Gigaom Change Leaders Summit Will Decode Key Technologies Changing The Business World fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

For immediate release:

GIGAOM CHANGE EMPOWERING BUSINESS LEADERS OF TODAY TO THRIVE IN A WORLD OF TOMORROW.

SUMMIT BRINGS TOGETHER LEADERS FROM AI, NANOTECH, CYBERSECURITY, ROBOTICS, VIRTUAL REALITY AND OTHER HOT TECHNOLOGIES THAT WILL IMPACT INDUSTRY.

Austin, TX — August 29, 2016 — Gigaom returns to the event stage in Austin with Gigaom Change, September 21 through September 23 in Austin, TX. This enterprise leader’s summit will bring together a growing community of exponential leaders, technology experts, entrepreneurs and keynote panelists to decode how seven key enterprise technologies are changing the business world, and how to level-up to the vast potential that exists within this rapidly advancing technological future.

Helping bridge the gap between today’s business operations and tomorrow’s demanding expectations, Gigaom Change will answer the questions that every business leader is pondering: what’s the state-of-the-art, what’s coming next and as we look to the future what do we need to know to begin confidently applying these ideas.

“Topics that were the mainstay of science fiction just decades ago are literally happening right now. The impact of these technologies cannot be overstated,” said Gigaom publisher and author, Byron Reese. “But in today’s busy world, it’s hard to know more than just a few general concepts. Gigaom Change was created to solve that.”

This event will take place over two and a half days of keynote panels with a lineup of speakers that are visionaries making R&D and proof of concept strategic investments to bring concept to reality. Three top industry experts in each of the following industries will highlight the current impact these innovations are having, then pivot toward what will be possible in the future: Robotics, AR/VR/MR, Nanotechnology, Human-Machine Interface, 3D+ Printing, AI and Cybersecurity.

The current speaker lists includes leading theorists and visionaries like Robert Metcalfe, Professor of Innovation, Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise at the University of Texas; Rob High, IBM Fellow, Vice President and CTO, IBM Watson. It also includes practitioners who are actively implementing these technologies within companies; like Shane Wall, CTO and Global Head HP Labs; Melonee Wise, CEO Retch Robotics; Stan Deans, President of UPS Global Logistics and Distribution; and Rohit Prasad, Vice President and Head Scientist, Amazon Alexa. We will hear from Sapient about AI, IBM about nanotech, Softbank about robots and a wide range of other innovators creating solutions for visionary enterprises.

Topics will be enlivened by the amazing set of attendees coming from Amazon, Bain, Best Buy, Disney, Deloitte, Intel, Nokia, Roku and Xerox, plus many, many more companies who are all managing the enormous amount of technical change that is sweeping our world.

Early registration for the conference has been strong and while ticket numbers are strictly limited, there are still a few available for purchase at Gigaom Change.

---

ABOUT GIGAOM
As the leading global voice on emerging technologies, Gigaom provides deep insight on the disruptive companies, people and technologies shaping the future for all of us. With an expanding set of assets encompassing research, peer-to-peer leader councils and conferences, we are focused on helping business leaders navigate a rapidly advancing technological future that’s set to impact everything from business through to economies. Giggaom reaches over 6.5 million monthly unique readers, with a mobile reach of over 2 million monthly visitors.

---

CONTACTS

Nancy Giordano – Executive Producer + Strategic Futurist
nancy@playbiginc.com
M: +1 (310) 890-0408

Byron Reese – Gigaom Publisher, CEO + Author
byron@gigaom.com

---

SOCIAL
Twitter | Facebook | Linkedin

#whygigaomchange #GigaomChange2016

Easy Way to Download

Book Review: The Start-up J Curve fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

There are all kinds of books about startups. How to come up with an idea, how to structure a company, how to attract investors, and how to know whom to hire. There are books about rapid development, offshoring, pricing strategy, how to get good press, how to create a roll-out plans, how to manage social media, how to build a board… and on and on and on.

The Start-up J Curve, by Howard Love, doesn’t cover any of that ground. Rather Love has taken on an entirely different mission. But before I get into that, a little background will go a long way to understanding what he is doing with this book.

Love is a prolific angel investor in Silicon Valley. Over the course of three decades, he has heard thousands of pitches, invested in nearly sixty companies, and has had a couple of dozen good exits. Additionally, he has been through the wringer himself a few times with his own startups. Again, with success.

And a few years back he was talking with his business partner David Hehman about how virtually all startups go through the same basic steps in their lifecycles. Over and over again, throughout the many years he has been doing what he does, Love saw history repeated again and again in almost every one.

And the interesting thing to Love was that how startups actually unfolded and grew was nothing like how people expected them to do so.

So Love has spent the better part of the last year documenting what he calls the J Curve. The curve has that name because of its general shape. The J Curve is comprised of the six distinct stages that, Love maintains, virtually all startups go through. The ones that are able to make it to the end of the J Curve, well, those are the ones that have succeeded. It is like that kids’ game Candyland, only if you make it all the way through, you don’t get just get bragging rights, you get a nine-figure check.

The book is a roadmap designed to, I suspect, help the entrepreneur get through each of the steps and to reassure him or her that the craziness happening around them is all perfectly normal.

Startups are hard. I can personally attest to that. There is a part of the J Curve Love calls the “Long dark winter” where nothing really went as you planned, demand for your product didn’t crash the servers, and you feel like all may well be lost. You start rehearsing that phone call with your aunt explaining how you managed to lose the $10,000 she carefully but confidently entrusted in you. I’ve made that call more than once. I have spent many such winters, and had I had Love’s guidance, I would not have been able to avoid the winters, but I would have taken some reassurance that there was a path out of them.

What the book purports to offer, it does so masterfully. Love’s knowledge of the lifecycle of startups is encyclopedic and he seems to be able to effortlessly recall example after example to show the various steps along the curve. He writes breezily in an easy-to-read fashion. Although the book clocks in at 260 pages, it is fast read the first time through, but my copy already has a dozen Post-its sticking out of it to mark places I need to return to and contemplate.

In summary, this is not a book for everyone. It is certainly not the kind of book you would ever read for fun. It is a very specific guide to doing a very specific thing: Launching a startup and seeing it though to success. If that is not a journey you are contemplating in life, look elsewhere for reading material, as this would probably be far too dry for you. But if that start-up spark stirs somewhere in your soul, then Love’s book should be on your must-read list.

The Start-up J Curve is available at howardlove.com.

(Full disclosure: Howard Love is an investor in fifty or so technology companies. He happens to have a minority investment in Gigaom. This review, however, was prepared with no input from him.)

---

Howard Love is a life-long entrepreneur who has founded, co-founded, funded and managed startups for over 30 years. He has founded or co-founded over 15 businesses and invested in over 50 startups. including:

Love was born in Detroit in 1960, and attended Phillips Exeter Academy (1974-1978) and Colgate University (1978-1983). He completed his first Ironman competition at the age of 51 in Lake Placid, NY. His first book The Start-Up J Curve is published by Greenleaf Book Group. Love resides in Silicon Valley, CA.

