half, and will further delay or dispel talks of global recession.

I wish you constructive disruption in this coming year. Whether it’s your job, your business, your personal life, or all of the above, be ready for disruption. As my Peloton instructor says, “Learn to be comfortable with discomfort.” Happy New Year.

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Government versus Big Tech escalates

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New page in government versus Big Tech : State AGs

Attorneys General from 48 states are collaborating in an effort to investigate Google to determine if the company is unfairly dominating the search market. Eight states plus D.C. are pursuing a similar investigation of Facebook. The collective action is separate, and in addition to investigations underway by the FTC and DOJ. Wired

dis-rup-shun: The line to extract a fine from Big Tech is getting long, and tech firms will definitely have to make some concessions and pay some large fees. Market domination is the dream of most every boardroom, but governments have succeeded at keeping the playing field at least open to innovators, who continue to refresh our economies. The pace of innovation among Big Tech ensures that new offerings will continue to find new profits, making up for any concessions won by state and Federal legislators.

How to plan a city with autonomous vehicles

The National Association of City Planning Officials is struggling to determine how to invest in the city of the future. Should parking lots and roadways be reduced to account for lower car ownership, shared rides, scooters and self-driving cars that will rarely park, or is the arrival of autonomous vehicles over-hyped? The association is recommending a network of variable pay per use roadways, based on time of day, as has been implemented in downtown London. Wired

dis-rup-shun: The aggressive pursuit of delivery drones by Amazon and others suggests crowded sidewalks or “drone allies” and the success of scooters and bikes calls for a permanent accommodation to make everyone safer. The auto industry fully expects continuing large shifts in transportation and ownership habits and cities should too. Developing pedestrian zones where use of autos requires an additional fee are highly feasible, given electronic, map-based payment and toll systems. Expect city centers to become far more user friendly and pleasant as they move to encourage ride sharing and less parking.

Really smart video camera keeps your data at home

ShimShine, a smart home camera startup in Shenzhen, China has raised $8 million in funding to build cameras with more intelligence built in the camera, relying less on the cloud and more on the device itself. The benefits include faster processing and less personal data being transferred across public networks. TechCrunch

dis-rup-shun: Two trends occurring in the smart home space are to make devices far more intelligent so that your habits and preferences are already known by your smart home. Thus, your home acts without your having to manage it, unlocking doors and changing lighting and temperature when you normally come home. One way to do this, the second trend, is to pack more intelligence into the device itself, relying less on the cloud to perform the magic. This second trend, however, will be challenged by faster, less expensive cloud services and 5G networks that make wireless data transmission lightning fast. The resulting combination is a future in which devices themselves will be packed with intelligence and will be connected to very fast wireless networks, meaning the home will have an enormous amount of compute power, capable of accurate facial recognition, video analytics and high level security. Smart home compute capacity will exceed the power of home applications for several years to come.

Time again for a Nokia flip phone? 

Nokia is staging an interesting comeback, offering a flip phone that, like its predecessor, connects a caller when opened and hangs up by closing. The top part of the clam shell features a screen where popular apps are displayed. The phone goes on sale in Europe later this month at a price of $98.

CNBC: Nokia 2720 Flip 190903

CNBC

dis-rup-shun: The new price points for mainstream iPhones and Samsung Galaxies are impacting sales by stretching the time people keep their phones, and by creating strong demand for mid-priced and low-priced phones. While Apple is releasing a lower priced iPhone, the gap for $100 to $600 phones is wider than ever, with a number of Chinese smartphone makers ready to fill it. Novel offerings from Nokia that include some nostalgia will be popular among the crowd that is more excited about saving than about showing off. Expect to see many new mid to low priced phones that have interesting personalities.

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How would you regulate Big Tech?

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Media and tech execs agree that regulation is inevitable

Execs gathered at Sun Valley conference agree that more regulation of Big Tech is inevitable, but point out that regulation should not be a matter of size, and must address anti-competitiveness and data privacy separately.  CNBC

dis-rup-shun: The tech industry is resigned that additional regulations are coming. Tech leaders such as Google and Facebook should lead the industry by working together to develop privacy standards along the lines of Europe’s GDPR’s standards and should develop a standard for fines to be paid by companies that fail to uphold privacy. This action would reduce the chances that lawmakers break up Big Tech.

U.S. Congress fails to create federal privacy laws

Lawmakers are angry with the FTC’s proposed $5 billion settlement with Facebook for privacy violations. Senator Hawley (R- Missouri) is pushing to move oversight of tech companies away from the FTC. Senators Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) and Markey (D-Mass) are pushing for sweeping reform of privacy laws that are seen as too aggressive by conservatives. Meanwhile Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) is calling for breakup of Tech Giants for thwarting competition. Wired

dis-rup-shun: Good news: our elected officials are seeking tighter privacy restrictions which are required for our tech economy to offer services valued, trusted and loved by millions of consumers. Bad news: our lawmakers’ inability to find consensus on nearly any policies will enable Big Tech to continue down its current course of “trust us, we will keep data safe.”

