Category: Collaborative Age value production system

How Space Is a New Strategic Field for Big Tech

In this interesting post ‘Big Tech, The New Space Invaders’, Frederic Filloux explains how Big Tech is invading space services with the money and brutality that will change significantly this market.

He describes all the emergence in the field of space-based services and how the GAFA are now launched on a frenzy of acquisitions. “Space has become an inescapable part of their core business of data collection, transfer and processing, with multiple layers of applications, including a growing demand for AI processing.
For the consumers of satellite images and signals — insurance companies, defense, agritech sector, financial services — working in Amazon, Microsoft or Google Cloud environments is almost the natural thing to do as the tools are de facto standards.” For example, ““Amazon played it quite well by offering to the US Geological Survey and NASA to process the huge volume of data generated by its Landsat program. They did it for free in exchange for bulk access to the data. That was meant to be mutually beneficial.”. It was particularly beneficial to Amazon Web Services which is now the standard gateway to access and process satellite data. AWS provides unparalleled storage and computing power with dozens of easy to use applications dedicated to spatial analysis, refined and trained by Landsat’s trove of data“

This of course creates questions about strategic dependence on those strategic services to American companies. According to Frederic Filloux this would also be a strategy aimed at minimizing the impact of the current antitrust drives – making the GAFA indispensable to the US national security.

In any case this is clearly a deeply preoccupying evolution to see space-generated data being increasingly captured by the GAFA and an awakening of governments on the topic would be useful.

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How Mediocre Generalists Could Be Quickly Endangered by AI

In a newsletter, Christopher C Penn (link to his blog Awaken your Superhero) writes about the ‘demise of the T-shaped marketer’ with the argument that AI is eating the concept rapidly – producing quickly mediocre content but thus replacing the generalist aspect.

The ‘T Marketer’ is someone with a vast array of generalist skills and a particularly deep area of specialization. It is widely recognized to be a rare beast – and that such people have a very high value on the market. It is quite rare because it is difficult to be both a strong generalist and a strong specialist as this requires quite different intellectual approaches.

Any way, Christopher C Penn’s point here is that as AI develops (and while it is still producing quite mediocre output), it is much better at bringing together all sorts of information and it thus in competition with the generalist aspect.

“Why does this myth of the T-shaped person endure in marketing and business? The reality is that most of the time, mediocrity is sufficient to get the job done.” “As the line of mediocre output from AI advances, it will do more and more of the mediocre work, the stuff that everyone can do to some degree. That line advances a little more each year; three years ago, natural language generation was in a sorry state of affairs. You wouldn’t even consider using machine outputs for final product. Today, machines can write the same bland press releases humans can, with the same average level of quality. Three years from now? Those machines will probably crank out better blog posts than the average person.” The conclusion would thus be rather to focus on being really good at something special. “Good enough isn’t good enough any more.”

It is quite a good question before I personally strive to achieve something like a T-shaped competency, because I believe complementing deep expertise with the breadth of generalist approach is quite beneficial. The question is really how much generalist thinking can inform and make even better the specialization area. I am convinced that while one must definitely be very good at a narrow domain, keeping a broad overview is still quite essential.

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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!

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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!

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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.

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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!

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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!

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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.

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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.

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How to Have the Right Skills and Abilities in Technical Positions

This interesting post ‘An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding‘ by Camille Fournier – targeted at coding engineering but more widely applicable – lists a number of skills and capabilities that are actually required beyond simple technical abilities. Of course they address a number of softer skills and human interaction capabilities.

Amongst all those skills listed I pick up my top 5 – those which based on my experience seem the most urgent to be acquired:

  • How to run a meeting, and no, being the person who talks the most in the meeting is not the same thing as running it
  • How to indulge a senior manager who wants to talk about technical stuff that they don’t really understand, without rolling your eyes or making them feel stupid
  • How to explain a technical concept behind closed doors to a senior person too embarrassed to openly admit that they don’t understand it
  • How to lead a project even though you don’t manage any of the people working on the project
  • How to find interesting work on your own, instead of waiting for someone to bring it to you

In any case this reminds us that whatever the position today, even in the most technical and expert positions, sufficient abilities in soft- and interpersonal skills is required to fully participate and contribute to projects and organisations.

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How Intuitive Approaches Are Better Suited to Opening New Markets

Following up from our previous post ‘How to Recognize Crazy Innovative Ideas that Aren’t so Crazy‘, and taking a slightly different viewpoint, this article from the Conversation addresses one of the main aspects of decision-making: ‘Gut feel or rational analysis? Both may be vital in finding winning ideas for new markets‘. It summarizes some research on the processes followed by companies trying to find winning ideas to penetrate new markets. And the conclusion is clear: intuitive approaches are more powerful to uncover new markets.

Like individuals, “Some [companies] will instigate procedures that encourage more analytical decisions – for example, using formal idea evaluation tools such as grid analysis techniques and weighted point-rating evaluation matrices. Others may opt for more informal ways of evaluating ideas, which leave more room for evaluators to draw on their intuition.”

The conclusion of the research is quite clear:

  • Rational idea evaluators tend to seek out ideas that focus on a company’s current strengths.
  • Intuitive evaluators focus more on identifying opportunities to enter new markets.
  • For intuitive evaluators, a highly formalised evaluation process reduces their emphasis on finding opportunities in new markets.

Hence it appears that intuitive approaches are more suited to exploring new market opportunities, and it also appears important not to introduce the rational approach too early in the process, letting intuitive approaches identify opportunities first!

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How to Recognize Crazy Innovative Ideas that Aren’t so Crazy

In this interesting post ‘Crazy New Ideas‘, Paul Graham sets the scene about how to deal with breakthrough ideas that look crazy at first. And he proposes a workable scheme of how to deal with these, to decide whether they are worth supporting.

As a Business Angel I am constantly wrestling with this issue when faced with business plans of startup companies. “Anyone who has studied the history of ideas, and especially the history of science, knows that’s how big things start. Someone proposes an idea that sounds crazy, most people dismiss it, then it gradually takes over the world.“

The first criteria proposed by Paul Graham is how reasonable the person proposing the idea is: “If the person proposing the idea is reasonable, then they know how implausible it sounds. And yet they’re proposing it anyway. That suggests they know something you don’t.” While we then need to beware of the expert trap, there is still an opportunity to ask questions and try to understand the viewpoint of the proponent.

The second issue is that the world will resist to the new idea. Free criticism is easy and socially rewarding, vested interests in the current state of the world widespread, current paradigms cloud our judgment. In addition the new idea is weak and fragile so it may easily be crushed away.

“If you’re nice, as well as wise, you won’t merely resist attacking such people, but encourage them. Having new ideas is a lonely business. Only those who’ve tried it know how lonely. These people need your help. And if you help them, you’ll probably learn something in the process.” That’s an interesting call to action for innovation if I have ever read one.

Thus if a reasonable and sufficiently expert person proposes what looks like a crazy idea at first, don’t dismiss it: investigate, try to overcome those current paradigms that cloud your judgment, and support them.

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