Easy Way to Download

Dropbox proactively asking users to reset old passwords fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Dropbox users that haven’t updated their passwords prior to mid-2012 will prompted to change it when they next sign in. The company made this announcement yesterday in a blog post by Patrick Heim, Head of Trust & Security for Dropbox. As Heim described their motivation,

Our security teams are always watching out for new threats to our users. As part of these ongoing efforts, we learned about an old set of Dropbox user credentials (email addresses plus hashed and salted passwords) that we believe was obtained in 2012. Our analysis suggests that the credentials relate to an incident we disclosed around that time.

Based on our threat monitoring and the way we secure passwords, we don’t believe that any accounts have been improperly accessed. Still, as one of many precautions, we’re requiring anyone who hasn’t changed their password since mid-2012 to update it the next time they sign in.

 

The incident he mentioned was in 2012, and involved usernames and passwords that were stored in a file, and which recently have been used to access some accounts.

Users are also being asked to set up two-factor authentication, which many avoid because of increasing login time, but which is a wise security move.

Easy Way to Download

Picture this: Exploring the Internet of Visuals fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

As eagerly awaited as it is wide-ranging, Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends Report is a data goldmine for anyone who wants to better understand the current state and future direction of the Web.

Meeker, an analyst with Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has been presenting this report for over 20 years. Her 2016 presentation ran to 213 slides, delivered in a whistle-stop 24 minutes.

Given her typical breakneck speed of delivery, Meeker had little more than three minutes to devote to one of her most interesting observations, but it’s one that has huge implications for online and mobile marketing.

In short, the Internet is becoming a far more visual medium, as consumers and businesses increasingly opt for pictures and videos over text-based communications as a means of storytelling. It’s the younger generation (between the ages of 18 to 34) that shows the most marked preference for pictures over words.

The rise of images has a lot to do with users’ increasing use of smartphones for storytelling, sharing, messaging and creative expression, Meeker said. Worldwide smartphone users grew 21% to over 2.5 billion in 2015, with Android shipments continuing to gain share over iOS: 81% to 16%, respectively. The global mobile user now has, on average, around 33 apps installed on their device, 12 of which are used daily and spends around 4 hours per day on their smartphone.

Because these devices combine cameras, comms and social media access in one handy package, it’s never been easier to take and share images – and to view and comment on images taken and shared by other people.

Every day, almost 3 billion images are shared on Snapchat, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp – all but one of which (Snapchat) are owned by Facebook. That’s up from just under 2 billion in 2014.

When it comes to video, meanwhile, daily video views on Facebook rose from 1 billion to 8 billion between 3Q2014 and 3Q2015. On Snapchat, they reached 10 billion in the first quarter of 2016.

User-generated content can result in surprise wins for brands. Take, for example, ‘Chewbacca Mom’ Candace Payne’s viral video, which saw her hooting with laughter, alone in her car, over a Star Wars mask she’d just bought from department store Kohl’s.

The video was viewed over 150 million times in one day – and also sent Kohl’s mobile app straight to the top of the rankings in the iOS app store. Demand for the mask, naturally, went through the roof. It’s the kind of result that not even the most carefully planned (and costly) marketing campaign could have orchestrated.

But at the same time, brands are working hard to get in on the act, by tuning into our passion for visuals and using them to help promote their brands in new and creative ways.

Pinterest, for example, is fast emerging as a potential goldmine for brands. According to Meeker’s data, around 55% of the site’s users (who passed the 100-million mark in September 2015) say they use the visual bookmarking site to find and shop for products. In response, Pinterest is ramping up its online shopping capabilities, announcing in June 2015 that it is introducing not only shopping carts to the site, but also visual search, which will allow users to upload a photo of a product they like and see images of similar, competing products.

Snapchat filters are another emerging use of Internet-based visuals by brands. These allow users of the site to superimpose masks on photos of themselves, friends, family or public figures. This year’s Cinco de Mayo festival, for example, saw Taco Bell release a branded Snapchat filter that turns the subject’s face into a giant taco. This won the fast-food brand 224 million views.

But creative thinking like this will be key, because traditional video ads simply do not pass muster with modern audiences. In fact, said Meeker, they are largely “ineffective” at engaging audiences: 62% of users say they’re annoyed by the ‘pre-roll’ ads that precede, for example, a YouTube clip; 81% say they mute them; and 92% say they’ve considered using ad-blocking software. A picture (or video) may be worth a thousand words – but not where it fails to delight, entertain or inspire.

 

Easy Way to Download

My Research Agenda for the Fall 2016 and a Call for Participation fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

After a few weeks of failed vacation — my attempts at unbroken away time kept surrendering to business-related meetings and travel — I’m ‘back’ (as if I ever was ‘away’).

During the few hours of contemplation that I managed, I determined to announce a few research initiatives that I’ll be kicking off, on the heels of finishing up the Work Management Narrative Baseline, and Marketing Goes Agile.

• Work File-Sync-and-Share — I am rebooting the former Enterprise File Sync-and-Share project which was started early in 2016, but which was sidelined for a number of unforeseen reasons. We will be reviewing the leading products in the market, and exploring the trends and changes in the marketplace.

• Workplace Communications — from the prospectus:

Workforce communications is a class of message-centric work technology that is principally geared toward the modern mobile workforce, especially geared toward enabling communications between workers in retail, manufacturing, transport, security, and construction. These are mobile-first applications, although they also support other enterprise functions, but with an emphasis on the efficient functioning of the mobile worker, often working outside the typical workplace, and in particular, often without access to PCs. They incorporate elements of messaging, chat, social media, and file sharing, as well as more workforce specific capabilities like shift scheduling, calendaring, task management, and other functional tools.

I’ve been talking with a broad spectrum of vendors, and we will likely launch this in October.

• Work Intranets — Intranets are private, content-centric networks used to provide communications and work-related services to internal knowledge-worker teams. We will likely launch this in December.

In all reports, we are taking a new approach. In each case, we are creating a research note that provides a concise take on the niche, and sets context for the trends and ‘bends’ (countervailing influences that block adoption) in the marketplace in question. I will take the lead role in these research notes, possibly supported by other researchers.

Call for Participation

And, about other researchers: We are taking a different approach to the Gigaom research network. We’ve had limited success with the model we more-or-less inherited from the old Gigaom, which was to rely on a network of self-motivated freelance researchers. This has had mixed results (at the most generous) and in some cases has led to extra effort due to the lack of alignment and integration in research processes. As a result, we are going to phase that approach out, and adopt a different approach.

