#but this explains basically the last decade of the tech sector

[txttletale]

My question about growth/the venture capitalist mindset is like … how have venture capitalists and the like not figured this out already? It’s been a decade, give or take a few years, since the internet started being monetized to hell and back, and if we all know they’re not really making a profit (bc no one clicks on ads, obviously) then why are the structures still in place?im looking at all this and I feel like a dunce bc I just don’t get how ppl can keep ofunelling money into something that we all know doesn’t work lol ! :0

there's a couple reasons for this, but the tldr of it is that if you're wile e. coyote and you're running in the air over the edge of a cliff, it's in your material interests not to look down

let's say you're a venture capitalist and you've put $10 million into hypnospace, the hot new social media site. when you invest into a company, you invest at a certain price--the company has an idea of how much it's worth, and that determines what price they'll sell their shares at. let's say you buy at $10 a share, so you have a million shares in hypnospace. that $10-a-share-valuation was based on hypnospace telling you (in, say, 2012, when this was still believable and even seemed self-evident) that becuse they were seeing huge growth in daily active users, they'd eventually become insanely profitable.

now usually even you, a venture capitalist, a lifeform mostly resembling a parasitic flatworm, might be a little cautious about this investment. will they really become profitable? it seems risky. however because it's 2012, the US federal reserve has been giving out loans at their ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) for four years in a response to the 2008 financial crisis. what that means is that it's incredibly cheap for banks to borrow money, which in turn means it's incredibly cheap for you, a venture capitalist, to borrow that money from banks. when money is cheap, risky investments make a lot of sense--when you can get an extremely low-interest-rate loan, throwing that money down the toilet is unfortunate but no longer catastrophic. so you put your $10 million into hypnospace because the risk is artificially lowered by the ZIRP, making it well worth the reward.

now it's five years later and it's 2017 and it's becoming increasingly clear that hypnospace.horse is probably not going to became the new facebook and that perhaps there will in fact only be one facebook. bummer. but you've still got a million shares in it. this means that you're directly invested--not in the company becoming profitable, but in the valuation of that company going up. if people can be convinced to buy hypnospace shares at $12-a-share, you can make off with a cool $2 million even though the website never did anything useful or made any money. on the other hand, if people start thinking 'hey, this website has never made any money and it's obviously never going to, why would we buy shares in it'--shares plummet to $1 a share, and you're out $9 million! worst case scenario!

so even if you, the venture capitalist, realize that the website's a boondoggle, it's in your best interest to convince everyone around you that no, it really will become profitable, and its shares (that you hold some of!) are really valuable and you should want to buy them. and this doesn't just mean lying to other venture capitalists (although they love doing this)--capitalists pay close attention to sales of stocks. if you realize that hypnospace is never going to make money and decide to cut your losses and abruptly offload all million shares, other capitalists will interpret that for what it means--that you've totally lost confidence in seeing return on your investment--and many of them will panic and also start selling their shares, while capitalists with no hypnospace shares will think 'boy, this hypnospace thing seems like a real wash, i don't want to buy shares in that'.

so what do you do? you keep putting money in. if the company's increasing in valuation the more it grows, then even if you're crystal-clear aware that growth has no path to profitability, you still gain wealth for every month that the business stays afloat by burning money, because the valuation goes up and your shares are worth more. the ideal outcome for a venture capitalist investing into a tech company is to make a big investment, let the company bleed money while it grows for several years, then sell--not all at once, not abruptly, and not while the price is in stagnation or decline. it's one big game of hot potato for when the gig is finally up. not every venture capitalist has to be a totally credulous dipshit--just the last one in the line.

#ask #now a lot of the calculus on this has changed with interest rates on the rise again #but this explains basically the last decade of the tech sector

[erigold13261]

Do you think the sector Miles and Co are in Nueva York is designed for young individuals with fairly complex powers? (Or difficult situations like Gwen)

So I see NSR as being a company for about... a decade about. And from this, I feel like Nueva York is a younger company

I'm thinking Nueva York is about 5 years old, give or take. Young enough to not have all the amazing funding at NSR, but old enough to still be comfortable and have a reputation.

Because of this, I think Nueva York had an uptick in support and donations in the last like 2-3 years (once it started taking in people who were detained on using their powers, such as Hobie, as a way to rehabilitate them instead of just incarcerating them).

This support went kinda to the infrastructure of the Nueva York building/physical area. There were some reconstruction and added buildings, but most of the support went to advertisement and technical advancements like the watches and Go Home Machine.

What does all this have to do with your question? It's to explain the housing situation!

I think the housing situation for residents are split up like primary schools, by age. There are some powerful babies/toddlers out there and you wouldn't put them in the same are as a grown adult trying to use their powers.

So I would say that Nueva York is split up by ages. Something like, idk what the youngest would be, like ages 2-10, 11-20, 21-30, 31-40, etc. Groups of 10s, maybe the younger groups are split a bit more and some of the older groups combine. Think 2-5, 6-10, 11-15, 16-20, 21-25, 26-40, 41+.

The younger groups probably have some leeway in where they are placed, like Hobie can hang around Miles and Gwen even though they are about 15 and Hobie's like 19 because those groups intermingle since social interactions are good.

Like, each person has their own room, or if they share with someone it's of the same sex and age (as much as I would love them to do it by gender, sticking two teens with out of control powers of the opposite sex together might turn out bad, not that something couldn't happen with the same sex, but if there's a possibility of something happening, you just get your own room).

I think Nueva York is trying to find a way to also separate by power classification (at least keeping DET, VOL, and CON labels a bit more separated), but just doesn't have the time or energy to do so yet. I think that's why Miguel latched onto using NSR's Revolution as propaganda, to get a lot more support and donations to help him with his goals.

Now I realized I could have just answered your question in like 2 paragraphs, but establishing Nueva York's (and by extension NSR's) age is something I wanted to do! I have basically the whole of NSR's (the company) history down already, so using that to work on Nuva York's history is really fun!

(Like fun fact, Psychonauts, by this point, is probably a 30+ year old organization. While Vandelay Tech is about... maybe 15-20 years. However, Kale has only been in power for like 3-6 of those years probably. Nueva York being the baby of the organizations is funny to me. Bitch couldn't even make it to a decade before the people started to revolt lol).

#nsrtalk #spidertalk #nspidr #eritalks #noart #asks

[evisionmediasusanfriesen]

Why Is Everyone so Afraid of ChatGPT?

With all the existential threats we’re faced with in the world today, the last thing we need is another one.

And you’d think that large language models, like Meta’s LLaMA, Google’s PaLM 2, and of course, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which are basically just chatbots on steroids, would be the least of our worries.

But in spite of the explosive popularity of these new AI tools, several dire warnings about the threat of artificial intelligence have coincided with their release.

That being said, cautionary tales and warnings about the threat of artificial intelligence are really nothing new, and they go back many decades, to a time before artificial intelligence as we know it even existed.

From The Terminator and Blade Runner to The Matrix, warnings about AI have pervaded popular culture for quite some time now.

But as we’ve been reminded over the last several months, these warnings don’t just come from pop culture, and many people in the know have given dire warnings about AI over the years, although they do seem to have been few and far between.

For example, in a BBC interview from 2014, renowned theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, declared that “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”

More recently, we’ve seen several warnings about the potential threat that these technologies pose to humanity.

At the end of March, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter, signed by a long list of prominent academics and industry executives, including Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak, and billionaire tech magnate, Elon Musk, calling on AI developers to pause training of any AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, OpenAI’s most advanced language model.

And just a couple of days ago, the Center for AI Safety published its Statement on AI Risk, which states that “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

The statement is signed by many well-known AI experts, and executives from several AI labs, including the CEO of Google DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, and OpenAI’s own chief executive officer, Sam Altman.

But in spite of all the warnings, it’s obvious that these AI tools are too useful and profitable to pause for any significant length of time, as many of the people signing on to these statements are heavily invested in and already profiting from these technologies.

And aside from these warnings about AI in general, doomsayers in pretty much every sector have been worried about AI potentially wiping out entire industries by making millions of people’s jobs obsolete.

This type of pessimism has been particularly pervasive in the marketing industry, where people fear that all manner of marketers – from copywriters, to programmers, to SEO specialists – will be out of a job soon due to AI tools like ChatGPT.

But are these people blowing things way out of proportion?

No one can really say for sure, but if you find yourself asking these kinds of questions, or wondering about the effect that tools like ChatGPT could have on your marketing, then you’re going to want to keep reading, because this article is for you.

READ: What ChatGPT Can Do to Benefit Your Business

The hyperbole surrounding large language models like ChatGPT couldn’t be more ridiculous, with people going so far as to claim that AI is going to put everyone out of business, or will inevitably exterminate all of humanity.

But the truth is, artificial intelligence can actually offer a lot of benefits for business owners, and if you want to take advantage of these tools, you’ve got to understand them.

So, if you want to learn more about ChatGPT, then you’re not going to want to miss this article. It explains what ChatGPT is, how it works, and what it can do for your business.

Read more here.

What’s the Big Deal with ChatGPT?

When it comes to AI, there’s so much to talk about that I could write quite the essay on this topic, but out of respect for my time, and yours, I’m going to focus this article on just one AI tool, and one aspect of the marketing industry, namely ChatGPT, and copywriting.

ChatGPT is clearly the most popular AI tool today, not least in the marketing industry, and copywriting is a sector of our industry where people seem to be most worried about being made obsolete, so I feel like it’s important to narrow my focus in this way.

But when I think about the reaction we’re seeing today in response to AI tools like ChatGPT, it reminds me of a couple of seemingly catastrophic events that I lived through in the past.

One of those events took place about 30 years ago, when the World Wide Web became publicly available, and at the time, people were terrified about the effect this technology might have.

Fast forward three decades, and in spite of some of these fears actually coming to fruition, few people today would argue against the fact that the Internet is one of the most amazing tools ever invented.

Another similar occurrence was the release of WordPress, and I distinctly remember all the doom and gloom surrounding that event. My team and I even had a debate at the time about whether or not we were going to use it, which is crazy to think back on today.

20 years later, WordPress is now used to build the vast majority of websites on the Internet, and in many ways, it has simplified the web development process and made maintaining a website much more affordable.

But this isn’t a new phenomenon, and this sort of skepticism seems to surround conversations about any new technology.

Even the calculator was feared when it came out, as it was thought to be the death knell of the human intellect, but that’s already been proven untrue, not least by the existence of things like ChatGPT.

But at the end of the day, these technologies are simply tools, and fear of their use and existence is typically unfounded, as we’ve seen time and time again over the years.

All things considered, just like the calculator, the Internet, and WordPress, artificial intelligence is not going away, and like it or not, it’s something we’re all going to have to come to terms with and learn how to navigate.

So, is it true that entire industries are going to be wiped out by tools like ChatGPT?

And will you be able to fire your entire marketing team and replace them with robots in the near future?

As someone who’s worked in marketing for more than 20 years, I would say don’t hold your breath.

Will ChatGPT Make Marketers Obsolete?

As is the case with all the technologies I’ve mentioned, just because you have access to these tools doesn’t make you an expert on how to use them.

I mean, just because you know how to use a calculator doesn’t make you a mathematician, right?

And simply having access to ChatGPT doesn’t mean you’re an expert copywriter.

So, when I think about things like what it takes to use AI for copywriting, this is when I realize how absurd it is to think that this technology will ever make marketers obsolete.

And even though I’m someone who absolutely loves this tool, even I can admit that the supposed benefits of ChatGPT are completely overblown, and the truth is, it’s actually been made out to be something it’s not.

For example, many people have been promoting the idea that ChatGPT can write a book for you at the snap of your fingers, but this just isn’t true.

While I’m sure you could technically use it for this sort of task, you can’t just give it a topic, tell it to write you a book on it, put your feet up, and wait for it to be done.

In my experience, even getting it to write more than 500 words without it randomly stopping in the middle of what it’s writing can feel like a chore.

Because the reality is this tool is nowhere near perfect, and if you want to make the most of it, you’ve got to understand how it works, and you have to know how to give it the right prompts.

So, if you wanted it to write a book for you, you’d have to hold its hand every step of the way, and it would end up being a very tedious process where you’d have to continually give it instructions on how to write each section of the book, breaking up its tasks into chunks of no more than a few hundred words.

At the same time, if you want to create effective copywriting, you’re going to need to have a deep understanding of a litany of different subjects, like marketing, branding, web design, psychology, and more, and be able to instruct ChatGPT on exactly what to do to create that copy for you.

You can’t just say, “Hey, ChatGPT! I’m creating a website where I intend to sell my collection of baseball cards. Can you write the copy for me?” and then expect it to be any good.

Because ChatGPT is a large language model, not a marketer, so it just doesn’t work that way.

Truth be told, it’s an amazing tool that helps experts in their field to be more efficient and effective at what they do, but it’s not going to make you into an expert marketer just because you’ve typed out a few prompts and hit return.

What I (and Our Clients) Love About ChatGPT

In spite of all the dire warnings and doomsaying, as I predicted, ChatGPT has turned out to be an absolutely invaluable tool for me and my team, allowing us to save a lot of time, and in turn, save our clients money.

But the benefits of using AI for copywriting go far beyond saving time and money.

In addition to allowing us to save our time, and our clients money, as marketers, ChatGPT gives us many other advantages, as well.

For example, you know those days when you just don’t feel like working, or you’ve got something on your mind that’s distracting you?

I don’t know about you, but when this is how I’m feeling, it can seem downright impossible to get anything done, and when you’re a copywriter, this is when writer’s block can cause problems, and coming up with ideas can be a real slog.

But when you’ve got access to ChatGPT, it can do some of the thinking for you, and instead of staring at a blank page for ten minutes, you can ask it to write a few paragraphs to get you started, or come up with a list of ideas, like article topics, if you’re feeling stuck.