Are virtual reality applications DOA?

For years, news reports of virtual reality for the consumer have said the technology is coming to living rooms soon. VR makers are finding that the high cost of VR hardware, and the high cost of developing content, mean that the enterprise market is a better application for the technology than consumers. HP, Varjo, Microsoft and HTC are developing enterprise-grade VR applications for training and defense. Gizmodo

dis-rup-shun: Virtual reality applications are similar to 3D TVs, for not one, but three years, the buzz at the Consumer Electronic Show was the advent of 3D in our living rooms. Mass market consumers have been reluctant to sit around the house with a something covering their faces and gamers have not found enough compelling content to make a multi-hundred dollar investment on a headset and game titles. Commercial applications will lower the costs of VR headsets, but it is unlikely that the technology will engage more than hard core game players even in the next half decade.

Verizon offers 5G hotspot

Furthering the race to provide 5G, Verizon has announced a mobile hot spot which enables devices to access its new screaming fast 5G network for a purchase price of $650 and monthly data plans costing $90 per month. Verizon is currently serving portions of 5 cities with 5G, and has announced 30 by year end. The Verge

dis-rup-shun: 5G is coming and changes the economics of the Internet of Things by a) making it possible to provide really fast bandwidth to mobile things like cars, or planes or non-mobile things without copper wires such as new buildings, and b) by making 4G a lot less expensive than it is today, enabling things like water meters, security systems, and traffic lights to be inexpensively connected to central stations, providing vast amounts of data that can be used to improve services.

SpaceVR seeks to spread spirituality of space to Earth

Most travelers to space express spiritual moment called Overview Effect. This experience occurs when one gets a view of the Earth from outer space. SpaceVR is a company that plans to launch a satellite that will beam realtime videos of Earth to users of its virtual reality viewing device. Wired

dis-rup-shun: The race to control a piece of space is now being run my many companies and a number of governments. Only one company is looking to outer space to bring a greater sense of peace and purpose to Earth. Let’s hope they are successful.

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Big Tech stares down Congress

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Congress summons Big Tech for a big chat

Top executives from Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google were on the Hill this week, arguing that they are not monopolies and are not using customer data for competitive advantage. Data is used, said Amazon’s Sutton, to better serve customers, when asked if the company launches its own products based on what’s selling. Wired

dis-rup-shun: Everyone except for small business was a winner this week as congress persons posed as tough on tech, tech executives sounded smarter than legislators by delivering punchy but circuitous answers, and lobbyists validated their billings by offering evidence that tech is increasingly under fire by legislators. Legislators have to find the balance between an increasingly less-competitive landscape and nationalistic interests in defending against global competition, mainly from China, for next generation technology dominance.

Netflix faces first significant subscriber loss 

In Q2, Netflix faced loss of 130,000 U.S. subscribers and added only 2.7 million global subs instead of the predicted 5 million. The Verge

dis-rup-shun: Why is the unstoppable streaming service slowing down? A number of reasons, and they aren’t new competition, as Disney, Apple and AT&T’s ‘Netflix killer’ streaming services are not yet open. The reasons include saturation — with nearly 60% of U.S. households already subscribers, those that aren’t, don’t want to spend the money or don’t watch TV. Existing competition is increasing its original content, making some other services more desirable than Netflix (since House of Cards is finished), and rising inflation has been slowly taking a bite out of U.S. consumers’ disposable incomes. Netflix may be an indicator of a slowing economy.

AT&T and Microsoft form $2 billion alliance for cloud and 5G

AT&T announced that it will move much of its business computing needs to Microsoft’s public cloud, Azure. In addition, it’s 268,000 employee workforce will use Microsoft  365 applications for its computing needs. The $2 billion deal does not include AT&T outsourcing its network infrastructure, like cellular communications networks. The companies are also cooperating on development of 5G tools. Reuters

dis-rup-shun: This deal looks like a huge win for Microsoft and likely a cost-savings move for AT&T which continues to seek efficiencies as it prepares to engage in a long battle for streaming content viewership following integration of Time Warner. Microsoft Azure is cleaning up cloud services accounts from many companies that consider Amazon a competitor on various fronts including retailers (Walmart) and shippers (FedEx). Microsoft also secured additional defense against Google apps by ensuring that AT&T continues to use Microsoft’s office tools.

Maps with images only moments old

Online maps such as Google Street View feature photos of locations that are often months if not years old. Nexar’s Live Map application uses dash cam and smartphone images to refresh map images constantly, showing viewers a wreck moments after it happened. The company has been quick to address privacy concerns by stating that pictures of people, addresses and licenses are anonymized and blurred. TechCrunch

dis-rup-shun: Privacy is a big concern when a) everyone’s every move is captured on a dash or doorbell camera, and b) companies collect and store those images and promise to self-police breaches in privacy. This puts companies in a position of high liability as they are liable to shareholders to monetize data they collect, and liable to society to not use that data in a way that would compromise privacy. Big profits come to those that expose secrets.