We will — going forward — bring aboard only those researchers who want to transition into being full-time staff at Gigaom. While those researchers will start as freelancers, it is our intention to only work with senior analysts that we believe will make great contributions as full-time employees. Yes, they would start with a short period of freelance involvement, like three to six months, so we can be certain of the fit. And, to start with, we will be limiting ourselves in the next months to finding two or three senior analysts who could operate very quickly as Research Directors, managing a research domain for the business, developing new business, and hiring other analysts. So the network going forward will be transitioning from a large number of relatively uninvolved freelancers to a smaller network of full-time researchers where freelancers are involved only as an on ramp to a full-time job.

I am actively seeking one or perhaps two prospective research directors to work with me in the work technologies and future of work domain, and we are open to more candidates in other domains we are interested in, like internet of things, big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and others.

At the present time, we are looking for contributors based in the United States, exclusively, people with considerable experience in their domain as analysts, consultants, or journalists (with an analytic bent). We are likely to expand that to other regions in time.

If you are interested in discussing the research agenda, or in participating in the new Gigaom research network, please contact me by email.

Easy Way to Download

Why is resource management in the corporate environment still a challenge? fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

 

You know the score. You’re faced with the need to find a quiet space to speak with a colleague or client, but didn’t book anywhere. So you grab what looks to be a free meeting room. And thus begins a logistical series of bumps and relocations. “Oh, sorry, didn’t realize you’d booked it,” you say. So you gather papers and move somewhere else, for a short time, at least.

Scheduling resources is possibly one of the most tantalizing opportunities offered by technology, but even the simplest of options remain outside our algorithmic grasp. Sure, options exist for meeting room scheduling — that’s not the point (and it leads to that other, standard part of office life — the “didn’t you check it was free on the calendar?” conversation).

Scheduling ourselves is also a huge challenge. This isn’t helped by the oh-so-close-but-not-quite compatibility between calendaring services from Microsoft, Google, and Apple et al. Those working within an organization can stick with one system (I can remember Microsoft saying the biggest problem it had to overcome, way back when it launched Exchange 5.5 was managing free/busy information). But right now, beyond sharing iCal data, there is little guarantee that a resource will be allocated.

Clearly nobody sent the memo that we’re working in ecosystems, not enterprises these days. Even if your company has a corporate standard, as soon as you try to book a meeting with a client or a supplier, you hit the challenge of knowing whether they actually received the meeting request. Oh, woe to all such services and a plague on their houses, as they try to drag you into a Skype session when no such facility exists, or offer a shared space only accessible to a subset of participants.

It should all be so simple, but it quite clearly is not for a number of reasons. First the complexity of resource scheduling, even for something as simple as calendaring meeting rooms, is beyond the ken of most of the tools corporate users have at their behest. Supply chain, fleet management and spares management companies have capabilities to deal with their specific needs, but these are as expensive as they are custom, and not suitable for the masses.

Not suitable yet, that should read. Consider Workwave for example, which offers field service management for organisations who rely on scheduling people to deliver their services, from home care to pest control, but whose heritage is in office efficiency. From Workwave and others we can see how field service is maturing, adding features such as video clips to be added to an invoice to show a job is complete, or location based mechanisms to enable more efficient routing.

In parallel, field service is looking towards analytics, to identify ways to become more efficient (or most likely, identify places where they are being inefficient) — such as using routing data to identify repeated bottlenecks. “You can get previews into customer experience hotspots, where possible issues are,” says Workwave’s CEO, Chris Sullens. The consequence is better orchestration, to the benefit of all parties — company, employee and customer. “For some categories, e.g. maid service, we can take a planned activity and make it on-demand,” continues Chris.

In other words, field service resource scheduling can move to real-time if the systems are there to manage it, increasing flexibility without adding cost. Such features clearly have a place beyond field service, as do more leading edge capabilities such as use of wearables. For these advanced capabilities to be effective however, they need to be open and integrated. “The challenge is, you want all or nothing,” explains Chris. “You’re going to have to hit a tipping point otherwise not going to get a benefit.” This is as true in the office environment as a food plant.

Technology has a habit of commoditizing, with features jumping from vertical-specific areas and into what might be termed ‘the mainstream’. In this case, our ability to orchestrate our time with each other and the resources we use appears tantalizingly close. But until either the majors address their compatibility issues (guys, nobody is going to walk away from your software if you integrate each others’ scheduling tools, really they are not), or somebody else comes up with an generalized mechanism for managing such things, we’ll have to stick with coping strategies.

Oh, sorry, did you book this meeting room? I’m just leaving…

 

Easy Way to Download

More Stellar Visionaries To Join Gigaom Change 2016 Lineup fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

If you’ve been following us, you’ll know our mission with Gigaom Change is to add real value to the business leaders who are building our collective futures by delving further into the seven most disruptive enterprise technologies that are widely known but little understood: Robotics, Nanotechnology, AR/VR/MR, Human-Machine Interface, 3D+ Printing, AI and Cybersecurity.

To do this, we have been carefully curating the top three experts in each industry and have invited them to share their ideas and experience on a Keynote Panel. We’ve worked overtime to bring together a stellar lineup devoid of often-hyped CEOs of unicorn companies. Instead, we’re bringing you the visionaries that have their heads down making big R+D/proof of concept strategic investments that will make this rapidly advancing technological future real for all of us. Each of these seven technology panels will include:

1. An industry leader who will explain why this technology is emerging right now and what the current state of the art really is.
2. An industry practitioner who will be able to really talk to what it’s like to bring these technologies in-house and address so many of the questions the rest of us have about the impact it is having right now.
3. An industry visionary who will take us into the next 5-20+ years and help us imagine what is possible moving ahead, as well as point out some of the big questions we all will need to prepare for, such as ethics and privacy, shifting intellectual property rights and regulations, the need for new business models and more.

---

ANNOUNCING MORE KEYNOTE PANELISTS:

After months of hunting for just the right people we’re excited to announce four more incredible speakers who will help us all better understand what this technology is, why it matters and where it’s headed:

Joining our AR/VR/MR panel, Liam Quinn is VP, Senior Fellow & CTO for Dell, responsible for leading the development of the overall technology strategy. Key passions are xReality where Quinn drives the development and integration of specific applications across AR & VR experiences, as well as remote maintenance, gaming and 3D applications.

Niloofar Razi is SVP & Worldwide Chief Strategy Officer for RSA. As part of the Cybersecurity panel she brings more than 25 years experience in the technology and national security sectors, leading corporate development and implementation of investment strategies for billion dollar industries.

Michael Petch is a renowned author & analyst whose expertise in 3D+ printing will bring deep insights to advanced, additive manufacturing technologies on our Nanotechnology panel. He is a frequent keynote speaker on the economic and social implications of frontier technologies.

Josh Sutton is Global Head, Data & Artificial Intelligence for Publicis.Sapient. As part of the AI panel Josh will discuss how to leverage established and emerging artificial intelligence platforms to generate business insights, drive customer engagement, and accelerate business processes via advanced technologies.

