Business Insider Analyzes the Death of Cable TV

Business Insider just published an in-depth article about the death of cable TV. "Cord cutters" are a hot topic lately - I heard an NPR bit on it last week and Business Insider is not the only publication talking about cable TV's declining ratings. This article quantifies the decline in monthly subscribers as well as per-event viewers (e.g. NBA finals, World Series).

I thought the most incisive graphic was exhibit 4 which showed cable TV's declining share of what Business Insider is now calling the "video market".

Business Insider offers several reasons for the decline such as increasing quality of programming on premium channels (AMC, HBO, etc). But they identify the main reason as a shift to watching movies on the internet and/or mobile devices. It will be interesting to see how cable TV providers pivot their business to capture this new method of consumption. Google Fiber is already threatening to pioneer streaming TV, so in my opinion, Comcast and others better act fast.

The Google Barge: How Mountain View does retail

I'm sure most of you have heard or read about this by now but Google has recently confirmed reports that they are indeed the proud owners and builders of a four-story barge currently docked on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay.

The barge (there is also one eerily similar which recently popped up in Portland, Maine) was rumored to be anything from a floating data center (which Google holds a patent on) to a retail store.  Could this mean that a IS714 student in five years could be sitting at the retail table and focusing on Google?  Google's official statement read:

"Google Barge ... A floating data center? A wild party boat? A barge housing the last remaining dinosaur? Sadly, none of the above," says Google in a statement. "Although it's still early days and things may change, we're exploring using the barge as an interactive space where people can learn about new technology."

Given that this may also be the only time Google and the U.S. Coast Guard are mentioned in the same breath, I must also highlight that Coast Guard inspectors (Coast Guard is the lead federal agency that inspects all U.S. flagged vessels including barges) were required to sign an NDA following their inspection of the barge.  Semper Paratus!

Gartner recently conducted a study of global, enterprise EHR system leaders, and came up with a conceptual map, displaying the leaders, visionaries, and niche players. Not surprisingly, Epic and Cerner are the favorites, occupying the “Leaders” quadrant, so named for its ability to execute and completeness of vision, while slightly smaller companies like Siemens, Meditech and Intersystems win the title of “Visionaries”. Conspicuously absent from the list are other big players in the EHR space, such as G.E. Centricity and athenahealth. The omissions are based on international reach: only systems that are marketed and sold in more than one continent were considered.

In terms of strategy going forward, ability to execute and completeness of vision are both very important aspects of EHR system leaders, but which will be required to stay on top? My guess is that completeness of vision will matter most in the coming years. When we’re talking about the most successful companies, variances in ability to execute will be small. All top companies must be near excellence in their ability to deploy, maintain, and upgrade their systems.

The real difference enters into a company’s ability not only to, as Gartner describes, understand buyer needs and translate those needs into products and services. These companies must also create products and services that actually deliver what the market demands. Population health management and other analytics services may claim to identify risk pools, but to deliver requires accuracy of vision, not just adding another catch-phrase to a system’s list of services.

Bob Dylan on Interlude - Check this out

We mentioned Interlude and their custom content in class - check out this Bob Dylan lip sync video. Scroll through the channels with the up and down keys.

http://video.bobdylan.com/desktop.html

Amazon: Education product, service or platform?

Google, Apple, MS, Intel all have touched the education sector, either through publishing or through digital initiatives to grab market shares in the large, attractive digital learning business. Recently Amazon acquired TenMarks, and Intel acquired Knos, both of them aim at K-12 education market. The strategy for Amazon to move forward is not very clear. We only know so far Amazon will have more offerings to its kindle users with kids as the product from Tenmarks will be included in the kindle. Whether Amazon will start to build educational learning platforms, possibly they may have done so, or just keeps themselves as a selling platform for digital educational products actually makes a huge difference for Amazon.

Amazon has a sector for publishing: they started to enter the trade publishing to chase for producing bestsellers, an average chance of less than 1% industrywide and bet on it. However their recent shift in Amazon publishing leadership may prove that this strategy did not work very well so far: B&N, which takes a large share in  physical book distribution in the US, fighted back by refusing selling Amazon physical books. When more than 50% of sales of books still come from physical books, Amazon may have a hard time signing best seller authors. Meanwhile trade book profit is far below the profit from educational publishing. Then the answer for Amazon for publishing is sort of clear: why not education publishing, why not digital education publishing, or why not digital learning?

for Amazon acquisition of TenMarks:here and for Intel, Kno here.

