For all the angst about the problems in the US, at least we still lead the world in innovation, right? Not so fast, read on for this telling little story. The US Is still in the throes of deciding which e-wallet it will use. There’s a ton of them around so mass appeal is limited until John Q. Public makes up his tiny mind. Then retailers can finall...
Unicorns are so….fashionable. You know what they are right? Startups valued at at least $1 billion, amazing right?. Right now in the US there are over 80 unicorns, mainly in Silicon Valley. One of them, Square, just went public at a valuation of $6 billion which was felt to be a low figure now. Hmmm. Now there are so many unicorns that there is a n...
The march towards robots taking over our everyday lives moves ahead inexorably. Self-driving cars are just the latest manifestation of the trend. Recent research now shows that in order to make them more human,, we need to give the similar flaws to real people so that we take them more seriously (How perfect is too perfect? Research reveals robot f...
Tech earnings were up significantly in the last quarter. This was at least partly due to significantly increased earnings from the Cloud by Microsoft, Amazon and Google. When Microsoft gets earnings from anything other than its legacy products it’s worth sitting up and taking notice. This time it aced the market for the first time in a long time. S...
I notice that Facebook has just announced a new policy concerning who owns a person’s account once they die. The issue of what happens to and who owns a dead user’s accounts is a huge and growing global issue as everything goes into the cloud. I had an employee who died about 3 years ago. I forwarded his emails to me since I didn’t want to lose bus...
Did you notice that the NASA’s Curiosity Rover has just seen spikes of methane on Mars? People are already putting one and one together to get five, namely the presumed presence of life on Mars, inferred from the production of methane. But there’s another possibility. That is, that the methane comes from inorganic, non-biological processes. If so, ...
Another day, another mega-hack. Sears, JP Morgan, the US Post office, etc. The only organizations that haven’t been hacked are the ones that don’t realize it has happened to them anyway. It’s clear that a new type of digital ecosystem is emerging. In this ecosystem, cyber spies are continuously monitoring what you are doing. Meanwhile the organizat...
