I have to thank Paul Kedrosky for finding this article, it makes me think of many things. Primarily, that us value investors still have hope that is value investors focusing on rather dull, boring, not so sexy businesses.
We like to believe we live in an era of unprecedented change: technological innovation is proceeding at a rate with no parallel in all of human history. The information revolution and globalization are radically disruptive. Just as Barack Obama would like to be a transformational President, so the rest of us like the idea that we live in a thrilling epoch of transformation. But the truth is that we are living in a period of stagnation.
Surprisingly, this stasis is most evident in an area where we assume we are way ahead of our predecessors: technology. In fact, the gadgets of the information age have had nothing like the transformative effects on life and industry that indoor electric lighting, refrigerators, electric and natural gas ovens and indoor plumbing produced in the early to mid-20th century. Is the combination of a phone, video screen and keyboard really as revolutionary as the original telephone, the original television set or the original typewriter was?
About the Lecture
Few companies have endured such hardship, or risen to such heights in a brief span of time as Akamai Technologies. Paul Sagan tells how he became the CEO of this young firm, and helped it survive and then flourish despite “unimaginable adversity.”
Brought up in a Chicago newspaper family, Sagan trained for a life in journalism. He cut his teeth as a broadcast news producer and executive in the 1980s, and in the 1990s. He helped launch New York 1, a cable news network pioneering digital video technology, and later, an interactive TV project in Orlando that featured video on demand and customized newscasts. Over the years, says Sagan, he picked up critical lessons on running a business: Don’t count on the permanence of any customer, job, or venture. He also “glimpsed the digital future,” realizing that if “you married the interactivity and openness of the web with the bandwidth available from cable…you could change the way the internet worked.”
Should humans address man-made rising temperatures and sea levels by tinkering further with mother nature? A lively debate about geoengineering has burst into the mainstream recently with reference to Ken Caldeira’s work in the final chapter of the popular book SuperFreakonomics.
This panel takes a measured look at the good, bad and ugly of what could and should be done. What is technically feasible? How could new tactics be tested? Does the mere possibility of geoengineering diminish efforts to reduce carbon pollution? Our speakers share their distinct perspectives on this passionate environmental topic.
Pill-shaped microcameras already traverse the human digestive tract and send back thousands of images to pinpoint sources of illness. Precision farming equipment with wireless links to data collected from remote satellites and ground sensors can take into account crop conditions and adjust the way each individual part of a field is farmed—for instance, by spreading extra fertilizer on areas that need more nutrients. Billboards in Japan peer back at passersby, assessing how they fit consumer profiles, and instantly change displayed messages based on those assessments.
Yes, there are traces of futurism in some of this and early warnings for companies too. Business models based on today’s largely static information architectures face challenges as new ways of creating value arise. When a customer’s buying preferences are sensed in real time at a specific location, dynamic pricing may increase the odds of a purchase. Knowing how often or intensively a product is used can create additional options—usage fees rather than outright sale, for example. Manufacturing processes studded with a multitude of sensors can be controlled more precisely, raising efficiency. And when operating environments are monitored continuously for hazards or when objects can take corrective action to avoid damage, risks and costs diminish. Companies that take advantage of these capabilities stand to gain against competitors that don’t
Interesting Excerpts (via McKinsey)
The widespread adoption of the Internet of Things will take time, but the time line is advancing thanks to improvements in underlying technologies. Advances in wireless networking technology and the greater standardization of communications protocols make it possible to collect data from these sensors almost anywhere at any time. Ever-smaller silicon chips for this purpose are gaining new capabilities, while costs, following the pattern of Moore’s Law, are falling. Massive increases in storage and computing power, some of it available via cloud computing, make number crunching possible at very large scale and at declining cost.
None of this is news to technology companies and those on the frontier of adoption. But as these technologies mature, the range of corporate deployments will increase. Now is the time for executives across all industries to structure their thoughts about the potential impact and opportunities likely to emerge from the Internet of Things. We see six distinct types of emerging applications, which fall in two broad categories: first, information and analysis and, second, automation and control (exhibit).