---

Join us at Gigaom Change 2016 Leader’s Summit on September 21-23 in Austin, Texas to explore some of the highly disruptive ways these seven key technologies are shifting enterprise business.

Tickets are strictly limited to 300+ attendees and we still have spaces left at a discounted rate for those who register early. We encourage you to take advantage and avoid a higher ticket price as we count down to this landmark event. Reserve your seat today.

Easy Way to Download

Gigaom Talks with Rodolphe Gelin about Robotics fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

As a graduate of the School of Civil Engineering (l’Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées) and with a DEA in Artificial Intelligence, Rodolphe Gelin, EVP Chief Scientific Officer, SoftBank Robotics, has 20 years of experience in research with teams in the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique (CEA)- most notably in robotics used to assist people. Rodolphe joined SoftBank Robotics in 2008 as Director of Research and Head of Collaborative Projects. He is also the head of the ROMEO project to create a large robot designed to assist the elderly. Rodolphe Gelin now leads the Innovation team which aims to develop new technologies for current robots and continue exploration of humanoid robotics.

Rodolphe Gelin will be speaking at the Gigaom Change Leaders Summit in Austin, September 21-23rd. In anticipation of that, I caught up with him to ask a few questions.

Byron Reese: People have imagined robots for literally thousands of years. What do you think is the source of this fascination?

Rodolphe Gelin: The idea of robots has fed our curiosity for more than half a century with the potential of having another form factor to interact with on our own natural terms. In reality robots offer us much more and, through recent technological innovations, robots are now helping us reach the next frontier in artificial intelligence research and engineering. As mankind has evolved our inherent nature is to create, build and then continue to evolve what we’ve created; advancing in technology is no different. As high tech has become more prolific, we are constantly on a quest to evolve our technical knowledge. Robotics represents the next step or extension of that continued innovation.
 
It is obviously extremely difficult to make a robot with the range of motion and movement as a human. What are some of the things that make it tricky?

Humans have evolved very specific types of muscles which provide us with strength, force and speed that currently no available motor can match. The complexity of the human skeleton gives us extraordinary mobility and support. This type of support is also very difficult to duplicate mechanically. In addition, to creating a general form factor for humanoid robots there are other details to consider like fluidity and other natural movements that require intricate programming, as well as various sensors and processors that would help identify the robot’s surroundings.
 
Do you foresee robots that are indistinguishable from humans? Would people want that?

At SoftBank Robotics, we strongly believe that robots should look like robots. Our robots, Pepper, NAO and Romeo, were created to resemble a human-like figure, but they do not look like us. While there are indeed some robotics scientists today who have created robots that look like humans which include features like eyes, and “skin,” similar to a wax figure. That is not where we are headed with our development of robots. All robotics research is ongoing and as each form factor becomes more advanced some robots could look very much like their human counterparts. However, SoftBank Robotics is focused on creating approachable robots that make people feel comfortable and happy.

Do you think that the computing power of robots will eventually be such that they attain consciousness?

I don’t think that a machine that plays chess will attain consciousness even with a lot of computing power. If consciousness is someday available in a computer, it will be because a human being would have programmed it, in one way or another. A robot is a machine that does what it has been programmed to do. If the programmer does not program a replicated state of ‘consciousness’, there would be no way for the program get one.  Having random ‘conscious-like’ processing could be seen in the form of a computer glitch but the software designer should detect and correct it, if he is not happy with the behavior. And if a developer wants to give a consciousness to his robot, he probably can. But what would be the purpose of it? To give a moral sense to the robot? Do we really want to have a machine judging the morality of what we are doing? I don’t think consciousness is a question of computing power, it is just a question of design.

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts on this subject. I look forward to further discussion in September.

Rodolphe Gelin will be speaking on the subject of robotics at Gigaom Change Leaders Summit in Austin, September 21-23rd.

Easy Way to Download

Cloud Databases for Enterprise Workloads fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Due to its complexity, cloud strategy will be the most challenging business driver in the years to come.

Take everything you need to consider in the purchase of every single piece of software. Now add a dimension that should be coordinated with every other piece of software installed or being considered. That dimension is the cloud. These days, not being able to include cloud-based software in your systems is tantamount to cutting off your arm.  Some software is strictly available in the cloud.

Certainly, with the data sizes involved in databases today, the cloud makes the utmost of sense for storing large, fast-growing amounts of non-sensitive data for which it is extremely difficult to estimate its ultimate size.

However, the cloud is not the cloud is not the cloud. The cloud is very multidimensional. As such, it is among the most abused terms in our industry.

The cloud can be public or private.  It can be software, infrastructure, or platform as a service.  It can be single- or multi-tenant (with tenants being other departments or other companies).  Also, a wide variety of application areas can be deployed on the cloud.

At the least, cloud means virtualization -– the abstraction of developers from their hardware internally. I have seen many companies that begin a quasi-private-cloud journey with the system administration group creating more of an SLA-based approach to their duties: “Give us your requirements and we’ll provide the machine(s).”

Server management is one of those technologies that is not considered a core competency of developing applications. It requires unique skill sets. So it is increasingly being delivered by service level to applications, including information management applications that need servers to function, which is most of them.

This presents a reality of co-existence between on-premise, private cloud and public cloud solutions, which will be the norm for the remainder of our careers.

GigaOm is conducting original research into this rapidly changing space. We are taking a close look at relational databases in the cloud: databases built for the cloud, databases that have been reengineered to work in the cloud, and databases that can reasonably be deployed in the cloud. We will publish our findings in an upcoming report.
The main cloud benefits for databases are the following:

• Flexibility to scale computing resources
• Ability to shorten implementation windows
• Reduced cost
• Testing, development, and sandboxing environments
• Geographic scalability

Database deployments in the cloud are at an all-time high and are poised to expand dramatically. We are looking at vendors who offer these value propositions to enterprises.

In terms of architecture, an organization considering a cloud database must determine its fit in the overall architecture of their current infrastructure and information ecosystem. When architecting for current and future data needs, there are key considerations across the board including data sources, change data capture, windows for extraction, data integration, security (as well as privacy and encryption), data validation, quality assurance, and so on.

The report will also present a fast-track methodology for landing and expanding databases in the cloud for an enterprise.

The cloud has been a disruptive technology that many companies have leveraged to maintain or gain momentum as a company. The cloud offers opportunities to differentiate and innovate with database systems at a much more rapid pace than ever before possible. Cloud storage costs less, enables more rapid server deployment and application development, and offers scalability.

---

If your value proposition to the market includes database services in the cloud, you are invited to get in touch and share that proposition. Contact Gigaom regarding participation in our research.

