Author: Jeremie Averous

How People Adapt their Behaviors to Deceive the Digital Ecosystem

I loved those articles such as this one from the Verge ‘Watch a police officer admit to playing Taylor Swift to keep a video off YouTube‘ showing how people are adapting to take advantage of Artificial Intelligence to deceive the system.

The point being that YouTube deletes all videos with copyright infringement, and therefore by playing music while being video filmed, US policemen ensure those videos of their interventions will can’t be uploaded to YouTube. Brilliant! (I am not sure how well that works though!).

Anyway that’s a good example of how people adapt their behavior to deceive the AI and digital ecosystem. I am quite sure there are many more strategies used by the tech-savvy to evade modern surveillance and ubiquitous photos and cameras. And we may implement new behaviors more and more to adapt to this digital world.

It is just the start of adapting our behaviors to deceive the digital ecosystem and AI surrounding us. Expect this to become much more prevalent!

Share

How the Digital Age Requires New Digital Body Language Skills

In this post ‘How Effective is your Digital Body Language? Let’s find out…‘, Charlene Li reports on her conversation with Erica Dhawan, the author of a book on Digital Body Language. A passage in particular has attracted by attention: “reading carefully is the new listening, and writing clearly is the new empathy.”

Attention on reading is now very scarce as we see so many messages on our digital platforms and it is true that reading carefully is akin to modern listening skills.

The authors goes on to recount how proper skills at digital communication is also essential in the field of empathy. Since communication is now going through the written word on electronic messages, conveying empathy through this medium is now an essential skill.

“You can’t get away with showing empathy in traditional body language only. We must master the skills of digital body language to build a culture of empathy and respect and showcase that we’re listening and that we value each other.“

The post goes on to highlight 3 recommended practices:

  • Assume good intent
  • Practice virtual water cooler moments
  • Show your vulnerabilities

The digital age requires new skills and we’d better pay sufficient attention to developing those to remain effective in communicating in particular to the younger generations!

Share

How Courage, Anger and Rage fit together

Austin Kleon – a famous author on creativity – writing about ‘What to do with your feelings‘ mentions in particular the issue of courage. “People often ask me how I got the courage to put my work into the world. I’m not sure I have any courage, but I do have rage.”

He continues explaining how anger can be channeled in an useful emotion (although this requires quite some control) in a situation where there is a need to react to something out there which is not quite right.

“Whenever you are out of ideas, there’s someone, somewhere, with bad ideas that need to be corrected. But you don’t necessarily have to talk about the bad ideas, or take them on directly, you can just articulate the good ideas that cancel them out.”

Anger could thus be the source of positive alchemy, if used right. And it is true that more often than not, ‘courage’ requires ‘rage’ to express itself.

Share

How Our Work Rhythm Is Changing

In addition to the issue of traditional office buildings (see our previous post ‘How Modern Offices May be a Transient Historical Phenomenon‘), the traditional work week is also under review. This Vox article “The five-day workweek is dead – It’s time for something better” makes the point (even if it a bit tainted with US specifics).

“The five-day workweek is so entrenched in American life that everything, from vacation packages to wedding prices to novelty signs, is built around it. When you live it every Monday through Friday, year in and year out, it can be hard to imagine any other way.” Of course, this was also build about 8h presence per day on the work location which was the only location where work could be done.

Currently most people in intellectual professions or service work tend to work more because they also work from home thanks to modern technology. But even the official 9-to-5 office rhythm does not make any sense anymore because we don’t need to be all at the same place at the same time to work together. “Some employers are testing out four-day workweeks. A recent study of shorter workweeks in Iceland was a big success, boosting worker well-being and even productivity. And workers themselves are pushing back against schedules that crowd out everything that isn’t work.”

It seems to me quite inevitable that work duration will go down, but that in exchange workers will need to be more flexible in the week or even during the year (working more intensively when needed, taking off when not). While this will be made easier with technology, it will also require new management tools and new discipline from the workers themselves. This transformation is just starting!

Share

How Modern Offices May be a Transient Historical Phenomenon

Many things get written nowadays about the future of work. We will know in a few months how the pandemics has really changed our approach. In this post ‘The end of the office‘, Seth Godin takes a historical perspective on the modern office and how it may have been a transient phenomenon.