This is just one of the many benefits of having access to an AI tool like ChatGPT, and it’s done a great job of helping me and my team to be more effective, and efficient, while keeping our clients happier.

And after several months of using it, I’ve realized that the truth about this tool isn’t found on one side of the argument about AI or the other, but more like somewhere in the middle.

It’s not going to write a book for you in a day, and it’s also not likely to overthrow humanity anytime soon.

With that in mind, if you really want to know the truth about ChatGPT, it’s best to steer clear of both of these extremes and just try it out for yourself.

Because once you’ve done that, I’m sure you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

Are you looking to hire an expert to write your website copy? We’ve been helping business owners to create an effective online presence for more than 20 years. Contact us today to find out more about what we can do for you.

To your business success, Susan Friesen

#chatGPT #MarketingTrends #Advertising Trends

[actioncoolingheating]

The Real Estate Bubble Fallacy

There has been a lot of talk lately about the "Real Estate Bubble", and many folks are asking the question: "When it is going to burst"? There're saying that the market just can't sustain this level of development and appreciation much longer, and I heat them tell you that it is inevitable that it must come crashing down before long. People are worried. They don't think it can last; That any goes up, must come down. These folks have been conditioned to believe the things they believe most likely from the experience of the stock market bubble of 2000, and maybe the 1990's when the real estate market was initially hit hard in many large metropolitan areas across the country. Its individuals nature to feel this way. We all know the saying (or any 80's tune for you big hair folks), "Once Injured, Twice Shy". Or what about, "All good things must reach an end. "? Its how we react to almost everything that has an effect on our well being and general safety. Its a subconscious reaction at the gut level. Just like in the stock market, you will discover bulls and bears. Bulls are typically more optimistic around the market and expect it go up, and bears are actually more pessimistic and expect the market to go down. The can always be there to provide free advice and "expert consulting". Remember though, who you decide to listen to will certainly have an effect on your responsibility making, and ultimately your success. Well, I'm below to say that there is no real estate bubble! There never was basically a real estate bubble. Its a complete and utter fallacy. "How can I say that? " you ask. I could say that because the real estate market is in reality, a Send. Its a cycle, and we just happen to be biking the big swells, or the crest of this rather long, consistent, and fairly predictable pattern. There is no doubt the fact that real estate has been a rock solid investment for decades, and will continue to be for those foreseeable future and for many reasons that I would like to demonstrate listed here and now. Because you, as a real estate investor, must be able to move ahead with confidence when deciding which projects and properties you prefer to buy and sell. That is the purpose of my website, www.realestateinvestment.net [http://www.realestateinvestment.net], to provide you timely information, strategies and techniques to enable you to succeed. But first, what is a bubble? In terms of economics as well as markets, the best definition is probably something along the lines of "an remote or ephemeral situation or condition with little guidance or substantiation from external conditions". The best example, as well as one foremost in the minds of us all, is the stock game tech bubble of 1999 and 2000. We all in a hurry into the tech stocks and the stock market in general as we discovered the. com millionaires being made. Y2K was an enormous factor in the tech bubble. People were buying new products at a unprecedented rate in order to prepare for doomsday. People were even buying consumable goods to stock up for the dreadful occasion that never came. So what was holding up, or encouraging the "irrational exuberance" as Alan Greenspan characterized it all? Well, we learned soon afterward, not much. It was the isolated, temporary incident that had little support out of your other conditions. It was indeed like a bubble that broke. And it has had little support since then. Historically speaking, following the stock market crash of 1929 and 1987, it had decades for the market to recover, although it did eventually recoup. Just look at the Dow average and the S&P average during the last hundred years and see the pattern of recovery. You can be sure that a slow steady rise for stocks is in develop. Now back to real estate. Let me explain why this is not an important bubble. Real Estate is Cyclic Real estate has had its fluctuations over the years, but it is generally stable, with no drastic swings by itself. If you were to look at the cycles on a chart you will see a clear pattern of gently rolling swells. The pattern is consistent across cities and regions throughout the United states, although slightly varied in degree. In addition , the particular cycles tend to favor the ups rather than the downs. It is far from uncommon to see large cycles of appreciation and much smaller sized downward cycles. In other words, the current double-digit growth we've most of come to know and love in recent years will likely be followed by downturns of single digit declines. Its like taking couple of steps forward and one step back. In the big impression you will still be further ahead than when you started. You will see slower growth, but it will still be growth. Real Estate is really a Basic Necessity People need to live somewhere. They need the roof over their head and their children's brains. Like food and clothing we must have a home. Individuals don't need stocks or bonds. Therefore , you can be sure whether the market is high or low in growth, if interest rates are up or down, people will be selecting, renting, leasing, and selling homes. It is as perennial as the years. This Real Estate Wave Has Been Around Awhile When i don't know when you first realized we were in an up current market in real estate, but it has been on a solid upward development for at least the last 3-4 years. It didn't just simply happen yesterday. Of course like anything else, awareness of the general public is actually a bit latent, and dependent upon the media. It has primarily been lately that the media has really focused on the software and thrust it onto the front page. The good old adage "Success breeds success" is also true. The push will grow as other more traditional investors continue to keep jump on the band wagon and pour their dollars and resources into real estate investment. It tends to create a never ending, self-feeding market that is ideal for more seasoned investors. Realty is Local and Regional It is true that sometimes in today's real estate boom, there are areas in the United States that are not even enjoying the high rates of return that many people are experiencing. California is a fantastic place to invest, so will be Arizona and a host of other places. But the Rust Belt states are not as fortunate. Watch what happens to South carolina home values after this horrendous hurricane season. This is because realty is driven by the primary capitalistic force of Deliver and Demand. Generally speaking, property values increase in locations where the job market is strong, and where you can get more people moving into than away from. Of course there are other sorts of factors to consider; including interest rates, availability of funding, climate, and governmental policies. These are all important and you must be cognizant in their impacts to your strategy. However , it is true no who matter what the rates are or how decent the climate is, people will continue to migrate whereby there are abundant job markets and affordable housing. Privided you can stay just slightly ahead of that migration, you will turn a profit immensely. Real Estate Investing is Diverse You can invest in several ways, from foreclosures and fix and flips, to obtain and hold and everything in between. Right now the business oriented space is relatively soft. It will recover no doubt, and yet people investing in single family homes are probably doing to some degree better in returns. Vacancies are up and rental prices are down for commercial properties, but fortunately, typically the forecast is for this sector to improve over the next number of years.

[newbestinvestmenttips]

The Estate Bubble Fallacy

There has been a lot of talk lately around the "Real Estate Bubble", and a lot of folks are asking the thought: "When it is going to burst"? They are saying that the market cannot sustain this level of growth and appreciation much longer, not to mention I heat them say that it is inevitable that it have got to come crashing down soon. People are worried. They don't feel it can last; That whatever goes up, must come down. They have been conditioned to believe what they believe most likely out of your experience of the stock market bubble of 2000, and maybe the particular 1990's when the real estate market was hit hard in many substantial metropolitan areas across the country. Its human nature to feel that way. We all know the saying (or the 80's tune for you enormous hair folks), "Once Bitten, Twice Shy". Or why don't you consider, "All good things must come to an end. "? Its how you react to almost everything that affects our well being and common safety. Its a subconscious reaction at the gut place. Just like in the stock market, there are bulls and bears. Bulls are typically more optimistic about the market and expect it all go up, and bears are generally more pessimistic and expect to have the market to go down. They will always be there to provide free of charge advice and "expert consulting". Remember though, who you listen to will certainly have an effect on your decision making, and ultimately your own success. Well, I'm here to say that there is no properties bubble! There never was a real estate bubble. The a complete and utter fallacy. "How can I say which usually? " you ask. I can say that because the real estate market is in reality, a Wave. Its a cycle, and also we just happen to be riding the big swells, and / or the crest of this long, consistent, and fairly expected pattern. There is no doubt that real estate has been a rock solid investment decision for decades, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future and for many purposes that I would like to demonstrate here and now. Because you, as a realty investor, must be able to move forward with confidence when deciding which will projects and properties you want to buy and sell. That is the purpose of the website, to provide you timely information, strategies and begin enlarging help you succeed. But first, what is a bubble? In terms of economics and markets, the best definition is probably something along the lines of "an isolated or ephemeral situation or condition with bit support or substantiation from external conditions". The best occasion, and the one foremost in the minds of us all, will be stock market tech bubble of 1999 and 2000. Individuals rushed into the tech stocks and the stock market in general once we saw the. com millionaires being made. Y2K was basically a big factor in the tech bubble. People were buying fresh systems at a unprecedented rate in order to prepare for doomsday. Individuals were also buying consumable goods to stock up for the dreadful event that never came. So what was holding up, or perhaps supporting the "irrational exuberance" as Alan Greenspan characterized it? Well, we learned soon afterward, not much. It had been an isolated, temporary incident that had little guidance from the other conditions. It was indeed like a bubble which will burst. And it has had little support since then. Historically presenting, after the stock market crash of 1929 and 1987, the software took decades for the market to recover, although it did gradually recover. Just look at the Dow average and the S&P common for the last hundred years and see the pattern of recovery. You may be sure that a slow steady rise for stocks open for progress. Now back to real estate. Let me explain why that isn't a bubble. Real Estate is Cyclic Real estate has had the ups and downs over the years, but it is generally stable, with no drastic ups and downs per se. If you were to look at the cycles on a record you would see a clear pattern of gently rolling increases. This pattern is consistent across cities and countries all across the United states, although slightly varied in degree. Additionally , the cycles tend to favor the ups rather than the downs. It is not uncommon to see large cycles of appreciation and far smaller downward cycles. In other words, the current double-digit growth we all come to know and love in recent years will likely be pursued by downturns of single digit declines. Its like bringing two steps forward and one step back. In the giant picture you will still be further ahead than when you began. You may see slower growth, but it will still be growth. Realty is a Basic Necessity People need to live somewhere. They want a roof over their head and their your child's heads. Like food and clothing we must have a place. People don't need stocks or bonds. Therefore , you may be sure that whether the market is high or low in development, whether interest rates are up or down, people could be buying, renting, leasing, and selling homes. It is because perennial as the years. This Real Estate Wave Has Been Around A short time I don't know when you first realized we were in an " up " market in real estate, but it has been on a solid " up " trend for at least the last 3-4 years. It couldn't just happen yesterday. Of course like anything else, awareness of the average person is a bit latent, and dependent upon the media. They have only been lately that the media has really devoted to it and thrust it onto the front page. The particular old adage "Success breeds success" is also true. Typically the momentum will grow as other more traditional purchasers continue to jump on the band wagon and pour the money and resources into real estate investment. It tends to come up with a perpetual, self-feeding market that is ideal for more seasoned buyers. Real Estate is Local and Regional It is true the fact that even in today's real estate boom, there are areas in the United States which have been not enjoying the high rates of return who others are experiencing. California is a fantastic place to invest, therefore is Arizona and a host of other places. But the Corrosion Belt states are not as fortunate. Watch what happens for you to Florida home values after this horrendous hurricane season. The reason is , real estate is driven by the primary capitalistic force regarding Supply and Demand. Generally speaking, property values increase on areas where the job market is strong, and whereby there are more people moving into than away from. Of course you can get other factors to consider; including interest rates, availability of funding, climate, plus governmental policies. These are all important and you must be aware of their impacts to your strategy. However , it is true basically no that matter what the rates are or ways nice the climate is, people will continue to migrate where there are abundant job markets and affordable home. If you can stay just slightly ahead of that migration, you are likely to profit immensely. Real Estate Investing is Diverse You can commit to so many different ways, from foreclosures and fix and flips, to buy and hold and everything in between. Right now typically the commercial space is relatively soft. It will recover obviously, but people investing in single family homes are probably going through slightly better in returns. Vacancies are up as well as rents are down for commercial properties, but thank goodness, the forecast is for this sector to improve over the then few years.