Easy Way to Download

End to End Monitoring Tames the SDN Beast fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

In many cases, a Software Defined Network (SDN) can create as many problems as it solves. After all, SDNs can be complex beasts that need constant care and attention. That said, the drive behind adopting SDN technology is skyrocketing. Gartner reports that by the end of 2016, more than 10,000 enterprises will have deployed SDN technology on their networks, a tenfold increase from end-of-year 2014.

Despite the rapid adoption of the technology, many enterprises have encountered failures when trying to transition to the technology. The reasons are numerous, with complexity defined as one of the major reasons for failure. Yet, there is another issue under the subtext of SDN deployment, one that derails the transition from pilot project to deployed technology. That issue can be summed up as unpredictable performance. While SDN networking performance seems to be adequate during the pilot project stage, an actual deployment reveals issues that directly impact the end user. In other words, many SDN deployments are derailed by end user experiences.

Detecting and understanding those performance issues are currently a major challenge for those working with SDN technologies, throw WAN connectivity and application servers into the mix, and troubleshooting performance issues becomes an impossibility.

Several vendors are attempting to address that problem with optimization appliances, which can improve performance and solve some of the performance problems. However, to truly deal with performance issues, one needs more that optimization, they also need visibility in the form of end to end monitoring. Many vendors have focused their WAN optimization solutions on the WAN to LAN to WAN ideology, making sure that the networks are able to communicate effectively. However, it is often what happens at the endpoint is what really defines success.

In other words, your WAN and SDN can be the fastest in the world, but if that performance doesn’t translate to the applications and the endpoints accessing them, then your SDN deployment may be classified as a failure.

Something Nik Koutsoukos, VP of Product Marketing at Riverbed has become keenly aware of. In an interview with GigaOM, Koustsoukos said “performance is often judged by how the end user is impacted, something that is really evident when the endpoints are running virtual desktops that are hosted on the corporate network.”

Koustsoukos added “To address performance issues, it is critical to be able to understand what is happening on the endpoint and the related applications, the only way to do that is to have end to end visibility.”

With that in mind, Riverbed has acquired Aternity, a company that specializes in end user experience monitoring. Koustsoukos said “Aternity brings with it the ability to analyze end to end application performance and how availability, latency, execution and quality are perceived by the end user.”  Koustsoukos further said “By incorporating Aternity’s features into Riverbed SteelCentral, administrators will have complete visibility in an enterprise’s application delivery ecosystem, a capability that will be sure to ease troubleshooting and enhance performance.”

For those looking to optimize WAN connectivity, deliver networking via SDNs, and improve the end user experience, Riverbed seems to have hit the nail on the head. One can only hope that the integration of such diverse capabilities will ultimately move SDN further ahead, while resolving the annoying performance issues that hamper end user productivity.

 

 

 

Easy Way to Download

AI for an Eye fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

While they predate the warm and fuzzy moniker that is “wearables,” contact lenses are one of the more common pieces of technology applied to the body today. But, unlike most other commercial wearable devices, corrective contact lenses have not been particularly sexy. They help us see as well as we should see and then their job ends. Or, at least, that’s where it has historically—yes, like everything from cars to shoes to refrigerators, the contact lens is about to get “smart.”

The innovation of smart contact lenses is moving in a few different directions. One notable and noble pursuit is health monitoring. Alphabet’s Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences) is doing work here, with a lens that monitors (via tears) blood glucose levels for diabetics, and startup Medella Health recently secured $1.4 million for its competitive product. Meanwhile, Swiss-based Sensimed AG, has received FDA approval for a lens that tests eye pressure for glaucoma patients. Unlike traditional glaucoma tests, Sensimed AG’s Triggerfish makes it possible to monitor eye pressure for a 24-hour period, including sleep, for more accurate assessment of a glaucoma patient’s risk of vision loss.

contact lens has an advantage in the health monitoring space—at least compared to other wearables that didn’t originate as medical devices and don’t connect so intimately with the body—but this isn’t the only future for the smart lens. There are new opportunities for vision correction coming, as evidenced by Google and Novartis and EPGL; both teams are developing autofocus lenses in an effort to correct farsightedness. And, of course, there are a number of other innovations in the works that will appeal to our sci-fi’d imaginations, like Ocumetrics, a company that reportedly has created a lens that improves vision 3x better than 20/20. While their “bionic” lens, technically a surgical implant, has received some skepticism from the medical community, it generated a fair amount of buzz in social media. (And, understandably so; for those who have who spent childhoods watching The Six Million Dollar Man, the wait for bionic vision has been long and grueling.)

Meanwhile, Samsung recently filed a patent for a smart lens, which, according to Sammobile, “shows a contact lens equipped with a tiny display, a camera, an antenna, and several sensors that detect movement and the most basic form of input using your eyes: blinking.” This is foundational user interface stuff that sets us up for interactions akin to Google Glass, but right there on the eyeball. It leads a future where the recording of experiences becomes incidental and video games, augmented and virtual reality can be experienced without the need for bulky equipment. In this way, tech becomes more discreet—a point of interest to marketers who have relied on the showmanship of early adopters because how do you fuel word of mouth for “invisible” technology?

More provocative, however, is the potential for change in human behavior as the boundaries between our bodies and information continue to dissolve. If you think there’s no need to lock facts, figures, and trivia into memory because your smartphone is in your pocket today, wait until you can blink your way through IMDB. And how does human interaction shift when Facetime happens in your face, when we have the power to conduct background checks on the fly? (“Hello, it’s great to meet you and…um…are you browsing my Facebook page right now?”) Given the pace of innovation today, it’s not difficult to imagine a world where the smart lens gives a lawyer or student a steroid-like advantage on the intellectual playing field, or a quick lens check become the norm before, say, the National Spelling Bee—all before the next time you need to renew your driver’s license.

As all the world’s information migrates from our fingertips to our eyes, the next logical step is to introduce some level of processing of the information—artificial intelligence—in a lens. Progress here depends a lot on computer vision, the same technology that helps a self-driving car distinguish between a traffic light and a man wearing a green hat. Computer vision is one of the more intensive areas of innovation today—Slate published an interesting piece on the challenges—and naturally there are a number of innovators tackling it. This includes a Russian developer that has created an open source computer vision platform in collaboration with both Google and Facebook. It’s also likely that large scope of data acquired as a result of the first wave of camera-like smart lenses will play a meaningful role in advancing computer vision. In other words, smart lens wearers will be effectively teaching computers how to see.

But we’re not cyborgs (eyeborgs?) yet. Even as humans get more comfortable with the idea of body hacking via objects like radio frequency ID chips, there’s still something squeamish about putting technology right there in the eye.  (Cue A Christmas Story: “You’ll shoot your eye out.”) Innovations in miniaturization, like ETH Zurich’s ultra-thin circuit—50 times thinner than a human hair—help address these concerns.