Forget Consumer Smartglasses, Think Commercial

A quick read summarizes recent research from Gartner forecasting an extra $1 billion in profit (yes billion with a 'B') due to improved efficiency from workers wearing Google Glass by 2017.

"Technicians, engineers and individuals working in healthcare, maintenance and manufacturing will find the smartglasses particularly handy, making it easier and quicker to complete daily tasks. 'In many jobs you can't glance back and forth at information, so it's useful if the information is overlaid in your line of vision.'"



Smartglasses have received a lot of hype in the consumer market, but the applications in the workforce are seemingly endless. Automation of the knowledge worker is a current hot topic, but what about the blending of man and machine? Computers have provided processing power to compliment mental abilities, and now devices like smartglasses can compliment human's physical capabilities. How many of you had or wished you had dual monitors at work? You can imagine the possibilities of overlaying visuals through smartglasses and eliminating extra screens.

Technology that tracks eye movement already exists; imagine incorporating this into Google Glass (next generation?) where users can scroll text or change displays as they read or look in a different direction. I don't see Google Glass taking off in the consumer market until social norms change, but their application in the commercial space seems more realistic. The same technology in contacts seems more likely to be adopted by consumers from a fashion perspective (1 pixel proof of concept).

What is the future of medicine?  Examining how quickly technology is changing the future of medicine it is important to ask the question what does the future hold for doctors in a technology driven medical industry. Examining the potential disruptions technology will have on the distribution of healthcare, it is important to assess the impact on key stakeholders: doctors, hospital administrators, and patients.  

Hospitals in California are experimenting with telepresence robots controlled by doctors from a remote location.  It is hoped that these doctor controlled robots will be able to increase access to specialized hospital care to rural areas.  The telepresence robots allow doctors to log in with a computer or iPad and at the patient’s bedside the doctor is able to see and speak to the patient and access all available electronic records.  Dr. Alan Shatzel says, "Literally, we compress time and space with this technology. No longer does distance affect a person's ability to access the best care possible."

Questions still remain on the adoption of telepresence medicine.  Will doctors and hospitals in rural areas accept such technologies, especially sense they currently require a nurse or another doctor in the room to conduct the physical inspections?  Will rural hospitals be able to take on the additional costs of renting the telepresence robots and doctors who man them?      

Google's Computers Outwit their Humans

I copied a recent article below (along with link).  It addresses a pretty interesting trend (or future trend) that we have have touched on with IBM: machine learning.  It appears as though some of Google's artificial intelligence clusters have been successful in solving software engineering problems its engineers could not.  It will be interesting to see which engineering tasks computers relieve humans of in the not-so-distant future.

Google's Computers Outwit their Humans
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/15/google_thinking_machines/

Analysis Google no longer understands how its "deep learning" decision-making computer systems have made themselves so good at recognizing things in photos.

This means the internet giant may need fewer experts in future as it can instead rely on its semi-autonomous, semi-smart machines to solve problems all on their own.

The claims were made at the Machine Learning Conference in San Francisco on Friday by Google software engineer Quoc V. Le in a talk in which he outlined some of the ways the content-slurper is putting "deep learning" systems to work. (You find out more about machine learning, a computer science research topic, here [PDF].)

"Deep learning" involves large clusters of computers ingesting and automatically classifying data, such as things in pictures. Google uses the technology for services such as Android's voice-controlled search, image recognition, and Google translate.

The ad-slinger's deep learning experiments caused a stir in June 2012 when a front-page New York Times article revealed that after Google fed its "DistBelief" technology with millions of YouTube videos, the software had learned to recognize the key features of cats.

A feline detector may sound trivial, but it's the sort of digital brain-power needed to identify house numbers for Street View photos, individual faces on websites, or, say, <SKYNET DISCLAIMER> if Google ever needs to identify rebel human forces creeping through the smoking ruins of a bombed-out Silicon Valley </SKYNET DISCLAIMER>.

Google's deep-learning tech works in a hierarchical way, so the bottom-most layer of the neural network can detect changes in color in an image's pixels, and then the layer above may be able to use that to recognize certain types of edges. After adding successive analysis layers, different branches of the system can develop detection methods for faces, rocking chairs, computers, and so on.

