Tag: analysis

FB Stories

Stories potentially have significant value for Facebook beyond strategic positioning. First and foremost, the fact that users find Stories even more engaging than the News Feed suggests there is at least the possibility to create even more engaging advertising as well. This is in fact another way to look at that chart about the top 200 advertisers: the biggest spenders are brand advertisers, and while it is to Facebook’s credit that they serve the long tail, there remains a significant opportunity the company has mostly not tapped into, and oh-by-the-way, those are the advertisers best equipped to spend the money to make an effective Stories ad; after all, they’re already spending the money on TV.

Google Cloud

Having invested $30b over the last 3 years in its infrastructure from hardware to submarine cables, Google has bought itself a seat at the adult’s table. The question at Next wasn’t, then, whether Google belongs in a conversation with the likes of AWS, Azure and, increasingly, Alibaba. The question is where Google is choosing to invest that capital, and how those investments are paying off. To explore that question, here are 5 brief takeaways from Google Next.

  • Google Goes on Premises
  • Diverse Assets
  • Enterprise Ready
  • Serverless
  • Serverless

25 regular places

people are constantly exploring new places. They move to a new home, find a new favorite restaurant, find a new bar, or start going to another gym, etc. However, the number of regularly visited places is constantly 25 in a given period. If a new place is added to the list, 1 of the places disappears. The pattern is the same when the researchers divide the locations into categories based on how often and how long time they spend at the location.

Disruption Antidote

the first place to look for weaknesses is not in the supplier base or distribution or even regulation: it is with the end users. That is why it matters that Amazon is the most popular company in the United States, why Apple and Google continue to have 2 of the most respected brands, and why Facebook is right to be more concerned about the PR effect of its scandals than the regulatory ones. Owning the customer relationship by means of delivering a superior experience is how these companies became dominant, and, when they fall, it will be because consumers deserted them, either because the companies lost control of the user experience (a danger for Facebook and Google), or because a paradigm shift made new experiences matter more (a danger for Google and Apple). In the meantime, though, disruption has its antidote.

Steps to self-driving

This is why so much work is going into how the vehicle might communicate with the user – ‘this is an L5 journey and you can sleep’, or ‘I’ll drive myself for the next hour, and alert you 5 minutes before it’s time for you to take over’? Does that autonomous golf cart just refuse to cross an invisible line into a neighborhood where it’s not certified for autonomy? And can you push the Johnnycab driver out of the way?

Amazing Aerial Future

this is very comprehensive and well researched.

Drones are going to solve our centuries-old problem of urban gridlock, by safely, quietly, and sustainably moving the transportation of growing quantities of goods and people into the third dimension, the air. Unlike digging underground, which will go far slower, these systems will take us nearly point-to-point, they are far easier to scale, and their load can increase with demand, with no additional construction costs.

Technological Unemployment

The argument against: we’ve had increasing technology for centuries now, people have been predicting that technology will put them out of work since the Luddites, and it’s never come true. Instead, 1 of 2 things have happened. Either machines have augmented human workers, allowing them to produce more goods at lower prices, and so expanded industries so dramatically that overall they employ more people. Or displaced workers from one industry have gone into another – stable boys becoming car mechanics, or the like. There are a bunch of well-known theoretical mechanisms that compensate for technological displacement – see Vivarelli for a review.
The argument in favor: look, imagine there’s a perfect android that can do everything humans do (including management) only better. And suppose it costs $10 to buy and $1/hour to operate. Surely every business owner would just buy those androids, and then all humans who wanted to earn more than $1/hour would be totally out of luck. There’s no conceivable way the androids would “augment” human labor and there’s no conceivable way the displaced humans could go into another industry. So at some point we’ve got to start getting technological unemployment.
This is a look at which of those arguments is right. Part I will investigate whether unemployment is getting worse. Part II will investigate whether that is because of technology. Part III will investigate what longer-term trends we should expect.

Defining Aggregators

Aggregation Theory describes how platforms (i.e. aggregators) come to dominate the industries in which they compete in a systematic and predictable way. Aggregation Theory should serve as a guidebook for aspiring platform companies, a warning for industries predicated on controlling distribution, and a primer for regulators addressing the inevitable antitrust concerns that are the endgame of Aggregation Theory.