There is also the powering of smart lens technology to consider—how do these things get their juice? Google’s glucose-monitoring lens would be powered by a “reader” device, such as a piece of clothing or headband that sits near the lens. Google also has a patent for solar-powered contact lens, while Sony’s recent patent includes “…sensors [that] would convert the movements of the eye into energy to power the lens.”

With these and other patents and products in the works today, it’s clear to see that both the reach and role of the contact lens is on the brink of transformation. From vision correction and enhancement to health monitoring, from entertainment to data capture and processing, the range of applications for smart lenses is vast and sets the stage for a behavioral shift on par with—if not more substantial—than what we’ve seen with the mobile device. While we’re not quite there yet, it’s a good time to start thinking about the implications—if recent advances in technology have taught us anything, it’s that big changes can happen in the blink of an eye.

Easy Way to Download

Will the Olympics Break Your Internet? fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

The worldwide games are sure to have an impact on the world wide web, however judging that impact proves to be more of a science than an art. After all, predictions can be based upon what happened four short years ago, when the 2008 Olympics generated some 628 million video streams and 8.2 billion page views.

Nonetheless, NBC is claiming that the 2016 Olympics will be its “most live Olympics ever”, with over 4,500 hours of coverage streaming to billions of potential viewers. What NBC fails to say is how all that traffic will impact corporate networks. While there is little worry that the Olympics will break the internet, the amount of content available may surely have an impact on business networks, as workers strive to see the latest scores and live stream events.

The potential productivity drain created by the Olympics has many businesses a little worried, after all those businesses want their employees attending to their chores and not attending (virtually) Olympic events. However, the worries should go beyond lost productivity due to workers watching events, the potential for network disruption may raise its ugly head and bring network performance to a crawl, impacting every one and not those just sneaking a peek at a gold medal ceremony.

A recent survey by Riverbed, a WAN optimization vendor, predicts that the bandwidth consumed by the 2016 Olympics will far outpace what was experienced just four years ago at the Beijing based 2008 Olympics, bringing additional doubt that business networks will be able to smoothly handle the strain.

However, there are some simple steps network administrators can take to mitigate bandwidth sapping issues before they bring traffic to a crawl. Respondents to RiverBed’s survey prove to be a fount of actionable information and are offering the following statistics:

• 69% of those surveyed claimed to have one or more network issues due to employees accessing online games content
• 85% are expecting to more closely monitor the performance of their networks and applications
• Only 43% are confident that they will be able to safeguard critical applications during high network demand
• 12% report that they lack the confidence that their networks will be able to handle the added strain and traffic
• 70% will limit employees from accessing games content through the network

With the Olympic stage set, network administrators are going to have to deal with the traffic demand proactively, and get their hands a little dirty with the plumbing of their networks. To head off a potential network traffic disaster, Nik Koutsoukos, VP of Product Marketing at Riverbed is offering some free advice.

In a phone interview with GigaOM, Koutsoukos offered that network managers should consider doing the following:

• Implement real-time end-to-end monitoring for visibility into the network and applications
• Prioritize and reserve bandwidth for critical applications
• Distinguish between company assets and BYOD
• Bring siloed IT teams together to plan for any high priority network events

Koutsoukos’ advice rings true, to be able to manage the bandwidth monster, administrators need to have full visibility into what is exactly happening on the network and how critical applications are being impacted. With that knowledge, administrators can craft bandwidth policies that can strike a happy medium between critical applications and ancillary network usage.

 

Easy Way to Download

Why Fear AI? fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

At Gigaom Change Leader’s Summit 2016 in September, we will be exploring seven key business technologies that are real today. One of these is AI. In anticipation of that event, we are doing a series of short pieces on the featured technologies.

In 1950, Alan Turing asked the question of whether a machine can think. In 1955, John McCarthy coined the term “Artificial Intelligence.” In 1956, a group consisting of McCarthy and three other AI scientists proposed a summer retreat to work out the essentials of the new field.

The optimism ran high that a thinking machine could be developed relatively quickly, even with the technology of that time. This optimism proved to be unfounded.

AI has endured a number of so-called “winters” where funding dried up due to a disconnect between the expectation of the funders and the realities of the science. But all the while, the power of computers and computer languages advanced such that for the first time, the expectations aren’t just being met, but being exceeded.

Now, some wonder if we have inadvertently begun to act out the drama in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, creating something that either through intention or accident wreaks havoc on our world. Some call it an existential threat.

But should we worry? Let’s dive in.

First, those suggesting caution:

Physicist Stephen Hawking believes development of a true AI would be no less than “the end of the human race.” According to Hawking, the fundamental problem is that AI would iterate and advance rapidly, whereas we “[h]umans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is equally bearish on AI, calling it the “biggest existential threat” facing mankind, “potentially more dangerous than nukes.”

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is more restrained, saying he’s “in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence,” because decades of accelerating progress may result in an intelligence so advanced that it’s hard to control.

Now, let’s hear from the other side:

Linguist and behavioralist Noam Chomsky, far from panicking about malevolent AI, thinks the entire pursuit of a statistically-driven AI is barking up the wrong tree. He says it’s a shallow approach which may have practical applications but is unlikely to yield real insight into the nature of intelligence or cognition.

AI author Ray Kurzweil isn’t afraid of artificial intelligence, either. He analogizes to other scientific endeavors with doomsday potential, like biotechnology, observing that safety rules and ethical guidelines have kept those technologies relatively safe.

And finally, deep learning pioneer Andrew Ng actually mocks the idea of an ‘evil killer AI,’ downplaying concerns as a “phantom” and an unnecessary policy distraction. To Ng, “[w]orrying about AI evil superintelligence today is like worrying about overpopulation on the planet Mars. We haven’t even landed on the planet yet!”

So what is the net of all of this? Well, when the estimates from smart people as to when we will have AGI vary from five to 500 years, there is obviously neither clarity nor consensus about the future. One thing seems certain: There is no turning back. Whatever is possible will be done.

Join us at Gigaom Change Leader’s Summit 2016 for a more in-depth look into Artificial Intelligence.

Easy Way to Download

Building the Next Generation of Leaders: Five Tips for Turning Top Talent into Managers fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

This article is the sixth in a series of six. It is excerpted from Not Everyone Gets a Trophy: How to Manage the Millennials by Bruce Tulgan

“Millennials want more status, authority, rewards,” said one senior engineer in a major electrical products company. “But they don’t want the additional responsibilities of being in management roles. We give a junior engineer the big promotion, make him an engineering supervisor, and he keeps acting like he’s just a project engineer. He acts like nothing has changed. They don’t step into that role. There is a big leadership gap, especially at those lower levels. How are we supposed to find those people who have sufficient technical skill to be in charge of an engineering project but are also suited for leadership?”

This is the holy grail of retention: identifying and building new leaders. It’s not just retaining the best technical talent. Rather, it is retaining those with the best technical ability who are also willing and able to take on leadership responsibilities and helping them step into those roles successfully. How many people have both the technical ability and the desire and ability to lead?