The modern office building has appeared with the industrial age and was conceived in fact as a data management factory. “For a century, the office was simply a small room next to the factory or the store. The office was upstairs from the bakery, or next to the stockyard or the foundry. Proximity to the worksite was its primary attribute.” Then it became sprawling office surfaces with layers of bureaucracy. For many it became one of the main centers of social life.

“As social creatures, many people very much need a place to go, a community to be part of, a sense of belonging and meaning. But it’s not at all clear that the 1957 office building is the best way to solve those problems“. With the remote work experience and the fact that we can share data irrespective of location, the need for large offices has disappeared.

I believe in the future there will be more remote work from home or decentralized offices, accompanied by a number of get-together events. This is already how many global companies work when it comes to global project teams. Transition may be faster or slower depending on industry and tradition, but it is ongoing!

Share

How Modern Streaming Leads to Watching and Listening Faster

Have you noticed this possibility on streaming portals to watch movies or listen to music faster? I discovered this feature in Netflix, but there now also tools to speed up any video on Chrome or other browsers – without having an effect on sound frequency or too much distortion.

I must confess I am using this feature regularly when I need to watch movies or series in a time-constrained circumstance. But now I tend to use it quite regularly even without such constraints. It is like accelerated reading and is an interesting evolution of the way we consume video or audio.

Of course this interferes with the original intent of the creator of the video or audio track, who had probably decided on the original pace with much thought, and in a way this thus interferes with the creator intent. At the same time it is also the direction of modern usage of media that we try to cram as much in the limited time we have to consume those experiences.

I am quite convinced that the media producers will soon notice the trend and change the way they produce media to accommodate this trend of accelerated listening and viewing. Still it shows the current tension between our physically limited time and the wish to consume more media experience.

Share

How Many Startups Subcontract Hardware Production to a Single Company

This article “Your Favorite Start-up Might Not Have Made That Thing It’s Selling Meet Doris Dev” highlights that many startup companies rely on a single source for their hardware design and production: a company named Doris Dev.

Doris Dev is “an agency that handles product design, engineering, sourcing, manufacturing, and even fulfillment from its offices in Dumbo, Brooklyn, and Hong Kong.” – “a team of product development experts who can lead any project from idea to market, including design, engineering, sourcing, manufacturing, testing, distribution and beyond” according to their website.

This can easily be understood taking into account the amount of design and production knowledge that is needed to produce hardware. Start-ups then focus on defining the product, brand and marketing. I find that it is a clever positioning for the Doris Dev company. “Doris Dev clears a path for founders, taking on the managerial load of product development (a huge plus for the many first-time entrepreneurs with minimal experience managing a team) and enabling more types of entrepreneurs and more types of products to go to market“.

The start-up ecosystem has thus evolved to enable outsourcing of hardware production. Still I can see some drawbacks in this approach, because the product may fail to deliver and it can certainly be cheaper to own its own supply chain in the longer term. At some stage the start-up companies will have to become more industrial. Still, actual value chains never stop astonishing us!

Share

How User Tables May Become Obsolete and How It Will Affect Internet Giants

In this very interesting post ‘The Billion User Table – The login is the gateway to the internet. And it’s about to get decentralized‘ some insight is given into the user data that is managed by internet giants and how much it is worth to them: the user table. With user blockchains this may be soon something from the past.

This photograph taken on September 28, 2017, shows a smartphone being operated in front of GAFA logos (acronym for Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon web giants) as background in Hédé-Bazouges, western France. (Photo by Damien MEYER / AFP)

User tables is the main data repository of all internet and cloud services about their users, and it is what makes the worth of internet companies. “Even if your users are registering via a social sign-on button — i.e., they sign in with Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. — you’ve still got a users table with information that lets you track users and market to them.” This serves to enhance your impact but also to lock-in users one way or the other by knowing what they are doing even outside your services.

“So the entire online attention economy is built around proprietary users tables that different apps jealously guard and are constantly trying to grow. This being the case, the size of this table is a direct measure of the size of a tech platform. It’s not a proxy measure, either. It’s truly direct, because it’s literally the same number that the platforms are using internally and that partners and investors are using externally.”