[creativitytoexplore]

Covid-19 has blown apart the myth of Silicon Valley innovation

The frustration in Marc Andreessen’s post on our failure to prepare and respond competently to the coronavirus pandemic is palpable, and his diagnosis is adamant: “a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to ‘build.’” Why don’t we have vaccines and medicines, or even masks and ventilators? He writes: “We could have these things but we chose not to­—specifically we chose not to have the mechanisms, the factories, the systems to make these things. We chose not to ‘build.’” Forgetting for a moment that this is coming from the same guy who famously explained in 2011 “why software is eating the world,” Andreessen, an icon of Silicon Valley, does have a point. As George Packer has written in the Atlantic, the coronavirus pandemic has revealed much of what is broken and decayed in politics and society in America. Our inability to make the medicines and stuff that we desperately need, like personal protective gear and critical care supplies, is a deadly example. Silicon Valley and big tech in general have been lame in responding to the crisis. Sure, they have given us Zoom to keep the fortunate among us working and Netflix to keep us sane; Amazon is a savior these days for those avoiding stores; iPads are in hot demand and Instacart is helping to keep many self-isolating people fed. But the pandemic has also revealed the limitations and impotence of the world’s richest companies (and, we have been told, the most innovative place on earth) in the face of the public health crisis. Big tech doesn’t build anything. It’s not likely to give us vaccines or diagnostic tests. We don’t even seem to know how to make a cotton swab. Those hoping the US could turn its dominant tech industry into a dynamo of innovation against the pandemic will be disappointed. It’s not a new complaint. A decade ago, in the aftermath of what we once called “the” great recession, Andrew Grove, a Silicon Valley giant from earlier era, wrote a piece in Bloomberg BusinessWeek decrying the loss of America’s manufacturing prowess. He described how Silicon Valley was built by engineers intent on scaling up their inventions; “the mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production.” Grove said those who argued that we should let “tired old companies that do commodity manufacturing die” were wrong: scaling up and mass-producing products means building factories and hiring thousands of workers. But Grove wasn’t just worried about the lost jobs as production of iPhones and microchips went overseas. He wrote: “Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.” The pandemic has made clear this festering problem: the US is no longer very good at coming up with new ideas and technologies relevant to our most basic needs. We’re great at devising shiny, mainly software-driven bling that makes our lives more convenient in many ways. But we’re far less accomplished at reinventing health care, rethinking education, making food production and distribution more efficient, and, in general, turning our technical know-how loose on the largest sectors of the economy. Economists like to measure technological innovation as productivity growth—the impact of new stuff and new ideas on expanding the economy and making us richer. Over the last two decades, those numbers for the US have been dismal. Even as Silicon Valley and the high-tech industries boomed, productivity growth slowed. The last decade has been particularly disappointing, says John Van Reenen, an MIT economist who has recently written about the problem (pdf). He argues that innovation is the only way for an advanced country like the US to grow over the long run. There’s plenty of debate over the reasons behind sluggish productivity growth—but, Van Reenen says, there’s also ample evidence that a lack of business- and government-funded R&D is a big factor. His analysis is particularly relevant because as the US begins to recover from the covid-19 pandemic and restart businesses, we will be desperate for ways to create high-wage jobs and fuel economic growth. Even before the pandemic, Van Reenen proposed “a massive pool of R&D resources that are invested in areas where market failures are the most substantial, such as climate change.” Already, many are renewing calls for a green stimulus and greater investments in badly needed infrastructure. So yes, let’s build! But as we do, let’s keep in mind one of the most important failures revealed by covid-19: our diminished ability to innovate in areas that truly count, like health care and climate change. The pandemic could be the wake-up call the country needs to begin to address those problems.

from Blogger https://ift.tt/3cKEQQ5

#Blogger

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A Lump of Coal in the Internet’s Stocking: FCC Poised to Gut Net Neutrality Rules

NOVEMBER 27, 2017

In a new proposal issued last week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) set out a plan to eliminate net neutrality protections, ignoring the voices of millions of Internet users who weighed in to support those protections. The new rule would reclassify high-speed broadband as an “information service” rather than a “telecommunications service” (remember, the FCC is forbidden from imposing neutrality obligations on information services). It would then eliminate the bright-line rules against blocking, throttling, and pay-to-play (as well as the more nebulous general conduct standard) in favor of a simplistic transparency requirement. In other words, your ISP would be free to set itself up as an Internet gatekeeper, as long as it is honest about it.

This is a bad idea for many, many reasons. Here are a few.

Net Neutrality Has Been a Pillar of the Open Internet

The FCC’s decision to gut net neutrality protections isn’t just partisan business as usual; it’s a withdrawal from over a decade of work to protect Internet users from unfair practices by Internet service providers. While the FCC’s approach has changed over the years, its goal of promoting net neutrality did not. Two years ago, it finally adopted legally enforceable rules, most prominently bright-line prohibiting ISPs from blocking, throttling, and creating Internet “fast lanes” that would favor some sites and content over others. But, as the saying goes, “elections have consequences.” One consequence of the 2016 election is that the FCC has new leadership that feels free not just to change the rules, but to get rid of them altogether.

Ushering in a Pay-To-Play Internet

Because the draft order repeals net neutrality rules altogether, it allows ISPs to block or throttle lawful content, or give the highest-paying websites and apps a better ability to reach customers’ devices, or to favor Internet traffic from the ISPs’ own subsidiaries and business partners, all without any legal repercussions. It paves the way for an Internet that works more like cable television, where wealthy insiders decide which speakers can reach a broad audience. A pay-to-play Internet means that smaller sites and apps, or startups without major funding, will be forced to negotiate with multiple ISPs to avoid their content being buried, degraded, or even blocked.

The FCC’s decision to gut net neutrality protections isn’t just partisan business as usual; it’s a withdrawal from over a decade of work to protect Internet users from unfair practices.

The draft order claims that “latency-sensitive” applications will benefit from paying to connect to you faster and more reliably, while other apps and sites will continue to work as they do today. But without rules, nothing will require ISPs to give the same quality of service even to apps that pay the same amount, let alone those that can’t afford it. Content from an ISP’s business affiliates or favored partners will be able to get a fast lane no matter how much another website or app is willing to pay. The order justifies its conclusions by cherry-picking some economic analyses that support them, while ignoring the harms to free speech that flow from paid prioritization.

Weirdly, the proposal acknowledges the fears of “non-profits and independent and diverse content producers” who spoke up this year to say that pay-to-play Internet access is harmful. But it dismisses these concerns, saying that these speakers “may be less likely to need [quality-of-service] guarantees.” Not surprisingly, it doesn’t explain why non-profits and independent content producers don’t need the same access to Internet subscribers as major media companies do.

FCC or FTC?

The FCC’s proposal attempts to paper over its abdication of regulatory responsibility by insisting, mistakenly, that the Federal Trade Commission can adequately protect Internet subscribers. The idea is that ISPs have to be forthcoming about their practices, and if those practices harm consumers or competition, the FTC (and/or private antitrust lawyers) can hold them accountable.

The most basic problem with this theory is that it doesn’t actually forbid unfair data discrimination practices. If a company is forthright about its intent to sell your private data, block competitors’ content, or throttle competing apps, then the FTC will do nothing. And unlike clear net neutrality rules provided under Title II telling ISPs and the public what is and is not forbidden, the FTC only acts on a case-by-case basis after harm has occurred. The agency has no power to issue rules that prevent that harm in the first place. Finally, ISPs have been working hard to defang the FTC in court, with some success. Recently, AT&T won a case in federal appeals court establishing that it was immune to FTC oversight because it operated a telephone service. Though the decision has been vacated pending further proceedings, ISPs now stand a good chance of getting both the FCC and the FTC out of the picture, leaving customers without an advocate in the federal government.

What is worse, even the transparency rules have been pared back, on the assumption that customers don’t really need detailed information about network performance. But those metrics are crucial to identifying non-neutral practices. And the draft order suggests that the FCC won’t even enforce the transparency rules in any meaningful way. Without the ability to double-check how ISPs are behaving, we'll be left taking their word for it. That obviously would make it very difficult to persuade the FTC that the companies are saying one thing while doing another.

The Antitrust Head Fake

Net neutrality is sometimes thought of as a competition problem: if users could vote with their wallets and switch providers, ISPs would be more likely to respect their preferences. Following this line of thinking, the new proposal insists that antitrust lawyers (at the FTC and in private practice) can police anticompetitive behavior.

Unfortunately, this won’t work. Antitrust enforcement is in such dire shape when dealing with regulated industries like ISPs that the FTC itself warned Congress about it years ago. Thanks to two Supreme Court decisions (one of which involved Verizon), the courts are likely to deny access to antitrust remedies so long as the industry is regulated by a sector-specific statute and agency. The intent behind the rulings was to ensure that expert agencies administrating sector-specific laws handle disputes rather than generalized knowledge courts. In this instance, the expert agency and statute are the FCC and the Communications Act. Notably, the new proposal ignores these Supreme Court decisions.

Curiously, the new proposal ignores the current competition problem. It insists that the ISP market is competitive, even though a majority of Americans have only one choice of ISPs for high-speed broadband access of 100 mbps and up.  That lack of choice isn’t a problem, the proposal suggests, because monopolies that face competition in some areas will act like they face competition everywhere.  Even the evidence that shows that people rarely switch providers is treated as a sign of customer loyalty to the regional monopoly. Those times when Comcast refuses to cancel your cable subscription? Proof that the cable company is aggressively competing for your dollars.

At the core of the FCC’s contorted vision of the competitive landscape is the effort to lower our expectations by examining only the broadband market of 25 mbps downstream and 3 mbps upstream, which are relatively slow speeds today. Even at that level, the FCC found the market to be “moderately concentrated,” which, under the Department of Justice’s own guidelines, can be a source of “significant competitive concerns and often warrant scrutiny.” In fact, the FCC’s view of the competitive landscape directly contradicts the DOJ’s finding that large ISPs have the power and intent to stifle online competition—a stance the DOJ took just last week in its lawsuit to block AT&T’s merger with Time Warner.

Tech Giants Aren’t Going to Protect the Open Internet Either

The new proposal’s final justification for abandoning neutrality rules is that tech companies will police ISPs for us. In other words, ISPs won’t engage in unfair discrimination because Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and others will exert their own pressure against it.

This argument misunderstands a fundamental purpose of network neutrality: ensuring that the Internet remains an open field so that the titans of today can be disrupted by the startups of tomorrow. Google and Facebook aren’t going to do that for us; it is not their job to protect the interests of users, much less future competitors. That is why literally thousands of small businesses (including small ISPs, which the FCC completely ignored) have asked the FCC not to abandon its responsibility to navigate the public interest in the Internet. They have no reason to believe the biggest corporations will act on behalf of everyone else.

Their skepticism is justified. Think back to when Google and Verizon tried to sell the public on a deal that allowed them to favor their own products.  Or when Facebook endorsed AT&T’s antitrust-violating merger with T-Mobile that would have raised prices on everyday wireless consumers. Or Netflix’s CEO Reed Hastings’ suggestion (later withdrawn) that the company would be walking back their fight for network neutrality. Each of these were major decision points for Internet policy and all of them were crafted to serve their shareholder interests (which is expected since that is the first responsibility of a corporation).

There are many more flaws in the FCC’s proposal, which we will discuss in future posts (for example, the FCC’s continuing confusion about how the Internet works). But the key takeaway is this: the FCC is repealing, not replacing, principles and rules that have been crucial to the growth of the Open Internet.

That means the fight for net neutrality moves into a new phase – and we’ll need your help.

The best way to help right now is to contact Congress. But don’t stop there – we’ll need some offline noise to protect online speech. Activists are planning protests around the country and in DC – if there’s one in your area, come out and make your voice heard.

And if the FCC nonetheless continues to ignore public outcry and the public interest, we’ll have a new front: the courts. The proposed rules have any number of legal flaws, and we will be happy to point them out to a judge. The FCC may be abandoning its role in protecting the Internet, but we won’t.

TAKE ACTION

TELL CONGRESS: DON’T SELL THE INTERNET OUT

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/11/lump-coal-internets-stocking-fcc-poised-gut-net-neutrality-rules

[magzoso-tech]

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/startups-weekly-plaids-5-3b-acquisition-is-a-textbook-silicon-valley-win/

Startups Weekly: Plaid’s $5.3B acquisition is a textbook Silicon Valley win

Hi everyone, my name is Eric Eldon and I’m the new writer of the Startups Weekly newsletter. 

I’ll be picking my favorite explicitly startup-focused articles of the week for you from Extra Crunch (where I’m the editor now), as well as TechCrunch (where I was the co-editor years ago… long story). 

Some people tell us that TechCrunch doesn’t cover startups like it used to. I don’t know if that is true, but it is definitely hard to keep track of our startup coverage mixed in with the rest of our news.

This newsletter will highlight the best startup coverage on TechCrunch and Extra Crunch to help fix that.

I probably hate reading bad startup advice and analysis even more than you do, and not only because I’ve had to read a lot of it over the years as an editor. I’ve also started a few companies myself, and I’ve had the chance to experience exits, failures and venture backing.

I’ll be highlighting articles that I think address something significant about building a company, and I’ll tell you why each one is worth a read. 

There will also be some experiments. Thanks for reading!

Everybody loves Plaid

Plaid’s product is beyond boring to most people, but it is already a name brand to its enterprise users and across the greater startup world, as its stats and funding rounds have grown. The $5.3 billion outcome announced this week cements its status as a top SaaS/fintech startup story of this era, in addition to being a popular platform for developers who need to sync user payment data.

Alex Wilhelm was all over the news. He dug into Visa’s presentation explaining the purchase on Extra Crunch — it paid more than twice Plaid’s last valuation — and found the classic tale of a large, slow-moving incumbent strategically buying a hot younger company in order to grow into newer markets. Then he got comments for Extra Crunch from a range of analysts… who basically said the same thing. 

You can now tune into the latest TechCrunch Equity episode to hear him talk about it with our resident former VC Danny Crichton.

Atrium gets out of the human law firm business

Closely watched Atrium is shutting down the law firm to focus on the tech company. Founder Justin Kan tells Josh Constine on TechCrunch that this is part of the evolution toward providing a better tech service.

The law firm had been designed to provide the human touch in a way that machines couldn’t, but Kan says that lawyers do that great as third parties.

Many SaaS startups are trying to take on the back office processes of the 20th century. Atrium’s change will be another reason for them to go all-in on software, with humans not included.

PR expert says maybe don’t do PR right now

One of the most loved and feared people in tech communications today, Brooke Hammerling has been in the middle of key stories of the decade with founders young and old. And sometimes on the opposite side of me.

 She knows her stuff. Here’s one of my favorite gems from the full interview with Jordan Crook over on Extra Crunch:

If you’re an early-stage company, and you’re an unknown founder, and you’re coming out with your own take on something, you don’t want to spend your money on PR too early.

You want to spend that money on product development and engagement and engineering and so forth.

Big funds do the small funding rounds now

That’s the word on the street from our resident former VC, who was recently out in San Francisco visiting his many friends and professional acquaintances. Danny put his notes together for TechCrunch back in the comfort of his New York apartment, and found that everyone is raising huge rounds [emphasis his] — and it’s all about being there for the future. Plaid’s cap table is a good example.

One of my favorite quotes:

As one VC explained to me last week (paraphrasing), “What’s weird today is that you have firms like Sequoia who show up for seed rounds, but they don’t really care about … anything. Valuation, terms, etc. It’s all a play for those later-stage rounds.” I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration to be clear, but ultimately, those one million-dollar checks are essentially a rounding error for the largest funds. The real return is in the mega rounds down the road. 