Introduction (via Tech Review)
Innovation is critical to economic growth and progress, and yet it seems so random. But if we step back, a pattern emerges. The pace of innovation is accelerating and is exogenous to the economy. At Draper Fisher Jurvetson, we see that pattern in the diversity and quality of the entrepreneurial ideas coming into our offices. Scientists do not think more slowly during recessions. Startup proposals seem better during downturns.
For a model of the pace of innovation, consider Moore’s Law–the annual doubling of computer power or data storage capacity. As Ray Kurzweil has plotted, these increased exponentially from 1890 (with punch-card computing) to 2010, across countless technologies and human dramas. Most recently, we have seen Moore’s Law revolutionize the life sciences, from genomics to medical imaging, and work its magic in ever bigger and more diverse industries.
Technology’s nonlinear pace of progress has created a juggernaut of perpetual market disruption, spawning wave after wave of opportunities for new companies. Without disruption, entrepreneurs, and VCs like me, would not exist.
During previous recessions, false oracles declared innovation dead because they did not see any in mature industries like enterprise software. Predictable and stable industries resist new entrants. Entrepreneurs and VCs have to follow disruption across markets. Many of the TR50 will no doubt lead the way.
I like this video… I like it because it makes me think about value investing. Buffett and Munger often talk about investing in boring businesses.Sometimes, even the most boring businesses use high end technology. If you ever take a plant tour you’ll see how much technology is in the average “factory”. Take a look.
Introduction (via Fora.Tv)
Heartland Robotics Chairman and CTO Rodney Brooks asks: What will it take for robots to be added to the toolchest of the makers of American manufacturing, so that they can increase productivity, provide better jobs for American workers, and compete even more strongly in our globalized world?
Following on President Obama’s call to “begin again the work of remaking America,” Maker Faire 2009 was organized around the theme of Re-Make America. Held in the San Francisco Bay Area, Maker Faire celebrates what President Obama called “the risk takers, the doers, and the makers of things.”
This could be a very interesting tool for web 2.0 users (blogs etc).
About this talk (via Ted)
Gary Flake demos Pivot, a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on breakthrough Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing.
About Gary Flake (via Ted)
Gary Flake is a Technical Fellow at Microsoft, and the founder and director of Live Labs.
Want to know how Google is about to change your life? Stop by the Ouagadougou conference room on a Thursday morning. It is here, at the Mountain View, California, headquarters of the world’s most powerful Internet company, that a room filled with three dozen engineers, product managers, and executives figure out how to make their search engine even smarter. This year, Google will introduce 550 or so improvements to its fabled algorithm, and each will be determined at a gathering just like this one. The decisions made at the weekly Search Quality Launch Meeting will wind up affecting the results you get when you use Google’s search engine to look for anything — “Samsung SF-755p printer,” “Ed Hardy MySpace layouts,” or maybe even “capital Burkina Faso,” which just happens to share its name with this conference room. Udi Manber, Google’s head of search since 2006, leads the proceedings. One by one, potential modifications are introduced, along with the results of months of testing in various countries and multiple languages. A screen displays side-by-side results of sample queries before and after the change. Following one example — a search for “guitar center wah-wah” — Manber cries out, “I did that search!”
You might think that after a solid decade of search-market dominance, Google could relax. After all, it holds a commanding 65 percent market share and is still the only company whose name is synonymous with the verb search. But just as Google isn’t ready to rest on its laurels, its competitors aren’t ready to concede defeat. For years, the Silicon Valley monolith has used its mysterious, seemingly omniscient algorithm to, as its mission statement puts it, “organize the world’s information.” But over the past five years, a slew of companies have challenged Google’s central premise: that a single search engine, through technological wizardry and constant refinement, can satisfy any possible query. Facebook launched an early attack with its implication that some people would rather get information from their friends than from an anonymous formula. Twitter’s ability to parse its constant stream of updates introduced the concept of real-time search, a way of tapping into the latest chatter and conversation as it unfolds. Yelp helps people find restaurants, dry cleaners, and babysitters by crowdsourcing the ratings. None of these upstarts individually presents much of a threat, but together they hint at a wide-open, messier future of search — one that isn’t dominated by a single engine but rather incorporates a grab bag of services.
