Tag: India

Consumer Electronics, IOT, Smart Home

Apple reports a stellar quarter

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Apple crushed it

The Q3 earnings report is in and its great news… Apple’s revenue exceeded Wall Street’s expectations. The key news is that iPhone sales were up 8% and other products (those tough-to-get-for-holiday AirPods) slightly beat expectations, and services were slightly below expectation. CNBC

dis-rup-shun: This is great news for the global economy. It shows that the economic engine called Apple was still able to create enough shiny new gadgets to excite consumers around the world. The services business is tough, and it will take a while for Apple to figure out how to extend the aura of its brand — design and user experience — to services.

Apple pushes directly into India

Apple has sold products in India through a number of retail partners that have discounted products and generally had lackluster performance. Apple will launch its own online store for India in Q3, followed by brick and mortar stores, with the first in Mumbai. India is the second largest smartphone market in the world. TechCrunch

dis-rup-shun: Apple doesn’t do well with third parties, and the premium, luxury experience of its retail online and brick and mortar stores will create an event in Mumbai and other Indian cities. The company has announced plans for a lower cost iPhone for big markets like India, and that product will undoubtedly do for India what the C-Class Mercedes Benz did for the U.S. — provide a luxury brand experience for a more affordable price and larger market.

Filmic app enables dual camera filming

An iPhone app by Filmic may transform the way people use smartphone cameras. The app enables use of two of your phone’s cameras at once, providing simultaneous and different streams. One view could be a selfie at the same time as the outward action is being filmed. CNET

dis-rup-shun: Will this app transform the future of pictures? Will it become customary to show two different views in one frame? Expect amateur videos to become very artsy as consumers learn how to edit-in different video camera angles, making even basic videos look like Hollywood products.

Boeing’s 777X has foldable wings

For news not related to the 737 MAX, Boeing completed a test flight for the very large, long haul 777X. Airlines want larger planes for long haul routes, maximizing economies of scale and creating very profitable operations. One problem with bigger aircraft is that they require a larger wingspan, which causes problems in tighter, crowded airports. Boeing is making this massive jet more nimble by enabling the wing tips to fold up during taxi, shortening the wingspan by 24 feet, then fully extending them for flight. CNET

dis-rup-shun: The company is in desperate need for some innovation credit as the 737 MAX debacle drags on. Innovation is what has kept Boeing the number #1 player in avionics. If the newly appointed interim CEO, Dave Calhoun, wants to make the company great again, he will focus on leadership through innovation, and, of course, improved testing and safety processes.

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Buffett offers success traits

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Buffett offers keys to business success

Speaking to a class of MBAs, Buffett advised the group that high IQs will not differentiate business leaders. Instead, he listed traits required to succeed:

  • Fulfill your promises
  • Be honest
  • Be trustworthy
  • Give credit where credit is due
  • Be mindful and emotionally intuitive
  • Manifest humility
  • Be willing to admit you’re wrong
  • Offer help when it’s needed
  • Treat others with respect
  • Be charitable
  • Be patient

CNBC

dis-rup-shun: While high IQs without integrity may lead to problems later in the journey, there is no quantitative score card available to rank workers on Buffett’s list of integrity traits. So for the foreseeable future, organizations will continue to use IQ as a unit of measure for recruiting and hope that their members possess, or will develop, Buffett’s leadership traits.

India going to the moon

India delayed, on Sunday, the launch of its lunar lander and rover project, called Chandrayaan-2 due to technical problems. The mission includes a lunar lander and rover that will explore the Moon’s south pole. Space.com

dis-rup-shun: Lunar landings are so 1960s — why bother? The moon is a convenient platform for a country to showcase its space travel capabilities. To be not only a global, but universal super power, a country now has to have a formidable space program, not so much to colonize the moon, but to operate a fleet of orbiting satellites that will provide future broadband and 5G services, as well as play important military roles including spying, weapons hosting, and communications. India will be the fourth country to land on the Moon (USA, China, Russia have landed, Israel missed).

Employee leaked recordings of Google Voice conversations

Google revealed that employees listen to conversations from Google Assistant that are not related to the watch phrase, “Okay Google,” or “Hey Google.” All of the smart speaker vendors have disclosed that real people listen to samplings of customer recordings to improve quality of speech recognition. ArsTecnica

dis-rup-shun: Listening to conversations for the purposes of development of the technology is not the big deal. The big deal is that 15% of the conversations listened to were not in response to the watch phrase, and therefore should not have been recorded. The fact that the recordings were leaked to a company in Europe, where the European Union is currently enforcing its new data privacy safeguarding law, GDPR, means that Google will certainly face additional investigations from the EU. The article provides instructions for settings that turn off voice recordings and delete conversation history.

Amazon building Sonos-killer 

Amazon continues to expand its line of Echo products. Bloomberg reports that the company will introduce a high fidelity version of the player that will seek to deliver a music experience akin to Sonos or Apple’s HomePod. eMarketer reports that the Echo family owns 63% of this year’s smart speaker market. Bloomberg

dis-rup-shun: Amazon will continue to flood the market with many shapes, sizes and variants of Echo devices as it seeks to establish critical mass as the voice control standard for all types of appliances, cars, players and even light switches. The smart speaker makers are buying market share, selling devices below cost, as sales of the devices are, more importantly, sales of a voice control network standard. The Network Effect states that the value of a network standard such as Echo increases with the number of nodes, making competition nearly impossible once one company grabs a high share of market. Building a high fidelity version of Echo puts Amazon in competition with Echo licensing customer Sonos, but alienation of a customer is a small price to pay when Amazon’s game is massive scale.