He also noticed for TechCrunch that VCs today seem to be especially tired. You can tell him what you think about these observations at [email protected].

(Photo by David Becker/Getty Images)

Home robots are making moves at CES

I have never been to CES and don’t plan to go, but Brian Heater always goes and this year he came back thinking that the home robot sector is getting serious.

His takeaway for Extra Crunch: 

There’s a cynical (and probably at least partially correct) view that these sorts of deals are publicity stunts — big companies using CES to demonstrate how forward-thinking they are about new technologies. But there’s something to be said for the show’s position at the forefront of such technologies. The products are real, even if wider use is hypothetical. And in an era when Amazon has deployed more than 100,000 robots across its U.S. fulfillment centers to enable next and same-day delivery, we’re well into the realm of real-world use.

Brian is also hosting a one-day TechCrunch conference focused on robotics startups at UC Berkeley in early March, for those who are focused on this space. The event last year was a huge hit and we’re looking forward to the next one. Follow the link to learn more. 

Will Silicon Valley win at weed?

Eaze has been one of the highest-profile cannabis distributors, but now it might be running out of cash, report Ingrid Owen and Josh Constine. There are many structural reasons why any cannabis business is very hard, legal or otherwise. 

But it’s interesting to take a look at who is succeeding in the consumer cannabis market and why.

One local example is Berner, a high school dropout in San Francisco who became a budtender and partnered with cannabis geneticists to create and promote the Girl Scout Cookies strain, and also became an international rap star (the main topic is his weed) and clothing designer.  

These days, he’s opening more and more Cookies retail cannabis outlets, including in Oakland and L.A., and cutting licensing and certification deals with a broad network of partners, (and claims to be turning down huge acquisition offers). Basically, his cannabis is also his modern multi-platform brand and the cool kids are into it. He does not appear to be running out of cash.

#Miscellaneous

[skdigitalcitizenship]

THE DIVIDED BILLIONS: How The World Is Becoming More Separated.

Since the creation of the WWW (World Wide Web), the publicly accessible internet as we know it today created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 the world has come on leaps and bounds in both societal advances and technological triumphs. But what most don’t know is those who are left behind!

The term widely known as the digital divide, refers to the separation in both realistic ability and, together with access, and literacy with regards to the internet. It is a clear fact that certain countries have an advantageous position to provide their citizens with access to the WWW.

Let me explain with a brief history for example, Berners-Lee was a British scientist and so his early creation of the “WWW” consisted of English based language. Hence why parts of Northern America very quickly adopted the technology and why it has led them to become one of the most internet reliant continents in the world. The USA (United States of America) being the main contributor to this lifestyle. Many of their countries basic building blocks of society are run using the internet and the WWW. For example, homes are powered, heated and provided with water, through not just pipes and wires; but through communication between employees, customers, managers and executives.

Many parts of the world who don’t have a large or fluent population of English speaking citizens, tend to show a trend of failure to adopt the web to the extent that others have in the 21st century. This could also be due to the political climate since the ending of the Second World War and the Cold War. Countries lesser involved with global politics, trading or combat appear to be left very much in the dust in terms of digital status in the world.

An interesting anomaly to this theory of course is displayed in the rate at which South-Eastern (SE) Asian countries are excelling in both digital usage, literacy and efficiency. The web and the connections that come with it are becoming more prominent in certain countries in those regions every day. An example of this would be how in a 2010 report made by Akamai, the world's largest CDN (Content Delivery Network, systems of servers that deliver web content to specific users) provider; showed how there was a 16.22 Mbit/s average difference between South Korea’s super-fast internet speeds and Iran’s bottom line technology.

Iran of course has been shrouded from the world/technology in the last decade, preoccupied with fighting and violence that has made setting up a decent living environment for its civilians a secondary priority. Interestingly all three top spots on this report are taken by SE Asian countries who are renowned for their dramatic increase in use for the new age technologies. So, what advantages come to those countries who have such a dramatic presence in the online world in today's age?

In a blog post by Google’s vice president for South East Asia & India and the Joint Head Investment Group at Temasek (a multinational investment organisation), they explained how the South East has rapidly increased its e-commerce value far greater than projected.

Additionally, in a study in February of 2017, by “WeAreSocial” they conclude that in the last 12 months, the web user base in SE Asia grew by 80 million people, that's more than a 30% increase in around a year.

They extended this point by saying that the rise is likely driven by an increase in mobile internet users, as handheld hardware technology increases in quality; customers are warming to the idea of connectivity and are seeing more benefits of living an online and interconnected lifestyle.

A really important part of online culture in many of the countries in SE Asia is online gaming. In South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong esports is a rising environment for both children and young adults. This adoption of the web shows how whole new platforms, businesses and parts of society can come into fruition under the right circumstances.

In other parts of the world, countries who have yet to begin making leaps and bounds into the world of modern online tech have clearly fallen behind in aspects such as these. In an article from “Motherboard” they interviewed a young esports star called “All Youssef Mohsen” who addressed the fact that despite his team's success in their region of India, the lack of game servers set up to accommodate their competitions with teams from other countries had effectively barred them from the global scene. This means that it wasn’t his team's failure to produce results that resulted in their stumped ambitions, but instead the inability of his country to provide quality network facilities.

This issue raises the point that “true” access to the internet is never a simple yes/no answer. Access to the internet should not be judged by the content that is available. For example, if users back in 2000 were trying to access the web there would be reasonable loading times, because there was less content and images being displayed online. If you tried to access say, “YouTube” today with the same speed connection the difference in loading time would be very obvious. Essentially, it is an imperative and crucial aspect of remaining within the “digital societal loop” that the quality of digital related facilities are invested into and kept up to date with the rapidly changing and advancing climate of today's world.

This being said, what are the disadvantages to not being within the “digital societal loop”?

Looking at countries that are members of the “lower half” of the digital divide, you can see political, social and geographical trends that may explain why these countries are less developed in terms of digital practices. An interactive map produced by “Fast metrics” displays countries average internet speeds. Green being high and red being low. Countries with lower speeds and presumably less advanced digital facilitation are often seen clumped together such as in the South Americas, Africa an Eastern Asia.

There are a few small number of anomalies to the geographical trend such as Greenland who is close of the coast of Canada (a North-American country with good internet access) and yet has dramatically different results. This is likely due to their very small land mass to population ratio. The population density in Greenland is 0.137 people per square meter as of 2016 according to “Index Mundi” resulting in a low input of infrastructure due to lack of population. To run cables and create a viable network across such a large portion of land to such a small potential customer base is not financially viable for many companies. Other anomalies on the other side of the planet include South Korea and Japan; two internet savvy countries surrounded by many other nations that appear much less advance in terms of technological infrastructure.. These nations fall under the small collection of countries that have thrived by themselves in providing its people with an unmatched source of access to technology.

Hector Ruiz, the former President of Motorola’s semiconductor products sector, and former president and CEO for AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) stated that “Technology is only as powerful as it is accessible. Broader access brings education, information, and a sense of community that can help combat AIDS, malnutrition, ignorance and neglect. The power of a connected and enlightened world community is just beginning” this describes how many countries who have a more organised system in place for internet use, communication, and advanced industries are often those who not only do help, but should aim to help those who don’t and who are suffering. This today is aided by having the fastest system the world has ever seen to send and receive money through online transactions.

As children are born into this era of new methods and ways of learning it is entirely possible for people from all walks of life to have access to an education, even if it different to that of the normal teaching process. With easy access to education comes more educated people. Democratic voting turnouts are suspected to increase as a result of individuals becoming more understanding of the world and politics. The perception of money from physical to digital has it’s issues but the education of finance can help form more stable economies and teach people who can eventually give back through ideas and breakthrough learning that can help the world directly. It has been shown through global trends and statistics that after countries invest time, money and resources into providing its citizens with digital facilities, that more advanced and efficient forms of education (such as online tutoring)  will rise in popularity and accessibility. With this comes the chance to educate children with areas such as English speaking which as mentioned, helps increase the chance that individuals can communicate with a much broader range of people, especially in the online world where 55.7% of the internet's content is published in English (from a study by unbabel.com).

In conclusion, the difference between first and third world countries across the globe has always been large, however with the rapid incline of digital access being provided to certain countries compared to the stagnant nature of it in others the gap between countries economies, infrastructures, industries, and societies is growing day by day. And who knows when or if it will stop?#

References

Anandan, R. and Sipahimalani, R. (2019). Southeast Asia’s accelerating internet economy. [online] Google. Available at: https://www.blog.google/around-the-globe/google-asia/economysea-2018/ [Accessed 21 Jan. 2019].

Fastmetrics.com. (2019). Internet Speeds by Country - Fastest Internet In The World Map. [online] Available at: https://www.fastmetrics.com/internet-connection-speed-by-country.php [Accessed 21 Jan. 2019].

Indexmundi.com. (2019). Greenland - Population density (people per sq. km of land area). [online] Available at: https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/greenland/indicator/EN.POP.DNST [Accessed 21 Jan. 2019].

Kemp, S. (2019). Digital in Southeast Asia in 2017 - We Are Social. [online] We Are Social. Available at: https://wearesocial.com/special-reports/digital-southeast-asia-2017 [Accessed 21 Jan. 2019].

Kleinman, J. (2019). African Esports Are Ready to Explode, but Video Game Publishers Are Holding Them Back. [online] Motherboard.vice.com. Available at: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/5994g8/african-esports-are-ready-to-explode-but-video-game-publishers-are-holding-them-back [Accessed 21 Jan. 2019].

Pingdom Royal. (2019). The REAL connection speeds for Internet users across the world (charts) - Pingdom Royal. [online] Available at: https://royal.pingdom.com/2010/11/12/real-connection-speeds-for-internet-users-across-the-world/ [Accessed 21 Jan. 2019].

Unbabel. (2019). Top Languages of the Internet, Today and Tomorrow. [online] Available at: https://unbabel.com/blog/top-languages-of-the-internet/ [Accessed 21 Jan. 2019].

[marlabs-blog]

Digital Disruption & The Road Ahead for Technology Service Providers

Digital Disruption &The Road Ahead for Technology Service Providers – blog by Prakash Hingorani

If we call the “Combustion Engine based Automobile & Oil” as the “Old Economy” and we all are now looking at Digital as the “Next Gen” it becomes so natural that “Electric Cars represent the future which is the Digital Age”

From a technology services industry perspective, the emergence of cloud services/ products, Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Deep Learning and IoT, over the last few years are having a disruptive impact, they now represent the Digital Age and Digital Transformation in Technology Services.

So, if we go by the pace of technology acceleration and cloud adoption over the last five years and factor in that every five years the rate of change is only going to accelerate, the predictions, for various industries are pretty radical.

As we have seen the rise of cloud services/products over the last few years, we are witnessing a radical shift in the mindsets of our consumers. We are witnessing more customers getting used to the “App Mindset/Revolution” and better User Experience and User Interface. This started with the emergence of the 99c instant app download mindset in the consumer space and has now overflowed into a similar mindset of consumers in the business world. The business users do not want to wait for a year for their tech folks or vendors to build a custom app. Idea to application prototype and prototype to final product time has remarkably reduced.

The basic question one asks today is “Is there an App for that?” This has become a common phrase, it has virtually become part of our life. Let’s analyze the power of this statement and how it has transformed every aspect of our work environment.

Users in every category and industry are first looking to explore if there is an app to solve every need or a problem they encounter.

Let’s take a leaf out of this and apply the impact to the Industries serviced by Technology Providers. Most CIO’s (Chief Information Officers), CTO’s (Chief Technology Officers, CMO’s (Chief Marketing Officer) now consider their first priority to explore options which are off the shelf – Cloud/SaaS based and easy to start, work straight out of the box or like an app. Main theme is why build if you can buy of the shelf – Cloud or SaaS based products.

There are numerous examples of Vendors/Organizations providing such ecosystems, to name a few such as Salesforce, Workday, and Quick Base. The common theme – Low Code/No Code “Less Code & Less Maintenance”.

Instant gratification! Gone are the days where CIO’s would have 3 to 5-year build plans. The life span of a CIO is now 24 months to 36 months, so he or she has must show early value and quick results. The best way to get early value for them is to look at cloud-based products or off the shelf solutions which can be installed quickly and allow users to have instant benefits. This does not need much of capex investments. The CIO’s can look at customizations and integrations to other systems in phase II.

These are also emerging trends as we are witnessing more CMO’s take the lead on innovation and are driving a larger share of the IT budgets.

If you analyze Michael Porters value chain of an organization, each aspect of it

(inventory, procurement, manufacturing, sales, marketing, finance, human resources can be covered using cloud/SaaS (Software as a Solution) based apps/solutions without really having to build custom applications. Ecosystems around cloud-based platforms (like Salesforce, Workday to name a few) can provide end to end solutions for major functionalities within an organization.

One can then look at many integration solutions (like, Mulesoft, Dell Boomi) and other frameworks available to integrate and enable different systems to talk to each other. This reduces time to market, reduces cost of implementation and maintenance.

For example, today creative organizations (say in non-manufacturing sector) can look at a combination of products like, Salesforce or Workday based ecosystems to deploy them as a mini ERP utilizing their CRM, finance, logistics and distribution modules, it would be a straight out of the box implementation for majority of their system requirements. This ecosystem has matured over a period of time they have enough real cases to fit most organization & processes. It is also becoming more flexible and cost effective from a licensing and maintenance perspective.

What does this model do for Traditional Technology Service Providers who depend on building custom solutions for their customers? This disruption has mostly large and midsized global technology solution providers extremely worried and rethinking their support model.

The trend clearly is moving towards those companies who can deliver value through a “platform”, “product” or “accelerators built on an existing platform” or those service/product providers who have an advantage on integration services (middleware and integration partners). Traditional Technology Service providers will find it difficult to survive on a “Custom Build Mindset”.