This sounds like the monster in my closet
Still, even if there is such a shift, Google’s algorithms will probably be able to incorporate that, too. That’s why Google is such a fearsome competitor; it has built a machine nimble enough to absorb almost any approach that threatens it — all while returning high-quality results that its competitors can’t match. Anyone can come up with a new way to buy plane tickets. But only Google knows how to find Mike Siwek.
I have a close friend working on a wireless med startup called Voalte. I highly recommend visiting their website if your in the medical field and interested in break through technology in paging and communications.
..moving on About this talk (via ted)
Eric Topol says we’ll soon use our smartphones to monitor our vital signs and chronic conditions. At TEDMED, he highlights several of the most important wireless devices in medicine’s future — all helping to keep more of us out of hospital beds.
About Eric Topol (via ted)
Eric Topol is a leading cardiologist who has embraced the study of genomics and the latest advances in technology to treat chronic disease
Many studies show that reducing your commute time to less than 30minutes significantly increases your happiness. So with this in mind I link to a video….seems like road traffic is a rather challenging problem.
Road traffic is a challenging societal problem, and with the increasing crowding of areas in and around cities, it is only becoming worse. With the proliferation of wireless connectivity, smartphones (think cheap embedded computers), it is now possible to continuously monitor urban areas using mobile sensors carried by people while they drive.
In this lecture, Hari Balakirshnan describes three challenges that need to be met in using data to help commuters—pedestrians, bicyclists, drivers—reduce the time (and fuel) spent stuck in traffic: 1) accurate modeling of traffic delays while conserving energy and protecting user privacy, 2) accurate predictions of future traffic conditions, and 3) “traffic-aware” routing to provide credible, time-sensitive routes to users.
While not a transportation “guru” himself, Balakrishnan has applied his considerable background in computing and networking to creating applications that capture data and use it in ways that provides drivers with real-time, “traffic-aware” solutions.
The broad premise of The CarTel Project is that solutions do not require massive investments by governments, but can rely on the electronics that most of us carry with us every day—cell phones. The technology has been around for years, but dramatic changes in computing and networking now allows its application at a massive scale and at sustainable costs.
Today’s smartphones are faster than your 2002 desktop and have the added advantage of including sensing and actuation capabilities—GPS, camera, microphone. Wireless availability produces a steady stream of data captures. Multiply this by the number of people carrying these devices and the amount of data captured is impressive. In return, you are provided with personalized feedback—your best route to a destination at a specific time of day linked to your personal calendar or pre-emptive warnings about current road conditions.
Since privacy is an acknowledged concern whenever user-specific data is captured, Balakrishnan’s project integrates solutions that protect information. For instance, the government may need to know when you exceed the speed limit by 10% so it can issue you a ticket; however, when you do not exceed that limit, the government cannot determine how fast you are driving or where you have been driving. Without having to provide exact data about your travels, the CarTel applications have “developed ways to compute functions of a trajectory that don’t reveal to the server your exact details, but do allow computations to be done correctly.”
After describing the user-facing programs, Balakrishnan goes into extensive detail explaining the mathematical elements behind the applications—data collection (“crowd-source” model), estimation and predictions (errors and noise), feedback algorithms (distribution around an approximate time), and stochastic considerations (maximizing probability of a desired event). Using overheads, he provides examples and information about the complexities of the algorithms and networking protocols working behind the scenes.
that is value investors focusing on rather dull, boring, not so sexy businesses.