What stunned Quoc V. Le is that the software has learned to pick out features in things like paper shredders that people can't easily spot – you've seen one shredder, you've seen them all, practically. But not so for Google's monster.

Learning "how to engineer features to recognize that that's a shredder – that's very complicated," he explained. "I spent a lot of thoughts on it and couldn't do it."

It started with a GIF: Image recognition paves way for greater things
Many of Quoc's pals had trouble identifying paper shredders when he showed them pictures of the machines, he said. The computer system has a greater success rate, and he isn't quite sure how he could write program to do this.

At this point in the presentation another Googler who was sitting next to our humble El Reg hack burst out laughing, gasping: "Wow."

"We had to rely on data to engineer the features for us, rather than engineer the features ourselves," Quoc explained.

This means that for some things, Google researchers can no longer explain exactly how the system has learned to spot certain objects, because the programming appears to think independently from its creators, and its complex cognitive processes are inscrutable. This "thinking" is within an extremely narrow remit, but it is demonstrably effective and independently verifiable.

Google doesn't expect its deep-learning systems to ever evolve into a full-blown emergent artificial intelligence, though. "[AI] just happens on its own? I'm too practical – we have to make it happen," the company's research chief Alfred Spector told us earlier this year.

Google's AI chief Peter Norvig believes the kinds of statistical data-heavy models used by Google represent the world's best hope to crack tough problems such as reliable speech recognition and understanding – a contentious opinion, and one that clashes with Noam Chomsky's view.

Deep learning is attractive to Google because it can solve problems the company's own researchers can't, and it can let the company hire fewer inefficient meatsacks human experts. And Google is known for hiring the best of the best.

By ceding advanced capabilities to its machines, Google can save on human headcount, better grow its systems to deal with a data deluge, and develop capabilities that have – so far – befuddled engineers.

The advertising giant has pioneered a similar approach of delegating certain decisions and decision-making selection systems with its Borg and Omega cluster managers, which seem to behave like "living things" in how they allocate workloads.

Given Google's ambition to "organize the world's information", the fewer people it needs to employ, the better. By developing these "deep learning" systems Google needs to employ fewer human experts, Quoc, said.

"Machine learning can be difficult because it turns out that even though in theory you could use logistic regression and so on, but in practice what happens is we spend a lot of time on data processing inventing features and so on. For every single problem we have to hire domain experts," he added.

"We want to move beyond that ... there are certainly problems we can't engineer features of and we want machines to do that."

By working hard to give its machines greater capabilities, and local, limited intelligence, Google can crack classification problems that its human experts can't solve. Skynet? No. Rise of the savant-like machines? Yes. But for now the relationship is, thankfully, cooperative.

Can Drones Leapfrog Roads?

The introduction of and rapid adoption of new technologies is allowing under-developed areas to leapfrog traditional infrastructure.  For instance, mobile phones have replaced the need for traditional land lines and ATMs.  Can drones replace the need for roads and help to physically connect rural and underdeveloped areas in the same way?

The idea may sound far fetched, but testing has already begun.  Two startups (Matternet and aria) as well as a challenge (The Flying Donkey Challenge) are looking for solutions to physically moving goods in places where infrastructure is not established, including under-developed regions and areas effected by natural disaster.  Initial use cases focus on distributing medicine, vaccines and food to hard to reach areas, but are hardly limited.  A network to move physical goods will also be required for e-commerce to take of in developing areas.

As we consider the implications of technological development, we often consider the impact in areas (geographies) that we are familiar with.  As the next 3 billion become digital, we need to consider how existing and emerging technologies allow for new and interesting solutions to old challenges.  What we have seen work might not be the best, quickest or most efficient solution.

Alibaba Breaks Sales Record Amid China Singles-Day Rebate

Who is Alibaba? You may wonder. This is the company which has surpassed Amazon to be the world largest online retailer, whose headquarter, is neither in Beijing nor Shanghai, but a city called Hangzhou. 11-11 has gained a special meaning in Chinese because of the 4 "1"s: the day for celebrating for being a single. When a marketing team invented this promotion event to clear stocks on this day to push sales after the Chinese national day holiday, they did not expect this to be one of the craziest shopping day in China. Alibaba just achieved 35 billion RMB sales, that is nearly 6 billion US dollar sales in just one day. This does not include other retailers of all kinds, say automobile, jewelries and etc. The overall sales for this day for the online retail could be even more impressive.