The technology trends are moving more towards building products and services around ecosystems. The largest ecosystems are converging around Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Oracle, and SAP, and Salesforce.

But what does that do to traditional technology solutions/service providers?

Right now, they work on a model, which looks at building and testing custom software solutions (be it on a waterfall or Agile Methodology) for their clients. They deploy thousands of developers and testers, BA’s (onsite/offshore) to do custom build, maintenance of existing systems and enhancements however, the Cloud based product model puts a big risk to these jobs.

In the Digital Transformation Age “technology service providers will need to relook at their value proposition and ensure they have alignment and value creation around some of the above-mentioned ecosystems.

However, the bigger question to ask is “If most services and solutions are available using a cloud platform or an AI based service/product” what does that do to the role of a traditional technology service provider? How do these organizations create sustainable competitive advantage? It is important to understand the main driving force behind this.

If you as an organization are supporting an industry and that industry is being disrupted or being re-invented, how is it possible for that change or disruption not to affect your existing model?

Now translate the above into the jobs of the future and the job losses emanating out of the cloud and AI movement.

If we see the future on a parallel track, the auto manufacturing and related services industry is getting disrupted due to the electric and autonomous vehicles, that will lead to job losses and economic re-orientation on a historic proportion as explained in my earlier article.

We are witnessing Artificial Intelligence based engines helping organizations with QA automation, helpdesk and service desk automation. AI and Deep Learning based platforms are helping in predictive analytics. Many Organizations are improving internal efficiency using automation tools for DevOps (CI/CD), Infrastructure & Deployment Automation using cloud services from AWS and Azure

Over the next 2 Technology Decades (10 years) the performance and reach of AI and Cloud based services and products will only accelerate, this will tremendously help organizations to innovate quickly as their speed to market will accelerate at a rapid pace and they may be able to achieve innovation on demand or close to on demand. The trends indicate that 47% of US jobs are at risk due to automation driven by AI and associated technologies. This is no longer restricted to blue collar job, most of this impact will be on white collar/service jobs.

The pace of change is profound, and organizations need to relook at this digital disruption and digital transformation as an opportunity to change and align with “The New Digital Economy”

Let’s take the example of Banking & Financial Industry:

FinTech is radically transforming and disrupting the traditional functions of the banking and financial services industry. The Digital Bank with Digital Security is replacing the Traditional Brick & Mortar Banks. Emergence of Block Chain Technology, Crypto Currency and Digital Wallets are having a tremendous impact of how banking services are provided, and financial transactions are audited. These are also changing how compliance and settlement services are being conducted. We can already see the benefits of digital transformations using digital wallets & Mobile payments in some of the developing world in fact, Block Chain Technology is no longer restricted to Banking and Finance, it is being adopted across industries like Retail, Insurance, and Real Estate.

These technologies will have an impact on the nature of jobs and will disrupt the traditional industry job market. We are witnessing the massive change in Digital Payments in Countries like India who are embracing digital technologies in all aspects and industries.

Emergence of Apps like Wealth Front, Venmo are challenging the domain of traditional investment advisors and banking/payment industry. The emergence of high-speed trading and artificial intelligence-based algorithms have had tremendous impact on the Role of The Traditional “Trader in the Stock Market” and the Business Analyst in the Financial World.

Nimble Cloud Based Fintech Service and Product Providers are disrupting large Banking and Financial Services Organizations. These New Fintech firms have cloud-based products do not have large legacy applications to support like the traditional banks. Technology services firms that are supporting the Banking & Financial Industry will have to rethink their models of support

How should technology consulting firms restructure their services to thrive in the “New Digital Economy”

Develop a Customer Experience/Journey Map The start of the digital transformation journey is to create the map of how the customer consumes or experiences your services. How digital transformation has changed that experience. The service provider needs to create this map for every industry segment it services. For their survival they will need to stay nimble by look at creating value at every stage of the customer’s new digital journey/experience.

Create a group of small startups within your large organization. Large technology service providers will need to create a startup culture within their organization. They will need to break their organization into small startups catering to each industry segment. Each small group within the organization will need to focus on creating value within a particular segment and learn to be nimble and work on small projects and small teams. For example, get teams across a few innovative segments like IoT, UX/UI, Digital Enablement, Cloud Services, Digital Security, Digital Product Engineering. This will put tremendous pressure on large technology service providers as this model contradicts their norm of getting large single engagements from clients. Now they will need to adapt to small engagements.

Create New Competitive Advantage based on a Digital World. Every Industry be it retail, automobile, media, publishing is undergoing a digital disruption/digital transformation, and this has given rise to numerous opportunities for technology services firms. It is a level playing field between the Big Consulting firms and mid-size organizations. Every tech services organization should look first internally to understand its core value and its key differentiators that has helped it so far. It requires a very detailed analysis of the type of work and value it currently delivers to its customers across industries. Then map the industry movement and the digital disruption that is affecting that industry. There should be a map showing the value chain, the organization must analyze where in that new digital value chain, will it create a competitive advantage. After analysis, they should narrow down maybe 3 to 4 key value drivers and each should answer the following question, “Which Industry and What Value Will it Create” How do we service it: Through,

a) A New Service Platform b) A New Product offering c) A New Integration Offering

All of the above will need to be driven from creating an IP (Intellectual Property) mindset. Each Organization will have to carefully evaluate what Value they deliver to their end customer and industry. Once the matrix evolves around a few customer segments and industries then they should look building either a platform, product or service which gives them a competitive advantage and helps their customer deliver value to the Industry they serve.

“The Road head can be summed up as “Be Prepared to Disrupt Yourself or Get Disrupted”

Source

#Digital disruption #Cloud platform #Cloud based services #Digital user experience #ux

[un-enfant-immature]

Freelancers rights come of age as gig economy booms

Gig workers, freelancers, sharing economy workers — call them what you want to, but the millions who drive you around in Lyfts, drop off your Seamless delivery or work on piecemeal projects from home have become a staple of the American workforce — and their numbers are only set to grow.

A report out today says 56.7 million Americans worked as freelancers in the last year. That is more than 1 out of 3 of the entire labor force.

For full-time employees, a whole array of protections exists to make sure they get paid, are not discriminated against and retain some income if they lose their jobs. From federal employment laws to state laws and city ordinances, employees have recourse for wrongdoing by employers. But for the fast-growing segment of Americans working as freelancers, little to no legal protections exist.

That’s beginning to change. From a modern take on labor unions in the shape of the Freelancers Union to legal tech startups trying to provide freelancers with simple and accessible contracts that protect their rights, freelancer protections are slowly catching up to the incredible growth that the gig economy has seen over the past few years.

Who is freelancing?

The Freelancers in America Study published today provides a window into who’s doing all the gig jobs around. Jointly commissioned by the Freelancers Union, which has more than 400,000 members nationwide, and Upwork, the largest freelancing website, the study is now in its fifth edition.

It found that freelancers live all across the United States, more than 40% of them are younger than 35 and almost two thirds of them found their work online. At the current rate of growth, we can expect the majority of the US workforce to freelance within less than a decade.

For the most part, the study found that freelancers are content with their work. More than half of those surveyed said that no amount of money would get them to take a traditional job. Compared to non-freelancers, freelancers have a better work/life balance and more control over their schedule, resulting in less stress and better health.

Yet, unlike their traditional full-time counterparts, freelancers disproportionately worry about whether they’re going to get paid for the work they complete, and how they can pursue claims for payment if they don’t. Nearly 70% of freelancers have struggled to collect payment for work they’d completed.

Protecting freelancers

This is where organizations like the Freelancers Union come in. Unlike traditional unions, membership in the Freelancers Union is free — with grants from various donors and fees from offering insurance plans covering the Union’s costs. While membership in traditional private-sector unions peaked in the 1970s and has been in a steady decline since, the Freelancers Union has seen steady growth since it was founded in 1995 and is currently growing at a rate of 1,000 new members a week.

Caitlin Pearce, the union’s Executive Director, tells me that freelancers deal with a fundamental power imbalance. With less than a fourth of them using a contract to protect their rights, they are often left at the mercy of the employer. “Freelancers are basically cut off from all the workplace protections that have become commonplace,” she explained.

In response to the concerns of its members, the Union has been advocating for timely payment by employers, access to affordable health care and more income predictability.

Last year, the Union led a successful advocacy drive to pass the “Freelance Isn’t Free Act” by the New York city council. Under this act, businesses hiring freelancers in New York City are required to use a contract, must pay within 30 days of the work being complete, and freelancers can file a claim with the city to resolve issues they have with businesses. If the claim is successful, then businesses have to pay freelancers double the damages, in addition to the freelancer’s attorney fees.

Serious challenges remain. Even the act itself can’t protect workers who work remotely from as close as New Jersey for businesses based in New York. Effective protections need state and federal level laws, but Pearce says that even within New York State they found little appetite for legislation to protect freelancers’ rights.

For now, the Freelancers Union is doubling down on their municipal strategy, advocating for other cities where many freelancers are based to adopt ordinances similar to the one passed in New York.

Pearce says they’ve started to gain traction in Philadelphia and Madison, and are using the New York campaign as a model. New York showed the Union the widespread support they can galvanize for freelancer rights. From traditional labor unions to WeWork and Kickstarter, a wide range of groups came together to support passing the act. In the end, it passed unanimously, with all 51 New York City council members, including three Republicans, supporting it.

“It’s just a common sense law, if you do work you deserve to be paid,” stresses Pearce. The hope now is that same common sense can prevail in other cities, states and eventually federally.

The startup approach

Protections for freelancers are not only coming from union-like organizations. Some legal tech startups are working to provide more affordable contract services directed specifically at freelancers and small businesses.

Gina Pak and Liam Moriarty met during their time at Columbia Law School, and at first followed the typical attorney route of working for high-powered New York law firms. But a few years into their law careers, they both quit their jobs, packed up their Upper West Side apartment and moved out to Los Angeles to co-found Lawgood.

Pak and Moriarty had found that bad contracts in the US were giving rise to more than 12 million lawsuits every single year, costing the national economy more than $600 billion. Freelancers and small businesses can’t afford attorney fees, and so choose to write their own risky contracts, or go without a contract at all, leading to lawsuits when things inevitably go awry.

Instead, Lawgood provides an online service, where freelancers and businesses can upload any contract they have questions about and get feedback for the fraction of the cost of hiring an attorney.

Then, the company’s system combines a network of carefully vetted lawyers with artificial intelligence technology designed to detect potential problems in the contract. Each user gets a marked-up contract that provides notices of potential issues, simplified explanations of complex wording, and suggestions on how to negotiate.

Pak tells me that as things currently stand, “laws are just inadequate when it comes to protecting freelancers and are not keeping up with the times.” A well-drafted contract can protect both the freelancer and the company that hires them. But in her experience, even the word contract has a bad rep. “It’s a pain point that people just don’t want to go through, and some freelancers are even hesitant to ask for a contract because they don’t want to signal a lack of trust in the person hiring them.”

This means that for Lawgood, apart from enabling freelancers to get affordable, easy to understand contracts, they have to advocate for behavior change. They have to convince freelancers that contracts are one of the most effective communication tools if written well. “Don’t think of it as distrust,” encourages Pak, “but a tool for both sides to succeed and be clear on expectations.”

What does the future hold for supporting freelancers’ rights?

While organizations like the Freelancers Union and startups like Lawgood offer some hope for freelancers, it’s clear that more national level protections are needed to make sure freelancers aren’t taken advantage of.

In that sense, the Freelancers in America Study offers some important clues as to why politicians everywhere should be paying more attention to freelancers. Apart from the fact that they already represent more than 1 out of 3 American workers, the study showed that freelancers are 19 points more politically active than non-freelancers.

Even more strikingly, a whopping 72% of freelancers said they’d be willing to cross party lines to vote for candidates who support freelancers’ rights.

Pearce says one of the best outcomes from publishing the study is quantifying the number of freelancers, a loose and dispersed constituency that had not been properly counted before. The hope now is that their size, level of political engagement and willingness to cross party lines, will lead to politicians taking on their cause and eventually pass legislation protecting their rights. Until that happens, freelancers should push for contracts that protect them and join groups like Freelancers Union to amplify their voices.

#TechCrunch

[biofunmy]

Stocks Fall as an Unending Trade War Leaves Wall Street Jittery

Investors are dealing with a painful new reality: The trade war between the United States and China could last indefinitely.

That anxiety spread across the stock markets on Monday, as investors around the world tried to divine the potential fallout to economic growth and corporate profits. Bonds and commodities, too, flashed warnings of a slowdown.

The stock losses have brought an end to a recent calm that had settled over Wall Street. For months, investors had assumed that the trade war, a major hazard for the global economy, would end soon. Just weeks ago, the S&P 500 reached a record high.

That illusion has been shattered, as concerns mount about slowing growth and rising costs. China said on Monday that it would increase tariffs on nearly $60 billion of goods, in response to a similar move last week by the Trump administration.

The S&P 500 fell 2.4 percent on Monday. It was the American stock benchmark’s worst day since early January. In all, the S&P 500 is down 4.6 percent in May.

Companies in trade-sensitive sectors like agriculture and semiconductor manufacturing were particularly hard hit. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index fell 3.4 percent, its worst decline in 2019.

The selling has come even as the American economy continues to show significant momentum. The economy expanded at a robust 3.2 percent annual rate in the first three months of the year. In April, unemployment fell to 3.6 percent, the lowest level since 1969.

But the declines in the financial markets raise the prospect of a negative feedback loop: As worries about the economy send stock prices lower, the weakness could prompt concern among the executives whose decisions drive economic growth.

“The longer the market turmoil continues, the bigger a hit it can have on economic activity,” said Kathy Bostjancic, chief United States financial economist at Oxford Economics, a research firm.

