Tag: biz

Predicting the future is a tricky business. With technology near term is still viable. Long term – science, fiction and magic all mesh up to create a haze. Still experts like Ray Kurzweil do exceedingly well ( see my post #16) getting upwards of prediction right over the span of multiple decades. So I look out for these and enjoy doing mental checks based on what I know (which is not much). Which is also why reading about 10 predictions by MIT Technology Review for 2017 in Inc by Jessica Stillman makes for an interesting reading.

Business Insider just released their UK Tech 100 list. It is an interesting mix of techies, VC’s, politicians, journalists and activists. Women feature in equal measure contrary to the normal discourse that tech is male dominated. Not so any more, at least on this list.

Have you ever wondered who instructs a Uber driver or a Postmate or Deliveroo worker what to do next, which route to take and how he is being rated. Right. It is algorithm. Self training AI.

In technology, failures were the stepping stones for all success.The thousands of prototypes Edison built for the electric bulb to NASA building its lunar module where the engineering philosophy was “There are no random anomalies”. In this Fast Company article Charles Fishman writes about two such amongst 1400 documented failures during development – one related to the the iconic triangle windows shattering and the high pressure helium tank bursting. The second was one of the solved puzzles while the first with the window glass, remains part of 22 that were never solved.

A lot of what we do online, posting videos, writing blogs or articles has been driven by the desire to garner likes. Now every company is a media company, inbound is your go to market tool driven by original content, in turn driven by likes, click-baits and similar basic appeals – it is time to stop and think.

It is known that the exponential growth we enjoyed thanks to Moore’s law is now leveling off and our ability to drive down the size of transistors using silicon is coming to the end of its road.

We have all heard it before. Why we strive to be the one to be disrupting – build the next Door dash, AirBnB, why Amazon even. Noam Cohen in his piece ‘Seeing Through Silicon Valley’s Shameless Disruption’ in Wired provokes some critical thoughts.