What usually happens is this. Those who are very good at their jobs (those with technical ability) are given more and more work. Over time, they need people to help them. If they are willing and available, these people are given supervisory responsibilities, sometimes informally at first. Eventually they become managers and are taught how to complete the additional paperwork that comes with their managerial responsibilities. But they are rarely taught how to be a manager. Instead, they develop their own management styles on an ad hoc basis, struggle, and finally conclude they are not management material. Usually they are stuck, in one organization or another, struggling with management responsibilities that nobody ever really taught them how to handle. They go through their careers thinking, “I’m not a natural leader. I’m a . . .” (You fill in the blank: accountant, engineer, doctor.)

Over the years, some business leaders have tried to fight this conundrum by creating technical tracks and manager tracks. The idea is that those who are great technicians can continue growing as technicians, while the “people people” are encouraged to follow the manager track instead. The problem with this strategy is that if an individual doesn’t have the technical talent, he will have a lack of credibility when it comes to playing the manager role. Who is going to manage an accountant but an accountant? Who is going to manage an engineer but an engineer?

That’s why, when you are looking for new leaders, you have to focus first and foremost on those with real technical talent, those who are really good at their jobs. These are the individuals who have demonstrated their commitment to their work and careers. That commitment is the first essential piece when it comes to identifying new prospects for leadership roles.

The problem is, especially among the best Millennial technical talent, that there are a lot of people who are committed to their work and career but are reluctant to take on supervisory roles. Why? The main reason, according to our research, is that they can see with their own eyes the experience of their own managers and their slightly more advanced peers. What they see is that managers, especially new managers, are often given loads of additional responsibility with very little additional support.

What do new managers need? They need support and guidance in learning and practicing the basics of management.

When you ask a young star to step up and make the transition to a leadership role—at any level—you owe it to that new leader and her team to make sure that she is fully prepared to take on additional responsibilities and authority. Teach new leaders how to do the people work, and then support and guide them in this new role every step of the way:

1. Explain that this new role carries with it real authority, that it does not award her license, of course, to act like a jerk. It is a huge responsibility that should not be accepted lightly.
2. Spell out for the new leader exactly what her new leadership responsibilities look like. Explain that management entails more than completing some extra paperwork. You have to explain the “people work” in detail. Create standard operating procedures for managing, and teach them to all new leaders. Focus on the basics, like spelling out expectations for every employee who works for them, following up regularly, tracking performance closely in writing, and holding people accountable.
3. Make sure you formally deputize any new leader, no matter how small the project or how short the duration of the leadership role. Don’t just whisper it in the new leader’s ear: “I want you to take charge of this project and make sure everyone on the team pulls his weight.” You need to announce the new leadership to the whole team, articulate the nature of this person’s new authority, and explain the standard operating procedures for management that you have asked the new leader to follow.
4. Check in daily (or every other day) with this new leader. Regularly walk through the standard operating procedures for managing people. Ask about the management challenges she is probably facing. At first, you might want to sit in on the new leader’s team meetings and one-on-ones with team members in order to build up this new leader. Do everything you can to reinforce her authority with the team and every individual on the team. But make sure to take every opportunity you can to help the new leader refine and improve her management techniques.
5. Pay close attention every step of the way, and evaluate the new leader in her new role. Some new leaders will practice the basics with great discipline; some won’t. Some will be consistent in their application of the basics; some won’t. Some will grow comfortable in their new leadership roles; some won’t. And some will simply fail in the leadership role. But it turns out that with the right amount of guidance and support, most people who are very good at their jobs and committed to their work and career have the ability to grow into strong competent leaders.

---

About the Author

Bruce Tulgan is an adviser to business leaders all over the world and a sought-after keynote speaker and seminar leader. He is the founder and CEO of RainmakerThinking, Inc., a management research and training firm, as well as RainmakerThinking.Training, an online training company. Bruce is the best-selling author of numerous books including Not Everyone Gets a Trophy (Revised & Updated, 2016), Bridging the Soft Skills Gap (2015), The 27 Challenges Managers Face (2014), and It’s Okay to be the Boss (2007). He has written for the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review, HR Magazine, Training Magazine, and the Huffington Post. Bruce can be reached by e-mail at brucet@rainmakerthinking.com; you can follow him on Twitter @BruceTulgan, or visit his website.

Easy Way to Download

Finding Funding to Battle SMB Security Threats fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Reducing the risk of a Cyber Attack is quickly becoming job number one for those administering an SMB’s network infrastructure. After all, Cyber Attacks constitute one of the biggest threats to operations and those threats are growing in ferocity and frequency, something the typical SMB operator fails to comprehend.

Although the news is rife with the details of the latest cyber-attack, intrusion or malware infestations, SMBs, for the most part, feel that those are threats to only the largest of businesses, and that the typical SMB is protected simply by anonymity. In other words, cyber criminals will simply ignore SMBs, because they are unaware of the existence of those small and medium businesses.

Nothing could be further from the truth, the Verizon Data Breach Investigative Report reveals that SMBs are the top targets of cybercriminals and suffer breaches more often than larger firms. What’s more, the impact of a breach on an SMB proves more devastating, with a study from the National Cyber Security Alliance stating that some 60% of SMBs cease operations within six months of a data breach.

Obviously the stakes are high, yet many IT pros have trouble explaining the potential devastation that a cyber-attack can wreck upon the typical SMB. Perhaps the best place to start is with the identification of why SMBs have become so targeted by the nefarious denizens of the web. One of the reasons that SMBs prove to be ripe targets is that the way most SMBs deploy security tools, which are ill equipped to combat today’s advanced attacks. Many SMBs rely on traditional security products, such as anti-malware products and basic firewalls, thinking that those products offer adequate protection.

However, the truth is that those products are woefully inadequate when it comes to targeted attacks, insider threats or advanced persistent threats. The reason being is that those technologies rely on approaches such as signature files, URL blacklists and static policies to mitigate attacks.

The simple fact of the matter is that most cyber attackers are very rational in how they target systems. In other words, there are strong incentives fueling the attack, which range from the value of the data that can be obtained (credit card information, user accounts, and so forth) to the likelihood that an attack will go undetected for weeks, months, or even years, if ever. Simply put, most of the defenses deployed by SMBs today are designed to deal with known threats and cannot counter the zero day or blended threats that are becoming all too common.

A survey by the Poneman Institute further paints the picture of SMBs taking a naïve approach to cyber security, with some 60% that do not consider cyber-attacks to be a big risk to their organizations, while 44% don’t consider strong security to be a priority. It is those misplaced beliefs that pose the largest challenge for those looking to keep SMBs’ systems secure, making worthwhile security suggestions fall on deaf ears.