The pace of economic growth has slowed in much of the world. On April 9, the International Monetary Fund reduced its growth forecast for 2019 to 3.3 percent, which would make it among the slowest years of growth in the past decade.

In adjusting its forecast, the fund cited, in part, the tensions between China and the United States. It also said it expected about 70 percent of the global economy to slow this year.

Economists say further rounds of tariffs from both China and the United States will most likely slow the world’s economy even more. As both sides take new measures, it will be hard for businesses and consumers to avoid the fallout.

Now that the Trump administration has raised tariffs on some $200 billion of Chinese goods to 25 percent, its next major escalation could cover nearly every product imported from China. The White House is weighing levies on another $300 billion of imports that includes a range of consumer products, from cellphones to computers and toys, that have so far been largely unscathed by the fight.

If consumers are forced to pay for those increases, they could be forced to cut back on spending. If the increases are absorbed by businesses, that could prove to be a drag on profit growth.

On Monday, concern that the broader tariff war could envelop parts of the economy that have so far been sheltered from the fight became evident in the shares of small companies, which fell even further than the broad S&P 500.

These smaller companies, which often have thinner profit margins and less negotiating power with suppliers and customers, could be poorly positioned to handle the next round of tariff increases.

“The escalation of tariffs is creating these problems that corporate America is going to have to work around,” said Lori Calvasina, head of United States equity strategy at RBC Capital Markets. “It’s just going to be tougher for the smaller guys.”

For now, stock investors continue to sit on sizable gains. The S&P 500 remains up more than 12 percent in 2019. But the sell-off also shows Wall Street is factoring in the prospect that the trade fight drags on, even as it closely monitors comments from officials in Beijing and Washington.

On Monday, anxiety about the economy appeared in other financial markets too.

Prices dropped for soybeans and copper, both of which are sensitive to global growth and trade. Interest rates rose in corporate bond markets, an indication that investors were seeking higher premiums in response to the increased risks of a worsening trade fight.

In the stock market, the damage required less interpretation. Shares of companies particularly dependent on trade with China, including semiconductor makers that rely on production networks in the country, fared badly.

Apple, which counts China as a major market for the sale of its iPhone and other devices and leans heavily on Chinese suppliers to produce them, fell 5.8 percent.

In addition to the effects of the trade fight, Apple shares were weighed down after the Supreme Court on Monday allowed a large antitrust class action to move forward against the company.

Boeing, one of the largest exporters in the United States, dropped 4.9 percent. Wynn Resorts, which is heavily reliant on casino operations in Macau that cater to gamblers from mainland China, fell 6.2 percent.

[Read more about China’s response here.]

There are reasons for investors to expect the United States economy to withstand the shock of an escalating trade war. Fears about the impact of a trade war and economic slowdown rocked stock markets late last year, only for major benchmarks to recover just as quickly.

Hiring in the United States continues, and corporate profits are expected to continue rising after a year of tax cut-fueled growth.

Most critically, the Federal Reserve had abruptly pivoted away from its previous plans to keep lifting interest rates, revving up risk-taking in the process.

Those factors — the Fed in particular — made for a spring-loaded start to the year, with the S&P 500 rocketing more than 17 percent higher through April. That steady glide higher may also explain some of the sharpness of the downturn in recent days, as it left the market overdue for a pullback.

“We were very overdue for one,” Ms. Calvasina of RBC Capital Markets said. “We basically did a year’s worth of gains in four months’ time.”

Sahred From Source link Business

from WordPress http://bit.ly/2Yoe5tN via IFTTT

#IFTTT #WordPress

[endenogatai]

Travel startups cry foul over what Google’s doing with their data

As the antitrust drumbeat continues to pound on tech giants, with Reuters reporting comments today from the U.S. Justice Department that it’s moving “full-tilt” on an investigation of platform giants including Google parent Alphabet, startups in Europe’s travel sector are dialing up their allegations of anti-competitive behavior against the search giant.

Google has near complete grip on the search market in Europe, with a regional marketshare in excess of 90% according to Statcounter. Unsurprisingly industry sources say a majority of travel bookings start as a Google search — giving the tech giant huge leverage over the coronavirus-hit sector.

More than half a dozen travel startups in Germany are united in a shared complaint that Google is abusing its search dominance in a number of ways they argue are negatively impacting their businesses.

Complaints we’ve heard from multiple sources in online travel range from Google forcing its own data standards on ad partners to Google unfairly extracting partner data to power its own competing products on the cheap.

Startups are limited in how much detail they can provide about Google’s processes on the record because the company requires advertising partners to sign NDAs to access its ad products. But this week German newspaper Handelsblatt reported on antitrust complaints from a number of local startups — including experience booking platform GetYourGuide and vacation rental search engine HomeToGo — who are accusing the tech giant of stealing content and data.

The group is considering filing a cartel complaint against Google, per its report.

We’ve also heard from multiple sources in the European travel sector that Google has exhibited a pattern of trying to secure the rights to travel partners’ content and data through contracts and service agreements.

One source, who did not wish to be identified for fear of retaliation against their business, told us: “Each travel partner has certain specialities in their business model but overall the strategy of Google has been the same: Grab as much data from your partners and build competing products with that data.”

Not OK, Google

This is now a very familiar complaint against Google. Crowdsourced reviews platform Yelp has been accusing the tech giant of stealing content for years. More recently, Genius got creative with a digital watermark that caught Google redhanded scraping lyrics content from its site which it pays to license (but Google does not). As Lily Allen might put it, it’s really not okay.

Last month’s Congressional antitrust subcommittee hearing kicked off with exactly this accusation too — as chair, David Cicilline, barked at Google and Alphabet CEO, Sundar Pichai: “Why does Google steal content from honest businesses?” Pichai dodged the question by claiming he doesn’t agree with the characterization. But for Google and parent Alphabet there’s no dodging the antitrust drumbeat pounding violently in the company’s backyard.

Based on this exchange, it seems like Google CEO Sundar Pichai *really* does not want to answer questions about local search. Perhaps because there are no good answers? pic.twitter.com/49RVwHMHS8

— Luther Lowe (@lutherlowe) July 29, 2020

In Europe, Google’s business already has a clutch of antitrust enforcements against it — starting three years ago, in a case which dated back six years at that point, with a record breaking penalty for anti-competitive behavior in how it operated a product search service called Google Shopping. EU enforcements against Android and AdSense swiftly followed. Google is appealing all three decisions, even as it continues to expand its operations in lucrative verticals like travel.

The Commission’s 2017 finding that Google is dominant in the regional search market carried what lawmakers couch as a “special responsibility” to avoid breaching the bloc’s antitrust rules in any market Google plays in. That finding puts the travel sector squarely in the frame, although not yet under formal probe by EU regulators (although they have opened an active probe of Google’s data collection practices, announced last year).

EU regulators are also examining a range of competition concerns over its proposed acquisition of Fitbit, delaying the merger while they consider whether the deal would further entrench Google’s position in the ad market by giving it access to a trove of Fitbit users’ health data that could be used for increased ad personalization.

But so far, on travel, the Commission has been keeping its powder dry.

Yet for around a decade the tech giant has been building out products that directly compete for travel bookings in growth areas like flight search. More recently it’s added hotels, vacation rentals and experiences — bringing its search tool into direct competition with an increasing range of third party booking platforms which, at least in Europe, have no choice but to advertise on Google’s platform to drive customer acquisition.

One key acquisition underpinning Google’s travel ambitions dates back to 2010 — when it shelled out $700M for ITA, a provider of flight information to airlines, travel agencies and online reservation systems. The same year it also picked up travel guide community, Ruba.

Google beat out a consortium of rivals for ITA, including Microsoft, Kayak, Expedia, and Travelport, who relied upon its data to power their own travel products — and had wanted to prevent Google getting its hands on the data.

Back then travel was already a huge segment of search and online commerce. And it’s continued to grow — worth close to $700BN globally in 2018, per eMarketer (although the coronavirus crisis is likely to impact some recent growth projections, even as the public health crisis accelerates the industry’s transition to digital bookings) — all of which gives Google huge incentive to carve itself a bigger and bigger share of the pie. 

This is what Google is aiming to do by building out ad units that cater to travellers’ searches by offering flights, vacation rentals and trip experiences, searchable without needing to leave Google’s platform. 

Google defends this type of expansion by saying it’s just making life easier for the user by putting sought for information even closer to their search query. But competitors contend the choices it’s making are far more insidious. Simply put, they’re better for Google’s bottom line — and will ultimately result in less choice and innovation for consumers — is the core argument. The key contention is Google is only able to do this because it wields vast monopoly power in search which gives it unfair access to travel rivals’ content and data.

It’s certainly notable that Alphabet hasn’t felt the need to shell out to acquire any of the major travel booking platforms since its ITA acquisition. Instead its market might allows it to repackage and monetize rival travel platforms’ data via an expanding array of its own vertical travel search products. 

One of the German consortia of travel startups with a major beef against Google is Berlin-based HomeToGo. The vacation rentals platform confirmed to TechCrunch it has filed an antitrust complaint against the company with the European Commission.

It told us it’s watched with alarm as Google introduced a new ad unit in search results which promotes a vacation rental search and booking experience — displaying property thumbnails, alongside locations and prices plotted on a map — right from insight Google’s platform.

Screengrab showing Google vacation rental ad unit, populated with content from a range of partners

Discussing the complaint, HomeToGo CEO and co-founder, Dr Patrick Andrae, told us: “Due to the monopoly Google has in horizontal search, just by having this kind of access [to the vast majority of European Internet searchers], they’re so top of the funnel that they theoretically can go into any vertical. And with the power of their monopoly they can turn on products there without doing any prior investment in it.

“Anyone else has to work a lot on SEO strategies and these kind of things to slowly go up in the ranking but Google can just snap its fingers and say, basically, tomorrow I want to have a product.”

The complaint is not just that Google has built a competing ad product in vacation rentals but — following what has become a standard colonizing playbook for seemingly any vertical area Google sees is grabbing traffic — its packaging of the competing product is so fully featured and eye-catching that it results in greater prominence for Google’s ad vs organic search results (or indeed paid ad links) where rivals may appear as plain old blue links.

“They create this giant, colorful super CTA [call-to-action], as we call it — this one-box thing — where everything is clickable and leads you into the Google product,” said Andrae. “They explain that it’s better for the user experience but no one ever said that the user wants to have a one-box there from Google. Or why shouldn’t it be a one-box from HomeToGo? Or why shouldn’t it be a one-box in the flight word from Kayak? Or in the hotel world from Trivago? So why is it just the Google product that’s colorful, nice, and showing up?”

Andrae argues that the design of the unit is intended to give the user the impression that “Google has everything there”, on its platform. So, y’know, why go looking elsewhere for a vertical search engine?

He also points out that the special unit is not available to competitors. “You cannot buy it,” he said. “So even if you would like to have this prominent kind of placement you cannot buy that as a third party company. Even if you would like to pay money for it — I’m not talking about being in the product itself, that’s another topic — but just having the same kind of advertisement, because it is what they do — they advertise their own product there for free — and this is our complaint.”

Pay with your data

In 2017, when the Commission slapped Google with the first record-breaking penalty over its search comparison service — finding it had systematically given prominent placement to its own comparison shopping service over and above rival services in organic search results — competition chief Margrethe Vestager disclosed it had also received complaints about Google’s behavior in the travel sector.

Asked about the sector’s concerns now, some three years later, a Commission spokeswoman told us it’s “monitoring the markets concerned” — but declined to comment on any specific gripes.

Here’s another complaint: GetYourGuide, a Berlin based travel startup that’s created a discovery and booking platform for travel tours and experiences, has similar concerns about Google’s designs on travel experience booking — another travel segment the tech giant is moving into via its own eye-catching ad units flogging experiences.

“They want to create experience products now directly on Google search itself, with the aim that ultimately people can book these type of things on Google,” said GetYourGuide CEO and co-founder Johannes Reck. “What Google tries to do now is they try to get [travel startups’] content and our data in order to create new competitive products on Google.”

The startup is unhappy, for example, that a ‘Things to do’ ad product Google shows in its search results doesn’t link to GetYourGuide’s own search page — which would be the equivalent and competing third party product.

“Google will not allow us to link them into our search but only into the details page so the customer sees even less of our brand,” he said. “Or in Maps, for instance, if you go to Eiffel Tower and press to book tickets you don’t see any of GetYourGuide despite us fulfilling that order.”

He also rejects Google’s claim against this sort of complaint that it’s simply ‘doing the right thing for the user’ by not linking them out to the rival platform. “We do know from our data that users convert better and spend more time on our site and have higher engagement rates when we link them into our search and then deeper down into the funnel,” he told TechCrunch. “What Google is saying is not that it serves the user — it serves Google and it serves their profits. Because the deeper down the funnel that you link, the user will either buy or they will bounce back to Google and search for the next product. If you link into searches — if you don’t verticalize as much — then the user will end up in a different ecosystem and might not bounce back to Google.”

“As a partner [of Google] you have limited choice to participate [in its ad products]. You do need to give Google that content and then Google will try to move as many of the customers to them,” Reck added. “I don’t think there ever will be a world where booking.com or Expedia or GetYourGuide will disappear — rather our brands will start to disappear.

“That is something that I think ultimately is bad for the customer and only serves Google, again, because the customer will, in the long run, have no other choice and no other visibility on how he can get to choice than to go through Google because our brands will basically be hidden behind a Google wall. That will turn Google firmly away from what their original mission was… to steer people to the most relevant content on the web… Now they are trying to be completely the opposite; they’re trying to be the Amazon or Alibaba of travel and try to keep and contain people in their ecosystem.”

During the congressional antitrust subcommittee hearing last month Pichai claimed Google faces fierce competition in travel. Again, Reck contends that’s simply not true. “In Europe more than 75% of travellers go to Google to search for travel and all those users are free,” he said. “Everyone else in the travel industry pays Google top dollar… for these queries. Which competition exactly is he referring to?”