At the moment each major platform has its own separate user table. But with the blockchain used as identification this approach is under threat. User tables would become centralized and major internet players could not leverage them in the competition. According to the author it may be a substantial revolution in the way network value is created on the internet. Definitely a new technology to be watched!

Share

How Population is Spread by Latitude

This interesting set of maps accessible at ‘Pop by Lat and Pop by Long‘ demonstrate how the northern hemisphere is vastly more populated than the southern hemisphere.

Of course the peaks for China and India are quite visible, as well as the US population. The epicenter seems to be around 30°N.

The map also reveals how Europe is quite an exception being more northwards than the major population centers.

There can be several explanations for this fact. The first is that average temperature in Europe is higher than it should be based on latitude alone, thanks to the Gulf Stream current. The second is the offset created by India and China populations which are located significantly more to the south.

The fact that there is much less population in the southern hemisphere is also an important observation which explains why many services and calendars are dominated by northern hemisphere considerations.

Share

How Quick New Energy Sources Can Grow

This interesting ‘The Conversation’ post ‘Nuclear fusion breakthrough: what do new results mean for the future of ‘infinite’ energy?‘ expands on the possibilities of nuclear fusion in view of recent progress. It also quite usefully puts back into perspective the historical growth rates of recent energy sources.

As can be seen on the graph, which includes some possible predictions for fusion, the growth rate of wind and solar has been quite tremendous, in particular for solar.

In the article the same growth rate is anticipated for fusion once the technology becomes operational. This still shows that it will not be really significant before the end of the century.

New emerging energy sources often take some time for maturity. Then then scale and that is the time where we can observe their drawbacks. The same will inevitably happen for fusion as it is not entirely clean either (generating tritium pollution for example). Still, the graph shows how prevalent an energy can become in a few years and decades and puts back the introduction of new sources of energy production in a new perspective.

Share

How to Improve Personal Projects

Seth Godin in his post ‘Five useful questions‘ advises us to ask some fundamental questions on our personal projects so that we address the right things and so that we don’t let us being distracted by less important stuff.

  • What’s the hard part?
  • How are you spending your time?
  • What do you need to know?
  • What is the scary part?
  • Is it worth it?

Having the right answer to those questions enables us to identify which projects are really those that will make us evolve and improve.

I like in particular the questions about the hard part and the scary part. It is those parts we will struggle to address, not necessarily because they are so hard, but because they are beyond our comfort zone and usual capabilities. Still if we want to progress we need to address those and make sure we increase our comfort zone reach. This is particularly true about getting the right data and the right interactions to reach our goals.

It is really useful to interrogate our projects with some fundamental questions about alignment and whether they will effectively lead to self-improvement.

Share

How Everything Can Be Measured Nowadays in Marketing and Beyond

In one of his newsletters, Christopher CS Penn reminds us that everything can be measured nowadays when it comes to marketing. And that if there is a lack of data, it is not because data does not exist, it is because we don’t know how to use it. In the era of digital, we have tremendous amounts of data that are just waiting to be exploited. I believe this just does not only apply to marketing – it almost applies to everything nowadays.

“I don’t believe there are things that cannot be measured. Everything can be measured. The question is whether or not we’re willing to invest the appropriate amount of time, effort, and money to measure well.”

“Let’s take brand as an example. What’s the value or strength of a brand? Brand market research has existed for decades and has proven, unimpeachable techniques for measuring the strength of the brand. For example, do a telephone poll of thousands of consumers in a representative sample and conduct unaided recall tests like “Name your favorite brand of soda to drink”.“

Thus, the important conclusion is that “The honest, ugly reality is that when someone says something can’t be measured in marketing, what they’re really saying is they’re unwilling to make the necessary investment to measure that thing. Market research, properly done, costs a lot of money – tens of thousands of dollars if you use a good market research firm. NPS data is pricey. Collecting all that data across your enterprise costs time, talent, money, and commitment.“

I believe this applies beyond marketing: nowadays if someone says something cannot be measured, it is probably because we don’t want to make the effort – or spend the money – to measure it. Data is there, or can be captured with some effort.

Share