Alibaba has its own payment system and does not generate profits by charging fees from sellers in their marketplace, but generate profits by charging for advertisement on their small seller marketplace called Taobao and regular fees for brands on T-mall. The business model depends largely on its significant online traffic. feeling threated by a popular online chat tool Wechat, they now push their online chat tool to compete with Wechat as Wechat starts to diverse some of the online shopping traffic from its Taobao and possibly T-mall platforms.Companies begin to use Wechat to direct sell products to Wechat users, which is about 0.3 billion by Jan 2013, a network of users who know each other personally and thus generating more credibility once products are recognized and recommended by a Wechat user.

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 Here is an article on Bloomberg. Interested? Read it Alibaba Break Sales Record

Nike's Leadership or Expansion?

This summer Nike released their Making app for free via Apple's App Store.  This app, built primarely for clothing designers and manufacturers, provides detailed information about the environmental impact and long-term sustainability regarding certain materials.  After nearly six years of research cataloging the 75,000 plus materials (linked article states 75,000 materials but Nike website sites 16,000 materials in use each year) used in their products, Nike created a scoring system for each material.  That scoring system is now referred to as the Materials Sustainability Index.

The industry leading tactic of such an effort seems obvious given Nike's unparalleled commitment to sustainability and transparency.  But I also question if this is just a new layer to Nike's business that they've selected to give away for free with the intention of monetizing other layers; for instance other services or environmental consulting?  

Nonetheless, this sleek app may have just set a new standard for the retail manufacturing industry.

The Internet of (JavaScript) Things

A new Boston-based startup (founded by a group of students) creates a way program a hardware device via WiFi. This will greatly accelerate the expansion of The Internet of Things
Its a 3 min read.

https://medium.com/boston-ma/2f6cad54fb

Microsoft CEO Shortlist Includes Ford's Mulally

Microsoft is on the hunt for a new CEO to replace outgoing Steve Ballmer.  Ford CEO Alan Mulally is a top contender for the position.  Mulally first emerged on the rumored short list earlier this fall and the short list just became shorter.  Reuters has reported that the list is down to approximately five remaining contenders, including Mulally, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop and a few internal candidates. 

Opinions have varied on Mulally's potential for success at Microsoft, with negative reviews from Forbes and Business Week and positive from Time.  The con group points mainly to lack of experience in the tech sector and a concern that the selection over emphasizes the importance of a "star CEO".  The pro camp points to transferable skills and references Lou Gerstner's success at IBM.  

From Forbes: "It’s intellectually impossible (and intellectually dishonest) to think you can come in off of a 7 year stint running an old-line car company in Detroit and then just “get up the curve” on the latest trends in cloud, big data, software, IT, outsourcing, search, consumer internet, wearable, mobile phones, and gaming to effectively maneuver in that new industry."

It hardly seems fair to say Mulally is unfamiliar with trends in tech.  Big auto has increasingly moved to integrate technology into vehicles.  Mulally and Ford have worked with Microsoft on sync technology.  Ford has had to consider tech trends in many of their choices in recent years.  But is Mulally's tech experience enought?

How well do you think Mulally is positioned for the role of CEO at Microsoft? 

How secure is the "Internet of all things"

The interest in the “Internet of all things” is growing tremendously and it is believed that in 7-8 years, there will be 50 billion devices connected to the internet, which includes traffic signals, swimming pool pumps, home security systems, and even cars. Adding software and IP on top of every hardware and machine and then connecting them to the network creates a very tempting target for hackers. The scalability of software means that a single exploit can propagate very fast and can be used against lots of machines. So the question is how secure is the "Internet of all things?"

Consider the same example of GM OnStar that we discussed in today's class, where the OnStar Control Center can slow down the car in case of a car theft or police chase. What if someone hacks the control center system and instead of slowing down the car, increase the speed of the car and cause it to crash. CNN Money talks about these dangers and discussed what can happen if they are used for cyber crime.

Tools like Shodan, a search engine for the internet-connected devices, including some industrial control systems, traffic signals, security cameras, health care units, gas stations, power plants, etc. Most of these systems have none or little security and many devices use "admin" as their user name and "1234" as their password.