“[Pichai] then claimed that they’re not leveraging partners’ content — that’s not accurate. If you look at Google if you want to be in the top results these days you either pay or you give them data so that they can build their own products into search.”

“This dates back ten years now when they acquired ITA software, which is the leading data provider for flights,” Reck added. “They’ve just paved their way into travel. I think their intent is very clear at this point that they have no interest in their partners — or their customers for that matter, who like the choice that’s being offered on Google.”

“What they want to morph into, basically, is to turn Google into the Amazon of travel where everyone else maybe a content provider or a fulfilment agent but the consumer has no choice but to go through Google. I think that is the key intent here. They want to limit consumer choice. And they want to monopolise the space. We don’t want that and we will fight that. And if that means we need to go to the EU Commission to protect our and the customers’ interests then we’ll do that and we’re currently reviewing that option.”

The looming harm for consumers around reduced choice could manifest in poorer customer service, which is an area vertical players tend to focus on — whereas Google, as a platform funnel, does not.

Another German travel startup — Munich-based FlixBus — was also willing to go on the record with concerns about the impact of Google’s market power on the sector, despite not being in the same position as its business is not an aggregator.

Nonetheless, FlixBus Jochen Engert, founder and CEO, called on regional lawmakers to act against what he described as Google’s “systematic abuses” of market dominance.

“We call on the politicians in Germany and the EU to now work for fair competition on the Internet. It must be forbidden that monopolistic companies like Google abuse their market power, especially in times of crisis, and prevent competition for the benefit of the customer due to their dominance,” he told us. “Google systematically abuses its dominant market position to seal off access to customers from competitors and gets away with it time and again. It is only a matter of time before other industries and business models, in addition to travel, hotel and flight bookings, are permanently threatened.

“For FlixMobility [FlixBus’ parent company] as an internationally positioned market leader with its own platform, technology and our unique content, the situation is more relaxed than for smaller start-ups or those which also aggregate content such as Google. Nevertheless, in our opinion Google should be obliged to list and market its own products in search results on an equal footing with comparable offers. Here regulation must not stand by and watch for too long, but must react before Google irretrievably controls customer access and excludes competition.”

GetYourGuide’s Reck expressed hope that German lawmakers might be able to offer more expeditious relief to the sector than the European Commission — whose competition investigations typically grind through the details for years.

“The German government is actually very alert at this point in time,” he said. “They’re currently working on a new competition legislation that they will put in place probably within the next six months. It’s already in the making — and that will also be addressed to exactly that type of behavior of global, quasi-monopolistic platforms crossing the demarcation line, moving into other fields and trying to leverage their monopoly in order to create synergies in adjacent fields and crowd out competition.”

Asked what kind of intervention he would like to see regulators make against Google, Reck suggests its business should be regulated akin to a utility — advocating for controls on data, including around the openness of data, to level the playing field.

Though he also told us he would be supportive of more radical measures, such as breaking Google up. (But, again, he says speed of intervention is of the essence.)

“If you look at all of the data that Google collects, whether that’s consumer reviews, availability from its partners, all of the content from its partners, all of the information that they have through Android, whether that’s geo-specific data, whether that is interests, whether that is contextual information, Google is training their algorithms day and night on this data, no one else can. But we all have to provide data to Google,” he said.

“That’s not a level playing field. We need to think about how we can have a more open data architecture, that obviously is compliant with our data privacy laws but where developers from anywhere can build products based on the Google platform… As a developer in travel it’s currently very hard for me to access any data from Google so I can build better products for consumers. And I think that really needs to change — Google needs to open us for us to create a more vibrant and competitive ecosystem.”

“At a national or EU level we need to have an updated legal code that allows for quick interventions,” Reck added, saying competition enforcement simply can’t carry on at the same pace as for the markets of the past. “Things are moving way too quickly for that. You need to take a completely new approach.

“As Google correctly pointed out consumer prices have fallen but falling consumer prices is the weapon in tech; offering products for free allows you to gain marketshare in order to crowd out competition, which again leaves less choice for the customer so I think we need to think about how we think about tech and platforms in new ways.”

The Commission is currently consulting on whether competition regulators need a new tool to be able to intervene more quickly in digital markets. But there’s more than a trace of irony that its adherence to process means further delay as regulators question whether they need more power to intervene in digital markets to prevent tipping, instead of acting on long-standing complaints of market abuse attached to the 800lb gorilla of Internet search — with its “special responsibility” not to trample on other markets.

Reached for comment on the travel startups’ complaints, a Google spokeswoman sent us this statement:

There are now more ways than ever to find information online, and for travel searches, people can easily choose from an array of specialized sites, like TripAdvisor, Kayak, Expedia and many more. With Google Search, we aim to provide the most helpful and relevant results possible to create the best experience for users around the world and deliver valuable traffic to travel companies.

During the pandemic, we’ve been working hard with our partners in the travel industry to help them protect their businesses and look toward recovery. We launched new tools for airlines so they can better predict consumer demand and plan their routes. For hotels, we expanded our ‘pay per stay’ program globally to shift the risk of cancellation from our partners to us. And we’ve updated our search products so consumers can make informed decisions when planning future travel, further reducing the risk of cancellation.

The company did not respond to our request for a response to claims we heard that it seeks to secure rights to partners’ content and data via contracts and service agreements.

No relief

In another sign of the growing rift between Google and its travel partners in Europe, German startups in the sector banded together to press it for better terms during the coronavirus crisis earlier this year — accusing the tech giant of being inflexible over payments for ads they’d runs before the crisis hit. This meant they were left with a huge hole in their balance sheets after making mass refunds for travellers who could no longer take their planned trip. But the gorilla wasn’t sympathetic, demanding full payment immediately.

Asked what happened after TechCrunch reported on their concerns at the end of April, Reck said Google went silent for a few weeks. But as soon as the travel market started picking up in Germany — and GetYourGuide decided it needed to start advertising on Google again — it reissued the demand for full payment.

GetYourGuide says it was left with no choice but pay, given it needed to be able to run Google ads.

Reck describes the recovery package Google offered after it made the payment as “a Google recovery package” — as it was tied to GetYourGuide spending a large amount on YouTube ads in order to get a small discount.

The offer would recoup only “fraction” of GetYourGuide’s original losses on Google ads during the peak of the COVID-19 crisis, per Reck. “YouTube obviously is not where we lost the money. We lost the money in search where we had high intent customers, Google customers that wanted to come and shop. So that to us was [another] slap in the face,” he added.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8204425 https://ift.tt/2Y4LvzY via IFTTT

#IFTTT #RSSMix.com Mix ID 8204425

[neptunecreek]

Stupid Patent of the Month: IBM's Software Patent on Texting and Driving

In the smartphone era, “distracted driving” is a serious, and well-known, problem. Official warnings about poor driving habits are as old as the automobile itself. The New York Times published a Pulitzer-winning series on distracted driving back in 2009.

Increasingly, technological assists are available for those seeking to manage their smartphone’s distractions while in the car. Apple integrated a “do not disturb while driving” mode into iOS 11, and Google has long had similar functionality in its Android Auto app. Multitudes of third-party smartphone apps exists to address the issue. Finally, more than 50 companies are working on what may be the ultimate solution to distracted driving: autonomous vehicles. 

Unfortunately, the U.S. patent system creates warped incentives for emerging software fields like road-safety features. Rather than competing in a challenging space, some players are seeking broadly-worded patents, then hope to sit back and extract profits later. 

That may be the strategy of the International Business Machine Corp., which has acquired more U.S. patents than any other company for decades now. This week, IBM was awarded U.S. Patent No. 10,191,462, describing a “Vehicle electronic receptionist.” 

IBM likely has the resources to make technology to manage communications while driving. But the ’462 patent describes nothing of the sort. Instead, IBM’s patent simply describes a computerized decision-making process.  

The patent’s Claim 1 describes a computer system that determines the “driving context” of a vehicle; analyzes an incoming communication; and then determines an “electronic action” in response, considering various weights and risk factors. The electronic action could be “taking a message, providing a silent or audible notification… [or] providing an automated response.”

Other claims add more layers to the analysis, like considering road conditions, doing voice analysis on a voicemail, or considering whether a passenger is sleeping before deciding to put a call through.

Essentially, IBM has described a futuristic car computer system that will analyze the driving conditions and the context of an incoming text or call, then use some unspecified type of AI to decide what to do about the communication. The specification is filled with empty platitudes typical of software patents, like “[t]he computer system may be described in the general context of computer system executable instructions, such as program modules, being executed by a computer system.” Aside from hand-waving like this, the patent has essentially no information about how one would actually create the claimed system. 

IBM: Ignore the “Troll Scare”

Some of the claims describe good ideas that could be useful parts of automotive software in the future. But the patent is just that—a list of ideas, not instructions for executing the ideas or creating anything. IBM’s patent offers no code, no algorithms, not even a vague description of how the rules might work.

We’ve seen this problem before, in which the Patent Office awards a patent not to the first proven inventor, but to the first applicant who describes a task using technological and legal jargon that patent professionals respect. The Patent Office and the Federal Circuit have been far too willing to approve patents that merely state the idea of applying rules without even specifying what those rules are. The public gains nothing from companies getting patents on the mere idea of using an algorithm to solve a particular problem. Patents like the ’462 patent leave all of the hard work—actually writing, debugging, and deploying software that solves the problem under real-world conditions—as an exercise for the reader. And they allow IBM to exclude the public from making or creating any of the wide range of algorithms that these broad patent claims could ensnare.    

In our view, IBM’s new patent should fail under the Supreme Court’s Alice v. CLS Bank decision, which holds that you can’t patent basic decision-making processes by adding references to generic computer hardware and software. Given that, it may come as no surprise that IBM is lobbying to throw out the Alice precedent. In a recent interview, top IP executives from IBM explained their plans to demolish Alice by getting Congress to re-work Section 101 of the patent laws, which bars abstract patents. “Every time we try to enforce a patent, we get a 101 defense that comes back at us,” said IBM Chief Patent Counsel Manny Schecter. IBM VP Mark Ringes said he’s hearing “positive messages from Congress” about changing Section 101 to better suit big patent owners.

Ringes went so far to claim that the “troll scare is largely just noise now.” That assertion flies in the face of the patent litigation landscape. By one estimate, about 90 percent of patent lawsuits filed last year in the tech sector were filed by non-practicing entities. IBM appears to be downplaying the damage done by patent trolls because its business interests have become aligned with them. IBM collected more than 9,000 patents in 2017 alone. It uses that massive storehouse of IP to fuel a licensing business that earns more than $1 billion per year. 

In some cases, that means IBM can let other companies battle for dominance in a particular sector, then step in and demand licensing payments when it’s clear who can pay. There’s less need for IBM to build new social media apps, when the company can use a patent threat to collect $36 million from Twitter right before its IPO. There’s less need to build an e-commerce business, when IBM can sue Amazon over an “electronic catalog” patent that dates back to 1994.

Make no mistake: IBM has an incentive to pile up overly broad patents like this one because these patents might allow it to extract revenues from other companies’ future products. A broken patent system encourages companies to use patents, rather than products, to assure dominance in key sectors like driving communications and autonomous driving. Getting rid of Alice would only make the system worse and lead to another flood of do-it-on-a-computer patents. We hope Congress agrees.

from Deeplinks http://bit.ly/2TkE6YK

#Deeplinks

[magzoso-tech]

Edtech notches a win as Teachable is acquired by Hotmart

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/edtech-notches-a-win-as-teachable-is-acquired-by-hotmart/

Edtech notches a win as Teachable is acquired by Hotmart

Edtech has been a hot category for investors for some time. Surging demand for better classes globally from new entrants to the knowledge economy has pushed revenues to new highs. Now, coupled with the rapid propagation of the coronavirus forcing dozens of colleges and universities to shut down and move entirely online, the sector is even further in the limelight.

New York-based Teachable rode that wave since its founding in 2013 as Fedora, creating a marketplace for teachers to sell their online courses and build up their own classroom businesses. I covered the startup’s $2 million seed round way back in 2015, and TechCrunch also covered the company’s $4 million series A in 2018.

Teachable raises $4M to create a tool to turn any online class into a true business

Now, I get to cover the company’s acquisition by Amsterdam-headquartered Hotmart, a global platform for online courses with deep penetration in Brazil and the global Portuguese and Spanish markets. Sources with knowledge of the transaction said that the acquisition was for around a quarter-of-a-billion dollars, which, if roughly true, would be well above Teachable’s last disclosed valuation of $134 million in 2018.

Teachable has seen prodigious GMV growth on its platform since launch. In total, CEO and founder Ankur Nagpal told me that the platform has driven half a billion in earnings for teachers on its platform, with nearly half of that sum coming in the past year.

That growth has also driven revenues to the bottom line. Unlike some online education marketplaces, Teachable is a SaaS revenue business, and teachers pay a monthly or annual subscription to sell and manage their classrooms (unless they are on the company’s “Basic” plan, in which a 5% revenue fee is also taken). Currently, its “Professional” plan is priced at $99 per month or $948 ($79/month) if billed annually, which includes unlimited students and five admin user accounts.

Nagpal said the company hit $21 million in revenue in 2019, and is currently on a $25 million run rate, compared to $14 million in the prior year. The company is not profitable, but its losses were “under $2 million” according to him. The company states that more than 20,000 students are taught every day across the classrooms on Teachable.

A photo of Teachable’s team (Photo via Teachable)

Explaining the rationale behind selling to Hotmart, Nagpal said that he liked the fact that Hotmart and Teachable have similar missions but very divergent markets, with Teachable focused on the English-language market and Hotmart proving competitive in the Portuguese and Spanish markets. “Synergistically, it just made a ton of sense … we instantly become one of the most valuable online education companies.”