However, the purveyors of SMB security solutions do have a strong ally on their side, one that is hard to ignore, and that is the financial argument. An argument that purveys the concept of what the cost of doing nothing is. Extensive research has been conducted on that very element, which can be summarized as the high cost of suffering an attack. For the financial impacts of a cyber-attack, SMBs can turn to an interactive info-graphic from Towergate Insurance, which offers a visual representation of collected facts and numbers.

The Ponemon Institute further highlights the financial burden in an NSBA report that states the average cost of a cyber-attack was over $8000, a significant amount of money to the typical small business. However, that cost does not include intangibles, such as down time, loss of business, remediation and so forth, meaning that the actual cost to an SMB is possibly far greater.

When armed with the right facts, garnering budget dollars for better security solutions should become a much smoother process. After all the argument quickly becomes one of not being able to afford doing nothing.

 

 

Easy Way to Download

Gigaom Chats: Interfacing with machines in 2026 fifianahutapea.blogspot.com

Mark Rolston, Cofounder and Chief Creative Officer of argodesign, is a renowned designer with a 25-year career of creating for the world’s largest and most innovative companies. An early pioneer of software user experience, Mark helped forge the disciplines around user interface design and mobile platforms.

Mark Rolston will be speaking at the Gigaom Change Leaders Summit in Austin, September 21-23rd. In anticipation of that, I caught up with him to ask a few questions.

Byron Reese: Let’s start with what you think we will be interfacing with machines in a decade?

Mark Rolston: For most of the 20th century we imagined our future with very physical visions: Massive superstructures, space travel, and amazing machines taking care of everything around us. Today we see the future arriving very quietly but no less profound than those visions. In ten years we will speak as often, or likely more, to machines as we do each other. With some of those machines we will even develop relationships that leverage human concepts such as trust and friendship. Everyone, everything, and everywhere will be codified, interactive, and addressable through ubiquitous interfaces scattered throughout our environments. And most profoundly we will be part cyborg. I don’t mean we will have mechanical implants (although we might) but instead if we were to assess who we are we will find a great part of us has become reliant on our digital dopplegangers. Our friends and business associates will frequently interact with our digital selves. By the way we call this digital+physical new self “Meta-Me”. Many of these interactions will occur outside of our interference because our digital “meta-me” has come to know us so intimately that it knows how you think. Today we rely on external systems such as maps and yelp to help make decisions. In ten years our minds will become so entwined with digital systems that we will scarcely recognize our own independence.

So you really think that in just ten years we will count machines among our friends? Do people want emotional relationships with machinery?

Sure. We already show love for precious objects in our life- cars, furniture, memorabilia, etc. And obviously we find room to love our pets even if they may not love us back. I’ve also watched my kids treat our Amazon Echo like a character, calling it “her” rather than “it”. So as everyday objects take on character it’s not hard to imagine us lending affection towards them. This won’t just happen overnight. It’s happening now.

Tell us about the work you are currently doing?

As a product design group we’re working on a range of digital and physical products. What’s exciting about these projects is that they are all examples for how much the world is changing because of advances in computing. Our partnership with WrapMedia is focused on developing an on-demand interface for the emerging world of devices and systems that don’t have their own interface. For example, if your car wants to tell you it needs an oil change, it needs a way to do that. In this scenario it sends you an instant application, called a ‘wrap’, that tells you where you can go for this oil change, helps you make the appointment, and offers you a discount on the visit. We are seeing incredible demand for GUIs that solve for these types of asymmetrical computing scenarios. We’re also working on the next generation of our PEQ smart home user interface. The platform is expanding to do so much more than the first gen of smart home software. We just finished a program with Farmlink that brings big-data and sophisticated data-modeling to the farming industry through a very accessible mobile user interface. And we have a team doing research in Tanzania and Jordan around using digital tools to drive entrepreneurialism in developing markets. Overall these projects follow a familiar pattern– computing has disrupted everything in life, and design is needed to help build and make sense of it all.

As a business argo is founded on a new model where we work as equity partners with our clients. Since our founding, we have established ten equity partnerships and have refined our process for working within this unique framework. The dynamics are very different because we act much more like an integral part of our partner’s operation. In many cases, such as with WrapMedia and PEQ, we have been their entire product design team from day 1. it means the product is much more than just something we worked on. This model has helped us change the way we operate the business.

I would guess that technological advance is a double-edged sword with regard to interfaces. On the one hand, tech lets you do things that you never could before, like recognize gestures or speech. On the other hand, we want our devices to do almost everything, even anticipating our needs. That’s a far cry from back in the day when the entire interface to a vacuum cleaner was an on-off switch. How does all that net out?

It nets out in deep changes in how we relate to our world and each other. We’re used to talking about the places and objects around us. Soon we will talk to them. Among the more interesting changes will be a potentially deep dependence on software for making decisions. Think about how digital maps have changed the way we find our way. Now apply that kind of shift to a much broader range of decisions we make every day.

What are the biggest challenges you are facing?

Every project we do is new– new problems, new concepts, new technologies, and new user expectations. On top of that we’re often engaged with the client in our unique business model. Because of that we’re constantly going in blind, developing the thinking as we go. But then again that’s why we do this and why we love it.

What challenges will the larger world face as we come to need to interface with machines more and more?

The list is long but two things concern me the most: The first is what this rapid change is doing to our own humanity. Never in history have the basic affordances of human interaction changed so rapidly and dramatically. The second is that technology is fundamentally an accelerator. It can magnify whatever we choose. I think we all shared initial optimism that technology can be used to create more opportunity for everyone. And it has to a large extent. But I’m seeing that we’re entering a new era where technology is just as effective of a tool to accelerate imbalances in the world. Winners don’t just win like they used to. Competitive advantage is radically magnified in digital. It makes competition more binary and that’s often not a good thing.

Hmmm. Elaborate on that. I would have argued just the opposite. Technology enables vast numbers of new entrants to compete against established companies. How would you have competed against Standard Oil a century ago? But today, anyone can compete against Microsoft. In fact, the simple fact that many of the greatest tech companies out there are less than two decades old, such as Google, Uber, Airbnb, Tesla, eBay, and Amazon, sure looks like they can compete successfully.

Ok, this part of the conversation wades deep into politics and what each of us believes the role technology will play in society and economics, but it is important that we not assume tech is only a force for good. I love that tech has brought about seismic shifts and ushered in a new era of companies. Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, etc. are great examples of disruption from tech. Uber is an example where we’re consolidating 100s of separate companies into one global transportation behemoth. The upside is that they’re killing off what we hated about taxi service. The downside is a consolidation of economic power and the commoditization of employment. Not every disruption will net out positive once the dust has settled.

Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts on this subject. I look forward to further discussion in September.

Mark Rolston will be speaking on the subject of human-machine interface at Gigaom Change Leaders Summit in Austin, September 21-23rd.

Easy Way to Download