The purpose of this blog is not to scare anyone but to start thinking about the dangers of exposed systems. The evolution of industrial internet security is much like the evolution of PC security, just as the original generation of PC operating systems didn’t anticipate connections to the Internet, many industrial systems are not built with outside contact in mind.

So what can be done to avoid this?

• Create an “air gap” and complete isolation of these systems from the Internet and other connected networks? I don't think that's going to work anymore!
• Educate people and inform them about the necessary security measures? Very important!
• Create standards and protocols with greater focus on security? I wonder why it hasn't been done yet!

Any thoughts and ideas to mitigate these risks?

Privacy - The Elephant in the Room

I thought our class room discussion last week was very interesting because it shed on light on just how much internet companies know about us.  As we are MBA's, I expected our conversation to be focused on the business implications of the data collected on users.  However, I found it surprising that no one mentioned the recent revelations regarding how our data is being collected and used by an organization of which none of us are a customer... the elephant in the room so to speak.  For the better part of the last decade, the NSA has been monitoring almost everything you do on the internet.

Why is this directly relevant to our discussion last week?

It's relevant because the NSA's PRISM program is pulling user's confidential information from the same companies we were discussing.  Do you have a Facebook account?  How about Gmail?  Like to shop for media on Itunes?  Well then the NSA has your information, knows all of your habits and who you correspond with.  They have a rich database of information regarding your online habits that any advertiser would pay top dollar for.

We all clicked yes to the user agreement before using these companies' services.  That agreement is supposed to act as a binding legal document by which both parties abide.  It's one thing for these internet companies to sell my information in order to make a buck off of advertising.  I don't like it, but I expect it because these are companies looking for profit.  However I don't remember the user agreement stating that all my information would be handed over to the Government under the premise of keeping me safe.

Why aren't we seeing more Privacy Laws?

Privacy has become an increasingly important subject from small talk between friends to important discussions among Congress and key figures. Controversy strikes me when everyone admits the importance of the subject however very little is done to protect consumers and individuals.

For example, "Even with Europe in an uproar over intrusive United States surveillance, its leaders are looking for ways to slow down legislation aimed at preventing violations of privacy at home." Europe has experienced violation to privacy from the USA. However, not even this is enough for them to pass a law for privacy!

Also, "In Washington, lobbyists from technology, marketing and related industries have effectively put the brakes on privacy protection legislation. Lawmakers have done nothing to advance a consumer privacy bill of rights that President Obama proposed in 2012, which would have allowed consumers to restrict the data collected and required businesses to give individuals access to files about them. And despite the Federal Trade Commission’s support for a “do-not track” option on Internet browsers that could prevent advertisers from monitoring consumers online, it has not been implemented."

This is why different states have decided to take matters into their own hands, by issuing state privacy laws. The problem with state rules is that each are different, and in some cases contradict each other, making it harder for the different companies to manage their activities taking into consideration these laws. Will we see them pushing back any time soon? I personally believe that they will, and this will cause pressure on the states to amend the laws or to come to a consensus and write a federal law. 

Is this an ever-lasting fight? I think it will definitely be longterm. 

You’re Just Too Monetizable for Google+ to Ever Go Away

This post serves mostly as a continued discussion from the eight-company-wrap-up lecture about the five webs.

We took a look at our personal data that Google provides to us in its dashboard and learned about all the things Google collects about us (assuming we're signed in). This article talks about what else Google plans on adding to its feature set to, essentially, grab more data about us.

One feature it highlights is the ability to use pattern recognition in searches for photos. You can search images based on what the images are, not by the text captions or file names. Or, you post a picture of a waterfall, you can then later search "waterfall" and your photo will appear in the results. I find this to be uninteresting but I give Google credit (?) in finding more ways to learn more about us.

While the reviews are still mixed on the feature's accuracy, Google could take this feature a step further and monitor which pictures we post, when we post them, which images we search, where we search them - essentially learning what we're "looking at" rather than what we're actively typing into a search box. Perhaps this is Google's attempt and one-upping Pinterest (who just secured more money at a $4bn valuation) since Pinterest hasn't focused on making money yet. If Google can make accurate and significant conclusions on how we view/search images, then perhaps retailers (I love the retail industry!) will be more in-tune with the going-ons at Google+ over Pinterest - where people complain about half of the pins leading to dead links.