Hotmart is a private company that’s approaching a decade in operation. The company recently received an infusion of cash from Singapore’s GIC and General Atlantic in disclosures last year. Teachable is a smaller company than its new parent, with offices in New York and Durham, N.C., but together, the combination of platforms, GMV and revenues will likely make it a major competitor in the online course space.

Today, that market includes companies like Udemy, which has raised $223 million in venture capital since its founding a decade ago, and Pluralsight, which went public in 2018 on Nasdaq after raising $192 million in VC and is currently valued at approximately $1.40 billion (experiencing the same public market headwinds as every other company these days). Those VC fundraise numbers are from Crunchbase.

Teachable has never raised that level of VC dollars, which makes its exit look much more financially favorable than is typical for edtech companies. Crunchbase has a total of $12.5 million in VC across a couple of rounds, with lead investor Accomplice being one of the presumed major winners in the acquisition, along with Naval Ravikant and Learn Capital. Most of these investors will cash out, except with Accomplice taking a stake in Hotmart to continue its journey with Teachable.

In the other direction, Nagpal himself has also invested as part of Accomplice’s Spearhead fund, in which founders are given small checkbooks to seed invest in promising startups.

Teachable is not changing its branding, mission or strategy, but hopes to use the leverage from a larger parent company to expand into more international markets and to cross-promote each other’s products. Nagpal will stay on as CEO of Teachable, reporting to the CEO and co-founder of Hotmart, João Pedro Resende.

Where top VCs are investing in edtech

#Miscellaneous

[cryptnus-blog]

Chemical barcodes at the intersection of blockchain and chemistry

New Post has been published on https://cryptnus.com/2018/12/chemical-barcodes-at-the-intersection-of-blockchain-and-chemistry/

Chemical barcodes at the intersection of blockchain and chemistry

“theme”:”dark”,”direction”:”horizontal”,”showArrows”:true,”splitTitle”:true,”playerOptions”:“captions”:true,”popupOnScroll”:true,”subscribe”:“title”:”Subscribe”,”url”:”https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKvc0WUB65GCvOTgPVJ9yRA?sub_confirmation=1″,”visibleOnMain”:true,”visibleOnPopup”:true,”active”:“index”:0,”start”:52,”end”:null,”thumb”:”https://d1ic4altzx8ueg.cloudfront.net/finder-au/wp-uploads/2018/10/Fred-Variant-9.jpg”,”thumbAnimation”:”kenburns-top-right”,”heading”:“small”:”WATCH”,”large”:”Craig Wright exclusive interivew. Bitcoin SV, Metanet and nChain. “,”yt”:“method”:”playlistItems”,”params”:“playlistId”:”PLUrt4pAH4g29Uw8QifHtSvvdWuFtDmz6V”,”type”:”video”,”part”:”snippet,id,contentDetails”,”banner”:true

What if there was an immutable and tamper-proof blockchain counterpart in the physical world?

Supply chain solutions are one of the most obvious applications of blockchain technology, and it’s become the first port of call for a number of the companies which aim to break into the blockchain space in a profound and lasting way.

Some of IBM’s more prominent blockchain flagships are focused on supply chains, Citizens Reserve started with “supply chain as a service” in its goal to blockchain-ify one industry at a time, and the World Trade Organisation is keen to see blockchains take off. Meanwhile, supply chain blockchain solutions can quickly save lives in fields like food safety and pharmaceutical tracking.

On the whole, blockchain solutions are widely regarded as the bee’s knees in the context of reinventing supply chains and tracking things across their entire lifecycle. But stumbling blocks remain.

For example, that the veracity of a blockchain is only as good as the data that goes in. A blockchain might be immutable and tamper-proof, but if you can still mess with its data inputs it’s not actually tamper-proof. In that vein there are enormous benefits to being able to track goods themselves across their entire lifecycle, rather than just tracking a bunch of RFID tags or vehicle GPS signals.

One might even say there’s not yet a lot of chemistry between the blockchain and physical world. But what if there could be?

Molecular blockchain

“I’m not going to invest the dollars invested in me building blockchain systems,” said Haggai Alon flatly. “Our model is not to create our own blockchain monster. Other companies are doing it better than us.”

Haggai Alon is the CEO of Security Matters, an ASX-listed Israeli firm that’s more about the molecular engineering than than the blockchain engineering.

Security Matters aims to create a system of customisable and uniquely-identifiable “chemical barcodes.” It’s based on a method developed by the government of Israel over the last decade or so, Alon explained. He acquired the license to bring it to market. The idea is that Security Matters’ chemists create uniquely identifiable molecular combinations which can be baked into anything, and then read with handheld devices. This data runs through Security Matters’ software and IT systems, and can then be deployed on the blockchain systems created by Security Matters’ blockchain partners.

Alon wasn’t prepared to say who exactly those blockchain partners were, but emphasised that the blockchain side of the Security Matters solution is coming from a “big player” hailing from the established tech sector, rather than being a blockchain or cryptocurrency-specific startup.

The reason for going blockchain, Alon said, basically boil down to that it’s most likely going to be the fabric of supply chains in the future, so anyone looking at that space needs to start thinking about blockchain now. And it looks good.

“We use blockchain for two reasons,” Alon said. “A: To promote clients’ capability to be leading and innovative in their segments. We are kind of like an external to internal means to push the technology and make them adopt it faster. B: We are using it as a means to enable the technology to be a dominant technology on supply chain, integrity, and all things related to supply chain liability.”

The work is currently being done on Ethereum, primarily because it’s popular and widely used enough that developments on Ethereum can be ported to other protocols where needed. This might be essential for a company like Security Matters which aims to work precisely to any kind of client requirements, which might include building a solution for a specific blockchain.

“The good thing about Ethereum, it can converge very easily to all other ledgers,” Alon said. “Kind of like a basic common ledger that is very easy to transform, because we do not plan to dictate to our clients what kind of platform to use… Ethereum was a good base to work with.”

The customer is always right

Beyond accounting for varying client preferences in blockchain platforms, Security Matters wants to be extremely flexible in the types of chemical barcodes it creates. One client might want something that can dissolve without a trace, others might want something that sticks around through a product’s entire lifecycle, come what may.

In the case of its work with the Hazera seed company, for example, one of the main challenges was to create an identifier that can allow the tracking and identification of each and every seed, while being robust enough to stick with the seeds throughout their shipping and other rigours, but then completely and safely dissolve after it’s planted without leaving any traces, in line with regulatory requirements.

“You cannot interfere with the growing process and the nutritious part of the seed. The challenge here was to create a barcode that completely dissolves when the seed is planted,” Alon explains. “Because this is how regulations and safety protocols are.”

There’s “no limit” to what can be done with these molecular combinations, Alon emphasises. “We let the client determine what his needs are… we let the customer walk us through it.”

Most cases aren’t like Hazera though, Alon notes, and on the whole he expects more clients to want a signature that “stays not only for the the whole shelf life, but the whole lifecycle of the propduct.

The place to be

Different products and materials are subject to very different requirements, and so require very different chemical barcodes. Ceramic, stone, metal, plastic, gases, chemicals of all kinds, grains and other foodstuff and so on – and all the subsets within those material types – will call for different chemistry. The company is literally assembling unique new combinations of molecules to bake into literally anything (within reason) which naturally requires a range of specialised skills, especially because Security Matters will need to keep making new ones.

“It’s about the ability to create a flexible and different sequence of molecules,” Alon explains. “You can picture the DNA sequence – that’s not what it is, but you can picture what it is – to create a different sequence of molecules each and every time, which is built to fit the substrate, the matter, the regulations, the safety protocols, but most importantly the commercial process we are providing for clients.”

There’s no chance of running out of unique combinations though, Alon assures.

And while it’s tough going initially, as the team gets its head around different industries, it’s going to get much quicker and easier to do certain materials the second time, because there will be a modifiable template to work from, and they won’t need to build it entirely from scratch.

The importance of building out this molecular library is also one of the things that brought Security Matters to Australia. It needed a country with a diverse range of industries to sharpen its teeth on, and for that reason and others, Australia fit the bill.

“Israel is not a good ecosystem to grow the technology,” Alon observed. “Because Israel is very small and there’s almost no basic manufacturing industry [or] processing and mineral industry. Europe is multilingual and highly regulated, America is expensive and big… Australia, put aside the distance which is nowadays less of an issue, is one language, [has] regulations which are very similar to American regulations, and in one country you get all dimensions of the economy from minerals to chemistry to processing to finished product…all segments. Australia is a perfect market to scale the technology.”

It helps that “there’s a lot of savvy tech investors in Australia after the end of the mining boom,” Alon added. Plus there definitely aren’t too many places in the world mining uranium, and it’s probably a good idea to track that stuff.

Getting things done

Reading these molecular barcodes is also relatively easy, which was one of the key practical considerations behind Alon’s decision to license the technology, and Security Matters licensed them along with the molecular signatures themselves.

“The readers are unique energy-based readers that are part of the X band family… this is part of the tech we got the license for,” he said. “The thing about them is it can also be a handheld portable device, and it can be in any kind of commercial environment which makes it very appealing to any kind of commercial application that’s around.”

“I’m not the inventor, but this is one of the things that convinced me to take this technology, because the limitations and restraints are fairly nonexistent. And the reading is – it’s pure science. It’s stable, its working. It can be scaled up so we can really make a business out if it.”

And it’s only going to get easier, Alon reckons. Creating the first unique barcodes for certain types of application is extremely difficult, but the second one is much easier. It’s still very much in the applied R&D neck of the woods which can make it tricky to predict the costs and timeframes associated with the creation of specific signatures, but once Security Matters is over the hump it will be much easier to turnaround client requests quickly and predictably.

If all goes well, a year from now Security Matters will be able to take in a client and get a solution out the door in just a few months, Alon says, and the main part of that is getting its head around different materials and industries.

“Part of it is really learning to do it in such a way that fits the client’s regulations, safety regulations, manufacturing protocols – creating it in such a way that is efficient – so when the solution is really deployed it’s fast and very easy and efficient.”

Milestones

There are a few essential areas that Security Matters wants to crack into first, but between them they might encompass just about anything you’ll ever touch, starting from the heavy chemical roots of mass production, moving on to “everything related to any plastic products” including packaging and covering all industries from agriculture to electronics.

Security Matters is also paying attention to some specific use cases which could yield strong and relatively quick results, such as “everything related to ethical mining and conflict minerals.”

For a sense of just how much room for improvement there is, it’s worth noting that at their peak conflict diamonds are estimated to have accounted for some 15% of the world’s supply, and that number only dropped because the wars stopped, not because the tracking and “conflict free” certificate system was working especially well. Smugglers were getting around it simply by smuggling diamonds to other diamond-producing countries where they would be mixed with the less-bloody diamonds and entered into the economy.

The prevalence of conflict diamonds might be more dependent on the state of Central African politics than any existing tracking systems, and barring the development of an entirely new and much more effective system of identifying and tracking diamond origins, conflict diamonds aren’t going anywhere.

From a strictly commercial perspective, this kind of system could also be a major win for Australia’s diamond mining industry. For perspective, it’s worth noting consider that Australia’s Argyle mine accounts single-handedly accounts for about 10% of the world’s diamonds.

Conflict diamonds flood markets with more products, while undermining the reputation and revenues of the legitimate side of the shiny rock industry. Provably conflict-free diamonds attract a premium, and the ability to verify every single natural diamond in Australia as actually having originally been mined in Australia – no matter where in the world they go – would be extremely valuable.

Similar benefits can apply to almost anything else. For example, verifying that wagyu beef is actually wagyu beef, that free range eggs actually came from the chickens on a specific farm, that the medication you’re taking is the real deal, or that your fake Rolex is a 100% guaranteed fake.

And it’s just scraping the surface. The idea is that any physical thing – solid, liquid or gas – can be verified in any way imaginable. If you get creative – which many people are – there are some enormous applications.

For example, by creating a system to verify the legitimacy of physical IDs and paper documents. On 17 December Security Matters signed an agreement with German ID company Veridos to do exactly that, or by creating a system for tracking the exact origin of pollutants to prepare more effective responses, or for tracking the fabric used in clothing right down to the source for actual assurance that you’re not wearing slave labour, or as part of a profit sharing system that allows the seamless monetisation of garbage itself by tracking things as they’re recycled as re-used even if they’re melted down in the process.

This has a lot of clear intersections with blockchain technology. At the most optimistic – but admittedly still not proven – side of things, these kinds of molecular barcodes might be the immutable and tamper proof physical world counterpart that blockchains have been waiting for.

Disclaimer: This information should not be interpreted as an endorsement of cryptocurrency or any specific provider, service or offering. It is not a recommendation to trade. Cryptocurrencies are speculative, complex and involve significant risks – they are highly volatile and sensitive to secondary activity. Performance is unpredictable and past performance is no guarantee of future performance. Consider your own circumstances, and obtain your own advice, before relying on this information. You should also verify the nature of any product or service (including its legal status and relevant regulatory requirements) and consult the relevant Regulators’ websites before making any decision. Finder, or the author, may have holdings in the cryptocurrencies discussed.

Crypto explained

“theme”:”dark”,”direction”:”vertical”,”showArrows”:true,”playerOptions”:“captions”:true,”popupOnScroll”:true,”subscribe”:“title”:”SUBSCRIBE”,”url”:”https://www.youtube.com/c/cryptofinder?sub_confirmation=1″,”visibleOnMain”:true,”visibleOnPopup”:true,”active”:“index”:null,”start”:0,”end”:null,”thumb”:””,”thumbAnimation”:”kenburns-top-right”,”heading”:null,”yt”:“method”:”playlistItems”,”params”:“playlistId”:”PLUrt4pAH4g28gehvPkL1VDHlNXR7zksYB”

Latest cryptocurrency news

Picture: Shutterstock