Tag: business

AI Telemarketing

Americans are fielding millions of calls from bright, energetic telemarketers, but what they don’t know is that they’re talking to machines. 99% of the people do not know that the agent just shifted from pre-recorded to a live voice and back to pre-recorded audio. All these different measures are part of making the human-cyborg conversation feel “natural,” even though it is anything but.

the title is just linkbait, and the author had to throw in the obligatory “creepy” (we’re supposed to be scared by recorded voices now? what is this, 1860?), but it is still fairly interesting.

Cheap smartphones

The high margins that Apple and Samsung get on the smartphones are going to be eaten away by companies like HTC, Huawei, and others to be named. They’re going to introduce smartphones that are almost as good and most people are not going to be able to tell the difference.

it’s getting time to stop being so attached to your jesusphone, because expensive smartphones will disappear in a few years. the Moto G is a harbinger of this trend. it is good enough for most people and < $200.

Technophobes

Talking to the people who understood the technology became demeaning, something to be avoided. Information was to move from management to workers, not vice-versa

this perfectly explains the dysfunction at banks and governments: both utterly reliant on technology but run by people who are afraid of it and proud of their ignorance. learning how things actually work would be hard, far harder than that intellectual lightweight so popular with that crowd: the MBA, but at least it would create leaders that aren’t just stumbling around in the dark.

Last Days of Big Law

another bubble is popping.

There are currently between 150 and 250 firms in the United States that can claim membership in the club known as Big Law, the group of historically profitable firms that cater to the country’s largest corporations. The overwhelming majority of these still operate with a business model that assumes, at least implicitly, that clients will insist upon the best legal talent instead of the best bargain for legal talent. That assumption has become rickety. Within the next 10 years or so, there will be at most 20 to 25 firms that can operate this way—the firms whose clients have so many billions of $ riding on their legal work that they can truly spend without limit. The other 200 firms will have to reinvent themselves or disappear.

Buffet on prosperity

No manager operates his or her plants at 80% efficiency when steps could be taken that would increase output. And no CEO wants male employees to be underutilized when improved training or working conditions would boost productivity. So take it one step further: If obvious benefits flow from helping the male component of the workforce achieve its potential, why in the world wouldn’t you want to include its counterpart?

buffett argues that fully realizing the potential of the women in the workforce will lead to more prosperity. obvious, but nice to be put so concisely by one of the smartest investors in the world.